Overview
Warhol's Factory of the 1960s, Minimalism's assembly-line aesthetics, conceptual and feminist concern with workers' conditions in the 1970sāthese are among the antecedents of a renewed focus on the work of art: labor as artistic activity, as artistic method and as object of artistic engagement. In 2002, the āWork Ethicā exhibition curated by Helen Molesworth at the Baltimore Museum of Art took its cue from recent art to spotlight this earlier era of artistic practice in which activity became as valid as, and often dispensed with, object-production. Revealed through this prism was ādematerializedā art's close and critical relation to the emergent information age's criteria of management, production and skill.
By 2015, the Venice Biennale reflected artists' wider concern with global economic and social crises, centered on exploitative and precarious worlds of employment. Yet while art increasingly engages with human travail, work's significance in itself is seldom addressed by critics. This anthology explicitly investigates work in relation to contemporary art, surveying artistic strategies that grapple with the complexities of being an art worker in the new economy, a postproducer, a collaborator, a fabricator, a striker, an ethical campaigner, or would-be transformer of labor from oppression to liberation.
Artists surveyed include
Pawel Althamer, Francis AlĆæs, Marwa Arsanios, Chto Delat, Alice Creischer, Ana de la Cueva, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jeremy Deller, Maria Eichhorn, Harun Farocki, Claire Fontaine, Andrea Fraser, Liam Gillick, Melanie Gilligan, Gulf Labour Coalition, Tehching Hsieh, Lamia Joreige, Lee Lozano, Goshka Macuga, Teresa Margolles, Adrian Melis, Annette Messager, Gustav Metzger, Jean-Luc MoulĆØne, Ahmet ĆgĆ¼t, Philip Rizk, Martha Rosler, Tino Sehgal, Santiago Sierra, Tamas St. Auby, Mladen Stilinovic, W.A.G.E., Artur Zmijewski
Writers include
Claire Bishop, Luc Boltanski, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Sabeth Buchmann, Ćve Chiapello, Kodwo Eshun, Silvia Federici, Isabelle Graw, Maurizio Lazzarato, Achille Mbembe, Antonio Negri, Jacques RanciĆØre, Gerald Raunig, Dietmar RĆ¼bel, Paolo Virno, Joseph Vogl
This book title, Work, ISBN: 9780262534338, by Friederike Sigler, published by MIT Press (August 11, 2017) is available in paperback. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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