A Politics of Obfuscation: Art, Class and the Dematerialisation of Demonstration
1 December 2022 at 2:30:00 am
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Session Convenors
Elyssia Bugg, University of Melbourne
Tara Heffernan, University of Melbourne
Dr Scott Robinson, Monash University
Session Speakers
Elyssia Bugg, University of Melbourne
Tara Heffernan, University of Melbourne
Dr Scott Robinson, Monash University
The aesthetic echo of 68 lives on in Pepsi commercials, runway shows and countless site-specific art installations featuring protest signs arranged in faux disorder in white walled galleries. Usually delivered in the seductive phraseology of art-speak, transparently self-serving talk of “micro-communities/utopias”, “awareness-raising”, “visibility” and “special knowledge” dominate much art discourse, lubricating the art market while eclipsing pragmatic discussions of material inequality. This panel will consider the co-option of “demonstration” as an amorphous and troublingly ambiguous concept central to the neoliberal politics of the post 68 art world. Presenters’ papers will address topics such as: neoliberal art and aesthetics, art strikes, elitism, global cosmopolitanism, and the status of artists, curators, academics and artworkers within the professional managerial class. The papers will situate these topics as they pertain to artists’ practice, political organising, and structures of class and power as they’re constructed in and imagined by the art world today.
Attention Futurist-Scabs! The uneven politics of the art strike
Elyssia Bugg, University of Melbourne
In 1969, artist Lee Lozano declared a personal general strike in which she would, “avoid being present at official or public ‘uptown’ functions or gatherings related to the ‘art world’”. Lozano’s piece is part of a long history of performance works, manifestos and protest actions that have sought “personal and public revolution” of one kind or another, by adopting the rhetoric of the strike.
This paper will chart varied expressions of this notion of the strike as it has appeared in art practice and activism from the late 1960s to today. It will seek to draw a political distinction between those actions that function as genuine working class organising efforts, and those that appropriate the strike as a classless concept. This distinction will be contextualised by the defeats of the workers’ movement at the end of 1960s, and the politics of autonomism and refusal that emerged out of this period. Consequently, this paper will examine the successes and limitations of the art strike as an artistic and political tactic, and argue that structural change is only won where the strike is liberated from art world abstraction, and performed in its political context–as a collective act of class struggle.
The Art of Laziness and the Politics of Work
Tara Heffernan, University of Melbourne
Some artists and theorists have recently revived and reconceptualised their opposition to capitalism in terms of the art of laziness. For instance, Francis Russell and David Attwood’s Art of Laziness (2021) defends ‘lazy action’ as cutting across the imposition of the work ethic, and poses the art worker as exemplary both in terms of their subjection to capitalism’s ideology and ethic of productivity, and resistance to it. In this paper, I evaluate this artistic strategy by returning to Kathi Weeks’ seminal The Problem with Work (2011) along with Hannah Arendt’s unorthodox distinction between labour and work in The Human Condition (1958). I aim to locate laziness as an artistic strategy in the era of post-industrial capitalism where management skills are prized above creative, intentional work, a category I argue should be defended against its subsumption into labour. I develop these arguments in relation to the adoption of the readymade as a symbol of anti-work politics, reconsidering its material link to production.
Give Me the Colours: The obscurest aesthetic politics of the Global art World
Dr Scott Robinson, Monash University
Anri Sala’s 2003 video-work Dammi i colori (Give me the colours) traces the aesthetic transformation of Albania’s capital city Tirana. Championed by then Mayor, now Prime Minister Edi Rama, this transformation saw the city’s grey, crumbling facades repainted in garish colours: a superficial gesture attempting to obscure the traumas of the past with broad strokes. The film’s inclusion in the 50th Venice Biennale and Rama’s ongoing championing of global art have helped secure a new reputation for post-communist Tirana as a playground for contemporary international art-world elites. Meanwhile, Albania’s National Gallery struggles under a diminutive budget and Rama (an admirer of Angela Merkel, Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan) has been heavily criticised for introducing harsh censorship laws.
Not only does Dammi i Colori mark a significant point in the socio-political history of Tirana, but also in the geographical spread of the contemporary art world whose political opaqueness it echoes. Inspired by the film’s intriguing presence at a contemporary art gallery in Australia in 2021, this paper will analyse Dammi i Colori as a harbinger of pervasive tendencies in global art today.
Biographies
Elyssia Bugg, University of Melbourne
Elyssia Bugg is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on theories of performativity as they relate to early sculptural works from the Arte Povera movement.
Tara Heffernan, University of Melbourne
Tara Heffernan is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Melbourne. Her research concerns the work of post war Italian artist Piero Manzoni. She has published in MeMO Review, Artlink, Overland, Third Text Online and Eyeline.
Dr Scott Robinson, Monash University
Scott Robinson is a casual academic who holds a PhD in Philosophy from Monash University, granted in 2022. His work is published in Overland, MeMO Review, Arena and Demos Journal.