Art makes diverse ways of being within and seeing the world emerge. Looking at, thinking about, and living alongside art is both a gesture of avoidance—of capital’s goals to normalize, control, and structure life—and a gesture of hope: encountering other models for living while lost inside the work.
Shift Work is a book of experimental art writing and collaborative autotheory, presenting an ongoing conversation between two friends. Liz Linden is an artist who writes based in California, Su Ballard, an art historian and curator living in Aotearoa New Zealand. They met in 2016 while teaching together in Wollongong, Australia. Shift Work traces their ongoing critical practices, as they consider the intersections of art and writing—those moments when aesthetic experiences are transmitted in texts, and the moments when art makes words irrelevant. Shift Work also traces how their relationship to the art they love, or love to think about, evolves in tandem with their own shifting places in the world, and asks what does it mean to take art seriously in a time of social and environmental change.
In this collection of time-stamped—but not necessarily chronological—essays, Ballard and Linden’s conversation drifts from the challenges of interpretation to a sculpture park in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand to the shared spaces of the classroom to the uncertain edges of a framed photograph, to New York galleries flooding, cratered, inhabited, and otherwise, to consider some of the shifting realities and experiences of life at the cusp of the third millennium, where art and life flow both ways.
About the Authors
Susan Ballard is a Professor of art history and environmental humanities at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Su’s writing is often collaborative and driven by feminist and decolonial concerns. Recent books on contemporary art, nature, affect, and memory include Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics (Routledge, 2021) and with Christine Eriksen, Alliances in the Anthropocene (Palgrave, 2020). Her recent essays with Liz Linden have appeared in October and The Anthropocene Review, and she has also published essays recently in GeoHumanities, Reading Room, Art New Zealand, Environmental Humanities, and Cultural Geographies. Her curated exhibitions include Listening Stones Jumping Rocks (2021) and Folded Memory (2023), both co-curated with Sophie Thorn at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.
Liz Linden is an artist based in Berkeley, California. She publishes her critical writing on postmodern art, feminist art, and artists’ writing in academic journals and elsewhere, including in Art Journal, Third Text, Camera Obscura, and Broadcast. Her writing with Su Ballard has been published in October and The Anthropocene Review. Liz’s art work has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally including the New Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum (all in New York City), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia, The Agnes Etherington Centre in Ontario, Canada, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She currently teaches at San José State University in California.