Introduction

The curtain rises and the performance begins. “We are posting that labor is of central importance to art making,” argue artists Jessica Stockholder and Joe Scanlan in their essay “Art and Labor: Some Introductory Ideas” (2005: 50). We agree. Stockholder and Scanlan note that, historically, creative production has been interwoven with materials and the manipulation of these goods as a mode of cognition, differentiating it from “thoughts generated while seated at a desk” (2005: 50). Yet, the intellectual efforts of physical labor and thinking in an office generating ideas that require action in order to be realized are not so dissimilar. Artists used to make objects by hand, “more eccentric impulses than those generated by the making of life’s necessities,” but many contemporary practitioners craft our artwork through the process of identifying, consuming, manipulating, and assembling goods we cannot afford to buy (2005). We collect and utilize commodities fabricated by anonymous labourers working on the assembly line of global production—performative creative production. It is a luxury.