Many artists use their personal lives as an experiment in which everything becomes material to work with and create from. All acts, from how one speaks to the way in which one has sex, become valuable pieces of information to examine. The artist understands life through what they're closest to, namely themselves. Contemporary American artist and sculptor Carol Bove practices this theory.
One day, Bove was eavesdropping on her neighbors in Brooklyn and realized the word 'work' was used in virtually every other sentence. As a self-experiment, she decided to stop using the word 'work' and substitute this word with the specific activity she was doing. Instead of leaving a party early because of work, she would say she had to leave early to finish a few drawings. Instead of saying she needed to work in the morning, she would say she had to clean the house and write up a draft.
Bove notes, "I discovered that the absence of the word 'work' forced me to reconsider assumptions about leisure because the idea of work implied its opposite. I let go of the notion that I deserved a certain amount of downtime for being productive or from being active. The labor/leisure dichotomy became uncoupled and then dissolved. I couldn't use labor to allay guilt or self-punish or feel superior."
The way language is directed shapes reality, and the absence of the word allowed Bove to reconsider productivity. The question was, "What is an artist's activity if it's not work?" The act of art itself lies outside of capitalism because it's not derived from labor in its most common employment.
Art is a way of being in the world, and the most significant thing an artist can do is live in a way where art has the room to be born. In this sense, the concept of work and labor blurs, it can be the act of sitting in the studio late at night or observing the way a couple speaks to each other at dinner. Both acts can be useful for creating a piece of work. Art is made from the channeled direction of attention and energy over a period of time.
Bove states, "Your time is not a separate thing from you; it's not an instrument. Time is part of what you're made from. Everything that you do and think about is going to be in your artwork. The computer science idea 'garbage in, garbage out' applies to artists. This is something to consider when you're choosing your habitual activities."
If time is not something we use but a part of us, then the way we navigate it builds our persona, and thus, our art. Do we read the greats from classic literature, or do we doom scroll on Twitter? Do we watch the news from our country or French avant-garde films? Do we spend the mornings running in the park or cuddling our pet in bed? We become what we consistently do. Time displays this notion to us, and it is not a cost-benefit analysis but an exchange. When we choose one thing, we inevitably let go of another.
If time is not taken up with objective 'work' or 'leisure,' all activity becomes a kind of necessary array of phenomena that create us. Without labeling actions as 'work' or 'leisure,' it takes an edge off of what we do. So much of activity is that liminal space in between. When making art, so much of 'work' is composed of what we enjoy, and it is not a laborious turmoil but a contributor to growth.
So much of leisure, from reading a book at home to staying in bed with a lover, is not turning off the brain but stimulating a playful side of the self that art needs. Art can be labor or leisure for some people, but I would argue it's neither. Art doesn't demand the objectivity of other professions like medicine or chemistry. It does not require staying in a specific environment like working in a cortisol-inducing atmosphere at a law firm would. Art speaks to the uniqueness of the individual. It can be work, leisure, or play, or it can be simply a way of life.
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