No. 49: Road Rage

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Dear Soft Labor,

I'm a female curator in my late 50s, hold a PhD, and have worked in major art museums for years. You know the drill: A curatorial assistant many years my junior launched an HR complaint about my somewhat formal and direct, yet entirely professional management style via a strongly-worded letter from her parents' lawyer. Before I knew it, I was out of a job—my dream job, the one I had worked my entire academic and professional career to obtain.

I have since spun this objectively shitty situation into gold. Podcasts, essays, independent curatorial gigs, all of my own devising. I look and feel younger than I have in years now that I'm not grinding my way through the bureaucratic hell that it institutional life. Here's my problem: Those same years have passed and I remain absolutely incensed that this happened to me—that a younger woman took aim at my job through legal channels; that the museum didn't give me the opportunity to defend myself; that I was treated as a fungible resource. I've seen absolutely tyrannical men get away with murder at work. Affairs, verbal abuse, wild forms of bias, you name it. Why me?

From my therapist's office, furiously,
Road Rage

Dear Rage,

At a forum in Washington, D.C. a while back called Making Their Mark, the infamous Anne Pasternak, current Director of the Brooklyn Museum, called it like it is: "Men retire; women get fired." You, dear Rage, are certainly not the first, nor will you be the last to suffer this form of life and career-altering dismissal. You already know your legal options; we won't bother addressing them here.

Rather, let's focus on what can grow out of a stone-cold firing—a walk off what we wryly like to call the "glass cliff." Your former assistant engaged in an increasingly common form of girl-on-girl subterfuge, one that belies an inability to directly address authority or to work through the workaday trials that color literally every professional experience in the world. This young woman has no grit. She's clearly cutting her teeth on paper and the vestiges of girl boss feminism! You, however, do have the tenacity that a long, hard career builds in a person.

Drive off into the sunset, Rage. We're not worried about you.

Yours,
Soft Labor

Search Results 

“Search Results” points toward Soft Labor’s research and reading interests. Follow Soft Labor’s ever-evolving and highly visual research channel on are.na, including links to our selected writings.

🔗 Did you see the A24 sleeper hit-in-the-making Backrooms over the weekend? In advance of the film's release, Outland comrade and UK-based academic Al Warburton went deep on the subject in The Backrooms of Art History. Likewise, Shira Chess did a take for the MIT Reader. See Phillip Pyle's 2003 analysis in 02C3. For the Internet historians out there, here is the original 4Chan post where the iconic image was first surfaced under the rubric "unsettling images." Finally, the r/backrooms Reddit thread. 🎥

🔗 We did some off-Broadway dabbling at Minetta Lane Theater last week, where London playwright Ella Hickson's New Born is currently wrapping its New York debut. Actors Sepideh Moafi (The Pitt), Marianna Gailus and Hugh Jackman deliver monologues whose stories weave in and out of one another conceptually in a way that left us riveted for two hours, no intermission. Our beer went warm in our hand! Moafi and Jackman are the famous ones, but Gailus, virtually unknown, was the sleeper agent. 🎭

🔗 We generally gave up on October back in grad school, but the fact that we're still having IRL conversations about artist Josh Kline's "New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art," published months ago, is significant. (Here's an illicit link to the full version, in case you haven't read this one yet.) One thing we will say is that we don't remember the last time we LOL'd while reading an art history journal! Julia Friedman recently clapped back in the Brooklyn Rail with "The Art World’s Managed Fantasies: A Response to Josh Kline," calling the essay "a solution in search of a problem." We're more interested in the Reddit thread dedicated to the essay—the fact that a diatribe first published in a staid academic journal (which we think needs a redesign, incidentally) inspired a sub Reddit says something about the populist nerve Kline actually did strike. 📄

🔗 A bit of criticism: Kadist and e-flux launched the Art and Ideas Archive, a website that relates the two organizations' creative output to draw connections between essays and images. (Try this search for post-Internet art, for example.) A compellingly logical concept couched in a clunky, content-burdened, endless rabbit hole of a system. Design friction! The kind that causes a heat rash. 🐇

Progress Report

"Progress Report" updates readers on Soft Labor's own work, as well as that of our collaborators and comrades.

🔗 Soft Labor collaborator, Laura Raicovich, former Queens Museum director and founder of the soon-to-launch jewelry brand Istria Napoli, just published a rousing call to action in Hyperallergic, "Society's Repair Begins with Art." In it, she claims that making with one's mind and hands can "radically deny the systems of power and their control over us both individually and collectively." We agree. 💎

🔗 Over this past weekend, Soft Labor collaborators, design studio Other Means and editor Sarah Demeuse, traveled 6.5 hours northwest of New York City to Medina, New York, for the opening of the Medina Triennial, subtitled All That Sustains Us. OM designed the exhibition's graphic identity and its applications; Demeuse served as consulting editor for the exhibition, including its guidebook. 🌀

🔗 Soft Labor collaborator, critic Brian Droitcour, curated an exhibition at Brooklyn gallery Subtitled NYC, The Other Internet: Yehwan Song, which opens on June 12th. Brian's writing is also featured in the latest issue of Spike, "Everything's Computer." (Which, as of Friday, was apparently sold out in NYC save for a single copy at Casa, according to the kind folks at Iconic.) The man is everywhere! 🖼️

🔗 Later this month, Soft Labor will be speaking on an invite-only panel called "Practical Aesthetic Services: On the Artist and Commercial Entanglements" hosted and moderated by Office of Applied Strategy. The panel’s title—"Practical Aesthetic Services"—takes its name from The Offices of Fend, Fitzgibbon, Holzer, Nadin, Prince & Winters, a short-lived 1979 venture in which a group of New York artists set up as a firm offering services to clients, leaving it deliberately unclear whether they were a real consultancy or performing one as critique. Moderated by Tony Wang, panelists Justin Morris-Marano, Wendy Yan, Sarah Hromack-Chan, Xandra Beverlin and Carson Salter will consider the artist as founder, inventor, and consultant who can work inside commercial markets while keeping a foothold outside them, and asking whether such entanglements can be generative even while the work remains critical. Should be a little epic. 🎤

🔗 Stay tuned for forthcoming project updates from Soft Labor. Reviews and essays have been written; websites, designed; strategies, strategized; and brands, branded, all to launch in the coming months. New business inquiries may always be directed to info@softlabor.biz. Our services are flexibly tailored to our clients' projects. Get in touch! ✨

PS: 🏀 GO KNICKS! 🏀