Maria Eichhorn. The Artist's Contract

The Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) began in January 1969 with a dispute about artists’ rights, leading Greek sculptor Takis to remove his work Tele-Sculpture (1960) from MoMA after the museum displayed it in the exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (New York, November 27, 1968 – February 9, 1969) against his wishes. The Angry Arts (1967) and the AWC/Artists and Writers Protest (AWP) (1970) petitions to Pablo Picasso to remove Guernica from MoMA as a protest against the Vietnam War were also predicated on Picasso’s right to decide about a work he still owned. In 1971, Seth Seigelaub — gallery owner, independent curator, publisher, and seminal figure in the Conceptual Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s — initiated the ‘Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement’ intended to “remedy some generally acknowledged inequities in the art world, particularly artists’ lack of control of the use of their work and participation in the economics after they no longer own it”. Maria Eichhorn’s project explores these issues through interviews and files as an archiving form.