LINKS


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.

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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