leisure time

If we were to compare task-time and labor-time to student life I believe we would find both. Educational programs set up curriculums and requirements and, in this realm I believe that labor-time dominates. Though most students attend schools and study in programs that they have chosen, there are always moments in which you must tolerate and complete certain things to allow you to be recognized for all of the work that you have done. One cannot get a degree based only on what want to do or learn.

My school experience is based on a leisure-time activity. Though in theory I am training for a job by attending school it is not the most economical investment. Paying for school with the intention that it will allow you to earn a living is an investment; however the realm of fine art is not the safest investetment. Being a temporary transfer student I am able to have an interesting perspective on tuitions and education. The school that I attend is a public institution that costs about 4 thousand dollars a semester and from what I understand CCA is almost four times as much. The tuition difference I believe changes some of the attitudes students have towards school. The passion to work doesn’t change and neither does the quality of the work, but I have had many conversations with people here in which the price of their education is affecting how they feel about their classes. How can a class be task time if you know it is worth a large amount of money, not to say that this doesn’t happen at mass art but the stress of money is less present when relating to school or class.

School is a comfort, it is suppose to enable us to find a place in this world and make a living doing so. Society is responsible for educating itself and keeping its people alive and healthy, education is one of society’s tools for doing so. There are so many things we are unable to enjoy under heavy stress levels. Poor working and living conditions as well as small income can lead to very a stressful quality of life in which only leisure-time can be enjoyed. The French want to retire earlier so they can enjoy more idle-time, not leisure-time, enjoying things in life for what they can be now instead of until work tomorrow. Students in England want to get the most out of their education instead of learning with the burden of dept over their shoulders. Dept is a stress that creates labor-time in the present and the fear of labor time in the future. We are in training but this training will lead to dept making us laborers, until the debt is paid.

Blog Post #3

Courtney Costello

Thompson's categories of task-time and labor-time are interesting to consider in relation to art school and CCA. I feel that the lines are not as clear cut as they are at other types of university. The time I spend doing homework I feel is completely task time. We often get anywhere from a week to a month to work on a single assignment. Within that month we get to choose when to work on it, how long to work on it, and ultimately we decide when it is done. There of course are also areas of CCA that resemble labor-time. Such as when we have to sit in classes for X amount of hours and someone else decides when we get to take time for idleness and leisure. But even the labor-time at CCA is often fun. For example last week in one of my classes our teacher had us all clap and laughing before starting class - just for the fun of it. Once I am no longer at CCA I think my experience of work-time will change but I don't know how much. There are ways to be an artist and make money on the side without constantly selling your art. For example this weekend I worked at OpenWater, an event hosted by Openrestaurant and SFMoma, The time I spent there should have been labor-time but to me it felt more like leisure with a hint of task-time. I was getting paid the hours I was there but since I was taking photo's the whole time and talking to interesting people who were mainly artists and gallery folk from the area it was really enjoyable.


When I think of how much money we pay to go to CCA, not only in terms of tuition but in the costs of a single project it used to make me angry. The dilemma of going to art school is that you know its really expensive and you also know that artsits dont make any money. Its kind of like your giving away all your money, plus money you don't have yet, just so that you won't have it later in life. I no longer think of CCA as a place for "job-training" really. When I think about the schools my friends are going to for art and their experiences, I am grateful that I do go to such an expensive school. One of the main and most important aspects we get from CCA is the community. There are so many amazing artists that we have access to that alot of other schools don't. CCA gives us the opportunity to build a strong base of working artists, gallery owners, and curators so that when we do get out of school we already have made some of the connections we will need in order to get our career to really take off.


Both the British and the French are indignant and enraged about the lack of control they seem to have over those who are in charge of their wage/tuition. With the tuition rise from the British it means that fewer people will have access to education and job-training. People who have a school degree have a better chance of getting a well paying job and thus being able to support their family and have leisure time.

Blog Post #3

Emily Cunningham

11/14/10

As a student I feel that school is divided between labor-time and task-time. To graduate I am expected to both spend a certain amount of time in class as well as work on projects on my own schedule. I see homework as being under the category of task-time because although there is always a due date, the project can be completed at anytime between that date and the date that it was assigned. There is also no specific amount of time that must be spent on the project. The amount of time spent on a project is mostly determined by the amount of time it takes to complete it. This amount of time varies from one assignment to another, based off of a variety of factors such as amount of research needed to put into the project or difficulty of subject matter. In this way the task-time aspects of school resemble those of the pre-industrial workers. However, since my day revolves around both the task of homework and the time I must spend in classes, I can’t look at my “job” of being a student as only task-oriented. The specific amount of time spent in class can easily be seen as labor-time. The student may be expected to participate or complete assignments in class, but because it is so time specific it can be considered labor-time.

My idea of leisure time is difficult to explain because it is defined by both the task and labor time put into school. Without homework I could define my leisure time by saying that it consisted of the time outside of my classes, which meet at a designated time. With homework, my leisure time becomes more blurred with the time needed for working. I am able to decide when to make the transition from leisure time to work, but at the same time my day may become structured around an assignment. It is also possible for work and leisure to be combined. I do not know if my experience of work-time will change when I leave school. It will most likely be determined by what type of work I am able to receive. If my work more closely resembles labor-time than my leisure time will be determined by the hours of the day when I will need to be at work. It is possible but probably less common for me to get work that does not have specific hours where I need to work.

Determining whether my education at this specific school was worth the money I put into it might be difficult to do at a time when I’m still attending the school. Since I do not know where my education will take me job wise or through the progress in my art I feel like I can’t make a complete decision. At this moment I feel that the amount of money it takes to get into this school does not seem worth what I get back from it, but I am trying to think of it in terms of job training.

The main connection that I see between the French strike and the British student protests is that they both have a strong relationship to the budget that controls the outcome of their protests. There is one specific quote in a video from the second link in which a reporter explains that while Britain had to deal with budget cuts in housing and childcare benefits “France was having massive strikes and violent protests because of their austerity measures”.

Blog Post #3 - Rani Khamphilavong

I posted my response as a new post since the site was telling me that it was too large to post as a comment!


I consider my time at CCA to largely resemble task-time. When I am doing my studio homework, it is both fun and productive. When my friends and I work on our illustration homework together, we still talk and joke around as we complete our assignments. There is no definite distinction between work and leisure to me. Though there is a sense of labor-time at CCA. We have classes at specific times that we must attend during those hours. But when class is in session, the fun and play is not lost. For example, in my Editorial class, the students as well as the instructor discussed a new movie with owls. We discussed the idea that if we can accept that the owls can talk, can it be possible for owls to talk to monkeys? Labor-time and idle-time are more present to me when I am doing my H&S classes. Idle-time is the most prevalent when I am doing my assignments for my H&S classes. I can only get through a couple sentences in my essays before I find myself mindlessly browsing the internet or playing Pokemon. I consider doing these activities to be idle-time because I am not accomplishing anything while I do them. When I am in my H&S classes, all that I am aware of is the time and how much time is left before I can leave. I consider these classes to be labor-time because I am basically clocking-in and clocking-out of class. I do expect my experience of work-time to change when I leave CCA because I will no long have classes or labor-time to make sure I keep doing art. I would have to create my own labor-time, setting time to motivate myself to keep illustrating.

I think that paying such a large sum of money should influence the students to try their best as a CCA student. We are paying to have access to instructors and facilities that can be hugely beneficial to us. Thought there is the draw back of paying so much money and not guaranteed a job afterwards. That is why the short time we have at CCA is so crucial. Students have to network and develop connections and skills so they can survive in such a competitive field. To have these opportunities and to not have to pay for them exists only in dreams. But there should be a reasonable price to pay for such opportunities.

It is understandable for the British students to strike because making the tuition so high limits the amount of people that can get a higher education. They lose the opportunity to build skills and connections to survive in the work force. I read that the teachers’ salary would also be cut and that could relate to the French strike. The people would have to work longer and earn less. The people would have to wait longer for leisure time. Since they would earn less, the people who have to work won’t be able to afford leisure-time as well.

Blog post 3

Blog post 3

Sofia Greenberg

It is interesting to consider art school, as opposed to other types of education, in terms of Thompson’s categories of time. It is also interesting to consider art school in terms of play versus work. Fine Arts education, I think, blurs the boundaries between work and leisure, and between task-time and labor-time.

First of all, the general education habit of homework is absolutely task-time oriented. A student must complete homework by a certain deadline, but beyond that the student has freedom and control in choosing when and where to do it. Because art school must function in a somewhat academic structure, there are mandated classes that a student must attend during set hours of the day. In this sense, the students are indeed bound to labor-time, with designated hours of concentration and attendance, and designated breaks for idleness or leisure. Also, the student’s work has generally no connection to the revolving of the earth; day light and seasons do not affect a student’s ability to produce work or attend classes, so in this way too education time differs from pre-industrial cyclical time. However, the act of making art is not the same as the act of writing a report, taking notes on a lecture, or filling out math sheets. Art-making is primarily a pleasurable activity, and the student attending art school probably enjoys making art, considers it a kind of play. In this way, art school lies ambiguously between the work and leisure realm. Making art also entails an aspect of task-time. Even though the student is required to fulfill certain amounts of attendance and academic work, the larger focus is on the student’s art. Producing art, in a sense, is more similar to pre-industrial work than industrial work. The artist, like the farmer, attends to the task at hand until it is finished, and then can look at his or her work with satisfaction and take a break. Both the farmer and the artist are directly connected to their work, whereas the factory worker fulfills as many tasks as possible until it is time to clock out, and only benefits monetarily from his or her effort. I imagine that most art students go to art school so that some day, by qualification and skill mastery, they can live a life predominantly task-time oriented, and leisurely. I must admit, though, sometimes I find myself bizarrely craving a labor-time, standard job, to do something semi-mindless for however many hours and have very little responsibility beyond that.

I think the irony of the massive expense of art school versus the likelihood of getting wealthy as an artist is pretty horrible. Student debt is a devilish thing. However, because no one is forced to go to CCA, I think students have to take responsibility for our choice to attend an expensive school that will not likely lead us to stable incomes. I justify this choice by telling myself I will be a creative writing teacher, someday, and a BA will provide credentials for getting that job. I think that for a very long time the realm of Fine Arts as an occupation has been reserved for the elite who can afford not to have all-consuming, "real" jobs. This is an ugly aspect of the Capitalist mindset. I feel pretty conflicted about the moralities surrounding the issue of art school, and I choose not to think about the fact that I’m paying a shit load of money for very little job-training.

I don’t know if I completely understand the connection between the French general strike and the British student protests. But from my understanding, keeping the tuition for higher education reasonable allows more people (people in a broader financial range) to get training for better jobs; jobs that require employees to have gone to university tend to make more money and allow earlier retirement.

Blog Post #3

Today in London, 50,000 students took to the streets to protest an unprecedent fee hike, which will effectively triple the cost of attending university in England. You can read about the protests, and the issues behind them, here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2010/nov/10/demo-2010-student-protests-live
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/11/10/uk.protest/index.html?hpt=T2

We talked recently about another set of protests in Europe: the general strike in France (google "France general strike 2010" if you don't recall the conversation.) It might at first seem like the student protests don't have anything to do with the strike in France; after all, the French workers were demanding an earlier retirement age (in other words, a shorter working life), while the British students are demanding an affordable education. For your blog post, I'd like you to consider the relationship between student life and the life of workers. Please respond to the following questions:

* Using terms from E.P. Thompson, discuss your own relationship, as a student at CCA, to the temporal conditions of work. In what ways does your "job" as a student resemble that of pre-industrial workers? Are there aspects of your work at CCA that resemble task-time as opposed to labor-time? What about idle-time and leisure-time? Do you expect that your experience of work-time will change when you leave the university? How so?

* How do you make sense of the relationship between university tuition/fees and the work you do as a CCA student? To answer this question, you might want to think about what it means to pay for job training--in other words, what it means to pay so that you're able to do a certain kind of work.

* How, finally, do you understand the relationship of the French strike and the British student protests?

As always, have fun with this. But also: PROOFREAD YOUR RESPONSE BEFORE POSTING!

Mapping Assignment

Mapping Assisgnment: The Dérive
















After rereading Guy Debord’s essay, “Theory of the Dérive,” plan to undertake a dérive of your own. Choose a place that’s off the beaten track, where you don’t usually spend any time. Taking into consideration Debord’s description of the dérive, attempt to identify and pursue a “unitary ambiance.”  You will need to figure out how to respond to the ambient qualities of space as you travel through it. Doing this will require you to think carefully about Debord’s assertion that a dérive involves “playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects.”  What sort of behavior does the space solicit? What kind of effects does it produce? Your goal will be to produce a map of your experience. You will present this map as well as a carefully elaborated account of your experience to the class on Wed Nov 17th.  

When designing your map, consider the limitations and strengths of the Situationists’ maps. Your map need not replicate the style of Situationist mapping; it must, however, take up the challenge of psychogeography, which refuses many of the conventions of ordinary mapping. It will be your task to present a map capable of charting the psychogeographic experience of your derive. Make sure you consider issues of time as well as space.

Report due November 17th in class.

3 PAGES TOTAL (12-pt. Times font, double-spaced, standard margins)

1) Give a rich descriptive account of your derive. (1 page) [You will read this section OUT LOUD in class. Come prepared.]
2) Describe how you translated this experience into a map. (1 page)
3) How does your map respond to, or even critique, the limitations of Situationist mapping? (1 page)