Art on Film at Finch College: Reproductive Labor in the Enrichment Economy

Finch College was a small women's liberal arts college located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan open from 1900 to 1975. The Contemporary Wing of the Finch College Museum of Art held a number of important exhibitions for conceptual art, experimental media, and film organized by the museum's curator, Elayne Varian, from 1966 to 1975. This article addresses how ideas of process, reproduction, and documentation were being reconfigured at Finch, especially in film and media art of the 1960s. Robert Morris's film installation, Finch College Project (US, 1969), is emblematic of this larger turn toward process in the visual arts; however, Varian's Projected Art exhibitions complicate our understanding of how and why artistic process became a subject of interest. In light of what Boltanski and Esquerre have recently identified as an “enrichment economy” and what feminist thinkers of the time theorized as reproductive labor, works in the Projected Art series shift attention to the reproductive labor of caring for, curating, collecting, and consuming visual art and film. I argue that Varian's exhibitions as a whole complicate our understanding of process-oriented work during the postwar period, especially film and media that moved into gallery exhibition spaces. These works attacked the existing modes of production by turning toward process, complicating the status of photographic reproduction, and contributing their own surplus value through reproductive labor.