My research is an the attempt to formulate, and to problematise, what would constitute a specifically political praxis in art production and mediation via notions of temporality, exchange, autonomy and abstract labour developed principally in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, Marx and Adorno. A parallel strand will consider the broadly autonomist Marxist concept of ‘affective labour’ within a dialectic of the term’s complicity with and subsumption into a thoroughly informalised and rapacious extraction of value in creative as in menial sectors (with salient distinctions) and the possibility of an analysis that would draw out its challenge to the predominance of exchange value and abstract labour. If cultural work, like housework, can be looked upon as a service which functions as an exception that confirms the rule of the capitalist social relations (for a minute ignoring the art market), this paradigmatic role can also dramatise the negative dialectic that hinders the full absorption of the object under the sign of the concept – the universality of value. Concomitantly, the encounter of the biopolitical and conceptual in much contemporary art prompts an assessment of whether there is the potential for a political praxis to be staged in art production and mediation that is ever constrained to most splendidly embody the logic of capital and point beyond it, in Adorno’s renowned dictum. Can art disrupt its immemorial symptomatic bind between being alibi of ‘untruth’ and the ‘laboratory’ for other ways of life? What kind of instantiations would such a move give rise to? Does the effort to elaborate such a set of possibilities already partake of an institutional grammar of evasion? To find out, I would like to materialise my research in a plurality of formats, social situations and temporo-spatial frames throughout the year.
In addition to Marx, Deleuze and the Frankfurt School, touchstones for my research include Marxist feminist writing on waged and unwaged labour, the work of autonomist Marxist theorists such as the Midnight Notes and Aufheben groups and Jacques Camatte, Paolo Virno on ‘virtuosity’, Jacques Rancière, dissident Modernists, feminist media and conceptual artists such as Valie EXPORT, Mierle Lademan Ukeles and Bonnie Sherk, and contemporary practitioners and phenomena too plural and, yet, ephemeral, to name here.
International Space Station Assembly
A Collective Construction Site
