While stumbling down an internet rabbit hole the other day, I ended up reading this 2017 interview with Carol Bove, who has some stellar sculptures on view at SFMOMA right now. The interview is an excerpt from the anthology AKADEMIE X: Lesson in Art + Life. She refers to a thought/speech experiment she undertakes, refraining from using the word “work” to describe her activities. I love the notion of being ever-more specific about what one is doing, and not relying on a work/play binary (personally, neither has ever been especially helpful or accurate in thinking about what I’m doing). Also: that words matter, even when casually to ourselves, even when casually about ourselves. And finally: how changing our words suddenly highlight the limitations of regarding time as a kind of currency to be used up. The ability to recognize and withdraw from “consensus reality” (or consensus un-reality?!) like this seems important in our algorithmic age.

Snippets from the interview:

I decided to stop using the word "work" as an experiment. It was very difficult! I had to compensate by substituting a more specific description of the activity. For example, instead of "I’m going to my studio to work," I’d have to say, "I’m going to make some drawings." Or instead of "I’m going to work around the house," I’d have to say, "I’m going to clean the kitchen and fold some laundry." 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 from being productive or from being active. The labour/leisure dichotomy became uncoupled and then dissolved. I couldn’t use labour to allay guilt or self-punish or feel superior. Work didn’t exist, so all the psychological payoff of work for work’s sake had nowhere to go.

WHAT IS AN ARTIST’S ACTIVITY IF IT’S NOT WORK? 

I started to adjust my thinking about productivity so that it was no longer valued in and of itself. It strikes me as vulgar always to have to apply a cost/benefit analysis to days lived; it’s like understanding an exchange of gifts only as barter. The work exercise made me feel as if I was awakening from one of the spells of capitalism. And there was more to it than that: I was able to begin the process of withdrawal from my culture’s ideology around the instrumentality of time, i.e. that you can use time. I think the ability to withdraw from consensus reality is one of the most important skills for an artist to learn because it helps her to recognize invisible forces.