ANDREW NEWMAN, COMINGS AND GOINGS

The accountant and the artist by Sach Catts

An old song by Randy Dougherty outlines the conditions for the good life; “Lucky, lucky, lucky me, I’m a lucky son of a gun/I work eight hours, sleep eight hours, that leaves eight hours of fun.” The simple division of one’s time into these segments provides the standard model for our existence. For most sons and daughters of guns these three states of action are easily distinguished. If one sleeps for eight hours there remains sixteen hours of potentially productive time in one’s day. Randy is lucky and therefore half of his productive time can be devoted to fun. For the less fortunate anything other than work is potentially fun. There is an important structural distinction that can be applied to demarcate our hours of work and fun however. Work can be defined as the time during which one’s productive output undergoes a ‘value adding’. For the majority, workers employed in a traditional workplace, from the time one arrives at work to the time they leave their productivity is financially remunerated at a market-determined rate. Thus, work = production + remuneration. In this sense, when the receptionist sits down at the counter their productivity undergoes a paradigm shift and enters the market.

This remuneration elevates work to a primary status in existence. When one is asked by a new acquaintance “what do you do?” it is immediately understood by both parties that the question pertains to one’s occupation rather than everything that they actually do. Questions of doing lie at the heart of Andrew Newman’s Comings and Goings. Ever heard the one about the accountant and the artist?

I don’t know what you do with your days
I go to my studio
And what do you do there all day?
I make art.

Within the aforementioned model for the constitution of one’s life the artist sits uncomfortably. The fruits of the artist’s labour are not directly/simultaneously in receipt of added financial value. Therefore they are not working. To the accountant, the one who collates and processes the fruits of labour whilst undergoing their own value adding, their work is not documented by a financial record and therefore does not exist. The accountant does not know what they do with their days.

Newman offers a counter to this. A motion sensitive webcam, originally intended as a security measure, gave him a record of his comings and goings from his studio. Just as the time sheet that accompanies a pay slip documents the points at which the worker shifts from the unremunerated to the remunerated realm of their productivity, these photos document the points of entry and exit from making art. They show Newman frozen mid-step in the doorframe, crossing the physical and conceptual nexus of the two worlds of normal-life and art. Over roughly a month these were uploaded daily to a blog, each entry and exit titled in a standard format; “Andrew Newman enters his studio on [day], [date], for the purpose of making art” and “Andrew Newman exits his studio on [day], [date], after having made art” respectively. The blog, as a surrogate timesheet, is evidence to the accountant of the artist actually doing something. Yet the accountant remains unsatisfied.

The worker’s productive receipt of value has a determinant counterpart. Their productivity is being exerted upon a pre-existent commodity – fruit laden trees for the picker, financial records for the accountant – which is modified into a marketable product in the process. Optimally, the value of this product will be in excess of that of the original commodity/ies and the cost of labour. Thus, profit, which keeps our accountant happy. To Marx however, to whom it would be ‘surplus capital’, this exploits the worker. As surplus capital is a result of the worker’s productivity it appears unfair that the employer should take it. The worker is alienated from their labour as their employer spends less time and makes more money. Thus, should we identify the aforementioned paradigm shift as being into alienated production? This appears to come out in Newman’s blog. It is not just a record of art-making hours. Accompanying each image is a block of text. At first glance it should be an account of the art made that day. Rather, what we are given is a sketch of activities undertaken pre-entry and post-exit of the studio; purchases, music listened to, books read, lying on the floor. Yet the time of making art remains a void. There is no connection made with the art-making paradigm. One may propose that this is Marx’s alienation at work. Alienation makes work a state to be endured. Does alienation provide offer grounds for Newman to justify himself to the accountant?

Whilst Marx’s vision of a communist state may not have stuck, the recognition of the worker’s plight found its expression in trade unions, organisations to which Australian conceptual artist Ian Burn was beholden. Burn’s artistic career underwent a ten-year hiatus from 1977-87 during which he worked extensively for the unions. His ‘Value Added’ landscape (1992-3) series plays on the economic concept of the title. Amateur landscapes, sourced from markets and junk shops, were overlaid with text printed on Perspex sheets creating (literal) layers of meaning. Newman employs a strikingly similar technique. Searching for something to fill the void that is what he ‘does’ an object is encountered – the painting. A webcam image from the blog, rendered in ubiquitous oils, the canvas is faced with the text of Newman’s business plan: ‘MAKE SOMETHING SOMEONE WANTS/SELL SOMETHING TO SOMEONE/BUY SOMETHING I WANT’. Is what we see here finally the product of the artist’s labour? The painting has been outsourced. Newman here is guilty of the kind of economic rationalism that our unionist Burn would decry. Globalisation and communication technologies have allowed labour that would be expensive in developed nations to be sourced cheaply from the developing world. The artistic equivalent of a 3 Mobile call centre in Mumbai, the painting was produced in China. The original image sent over the web, this oil on canvas masterpiece cost $100.00 – less than the price of materials at home. For our accountant, this would be a shrewd economic decision, although he may have different views on its artistic value. Newman is mobilising the modes of production enabled by globalisation, justified by a neo-liberal economic agenda. Popular opinion often expresses distaste for outsourcing in the production of art. The artist should remain an individual gifted with astounding skills of rendering; DaVinci and Michelangelo as the model. When Burn and Newman find or buy a painting and then graft their own ideas onto it, it seems too easy, almost untrustworthy, passing someone else’s work off as their own. Exploring this productive discomfort, the outsourced painting becomes a ground for the artist’s operational logic – the business plan. This constitutes an operational logic for the artist’s production. The ultimate aim contained within is trade. The blog acts as a justification of art as work. The painting represents a parallel urge for the artist’s production to be a marketable product.

Our accountant needs to think laterally here. He seeks to see into the void that is the time of making art. He sees no record of accrued financial value. No value adding enacted upon commodities. The value added oil painting offers no answers, as it is only an abstraction of an image representing the time when art begins. If he is able to throw off considerations of finance then it begins to reveal itself. The artist collects objects, images, ideas all of which are commodities. These are then subject to the exertion of productive force; collated, modified, pared back, enlarged, discarded. Through this they become more than the sum of their parts. Just as the accountant takes financial figures and computes them through an operational logic, the artist takes materials and ideas and subjects them to artistic inspiration. Newman assures he is “making art”. Both operators have a process and a product. Newman’s void does undergo a value adding. The studio is a correlate of the workplace. The accountant has times of engagement, a place of employment, a business plan, even a sense of alienation. From this he can only surmise that Newman does nothing useful; a toxic asset, worthy of liquidation.

(Originally published as a catalogue essay for Andrew Newman's exhibition, "Comings and Goings" at Don't Look Experimental New Media Gallery in 2009)