Work

Contents: ART WORKERS AND THE NEW ECONOMY. X notes on practice: Stubborn structures and insistent seepage in a networked world, 2004 / Immaterial labour, 1996 / When life goes to work: Andy Warhol, 2010 / Dirty commerce: Art work and sex work since the 1970s, 2012 / Rottenberg pearls, 2016 / wo/manifesto, 2008 / The work of critique and normative change, 2001 / In conversation with Nicolaus Schafhausen, 2016 / Real encounters, 2013 / Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative?, 2009 / POSTPRODUCTION. In conversation with Christine Fricke, Petra Schwarz and Bernd Ziesemer, 2005 / Under the sign of labour, 2006 / Bodies in use, 2016 / In conversation with Tom Finkelpearl, 2000 / Brothers in arms: Laboratoire AGIT'Art, 2014 / Museum of Proletarian Culture, the industrialization of Bohemia, 2012 / The server/user mode: On Olafur Eliasson, 2007 / Postproduction, 2002 / The spectre of capital, 2014 / In conversation with Tom Holert, 2012 / Mechanics of meaning, or the painting machine, 2003 / Inventing the future: Postcapitalism and a world without work, 2015 / Contents: WORKING TOGETHER. CCC: Currency of Collective Consciousness, 2015 / Tucumán is burning, 1968 / To our friends, 2014 / The Art Workers' Coalition: Not a history, 1970 / Delegated performance: Outsourcing authenticity, 2012 / Donald Judd, 1965 / Producing and its byproducts, 2010 / How to provide an artistic service: An introduction, 1994 / A declaration on politics, knowledge and art, 2008 / Ten theses on the multitude and post-Fordist capitalism, 2004 / In conversation with Joanna Sokołowska, 2010 / WE -- Collectivities, mutualities, participations, 2002 / ON STRIKE. Politics of art: Contemporary art and the transition to post-democracy, 2011 / Years without art, 1974 / Critique of violence, 1921 / How does/could/would the withdrawal of art affect the world?, 2002 / Lee Lozano: Dropout piece, 2014 / Tamás St. Auby's strikes, 2016 / A very careful strike: Four hypotheses, 2005 / In conversation with Friederike Sigler, 2016 / Trace, 2009 / Moulène, Rancière and 24 objects de grève, 2012 / Notes on the abstract strike, 2015 / Contents: Human strike has already begun, 2009 / FACTORY. Workers leaving the factory, 2001 / The university-factory as a site of reterritorialization, 2013 / In conversation with Heinz-Norbert Jocks, 2015 / It's her factory, 2012 / On Kay Fido Hunt, Margaret Harrison and Mary Kelly: Women and work, 2002 / Against domesticity: Artists and feminists in the kitchen, 2015 / Factories as places of knowledge: Richard Serra and the production process, 2010 / The aesthetics of resistance, 2005 / Factory complex: The post-vérité turn of Korean experimental documentary, 2015 / Distortion, or gay science according to Paweł Althamer / Olga's notes: This whole new world, 2015 / Is a museum a factory?, 2009 / SPECTRES OF MARX: FROM EXPLOITATION TO PRECARIOUSNESS. In conversation with Teresa Margolles / The precarious soul, 2009 / To have and to need manifesto, 2012 / For an art against the mythology of everyday life, 1979 / On affective labour, 2011 / Nightcleaners: The ambiguities of activism and the limits of production, 2015 / Artists' boycott of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, 2011 / Necropolitics, 2003 / Contents: On Steve McQueen: Gravesend, 2007 / In conversation with Iona Whittaker, 2015 / Grundrisse, 1857-58 / Primitive accumulation as exemplified in Potosí, 2010 / Toxic work, 2015 / THE GOOD OF WORK. On the battle of Orgreave, 2002 / On touch sanitation, 1980 / In conversation with Rudi Laermans, 2012 / How to work better, 1991 / In conversation with Marie-Josée Corsten, Pascal Gielen and Luigi Coppola, 2009 / The good of work, 2011 / Proletarian nights, 2012 / A brief history of the Women's Workshop of the Artists' Union, c. 1973 / On when faith moves mountains, 2002 / Occupy, migrate, disintegrate...Carolee Schneemann and Annette Messager's studio abandonment, 2010 / In praise of laziness, 1998 / Statement, 2016 / Summary: Warhol's Factory of the 1960s, Minimalism's assembly-line aesthetics, conceptual and feminist concern with workers' conditions in the 1970s -- these 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 'Work Ethic' 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 'dematerialized' 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.