At Work

Description:

In 1983, Ian Wallace produced At Work, a project that converted a gallery space into a studio and presented himself, the artist, at work in the intellectual processes of thinking, reading, and writing. 

Conflating the practices of academic activity with conventional artistic production, part of At Work’s local importance and larger, symbolic significance is its scrupulous presentation of the individual working artist as a social and public intellectual.

Twenty years later, writer, critic, and theorist Clint Burnham reprised Wallace’s strategy through the deliberately reflexive act of contemplating another’s contemplation. Realized in part as a strategic reversal of Wallace’s original, Burnham’s project attempted to append Wallace’s model of the academic-artist with his own ersatz translation of the academic-artist.

With a desk, chair, and the original 1983 photograph documenting Wallace at work in the gallery, Burnham re-enacted Wallace’s project by working in Western Front’s exhibition space during public hours over the course of two weeks. In the end, Burnham’s stay in the gallery resulted in a photograph and essay published as a poster that serves to reflect on both the history and significance of Wallace’s original project as well as on the more recent shifts in artistic and academic production over the past two decades.

Curated by Tim Lee.