Are You Working Too Much?: Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art (Sternberg Press / e-flux journal) PDF
Preview Are You Working Too Much?: Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art (Sternberg Press / e-flux journal)
e-fluxjournal Are You WorkingToo Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art Sternber Pres(f- 9 e-fluxjournal Are You WorkingToo Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art Sternber Pres(f- 9 Contents Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Keti Chukhrov Wood, Anton Vidokle Towards the Space of the Introduction General: On Labor Beyond 5 Materiality and Immateriality 94 Diedrich Diederichsen People of Intensity, People Tom Holert of Power:The Nietzsche Hidden Labor and the Delight Economy of Otherness: Design and 8 Post-Capitalist Politics 112 Hito Steyer! Politics of Art: Contemporary Franco Berardi Bifo Art and the Transition to Cognitarian Subjectivation Postdemocracy 134 30 Antke Engel Marion von Osten Desire for/within Economic Irene istViele! Or What We Transformation Call "Productive" Forces 147 40 Precarious Workers Brigade Liam Gillick Fragments Toward an The Good of Work Understanding of a Week that 60 Changed Everything ... 167 Lars Bang Larsen Zombies of Immaterial Labor: lrit Rogoff The Modern Monster and the FREE Death of Death 182 74 Contents Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Keti Chukhrov Wood, Anton Vidokle Towards the Space of the Introduction General: On Labor Beyond 5 Materiality and Immateriality 94 Diedrich Diederichsen People of Intensity, People Tom Holert of Power:The Nietzsche Hidden Labor and the Delight Economy of Otherness: Design and 8 Post-Capitalist Politics 112 Hito Steyer! Politics of Art: Contemporary Franco Berardi Bifo Art and the Transition to Cognitarian Subjectivation Postdemocracy 134 30 Antke Engel Marion von Osten Desire for/within Economic Irene istViele! Or What We Transformation Call "Productive" Forces 147 40 Precarious Workers Brigade Liam Gillick Fragments Toward an The Good of Work Understanding of a Week that 60 Changed Everything ... 167 Lars Bang Larsen Zombies of Immaterial Labor: lrit Rogoff The Modern Monster and the FREE Death of Death 182 74 L!) Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle Introduction L!) Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle Introduction Let's be clear about something: it is infuriating that comparison to the amount of self-exploitation-the most interesting artists are perfectly capable of willingly inconclusive, highly generative work that is functioning in at least two or three professions that either too useless or too stubborn to ever align itself are, unlike that of art, respected by society in terms with the mundane, but remunerated, field of aver of compensation and general usefulness. And com age labor: that of bakers, garbage men, police offi pensation-which is money-is not only for feeding cers, cobblers, lawyers, engineers, day laborers, and lavish lifestyles or taking spontaneous beach vaca so forth. These are the people you make your work tions. Ask anyone who has children or sick relatives about, and perhaps who your parents are. Art, you in a country without good health care-which could would like to think, is a shining vision of a possibility by now be almost any country, as the administra for something else. tion of life is deferred more and more to the private So you secretly support your art work with sphere of personal finance. This only makes the your money job, even a high-paying one. You are your question of fair compensation all the more press own sugar daddy and trophy wife in a single pack ing. It is no longer an issue of some kind of moral or age. Your gallery sells your work, maybe for a lot of ethical principle, but of life itself. So why should so money, yet something does not line up there either. many talented and hyper-qualified artists submit The work does not find its reception even when it themselves willingly to a field of work (that is, in art) is well received. You keep dumping your personal that offers so little in return for such a huge amount resources into producing your work, your relation of unremunerated labor? ships crumble, and the work simply doesn't find its For some reason, either due to artists' own audience the way an engineer's building plan will vanity, to being hypnotized by some sort of authorial inevitably be constructed, for better or worse. diva imperative that promises large-scale recogni One option is to blame it all on authorship and the tion, or to the expectations of the cul tu re itself (not cult of the author. But that seems frankly ridiculous. the field of "cultural production" but the de facto Erase your name, and not only will you not get paid one, the less dynamic and slower moving one) and for your time, you will not get credited either. It's its own befuddlement with regard to artists' use like performing an act of charity for a plant. The only fulness, the artist is left to expend an enormous option available could be to simply work more-but amount of professional energy in the doldrums of a while claiming the privileged capacity of the artist murky pseudo-profession that absorbs work under within the fields in which your determined amateur the auspices of some kind of common belief in its ism has made you a functional expert. higher value. But art is not a religion, and, though it often seems structurally similar, it is not a charity either. co E Th is idea of a "higher value" that presides over-and ::, .2. indeed fuels-an idea of art labor as free labor must X ::, be contested. All are to blame for it: though classi ..:: I cal exploitation is rampant, it may actually pale in Q) Let's be clear about something: it is infuriating that comparison to the amount of self-exploitation-the most interesting artists are perfectly capable of willingly inconclusive, highly generative work that is functioning in at least two or three professions that either too useless or too stubborn to ever align itself are, unlike that of art, respected by society in terms with the mundane, but remunerated, field of aver of compensation and general usefulness. And com age labor: that of bakers, garbage men, police offi pensation-which is money-is not only for feeding cers, cobblers, lawyers, engineers, day laborers, and lavish lifestyles or taking spontaneous beach vaca so forth. These are the people you make your work tions. Ask anyone who has children or sick relatives about, and perhaps who your parents are. Art, you in a country without good health care-which could would like to think, is a shining vision of a possibility by now be almost any country, as the administra for something else. tion of life is deferred more and more to the private So you secretly support your art work with sphere of personal finance. This only makes the your money job, even a high-paying one. You are your question of fair compensation all the more press own sugar daddy and trophy wife in a single pack ing. It is no longer an issue of some kind of moral or age. Your gallery sells your work, maybe for a lot of ethical principle, but of life itself. So why should so money, yet something does not line up there either. many talented and hyper-qualified artists submit The work does not find its reception even when it themselves willingly to a field of work (that is, in art) is well received. You keep dumping your personal that offers so little in return for such a huge amount resources into producing your work, your relation of unremunerated labor? ships crumble, and the work simply doesn't find its For some reason, either due to artists' own audience the way an engineer's building plan will vanity, to being hypnotized by some sort of authorial inevitably be constructed, for better or worse. diva imperative that promises large-scale recogni One option is to blame it all on authorship and the tion, or to the expectations of the cul tu re itself (not cult of the author. But that seems frankly ridiculous. the field of "cultural production" but the de facto Erase your name, and not only will you not get paid one, the less dynamic and slower moving one) and for your time, you will not get credited either. It's its own befuddlement with regard to artists' use like performing an act of charity for a plant. The only fulness, the artist is left to expend an enormous option available could be to simply work more-but amount of professional energy in the doldrums of a while claiming the privileged capacity of the artist murky pseudo-profession that absorbs work under within the fields in which your determined amateur the auspices of some kind of common belief in its ism has made you a functional expert. higher value. But art is not a religion, and, though it often seems structurally similar, it is not a charity either. co E Th is idea of a "higher value" that presides over-and ::, .2. indeed fuels-an idea of art labor as free labor must X ::, be contested. All are to blame for it: though classi ..:: I cal exploitation is rampant, it may actually pale in Q) 1. Classical Music vs. Free Jazz When an adult in Berlin or Vienna wants to spend an evening with company, there are two basic options: one can have a cozy dinner with friends at a restaurant or someone's apartment, or one can go out. The second option may not be a radical step into the unknown, as there are familiar signposts, co but nevertheless, when we go out, we switch into an entirely different mode of experience. Now "going out" can mean all sorts of things: an art opening followed by dinner with the artist or Diedrich Diederichsen artists and a visit to a club, or a certain constella Peopleo f Intensity,P eopleo f tion of bars and clubs where we are sure to meet acquaintances. Or we go to a specific club straight Power:TheN ietzsche Economy away, on~ that offers everything in a single package. But really, the distances we cover, the outside world fading in and out of the theater of our increasingly inebriated perceptions, the glistening pavement, diffuse light, car doors slamming, unexpected music in the cab: these are all part of it, the whole program. The first variant, dinner with friends, is not necessarily any shorter or more sober. This sort of night among friends can be no less long-and no less boozy. Here, however, we get intoxicated not in order to enable ourselves to react more smoothly to new stimuli, but so we can bear the social den sity and concentration. Friends often show up in couples, and when they don't, there are many long term friendships boasting of accumulated intimacy not too different from the monogamous relation ships that become the dominant model as we get older. This means that many possible constellations of arguments, agreements and disagreements of i6 E taste, antagonisms and harmonies of temperament :l .!2, and mentality, have already been played out, and X may well have reached a stage at which they no lon :l t;:: I ger ruffle any feathers. Still, these evenings demand <I> 1. Classical Music vs. Free Jazz When an adult in Berlin or Vienna wants to spend an evening with company, there are two basic options: one can have a cozy dinner with friends at a restaurant or someone's apartment, or one can go out. The second option may not be a radical step into the unknown, as there are familiar signposts, co but nevertheless, when we go out, we switch into an entirely different mode of experience. Now "going out" can mean all sorts of things: an art opening followed by dinner with the artist or Diedrich Diederichsen artists and a visit to a club, or a certain constella Peopleo f Intensity,P eopleo f tion of bars and clubs where we are sure to meet acquaintances. Or we go to a specific club straight Power:TheN ietzsche Economy away, on~ that offers everything in a single package. But really, the distances we cover, the outside world fading in and out of the theater of our increasingly inebriated perceptions, the glistening pavement, diffuse light, car doors slamming, unexpected music in the cab: these are all part of it, the whole program. The first variant, dinner with friends, is not necessarily any shorter or more sober. This sort of night among friends can be no less long-and no less boozy. Here, however, we get intoxicated not in order to enable ourselves to react more smoothly to new stimuli, but so we can bear the social den sity and concentration. Friends often show up in couples, and when they don't, there are many long term friendships boasting of accumulated intimacy not too different from the monogamous relation ships that become the dominant model as we get older. This means that many possible constellations of arguments, agreements and disagreements of i6 E taste, antagonisms and harmonies of temperament :l .!2, and mentality, have already been played out, and X may well have reached a stage at which they no lon :l t;:: I ger ruffle any feathers. Still, these evenings demand <I>
The list of books you might like
