Kuba Szreder
Neither working nor unworking: Contemporary politics of art and labour

The majority of artists are poor. That‘s the statistical fact. But: Do artists actually work? If they indeed do, it makes sense to investigate the conditions of artistic labour. If they don‘t, it needs an explanation of the artists‘ position in the social division of labour.

The first question is about labour relations in the global art world, where multiple forms of artistic creativity intertwine with various modes of laborious engagement. The operations of the global art circuit, with all its glitter and glamour, are sustained by a poorly paid service work of museum staff, a freelance project-making, an unpaid involvement of artists, an underpaid internship and an intermittent toil of technical personnel. As the constellation of art celebrities and higher echelons of the art world cherish their privileged status, the majority of cultural producers barely make ends meet.

The second area of investigation relates to a contemporary validity of the promise of emancipation that avant-garde art has carried since its modern inception. Art has been mythologised as a vehicle of resistance and defiance of dominant regimes of alienated labour, denying the mundane primacy of effectiveness, productivity and profit making. The question remains what is artists‘ relation to those laborious people who by their toil enable their “neither productive nor unproductive" activity. Moreover it is worthy asking if and how this subversive potential is maintained and played out in the contemporary economy, that employs creativity, self-management and vocational involvement for its own means.

Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Kuba Szreder
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Hans Abbing
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Janek Sowa
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Michal Kozlowski
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Adrienne Goehler
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Ellen Blumenstein
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Joanna Figiel
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Stevphen Shukaitis
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Precarious Workers Brigade
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: W.A.G.E.