Art as Occupation: Claims for an Autonomy of Life

I am ripping these ideas from a brilliant observation by the Carrot Workers Collective. See →

Walter Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, part 2, 1931-1934, ed. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 694-711, esp. 696.

One could even say: the work of art is tied to the idea of a product (bound up in a complex system of valorization). Art-as-occupation bypasses the end result of production by immediately turning the making-of into commodity.

Lawrence Rothfield as quoted in John Hooper, “Arm museum guards to prevent looting, says professor,” The Guardian, 10.07.2011, “Professor Lawrence Rothfield, faculty director of the University of Chicago's cultural policy center, told the Guardian that ministries, foundations and local authorities “should not assume that the brutal policing job required to prevent looters and professional art thieves from carrying away items is just one for the national police or for other forces not under their direct control”. He was speaking in advance of the annual conference of the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art (ARCA), held over the weekend in the central Italian town of Amelia. Rothfield said he would also like to see museum attendants, site wardens and others given thorough training in crowd control. And not just in the developing world.” See →.

Carrot Workers Collective, “The figure of the intern appears in this context paradigmatic as it negotiates the collapse of the boundaries between Education, Work and Life.” See →.

As critiqued recently by Walid Raad in the building of the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim franchise and related labor issues. See →.

Central here is Martha Rosler’s three-part essay,“Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism,” in e-flux journal 21 (December 2010); 23 (March 2011); and 25 (May 2011). See →.

These paragraphs are entirely due to the pervasive influence of Sven Lütticken's excellent text "Acting on the Omnipresent Frontiers of Autonomy" in To The Arts, Citizens! (Porto: Serralves, 2010), 146-167. Lütticken also commissioned the initial version of this text, to be published soon as a "Black Box" version in a special edition of OPEN magazine.

The emphasis here is on the word obvious, since art evidently retained a major function in developing a particular division of senses, class distinction and bourgeois subjectivity even as it became more divorced from religious or overt representational function. Its autonomy presented itself as disinterested and dispassionate, while at the same time mimetically adapting the form and structure of capitalist commodities.

The Invisible Committee lay out the terms for occupational performativity: “Producing oneself is about to become the dominant occupation in a society where production has become aimless: like a carpenter who’s been kicked out of his workshop and who out of desperation starts to plane himself down. That’s where we get the spectacle of all these young people training themselves to smile for their employment interviews, who whiten their teeth to make a better impression, who go out to nightclubs to stimulate their team spirit, who learn English to boost their careers, who get divorced or married to bounce back again, who go take theater classes to become leaders or “personal development” classes to “manage conflicts” better—the most intimate “personal development,” claims some guru or another, “will lead you to better emotional stability, a more well directed intellectual acuity, and so to better economic performance.” The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (New York: Semiotexte(e), 2009), 16.

Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

It is interesting to make a link at this point to classical key texts of autonomist thought as collected in Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, ed. Sylvere Lotringer and Christian Marazzi (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007).

Toni Negri has detailedthe restructuring of the North Italian labor force after the 1970s, while Paolo Virno and Bifo Berardi both emphasize that the autonomous tendencies expressed the refusal of labor and the rebellious feminist, youth,and workers movements in the ‘70s was recaptured into new, flexibilized and entrepreneurial forms of coercion. More recently Berardi has emphasized the new conditions of subjective identification with labor and its self-perpetuating narcissistic components. See inter alia Toni Negri, i: “Reti produttive e territori: il caso del Nord-Est italiano,” L'inverno è finito. Scritti sulla trasformazione negata (1989–1995), ed. Giovanni Caccia (Rome: Castelvecchi, 1996), 66–80; Paolo Virno, “Do you remember counterrevolution?,” in Radical thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (New York: Semiotext(e), 2010.

I have repeatedly argued that one should not seek to escape alienation but on the contrary embrace it as well as the status of objectivity and objecthood that goes along with it.

In “What is a Museum? Dialogue with Robert Smithson,” Museum World no. 9 (1967), reprinted in The Writings of Robert Smithson, Jack Flam ed. (New York University Press: New York, 1979), 43-51.

Remember also the now unfortunately defunct meaning of occupation. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries “to occupy” was a euphemism for “have sexual intercourse with,” which fell from usage almost completely during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Inoperative Committee, Preoccupied: The Logic of Occupation (Somewhere: Somebody, 2009),11.

In the sense of squatting, which in contrast to other types of occupation is limited spatially and temporally.

I copied the form of my sequence from Imri Kahn’s lovely video Rebecca makes it!,where it appears with different imagery.

This description is directly inspired by Rabih Mroue’s terrific upcoming lecture “The Pixelated Revolution” on the use of mobile phones in recent Syrian uprisings.