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.