Capital implications: the function of labor in the video art of Juan Devis and Yoshua Okón

Abstract

It is increasingly evident that advanced forms of speculative value that have become the driving engine behind the inflated global art market are nonetheless inextricably bound to and dependent upon more informal market systems that operate through the spontaneous organization of exploitable, precarious, marginalized, and ultimately undervalued forms of labor. This fact makes labor a pivotal site where the linkages between these two purportedly independent markets (and their respective systems of value and exchange) come into focus and can be more tangibly assessed and critiqued. This paper will follow this current by first contextualizing the function of labor within two contrasting historical traditions/tendencies of art and cultural production that explicitly reference labor as an essential structuring condition of the work. It will then develop a detailed case study of a recent exchange between two contemporary media/video artists in Los Angeles that demonstrates the complexities of how the market value of art is implicated within a precarious trans-national wage labor system in the neoliberalist global economy.

Keywords:

• neoliberalism
• media
• video art
• contemporary art
• labor
• biopolitics
• Latin America

Notes

1. Although purportedly I am referring to two independent works here, I maintain that there is a level of intextricability that requires the Devis/Okón collaboration be interpreted as single project.