Labor

Sands’ often describes himself as “too productive.” He can generate five HORSES in a matter of minutes. This over production combined together with his refusal to ever throw anything away is, in part, why the Gift Science Archive is so massive and sprawling.
Labor, though, also figures into Sands’ practice and, with it, into the Gift Science Archive in other infrastructural and immaterial ways. On the one hand, there is a continual reckoning with the neoliberal demands for professionalization and, with it, a miming of market-oriented performances of labor. What is work anyway?

On the other hand, there is a consistent commitment to honoring the DOMESTIC, day-to-day, reproductive labor involved in sustaining a life and a practice. Questions of value and relationships, in particular, inspired the project’s three “PROCESS EVENTS”, which featured conversations with Vivian van Saaze, Aimar Arriola, and the Gift Science team respectively. But, really, one need only search ROBIN to understand this. Robin is a partner, an interlocutor, a photographer and a marker of time. Murray-Wassink and Wassinque Inc. emerge as new signatures. The kinship unit and business unit blur.

Blurring is one of Sands' favorite actions, actually, whether it be on the page or on stage, in the photograph or at home. In the blurring the formless comes into focus, and the networks that hold objects and people together become our buoys. Those networks, the emotional labor that acts as their glue, and value of relationships are organising principles for the Gift Science Archive. One need only look at the extensive list of ‘social links’ tracked in the database to understand this. But you won’t find Robin there because he’s so much more. – MH.



Image of Studio object

  • Catalog No.
  • 00261-2001-TwHd-ListenToYourSupportSystem
  • Title
  • Listen To Your Support System
  • Dimensions
  • 42 x 59
  • Materials
  • Pen and poster marker on paper
  • Object Location
  • Physical

  • Technical Notes

Make-up stains.


  • Reflection Notes

Email exchange – 26.04.20. “Art for me is a belief system, and a tool to get through life.” – SMW.

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Image of Studio object

  • Catalog No.
  • 00329-2000-PsW2000-Sickness:
  • Title
  • Sickness:
  • Dimensions
  • 42 x 59
  • Materials
  • Poster marker on paper
  • Object Location
  • Physical

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Image of Studio object

  • Catalog No.
  • 01430-2000-PsW2000-AMarketingImpulse
  • Title
  • A Marketing Impulse
  • Dimensions
  • 42 x 59
  • Materials
  • Poster marker on paper
  • Object Location
  • Physical

  • Reflection Notes

“Body as material. Thought as material. Why does something have to be physical?” – SMW paraphrased by MH.

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Image of Studio object

Photographer: Radna Rumping

  • Catalog No.
  • 01301-2020-MaPi-LavendarChair-002
  • Title
  • Lavender Chair
  • Dimensions
  • Variable
  • Materials
  • 4 phone snapshots
  • Object Location
  • Digital

  • Technical Notes

Date: 07.01.20. Location: Rijksakademie, studio manege. Images of Megan Hoetger and Sands Murray-Wassink unrolling a naked self-portrait of Sands. Lavender chair with Sands his sequined notebook. Studio with mostly empty shelves.


  • Reflection Notes

“GSA meetings around this time involved a lot of unrolling. Sands his naked body, the ‘explicit’ images and texts in his work have been always present. But this image, of MH and SMW unrolling together, reminds me of another moment: when we did interviews with possible interns, and we would during the job interview randomly pick a painting and unroll this together-of course precisely that one had an explicit text. It was a surprise, and a nice test if the interviewee and Sands would match.” – RR.

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Image of Studio object

Photographer: Radna Rumping

  • Catalog No.
  • 01322-2020-MaPi-ShabbyChic-007
  • Title
  • Shabby Chic
  • Dimensions
  • Variable
  • Materials
  • 18 phone snapshots
  • Object Location
  • Digital

  • Technical Notes

Date: 28.01.20. Location: Rijksakademie, studio manege. Images of SMW and MH unpacking, measuring, photographing and ordering rolled-up painting works. Images of the large print of e-mail from Adrian Piper with archiving tips on the wall.


  • Reflection Notes

“Books as weights to keep the painting rolled out on the floor, a table instead of a ladder-ways of auto-archiving, no need to do it perfect.” – RR.

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Image of Studio object

  • Catalog No.
  • 02389-2015-DA4-AbsurditySurvival(Repetition)
  • Title
  • Absurdity, Survival (Repetition)
  • Dimensions
  • Variable
  • Materials
  • Scan of gouache, acrylic paint and permanent marker drawing on lined paper
  • Object Location
  • Digital

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Image of Studio object

  • Catalog No.
  • 01475-2020-C-GiftScienceArchiveDiagram
  • Title
  • Gift Science Archive Diagram
  • Dimensions
  • 32 x 30
  • Materials
  • Marker, pen and photographs on pink paper with caption
  • Object Location
  • Physical

  • Technical Notes

Diagram with caption created by Megan Hoetger on occasion of the Rijks 150-year anniversary publication. Caption reads as follows: Gift Science Archive (GSA) is an eighteen-month ‘monumental’ performance commissioned by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (Edition VII – Ritual and Display). The project has in part unfolded at the Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten, where Sands Murray-Wassink is a guest resident, and where he and collaborators Megan Hoetger (Curator, If I Can’t Dance), Radna Rumping (independent curator and editor), and Amalia Calderón (storyteller and graduate student) have dug through, ordered, and archived over 2000 ‘studio objects’ accrued over the artist’s expansive, multimedia twenty-five-year studio practice. Between March 2020 and May 2021 Murray-Wassink worked with Calderón and Hoetger in archiving sessions making an inventory of both physical and digital materials in a custom-built GSA digital database, developed by the If I Can’t Dance team to ‘catalogue’ objects through their messy webs of relations. Alongside the archiving proper, Rumping has developed the meta-archive: reflections on the archiving process, as well as recorded conversations between Rumping, Murray-Wassink, Calderón, and Robin Wassink-Murray on the intergenerational and intimate processes of remembering (later transcribed by Martha Jager). These private dialogues have been complemented by public “process events” that began in the Rijksakademie studio in March 2020 with art historian Vivian van Saaze (“VALUE. What is Trash? What is Trashy but Valuable?”) and transitioned into an eight-month epistolary exchange (“RELATIONSHIPS. Feminist Legacies, Queer Intimacies”) between Murray-Wassink and curator Aimar Arriola, which was shared in the ificantdance.studio over Winter and early Spring 2021. All of these intersecting activities—and countless other studio visits and research exchanges—form the multi-dimensional core of the GSA ‘performance’ and inform the project’s collaborative ethos. The exhibition In Good Company (Horsepower): Materials from the Gift Science Archive, 1993–present at mistral, Amsterdam, in Spring 2021 presented a ‘culminating’ performative installation, which offered viewers one-on-one haptic engagements with the GSA database, the meta-archive, and the materials unearthed in the gift-science-archiving process. For the final public moment of the performance, and in conjunction with the Rijks Opens Studios, the GSA database is being launched as giftsciencearchive.net, a website that makes Murray-Wassink and team’s Gift Science Archive accessible to audiences near and far. Following the formal end of Murray-Wassink’s guest residency at the Rijksakademie and, with it, the GSA performance, Murray-Wassink will open I Am Not American. I Have Venus Envy, an exhibition and public performance program developed over the course of GSAin conversation with the curatorial team of AutoItalia, London.

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Image of Studio object

  • Catalog No.
  • 00456-2020-DN-ItsAllAboutPeople
  • Title
  • It's All About People
  • Dimensions
  • 21 x 27 (appx.)
  • Materials
  • Three-page contribution to magazine
  • Object Location
  • Physical

  • Technical Notes

Spread for ‘Metropolis M’ magazine, October 2020.


  • Reflection Notes

SMW & AC inventorying session – 08.10.20. “You can’t extinguish everyone in your life who isn’t a feminist, or pro-queer, or decolonial. You have to live in the world and with the people in it.” – AC. “Lines get blurry. It’s also about chemistry between people, you can’t account for people in your life. [… ] It wasn’t even about politics, it was their behaviour.” – SMW. “Behaviour enacts politics. Someone’s behaviour is the real politics, and sometimes they are different from what they say they are.” – AC. “There is something about having an irritative quality or work. I may destroy them (some artworks) someday, but for now they can go in the archive and irritate people.” – SMW.

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Photographer: Radna Rumping

  • Catalog No.
  • 01704-2021-MaPi-MakingInGoodCompany38
  • Title
  • Making In Good Company
  • Dimensions
  • Variable
  • Materials
  • 93 phone snapshots
  • Object Location
  • Digital

  • Technical Notes

Date: 22 February-5 March, 2021. Location: mistral, Amsterdam (Pakhuis Wilhelmina).

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Image of Studio object

  • Catalog No.
  • 02168-1995/1998-TwLd-BullshitThings
  • Title
  • Bullshit Things
  • Dimensions
  • 29.5 x 21
  • Materials
  • Scented marker on A4 stationary
  • Object Location
  • Physical

  • Technical Notes

Like the horse drawings, the letterhead drawings are not always on letterhead, but share amongst them use of the handwritten text.


  • Reflection Notes

“I printed this stationary to use for my business, but never really used it for that. I used it to start making drawings on. My Mom had sent me fruit scented markers with animals printed on them, which I had used in my childhood. I used these to make the drawings, declarative statements to find my way.” – SMW.

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Image of Studio object

  • Catalog No.
  • 02263-c2015-TwA4-TheConceptOfWork
  • Title
  • The Concept of Work
  • Dimensions
  • 29.5 x 21
  • Materials
  • Acrylic paint on pages of Gai Pied magazine
  • Object Location
  • Physical

  • Technical Notes

The pages are yellowed and cracked with age. Dutch Curator Erik Hagoort gave SMW a few huge boxes of these French gay liberation magazines from the 80s, and SMW intuitively started painting on them. There are many more than those listed in the archive.


  • Reflection Notes

“I had to throw away a lot of these, there were also Dutch gay liberation magazines in the boxes Erik Hagoort gave me, called ‘De Verkeerde Krant’ or so, (‘van de verkeerde kant’ was a Dutch saying for a queer person) but due to storage I could not keep everything as a resource to use. There are hundreds of these painted drawings, and they get quite a good response. Paul Thek = newspaper paintings, Karen Finley = same as Paul Thek, Erik Hagoort is the partner of Dutch artist Albert van Westing and AA Bronson showed a fondness for the drawings.” – SMW.

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Image of Studio object

  • Catalog No.
  • 01857-2021-DoP-ProcessEvent#3COLLABORATION07
  • Title
  • ProcessEvent#3: COLLABORATION. How to work together?
  • Dimensions
  • Variable
  • Materials
  • Digital video file
  • Object Location
  • Digital

  • Technical Notes

Video registration of the third and final of the process event series, which took place as a live-stream conversation within the public program of Rijksakademie Open Studios 2021. The artist and collaborators Amalia Calderón, Megan Hoetger and Radna Rumping sat together with If I Can't Dance archive and research curator Anik Fournier to discuss the structures of 'collaboration' within the group's 'monumental' 18-month performance of archiving, as well as their respective roles and shared tasks throughout the process. Friday 21 June 2021, 12.00-13.30hr. Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Sarphatistraat 470, 1018 GW Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

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Listings connecting to the keyword “Labor” (807)



Image of Studio object

  • Catalog No.
  • 00212-2000-PsW2000-InnerEmotionalLife
  • Title
  • Inner Emotional Life
  • Dimensions
  • 42 x 59
  • Materials
  • Pen on paper
  • Object Location
  • Physical

  • Reflection Notes

“I refuse to destroy things.” – SMW.

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Image of Studio object

  • Catalog No.
  • 00247-c2001-PsW2000-gaymen#2
  • Title
  • gay men #2
  • Dimensions
  • 42 x 59
  • Materials
  • Poster marker on paper
  • Object Location
  • Physical

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Image of Studio object

  • Catalog No.
  • 00279-2001-PsW2000-gaystructure.
  • Title
  • gay structure
  • Dimensions
  • 42 x 59
  • Materials
  • Poster marker on paper
  • Object Location
  • Physical

  • Reflection Notes

Email exchange – 12.04.20. “I had to document it all, even with others, partners, etc. because gay pornography figures and has figured in my life so I have to put my own body where I see the bodies of others…” – SMW.

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Image of Studio object

  • Catalog No.
  • 00311-c2001-PsW2000-MetSlechteMensenGaatHetA…
  • Title
  • Met Slechte Mensen Gaat Het Altijd Good.
  • Dimensions
  • 42 x 59
  • Materials
  • Poster marker on cardboard
  • Object Location
  • Physical

  • Technical Notes

Translation: ‘It’s always going good with bad people’.

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Image of Studio object

  • Catalog No.
  • 00343-2000-PsW2000-GAYISDRIVING
  • Title
  • GAY IS DRIVING
  • Dimensions
  • 42 x 59
  • Materials
  • Poster marker on paper
  • Object Location
  • Physical

  • Reflection Notes

“Did I ask for your opinion? Stay in your body.” – AC. “Stay in your lane.” – SMW.

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Image of Studio object

  • Catalog No.
  • 00375-2002-PsW2000-GoldFucking
  • Title
  • Gold Fucking
  • Dimensions
  • 56.5 x 76.5
  • Materials
  • Oil crayons on paper
  • Object Location
  • Physical

  • Reflection Notes

“I’ve always been involved with sex as a kind of truth.” – SMW. “My body is almost a language to the research (the sex), which is so important to my life.” – SMW. “I was told that due to C19 having all cruising places closed, that the lesser sex I was having would feel more intense, but not really.” – SMW. “Having less just feels like having less!” – AC.

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Image of Studio object

  • Catalog No.
  • 00407-2001-TwHd-IWILLNOT
  • Title
  • I WILL NOT
  • Dimensions
  • 42 x 59
  • Materials
  • Poster marker and pen on paper
  • Object Location
  • Physical

  • Reflection Notes

“Sex, perfume and music are the three things that can snap me out of nothingness.” – SMW. “Just purely on the rebel side of life.” – AC.

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Image of Studio object

  • Catalog No.
  • 00441-2001-PsW2000-HumanLife
  • Title
  • Human Life
  • Dimensions
  • 42 x 59
  • Materials
  • Poster marker and pen on paper
  • Object Location
  • Physical

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Image of Studio object

  • Catalog No.
  • 01248-c2000-PsW2000-DreamWorld
  • Title
  • Dream World
  • Dimensions
  • 42 x 59
  • Materials
  • Poster marker on paper
  • Object Location
  • Physical

  • Reflection Notes

SMW & AC inventorying session – 03.09.20. “Dream a little dream of me is my Carolee song.” – SMW. SMW & AC inventorying session – 24.09.20. “I was distracted by the dream of…” – SMW. “The story?” – AC. “Sex.” – SMW.

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Image of Studio object

Photographer: Megan Hoetger

  • Catalog No.
  • 01282-2019-MaPi-StudioMove-015
  • Title
  • Studio Move
  • Dimensions
  • Variable
  • Materials
  • 32 phone snapshots
  • Object Location
  • Digital

  • Technical Notes

Date: 12.12.19. Location: Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, small studio (in main building) and large studio (in manege). Images of Sands Murray-Wassink, Megan Hoetger and Radna Rumping moving studio; from a smaller ‘office-like’ space in the main building of the Rijksakademie, to the larger studio at the manege. Images of paintings, slides, photographs, studio interior, bags to move the materials. Plus a portrait of SMW, MH, RR together.


  • Reflection Notes

“On a very personal note, while moving bags from one studio to the other, this day something small happened that later turned out to be magical. I will keep it to myself, but am now happy to see a picture of that day.” – RR.

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Image of Studio object

Photographer: Radna Rumping

  • Catalog No.
  • 01314-2020-MaPi-MeetYourOwnNeeds-011
  • Title
  • Meet Your Own Needs
  • Dimensions
  • Variable
  • Materials
  • 12 phone snapshots
  • Object Location
  • Digital

  • Technical Notes

Date: 14.01.20. Rijksakademie, studio manege. Images of various materials that are unpacked in the studio by SMW and MH. Written caption by Sands on a rolled-up painting ‘meet your own needs’. Two images of a diagram MH has made during a brainstorm about the possible structure of the database.


  • Reflection Notes

“That’s still the case. Consistency.” – RR.

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Image of Studio object

Photographer: Radna Rumping

  • Catalog No.
  • 01346-2020-MaPi-BottomingToTheTop-003
  • Title
  • Bottoming to the Top
  • Dimensions
  • Variable
  • Materials
  • 4 phone snapshots
  • Object Location
  • Digital

  • Technical Notes

Date: 18.02.20. Location: Rijksakademie, studio manege. Images of SMW working in the studio. Image of a self-portrait. Image of a pink note from the Angelyne Fan Club on the wall, accompanied by a card saying 'bottoming to the top' (a gift from MH to SMW).

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Image of Studio object

Photographer: Radna Rumping

  • Catalog No.
  • 01377-2020-MaPi-HangingTime-031
  • Title
  • Hanging Time
  • Dimensions
  • Variable
  • Materials
  • 50 phone snapshots
  • Object Location
  • Digital

  • Technical Notes

Date: 25.02.20. Location: Rijksakademie, studio manege. Images of installation activities in the studio, with SMW, MH and Roger Cremers who assists with hanging a large vinyl print and the framed work dedicated to Carolee Schneemann. Unpacking materials. Sands holding a drawing with a clock and 'tyranny' text, a gift for Roger. The beginnings of making the horse cloud on the studio wall.

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Image of Studio object

Photographer: Radna Rumping

  • Catalog No.
  • 01409-2020-MaPi-HorseCloud-013
  • Title
  • Horse Cloud
  • Dimensions
  • Variable
  • Materials
  • 14 phone snapshots
  • Object Location
  • Digital

  • Technical Notes

Date: 04.03.20. Location: Rijksakademie, studio manege. Images of working on large horse cloud with SMW, MH and Amalia Calderón. First time GSA meeting with Amalia present, images of Sands and Amalia talking with poster of Hannah Wilke in the background.


  • Reflection Notes

Rijksakademie Internal Open Studios – 07.09.20. “… bring roughness and playfulness into this serious art discourse.” – N/A. “Funny that you say the word playful, because when you read the (horse cloud) sentences, they are quite heavy, and it makes you draw from your own experiences […].” – SMW. “When I draw them (horses), I feel better.” – SMW. “So it’s like magic!” – N/A.

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Image of Studio object

  • Catalog No.
  • 01441-2001-TwHd-DisaffiliatedArtist
  • Title
  • Disaffiliated Artist
  • Dimensions
  • 42 x 59
  • Materials
  • Poster marker, pen and unidentified make-up on paper
  • Object Location
  • Physical

  • Technical Notes

Before the show with Carolee – the text dreaming of inviting her to be in a show together at Cookie Snoei.

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