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Artist at work, Proximity of art and capitalism

2020-11-12T22:02:04+01:00Tags: , , , |

The main affirmation of artistic practice must today happen through thinking about the conditions and the status of the artist's work. Only then can it be revealed that what is a part of the speculations of capital is not art itself, but mostly artistic life. Artist at Work examines the recent changes in the labour of an artist and addresses them from the perspective of performance. It draws its conclusions mainly from the argument that art no longer needs to re-affirm itself as a socially relevant and useful activity because this would lock it within immanent capitalist (and populist) production of value. Instead, art has to rediscover its material basis and 'occupy' exactly those abstractions which enable the preservation of the capitalist system and reproduction of capital. The book would like to remind art – which has constantly thermalized and practiced politics during the last decades – that it has forgotten its power to connect the abilities of the abstract (thinking) with the actual abstractions (value, capital, productivity, money, commodity, time, etc.)

The Undercommons: Fugitive planning & black studies

2020-11-12T01:02:34+01:00Tags: , , |

In "The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study", Moten and Harney examine the University, Debt, Politics and Logistics to help us grasp how these (and other) institutions, organizations and capitalist mechanisms (including the State as an agent of capital) reduce our ability to empathize, our capacity for true learning and our ability to love. Moten and Harney define the “The Undercommons” as “Maroon communities of composition teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state college ethnic studies departments, closed-down film programs, visa-expired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college sociologists, and feminist engineers ” that “refuse to ask for recognition and instead want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places we know lie beyond its walls. ” The structure itself is holding us back; as we pour our energies into combatting mass incarceration, debt-slavery, and the professionalization of intellect, Moten and Harney argue that we only buttress the society that makes such singularly anti-human calamities possible in the first place...

Commonism. A new aesthetics of the real

2020-11-12T01:05:50+01:00Tags: , , , |

The book explores the ideological thoughts under the notion of the commons and asks how this shapes the reality of our living together. Pays attention to the aesthetic dimension of communism as an ideology: what artistic strategies and what aesthetics do commoners adopt? After half a century of neoliberalism, a new radical, practice-based ideology is making its way from the margins: commonism, with an o in the middle. It is based on the values of sharing, common (intellectual) ownership and new social co-operations. Commoners assert that social relationships can replace money (contract) relationships. They advocate solidarity and they trust in peer-to-peer relationships to develop new ways of production. Commonism maps those new ideological thoughts. How do they work and, especially, what is their aesthetics? How do they shape the reality of our living together? Is there another, more just future imaginable through the commons? What strategies and what aesthetics do commoners adopt? This book explores this new political belief system, alternating between theoretical analysis, wild artistic speculation, inspiring art examples, almost empirical observations and critical reflection.

Taken literarly

2018-06-15T14:37:35+01:00Tags: , |

The authors revisit the evolution of regulation of ownership in the field of intellectual production and housing as two examples of the historical dead-end in which we find ourselves.

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