TODAY: The Centre for Social and Political Thought research seminar this week will take place TODAY, Wednesday, March 12th in Jubilee 118 from 16:00-18:00. All are very welcome to attend. The Artistic Labour Contract: The Legislative Imperative of Authorship Dr Zoe Sutherland (University of Brighton) and Dr Marina Vishmidt. ABSTRACT: This paper attempts to formulate a new approach to the question of the character and status of artistic labour, thus locating itself within the labour politics of art. Unlike recent approaches, which take as their conceptual framework categories such as ‘the wage’ or ‘subsumption’, we approach this question in a new way, through an analysis of the emergence of the artistic labour contract as a constitutive part of art practice from conceptualism onwards. The contract has occupied a range of positions within the relational whole of the conceptual artwork; it can both act as an imprimatur of the artwork, as the artwork itself, and as a vehicle for introducing a socially pervasive logic of ‘contractualism’ into the relationship between artist and dealer or collector. In a sense, the contract interposes itself between the artist as an artisanal service provider and the artist as a wage worker, two positions that the labour politics of art have always been forced to negotiate in capitalist society. The contract has been the main instrument mediating the power relations between artists as producers of doubtful or unrecognisable commodities and collectors, rendering the contract an interesting extension or development of the logic of the Readymade, and of the nominalism which guarantees authorship in the supposed decline of its mystique. The contract has also been at the high point of collective organisation for artists around the issue of artistic labour, as exemplified by groups such as the Art Workers Coalition. In this paper we focus specifically upon the role of the labour contract in the work of the 1960s-70s artist Michael Asher, as a vehicle for registering wider shifts in the relation between authorship, the artwork, the peculiarity of artistic labour.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 09:39:51 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015