The Post-Occupational Condition

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Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, a research centre of Nanyang Technological University, in March 2015 and at the RMIT Professional Practice Advanced Seminar Program in June 2015. I thank Ute Meta Bauer and Vera Mey for the invitation to speak in Singapore, Phip Murray for the opportunity to present the work in Melbourne, and the audiences at each venue for their thoughtful responses. I thank the 2015 working group on labour at Monash University Art Design and Architecture (MADA), especially Kym Maxwell and Jacqui Shelton, for reading and commenting on the text. Lastly, I'm grateful to Leanne Bennett, Jan Bryant, Helen Hughes, Boris Portnoy and Tirdad Zolghadr for casting their eyes on drafts at various stages with incisiveness and generosity.

Notes

1. ‘Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art Changes its Condition’, http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/moscow-biennale-of-contemporary-art-changes-its-condition/ (accessed March 7, 2016). As the press release states, ‘The central pavilion of VDNKh will become a site to embrace art and thinking in action, encompassing daily keynotes by thinkers, in situ work and performances by artists as well as workshops with Russian and international cultural figures.’

2. Artnet reported that ‘Due to the drop in the value of the Russian ruble, the biennial's budget was cut from $2.5 million to $800,000.’ https://news.artnet.com/art-world/2015-moscow-biennale-review-333121 (accessed March 7, 2016).

3. Jens Hoffmann and Tara McDowell, ‘Reflection’, The Exhibitionist 4 (2011): 4. See also the special section on ‘The Paracuratorial’ in The Exhibitionist 4, and Tara McDowell, ‘Space as Support: On Curating, Education, and Architecture’, Studies in Material Thinking 12 (March 2015): 3–21. Echoing the above, architect and educator Nikolaus Hirsch recently observed that ‘increasingly the proportion between the exhibition and the “collateral program” seems to invert. The collateral program consumes more and more curatorial energy, eventually moving what used to be considered the marginal to the centre of curatorial innovation and thereby changing the temporal logic of the exhibition itself.’ See Nikolaus Hirsch, ‘Plans Are Nothing—Planning Is Everything: Productive Misunderstandings of Time’, in Timing: On the Temporal Dimension of Exhibiting, eds. Beatrice von Bismarck, Rike Frank, Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer, Jörn Schafaff, Thomas Weski (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014): 66.

4. A ‘greatest hits’ genealogy of the discursive exhibition in Western Europe and North America would include Les Immatériaux (1985), co-curated by the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard; Democracy (1988), curated by the collective Group Material; If You Lived Here... (1989), curated by Martha Rosler; Documenta X (1997), curated by Catherine David; and Documenta 11 (2002), curated by Okwui Enwezor. Related to the discursive exhibition is what Claire Bishop calls the performative exhibition, the history of which she traces in ‘Performative Exhibitions: The Problem of Open-Endedness’, in Timing, 239–256.

5. See also Bishop, ‘Pedagogic Projects: “How Do You Bring a Classroom to Life as if it were a Work of Art?”’ in Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012) 241–274.

6. Gabrielle de Vietri, ‘An Investigation of the Lecture in and as Art’ (MFA Thesis, Monash University, 2013).

7. Miwon Kwon, ‘Questionnaire on “The Contemporary”’, October, 130 (2009): 15.

8. Ibid.

9. Edgar Arceneaux and Julian Myers, Hopelessness Freezes Time: 1967 Detroit Riots, Detroit Techno and Michael Heizer's Dragged Mass (Basel: Kunstmuseum Basel, 2011).

10. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 61.

11. Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012), 230.

12. The paracuratorial has one final close relative, the paraliterary, which Rosalind Krauss (whose theorisation of the post-medium condition is discussed later in this paper) conjured to explain certain works by Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes (the late Barthes, of A Lover's Discourse and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes). A poststructuralist ethics is at the heart of her definition of paraliterature, made clear by the title of her 1980 text on the subject, ‘Poststructuralism and the “Paraliterary”’. ‘The paraliterary space’, she writes, ‘is the space of debate, quotation, partisanship, betrayal, reconciliation; but it is not the space of unity, coherence, or resolution that we think of as constituting the work of literature.’ See Rosalind Krauss, ‘Poststructuralism and the “Paraliterary,”’ October 13 (Summer 1980): 37.

13. Maria Lind, ‘Performing the Curatorial: An Introduction’, in Performing the Curatorial: With and Beyond Art, ed. Maria Lind (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 20.

14. Jean-Paul Martinon, ‘Introduction’, in The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), x.

15. Paul O'Neill, ‘The Curatorial Constellation and the Paracuratorial Paradox’, The Exhibitionist 6 (2012): 57.

16. Ibid., 59.

17. Bennett hoped that in the coming years, with the inception of a fresh, forward-thinking leadership and curatorial team, with revised perspectives on collecting and exhibiting, that his original unprecedented Biennale proposal would be eventually realised by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

18. The exhibition itinerary and interventions were as follows: WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (with Danh Vo), 16 January—25 April 2010; Fondation Beyeler, Basel (with Carol Bove), 21 May—29 August 2010; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (with Tino Sehgal), 28 January—25 April 2011.

19. Flatbread Society, http://www.flatbreadsociety.net/about (accessed March 7, 2016).

20. O'Neill, ‘The Curatorial Constellation and the Paracuratorial Paradox’, 55–56.

21. Nato Thompson, ‘Reflections on Living as Form,’ The Exhibitionist 6 (2012): 65.

22. Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 6. See also Krauss, Perpetual Inventory (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010) and Under Blue Cup (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2011).

23. Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”, 6.

24. Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Rosalind Krauss with Yve-Alain Bois’, The Brooklyn Rail, http://brooklynrail.org/2012/02/art/rosalind-krauss-with-yve-alain-bois (accessed March 7, 2016).

25. Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”, 20.

26. Alex Potts, ‘Tactility: The Interrogation of Medium in Art of the 1960s’, Art History 27 (2004): 299.

27. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 457.

28. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project’, Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity, eds. Seyla Benhabib and Maurizio Passerin d'Entreves (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997), 45. Habermas writes that as a result of increased specialisation, ‘the distance grows between the culture of the experts and that of the larger public. What accrues to culture through specialized treatment and reflection does not immediately and necessarily become the property of everyday praxis. With cultural rationalization of this sort, the threat increases that the life-world, whose traditional substance has already been devalued, will become more and more impoverished.’.

29. William Deresiewicz, ‘The Death of the Artist and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur’, The Atlantic (January–February 2015). http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-death-of-the-artist-and-the-birth-of-the-creative-entrepreneur/383497/ (accessed March 7, 2016).

30. Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, 465–6.

31. Nick Aitkens, ed., Too Much World: The Films of Hito Steyerl (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014).

32. Wikipedia, ‘Pierre Huyghe.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Huyghe (accessed March 7, 2016).

33. Ibid., ‘Frances Stark’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Stark (accessed March 7, 2016).

34. Raqs Media Collective, ‘RAQS’, http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/ (accessed March 7, 2016).

35. Sutton Gallery, ‘Nicholas Mangan’, http://www.suttongallery.com.au/artists/artistprofile.php?id=15 (accessed March 7, 2016).

36. My gloss of this narrative is drawn from Fayen d'Evie's excellent essay on this work, ‘Rot and Reinvention in the Nation Formerly Known as Pleasant Island’, http://www.nicholasmangan.com/files/rot-and-reinvention-in-the-nation-formerly-known-as-pleasant-island.pdf (accessed March 7, 2016).

37. See Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

38. See, for example, texts such as Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1998), 85–104; Hal Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’, in The Return of the Real (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), 171–204; and Mark Godfrey, ‘The Artist as Historian’, October 120 (2007): 140–72.

39. Lise Soskolne, ‘Online Digital Artwork and the Status of the “Based-In” Artist’, http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/online-digital-artwork-and-the-status-of-the-based-in-artist/ (accessed March 7, 2016).

40. Hito Steyerl, ‘Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy’, e-flux journal 21 (2010), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/politics-of-art-contemporary-art-and-the-transition-to-post-democracy/ (accessed March 7, 2016).

41. Ibid.

42. Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, ‘The General Intellect Is Looking for a Body’, in Work, Work, Work: A Reader on Art and Labour, eds. Cecilia Widenheim et al. (Stockholm and Berlin: IAPSIS and Sternberg Press, 2012), 93.

43. Lucy R. Lippard as quoted in Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: UC Press, 2011): 154.

44. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Job Insecurity Is Everywhere Now’, in Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market, trans. R. Nice (New York: New Books, 1999).

45. Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt, ‘In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work’, Theory, Culture & Society 25 (2008): 11.

46. Ibid, 14. See also Pierre-Michel Menger, The Economics of Creativity: Art and Achievement under Uncertainty, trans. Steven Rendall et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

47. Moira Weigel and Mal Ahern, ‘Further Materials Toward a Theory of the Man-Child’, The New Inquiry (9 July 2013), http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/further-materials-toward-a-theory-of-the-man-child/ (accessed March 7, 2016). I recognise that some readers may take issue with the socially gendered term ‘housewife’. I use the term here as a provocation, even an ideological projection, contra to the figure of the (male) freelancer, and intend it to be sympathetic to the way Weigel and Ahern deploy ‘Man-Child’ in opposition to the ‘Young-Girl’ theorised by the target of their polemic, Tiqqun.