Minimalism was originally a reaction to the individualistic excesses and bank-friendly ambivalence of Abstract Expressionism, which Nelson Rockefeller once described as “free enterprise painting”. If it were to emerge as a new movement in 2016, then it would undoubtedly represent a similar stance towards the flexibility and obedience of today’s instrumentalised artistic labourers. For today’s culture of voluntarism and precarity is kept alive by nothing less than the ghost of modernism. Whether they like it or not, artists are sustained by their egos and the myth that they are making a difference. In reality, they are instrumental in creating a post-welfare culture of voluntarism, sustained by the endless labour of self-making.
I present no alternatives or outsides to the labour power that artist’s frequently misrecognise as capital, except for a futile call for the withdrawal of labour. The clock is an ironic counterpoint to this act, representing the end of clock-time in an age of self-regulated / self-surveilled labour, in which there is no ‘free time’ and the tick of the clock is subsumed into the heartbeat of subjective labour. Performing the act of ‘killing time’ highlights the futility of non-participation. However, in the context of a conference, only a fool would refuse the opportunity to network, because without social networks we are adrift in a sea of signs and possibilities, and unplugged from the cybernetic feedback systems that sustain our labour. The performance serves not only as a reminder that refusal of work is a dangerous and potentially suicidal game but also an act of labour in itself; turning away from the shadows of illusion and language, and towards the shadow within and the potentiality of Jung’s “dark night of the soul”.
"Being in Love is Dangerous" (2015) is a project in which I took the
habitual field of DIY as a starting point, in order to interrogate the
relationship between material and immaterial labour, work and leisure,
in neoliberal society. In isolating material labour from the creative
act of art, I was able to explore the potential of making and embodied
geographic relations to disrupt flows within the habitual discources and
representations of capitalism, and to attempt to produce - through practice, performance and performativity - alternative modes of being and becoming.
The room interior was designed the youngest member of the host family
and all materials were bought from corporate owned DIY stores. I walked
from the host family's house in Southbourne to Castle Point retail park,
Bournemouth, on three consecutive days to collect materials including
three 15kg bags of Homebase 'beach pebbles'. One of the journeys was
documented in the following video, which plays with the idea of slowed-down 'zombie' walking, attentive engagement with non-human objects, and fissures and disruptions in the spatial and temporal flows of late-capitalist geographies. The video includes music by Pink Turns Puke.
The
title for the project is taken from David Salle, who argues that “being in love is
dangerous because you talk yourself into thinking you’ve never had
it so good”. This statement can be taken literally as a warning
towards the mythologies of romantic relationships and their
embeddedness within the power and property structures of
late-capitalism. However, the statement also allows us to consider
the ways in which subjectivity is shaped by capitalism as we engage
in everyday creativities such as DIY as part of the endless work of
self-making and the 'affective labour' of disseminating our efforts
within networks of humans and non-humans. Thus, the home becomes a
shop front for the self and its wider habitus.
Individualism
places identity solely in the hands of the markets, it focuses our
attention on the material and symbolic property required to shape who
we are rather than what we can become. Yet,
the power and property relations of subjectivity are rarely just our
own. For Foucault (1998), 'technologies of the self' work as a
dispositif,
or apparatus,
through which power is exercised upon individual bodies within the
biopolitical structures of late-capitalism.
Fire surround clad in 'beach pebbles' bought from Homebase, near Castle
Point retail park, and brought back on foot, despite house being a few
minutes walk from the sea.
Wood cladding 'trompe-l'œil':I wanted the gifting of labour to be a gifting of skilled labour to oppose the deskilling of the neoliberal workplace and the economic rationalisation of skill and craft as entrepreneurial capital in the creative economy.
Recomposition of the total amount of masking tape used to create divisions between planks on mural.
The
initial aim of this project was to take a phenomenological approach
to the performance of 'work', in order to critique the relationship
between material and immaterial labour in everyday production.
Indeed, as Hardt and Negri (2011) suggest, ‘[w]hen
immaterial production becomes hegemonic, all the elements of the
capitalist process have to be viewed in a new light’
(Hardt and Negri, 2011: 25). In the everyday structures of
neoliberalism, labour and work are the same thing! Immaterial labour
becomes a productive force, that proliferates – when aligned with
the big data revolution – increasingly quantifiable surplus value
through the unpaid work of everyday life. On these terms it becomes
increasingly difficult to mobilise a critique of work. The immaterial
labour of everyday production blurs the boundaries between work and
non-work to such an extend that work is prevalent both in and out of
the workplace. A further aim of this project, therefore, was to make
visible the immaterial work of everyday life and to use performance
as a way of “doing” work, phenomenologically, in order to isolate
its affects. Methodologically, I have attempted to articulate a
series of affective relations by using practice and performativity as
a means of opening up to – and feeling – the process of becoming
in order to critique the conditions of work and leisure in neoliberal
society.
My
'work' became problematic, as neither skilled labour nor the creative act could be rationalised in economic terms or exchanged as capital or labour value.
The 'soft touch' rug.
The
performance took place, in (and on) several stages. The first
stage involved walking to a large “out-of-town”
retail park, over several days, to purchase decorating materials and bringing them back to the host's house. This process reconnected the act of labour with
material and spatial ways of thinking – for example the
difficulties of carrying 'beach pebbles', bought from a large DIY
store, to their destination – the house, which is, unironically, a few minutes walk from the beach. On the second
day I began the work of cladding a fireplace in the pebbles, and on
subsequent days completed this task along with the rest of the
decorating – including the creation of a 'trompe-l'œil'
of wood panelling on one wall. This process highlighted the nature of
skilled work in an age where the de-skilling of the workplace is a
neoliberal trick to perpetuate low wages, precarity and
interchangeability employees. Likewise, the possession of hard skills
and creative talent, leaves individuals vulnerable to the insecurity
of the marketplace. It is not enough to possess a skill or creative
propensity, tradespeople and creative workers must also be
“front-facing” affective labourers – ceaselessly smiling,
eternally grateful and polite self-publicists, tirelessly working
their magic on others to stay ahead in the marketplace.
Absolute Radio: a stupefying mix of masculine melancholy, nostalgia and normative advertising. A false haven from the turbulent seas of 'crisis capitalism'.
The receits: all time-stamped as evidence of my presence 'within' systems of immaterial labour and capitalist exchange.
As
the performative engagement with the work wound-down, and the space
was re-staged as an installation, the performance took to a new
stage, upon which I became a 'tour guide', explaining the project to
visitors and justifying this 'work tourism' to myself and others.
This was perhaps the hardest part of the project – to break away
from performative mediation of the habitual and embodied, and to
justify the gap
between intention and reception, artwork and context, rather than
simply occupying that gap. The work itself allowed for the opening up
of meaning and I did not want to close down the material and
imaginative dialogue. Instead of defending the work as 'art', I used
the opportunity as an exercise in 'commoning' – to talk with
audiences about the work and to enable them to connect ideas
emanating from the 'work', with their personal experiences –
bringing things back to the material and ontological. One visitor,
for example, said that the discussion enabled him to value DIY as a
way of connecting with his home, when he had previously begrudged
the fact that his labour was a consequence of not being able to
afford to pay for professionals to do it for him. He was able to
reflect on the development of skills and creativities based in
materiality and outside of immaterial demands of work. Here work
becomes play, as it is without consequence. Moreover, in engaging
with materials and spaces, the labour of DIY becomes a poetic act,
allowing memory and embodiment to collude, and giving birth to poetic
images in the unlearning of habitual objects. Indeed, Bachelard
(1992) characterises the phenomenological exploration of the poetic
image as being fruitful by virtue of fact that it has ‘no
consequences’. He argues that the poetic image is ‘the property
of a naïve
consciousness; in its expression a youthful language’ (Bachelard,
1992: xix). The
visitor also articulated the way in which his labour was imbued with
a sense of care for his family and for place, and was a way of
becoming at home in the world (Ingold, 1995). In this direction,
phenomenology offers a way to move beyond transcendental critique, to
the immanent and its affects on body and imagination. Here,
practice-based research is used as what Crouch (2010) calls a 'gentle
politics' – a way to explore becoming from within the conditions of
late-capitalism, in the recognition that there is no outside.
References
Bachelard,
G. (1992) [1958]. The
Poetics of Space.
Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Crouch,
D. (2010). Flirting
with Space: Journeys and Creativity.
Farnham: Ashgate.
Foucault,
M. (1998). 'The Birth of Biopolitics'. Ethics:
Subjectivity and Truth (Essential Works Michel Foucault, 1954-1984).
New York: New Press.
Hardt,
M. and Negri, A. (2011). Commonwealth.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ingold,
T. (1995). 'Building,
Dwelling, Living: How Animals and People Make Themselves at Home in
the World'.Shifting
Contexts: Transformations in Anthropological Knowledge,
ed. Marilyn Strathern.
London: Routledge.
Art galleries – in particular ones that stage encounters between those who consider themselves to be artists and those who do not – often pose as a cultural laboratories in which the boundaries between 'common-sense' worlds are drawn and challenged. However, gallery art encounters are still culturally and geographically segregated from day-to-day life and as such are a problematic field for political action. For Bourriaud however, the simple act of facilitating such encounters is enough. The gallery becomes a liminal zone in the ‘arena of representational commerce’, which has the capacity to transform both art and the everyday by generating ‘free areas, and time spans whose rhythm contrasts with those structuring everyday life’ (Bourriaud, 2002: 16). But this in itself is not enough. It’s the equivalent of saying that going on holiday once in a year is enough to transform life back home. Whilst, the 'free' experiences we have on tour might influence our perspectives on everyday life, what can two weeks away in the sun really do to transform the structures of everyday life? The answer, for Bourriaud at least, lies in the notion that the ideal of a wholesale transformation of society is illusionary, and that we must therefore deal with a micro-political process of 'tiny revolutions'. However, this too would seem to limit the potential for action in everyday life if we are expected to attend relational art exhibitions and artist’s workshops in order to know how to escape the alienating demands of consumer capitalism! The very idea that the artist knows better than the rest of us is absurd. Can art encounters alone really help us to lift the sheer weight of capitalism's oppression within the structures of everyday life? Indeed, the mythologies that venerate the post-YBA, artist as a kind of guru or touchstone of 'good' living, seem to be a crass perpetuation of the cult of the artist and indeed, the cult of the self. Something Marina Abramović's 512 Hours (2014) is testimony to. The preconception that artists are the only people with the privilege to stop time, or at least view it from afar in a practice akin to mindfulness meditation, suggests that the fundamental rift between work and leisure, has not gone away, and that romantic notion of leisure (and art) as 'time to stand and stare' as expressed by the poet W.H. Davies in 1911, still haunts our worldviews and convinces us that art practice is an activity of the leisure classes. Yet, despite the fact that the 'freedom' leisure is everywhere, the structures of today’s leisure still suggest that liberation is found elsewhere and if we want 'freedom' in everyday life, then we have to be either rich or unemployed, or to earn it through resourcefulness or entrepreneurialism. Thus, the artist is imagined as either aristocratic dilettante or subversive layabout, which perhaps accounts for why artists are rarely paid for their time, and that their work can only be evaluated in terms of productivity and output. Yet conversely, if we are to judge the power of artists to transform the world on basis of their actions rather than products, then aren’t we throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Actions, in the case of Situationism, amount to, at best de Certeau’s pin-prick tactics and at worst, distractions akin to fascist propaganda or the very image of spectacle. Likewise, actions do not challenge the productivist logic of neoliberalism – that the pursuit of freedom is the catalyst of immaterial labour and biopolitical production (Hardt and Negri, 2011). Rather than considering the art object to be the enemy of social transformation, perhaps it is better to suggest that the root of the problem is the notion that being an artist is a specialised activity, distinct from everyday life, in the same way as being a tourist. Indeed, both have equally negative connotations, depending on one’s perspective!
