If Manual
Labour: Making & Making-Do has piqued your interest in exploring what
others have done in and around the area of Labour, then here are some links to recent and relevant projects, exhibitions and writings which you might find
relevant.
Books
Frederico
Campagna, Oct 2013
Our secular
society seems to have finally found its new God: Work. As technological progress
makes human labour superfluous, and over-production destroys both the economy
and the planet, Work remains stronger than ever as a mantra of universal
submission. This book develops a fully-fledged theory of radical atheism,
advocating a disrespectful, opportunist squandering of obedience. By replacing
hope and faith with adventure, The Last Night of our lives might finally become
the first morning of an autonomous future.
See also: http://federicocampagna.eu/
Lockhart,
Heathcote, Massop & Bunton, 2010
Published by
Modern Art Oxford for the launch of Jon Lockhart's Manual Labour
exhibition; Lockhart and a panel of
artists and curators (including Katy Beinart, Melanie Manchot, Nicolas de
Oliveira & Nicola Oxley and Joshua Sofaer) discuss the merits and issues
that arise out of artistic practices that acknowledge the contributions made by
non-artists who actively inform, positively influence, and contribute to the production
of their work.
Papers/Essays/Conferences
Pil and
Galia Kollectiv
In The
Social Contract, Jean Jacques Rousseau claims that representational democracy
equals the enslavement of the people. The democratic system of governance in
the classical world, Rousseau explains, relied on slave labour and, thus, time
was devoted entirely to freedom as a totality – democracy was a total way of
life in which citizens of the Greek polis were involved in all decisions all
the time. To quote Rousseau, “the citizen can be perfectly free only if the
slave is absolutely a slave” whereas “people of the modern world, [who] have no
slaves, but… are slaves [them]selves … believing themselves to be free, have
representatives” (114 –5). The problem of the attainability of a project of
total freedom is therefore not merely a problem of the division of labour, but
fundamentally that of representation. To understand the implications of this
problem for contemporary art, we would like to conflate two meanings of the
term ‘representation’, using it both in the artistic sense, unintended by
Rousseau, and in the political sense, in which he uses it. We would like to
suggest a link between the rejection of representation in favour of ‘direct
action’ in the political terrain and in the artworld.
Svenja
Bromberg, 2013
Now that
immaterial and affective labour seem to be waning as subjects for art, a
fascination with the radical contingency of the material world has grown to
take their place. Through close readings of the speculative realist philosophy
that so inspires contemporary aesthetics, Svenja Bromberg pinpoints the
anti-politics inherent in this turn. Svenja
Bromberg works on Marxist political philosophy, aesthetics and politics, and
feminist theory.
Alfred Sohn-Rethel, 1977
Seminal and most influential work by German Marxist economist and
philosopher of work and epistemology.
Papers for
the 6th Annual Conference of Historical Materialism (27-29 November 2009, SOAS,
London) entitled Another World is Necessary: Crisis, Struggle and Political
Alternatives:
John Roberts
- Art After Deskillin
Angela
Dimitrakaki - Reflections on the ‘Labour Turn’ in Contemporary Art
Marina
Vishmidt - Art and Labour as Anti-Matter: Why and Why Not
Land │Labour│Capital
Future
State, in partnership with Limerick City Gallery of Art (LCGA) and Goldsmiths,
University of London, is hosting Land │Labour │Capital, an interdisciplinary
and collaborative symposium at LCGA on 26-28 September 2013. The symposium is taking place during Labour
and Lockout, an exhibition to mark the centenary of the 1913 Dublin Lockout, a
key moment in Ireland’s industrial history when employers refused to recognize
workers in an attempt to break worker solidarity and the trade union movement.
Land │Labour │Capital will reflect on the relevance of 1913 for the
contemporary moment and seek, through dialogue, to foreground radical and
alternative narratives for future history-making. Invited speakers include Mark
Curran, Dr Angela Dimitrakaki, Professor Nicholas Mirzoeff and Deirdre O’Mahony
among a host of other academic and artist participants.
Tue 9th Nov 2010.
Art+Labour
is a public conversation exploring the conditions and experiences of creative
labour in the cultural industries - working conditions, pay, working hours;
freedom and autonomy, pleasure and obligation; insecurity and uncertainty;
social reproduction, networking and isolation - and artists' organising within
it - unions, artists' associations, or self-organised studio/exhibition spaces.
Cristian Nae, 2012
How can an
art biennale take a renewed critical stance towards its own immersion in the
production of cognition, and in the effects of accelerated semiocapitalism, or
the capitalization of linguistic labor (to which the critical discourse of
contemporary art certainly belongs)?Tackling the broad topic of the
precariousness of contemporary living – or radical instability, loosely defined
in relation to the changing cultural and socio-economic conditions of both life
and artistic practice – the 5th International Bucharest Biennial for
Contemporary Art, curated by Anne Barlow, focuses on investigative artworks,
gathering together nineteen projects of artistic research, complemented by
various small-scale parallel events.
Dublin Institute of Technology, 2010.
This
symposium explores what it means to be a ‘creative worker’ today. What are the
working conditions, expectations and realities for those working in the cultural
and creative sector? Helping to explore these issues are philosopher Gerald
Raunig and writer and policy analyst Dr. Kate Oakley to Dublin as two of our international guest speakers,
as well as entrepreneur and consultant Toby Scott, critic, educator and
researcher Tim Stott and other representatives from the cultural sector.
Tate
Britain, 2012
A half-day
symposium: International artists and academics investigate current conditions
of artistic production in relation to new forms of labour in the emerging
global economy. Presenting various perspectives on immaterial labour and its
relationship to contemporary art, speakers address questions around the impact
of immaterial production on new aesthetic forms and uses of art, how artists
both embody and contest the precarious working conditions of immaterial labour,
and art’s potential to serve as immanent critique of capitalism.
Lev Manovich
Paper resented at the International Symposium on Electronic Art, Helsinki, 1994.
Research Projects
Jenny Richards & Sophie Hope
‘Manual Labours’ is a long term research project exploring
people’s physical relationships to work, initiated by . This project reconsiders current time-based structures of work (when does
work start and end?) and reasserts the significance of the physical (manual)
aspect of immaterial, affective and emotional labour.’Manual Labours’ started
with a 35 hour ‘working week’-long investigation into the embodied, sensory,
emotional affects of work. Research included a 9 mile walk to work, meetings
with our co-workers, film screenings and eating together during a Public Lunch
Hour.
Exhibitions
Visions of Labour
Kunsthalle
São Paulo • 24 August - 21 September 2013
Visions of
Labour explores living conditions, rituals and memories of workers' communities
in three different geographical and historical contexts. Through the means of
video, interviews, performance, installation and music, artists Cora Piantoni
(Switzerland), Enzo Umbaca (Italy), and Cosimo Veneziano (Italy) generate
processes of self representation. Leaving aside the stereotypes of chain work,
they explore relations between people, their working environment and society.
Neglecting material aspects of labour, the artists have produced intense
portraits of worlds that are somehow fading. As they concentrate on the
relevance of residual elements such as sound, gestures, routine and informal
conversations, their works convey images which are both abstract and firmly
rooted in the life of workers. By researching archives and discussing and
producing new formats to translate shared experiences, they highlight the way
these communities have developed as political, historical and economic
subjects, rooted in labour.
"Manual Labor” at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, 2012
Oscar Tuazo
New work by
Paris-based American artist Oscar Tuazon in a show entitled Manual Labor. In
recent years, Oscar Tuazon’s works, notably constructions in wood and concrete,
have been shown in many exhibitions worldwide, including the 2011 Venice
Biennial. His approach, working with and against the entropic qualities of
natural materials, achieves fascinating results. In formal terms, Tuazon’s work
displays loose links with the development of minimal and land art by artists
such as Sol LeWitt or Michael Heizer. Tuazon’s hybrid sculptures, which are
formed by and bear the traces of physical labor, are situated between
architecture and performance.
Part of The
Nordic Model, Malmø Nordic, 2013. Sweden. The work, consisting of five wood cut
prints and a lasercut wooden plate depicts the human autonomic nervous system
and hands injured by repetitive strain. Concerned with the definition of manual
labour in relation to cognitive labour forms, the artist dealt with her own
working condition as an artist and freelancer against the commissioning power
of the Malmø Art Museum. The visual proposition and the gesture of donating her
work to this institution, is the first manifestation of a larger research
project called Zero Collection, that tries to introduce the rolling jubilee
(http://rollingjubilee.org/) and debt resistance as a possible investment for
the Malmø Art Museum.
2012, A
touring exhibition of Live Art, featuring eleven leading female artists who are
resident within, or native to, Northern and Southern Ireland. LABOUR was
co-curated by Amanda Coogan, Chrissie Cadman and Helena Walsh and produced by
Benjamin Sebastian of ]performance s p a c e[, London. The exhibition was
accompanied by two public forums and a one-day symposium. It was supported by
]performance s p a c e[, London, The Lab, Dublin, Void Gallery, Derry
/Londonderry, Queen Mary University of London, Graduate School of Creative Art
and Media (GradCAM), Dublin University of Ulster, The Live Art Development
Agency, London, Derry City Council and The Arts Council of Ireland.
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2013
This exhibition puts on show contemporary art works which radically transform our understandings traditional media like ceramics, tapestry and woodcarving. From Ricky Swallow’s “Sleeping Range” (2002) of life-sized mummy-shaped
sleeping bags painstakingly carved out of a single large block of wood, to
Grayson Perry’s ceramic vases and tapestry Mind Maps, curator Julie Joyce makes a case for the centrality of an 'artisan avant-guarde' in the development of early 21st Century art.
Eleanor Heartney, 2012.
"The notion
of the “Working Man,” once a staple of populist political rhetoric and
Hollywood social drama, has become almost quaint -- as much a vestige of
earlier times as is the apparently antiquated concept of class. In the era of
outsourcing, crowd-sourcing, digitization and the triumph of global markets,
labor is just something you save with ever more sophisticated electronic
devices…”. Eleanor
Heartney is a New York art critic and the author of Art & Today (2008) and
many other books.
With work by
Thomas Bayrle, Sarah Browne, Andrea Büttner, Alice Channer, Isabelle Cornaro,
Dewar & Gicquel, Pernille Kapper Williams and Běla Kolářová. ‘Unto This
Last’ Raven Row, London 2010, takes its cue from John Ruskin’s eponymous book
to consider the complicated relationships between contemporary art and craft.
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