[-empyre-] 'artistic' praxis, induced labor, sterile field

[christina]

  Monica Rizzolli a few days ago, wrote, in part,

"Artistic practices potentialize individual "FIELDS"  When an  
individual through painting, writing, music is capable of synthesizing  
a new idea, a thought convincingly, that individual action can  
reverberate-- exponentially changing--the masses.
But how is this process happening?Many individuals are at this very  
moment painting, dancing, writing, immersed in their creative  
processes. Why do some modify their environment and others not?
What makes the "FIELD" relevant? If we understand the "FIELD" as the  
action, the agent and the environment (all together),  are we to think  
that an action at odds with its environment, creates a  sterile  
"FIELD" ?
Yet, from time to time, an individual at odds with his or her  
environment creates a new paradigm. The "FIELD" is  
unpredictable.....we can conclude that, minimally understood, as a  
"FIELD" becomes visible, it is possible to induce it;  and, a sense- 
condition  apparently irrelevant to the whole,  can sometimes become a  
mass phenomenon."


Monica's post leads to this moment when as we stand by and watch  
collective bargaining destroyed in Wisconsin.  We are precarious, we  
are at odds with 'environment', are we making a sterile field.  Is the  
silence of -empyre- that sterility in nonaction.
How can art practice matter?  What is the default? Why is it so  
enervating, why are we sterile, what are we doing, what is to be  
done? .....

With that I want to bring forward an astonishing article just now  
published on Occupy Everything.  Thank you, Cara Baldwin, for bringing  
it to my attention.  The writer is Jaleh Mansour.

Jaleh:
"Artistic practices of the last decade highlight the remunerative  
system of a global service industry, one in which “art” takes its  
place fully embedded in–rather than at an interval of either autonomy  
or imminence–the fluid, continuous circulation of goods and services:  
Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2002) in which Fraser had her gallery,  
Friedrich Petzel, arrange to have a collector purchase her sexual  
services for one night, Santiago Sierra’s 250 cm Line Tattooed on Six  
Paid People (1999) in which the artist paid six unemployed men in Old  
Havana, Cuba thirty dollars each to have a line tattooed across their  
back. Fraser’s work was characteristically “controversial” in the most  
rehearsed ways, and Sierra’s drew criticism for having permanently  
disfigured six human beings. The misprision and naivete of the critics  
spectacularized both, of course. Sierra’s retort involved a set of  
references to global economic conditions that the critics may not have  
liked to hear: “The tattoo is not the problem. The problem is the  
existence of social conditions that allow me to make this work. You  
could make this tattooed line a kilometer long, using thousands and  
thousands of willing people.”1 Both Fraser and Sierra point to the  
quasi-universality of what autonomist Marxist theorist Paolo Virno  
calls a “post-fordist” regime of “intellectual labor” to describe the  
shift from the assembly line to a wide range of labor in which  
traditional boundaries and borders no longer apply. Virno says, “By  
post-Fordism, I mean instead a set of characteristics that are related  
to the entire contemporary workforce, including fruit pickers and the  
poorest of immigrants.”2 This post-fordist regime is characterized by  
flexibility, deracination, and the shift from habituated work to  
contingency. Concomitantly, the post-fordist laborer does not take his  
or her place in the ranks of he masses, but flows into a multitude,  
differentiated by numerous factors, among them, post-coloniality,  
endless permutations at the level of gender, ethnicity, race.

For Virno and the autonomists, art and culture are no longer  
instantiations of exemplarity and exceptionality, as for Adorno, but  
rather “are the place in which praxis reflects on itself and results  
in self-representation.” In other words, the cultural work operates as  
a supplement, a parergonal addition to an already existing logic. It  
neither passively reflects nor openly resists. There is no vantage or  
“outside” from which art could dialectically reflect and resists, as  
Adorno would have it. Long since the work came off its pedestal and  
out of its frame, from the gallery to the street, the ostensibly non- 
site to the site as Robert Smithson put it, cultural production is too  
embedded in social and economic circulation to reflect let alone  
critique. Virno sees this limitation—the absence of an outside—as one  
shared with that of activism and other forms of tactical resistance:  
“The impasse that seizes the global movement comes from its inherent  
implication in the modes of production. Not from its estrangement or  
marginality, as some people think.”3 Ironically, the luxury of  
estrangement and marginalization enjoyed by the avant-garde and neo  
avant-garde is no longer available. And yet, it is “precisely because,  
rather than in spite, of this fact that it presents itself on the  
public scene as an ethical movement.”4 For if work puts life itself to  
work, dissolving boundaries between labor and leisure, rest and work,  
any action against it occupies the same fabric.



http://occupyeverything.com/features/notes-on-labor-maternity-and-the-institution/







"