Course info

This course will reflect on how both the grammar and the politics of labour have entered into the field of contemporary art since the late 2000s moment of the financial crisis. The increased concentration of wealth in society is also reflected in art institutions and markets, while the political economy of the field becomes a widespread topic for practitioners who adopt individual and collective strategies to focus on the conditions of their labour as the material of their practice. Our lens will take in art practices and methodologies, but also ways of organizing in the field, both by artists and arts workers, as well as the increasingly blurred line of the self-identification of these figures. While entrepreneurial, ‘passionate’ and ‘activist’ modes of labour have been long integrated into the exploitative routines of the culture industry, there is a growing recognition that questions around social justice need to be confronted in the infrastructural as well as the representational level of cultural production. The impact of debates around precarity is significant, as well as discourses around affective and reproductive labour stemming not just from historical materialist analyses but from queer feminisms of colour, affect theory, performance studies, disability studies, science and technology studies and black studies. Departing from materialist feminist genealogies such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Maintenance Art, the course will approach aesthetic strategies as organizing strategies (seeing what the organization of the senses into specific materialities has to say to forms of artistic labour) and organizing strategies as aesthetic strategies (how the politics of labour call upon us to feel and see differently in the contexts of our artistic and knowledge-making practices). We will be looking at authored practices, collective projects, institutional moves, political campaigns and technological propositions for reckoning with artistic and creative labour. Each week will feature a practice or cluster of practices, 1-3 texts, and a further reading list.