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totality has been achieved does it become apparent that

it is not a totality at all.15 Today, we work incessantly in


order to open up the future through work; we experiment
with our own lives and the lives of others. The more we
work, however, the stronger our feeling that we do not
control work but that work controls us. Project work is
therefore connected to a constant catastrophic feeling
that, as a totality with which we are supposed to redo our
lives (and our present), work is on the verge of collapse.
Interestingly, this prevailing way of working gives a
feeling (even in the case of the smallest of projects) that
it transforms the whole world or at least life in general;
in this manner, it even more radically influences the
acceleration of duration and present time, establishing a
specifically economizing attitude toward life we work
responsibly for the future while the present slips through
our fingers.
However, as Boris Groys points out in his essay The
Loneliness of the Project, the project is always committed
to parallel temporality or the temporal exclusion from
the daily flow of life. The project is actually a temporary
and sometimes also a permanent retreat from life
(characteristic e.g. of religious communities as well as
some artistic projects). The project is therefore marked
by desynchronised time; when working on a project, we
are actually separated from the time as experienced by
society and the community. But somewhere beyond
this general flow of time, someone has begun working
on a project writing a book, preparing an exhibition, or
plotting a spectacular assassination in the hopes that
the completed project will alter the general run of things
and all mankind will be bequeathed a different future:
the very future, in fact, anticipated and aspired to in this
project.16 Groys characterizes the creation of the project
as socially sanctioned loneliness17, desynchronised
with the flow of time but required to offer something in
return when it comes to an end. The loneliness discussed
by Groys brings up a paradoxical image of the modern
solipsist artist, a loner, potentially an idiot18, who
temporarily leaves society due to the need for a change
in the life he or she is a part of. The project is capable
of taking itself out of the flow of life because it is based
on the hope that it will again be able to harmonise with
social reality at a later point. However, this temporal
harmonisation is contradictory in character because it is
possible due to the change that the project is supposed
to bring. For this reason, this harmonisation is always
a harmonisation of something different, of something
that has already taken itself out of society (regardless
of whether the project is successful or not). Many loners
can be found e.g. in the experiments in the second half of
the 1960s in performance art pieces and experimental
events involving the audience, in which art came close
to life by actually stepping out of it: it created special
conditions of experience (hence the emphasis on rules,
scores, scripts, etc.) which could induce change in
the method of perception and the creation of aesthetic
forms.19 Loners, however, can also be found earlier, e.g.
in the projects of the historical avant-garde the first
projects in art proper, committed to a universal change

There is then something else paradoxical in nature and


interesting for our analysis that takes place in this way
of working; it is closely linked to temporal proposals and
the projection of the future still to come. In the present,
we actually run out of time, we do not have any. It is no
coincidence that our daily I do not have time paradigm
is so connected with the organisation of time, time
management and work in the future. Projective temporality
strengthens work in the future still to come while taking
time away from the present time which Henri Bergson
describes as duration. The more possibilities the project
opens for the future, the more time gets sucked out of
the present. The present just does not seem to last.
The more it is possible to project, the less time we have
available for duration and persistence, for establishing,
enabling and building social, political and communal
relationships (which are not just spatial but chiefly
temporal relationships). This intriguing relationship
the project has with time has several consequences
for understanding our subjectivity. As the basic
production model, the project is interesting because
it provides an insight into the fact that, today, the way
of working includes all the areas of our lives; the project
no longer knows a border between professional and
personal investment in other words, between life
and work. The project not only entails work, but also
self-realisation, on the level of ones life and sometimes
deeply personal. The nature of this self-realisation is
contradictory, however. We work so much that we never
again have time for ourselves and others; due to the
amount of work and the intensity of our self-realisation,
we can actually burn out in life.
It is therefore essential to make a theoretical distinction
between work and the project. This distinction should
be understood as one of the contemporary forms of the
division of labour. Today, the project is the prevailing

of human life if not that of the universe. Groys points out


the problematic character of such historical avant-garde
endeavours committed to utopian universal projects
with the aim of shaping a new future for everyone, but by
means of hermetic language and forms that could only
be communicated in self-isolation. This also makes the
project a modern phenomenon whose implementation
is based on exclusion and exclusivity, which gives a
highly contradictory status to modernity and its yearning
for progress. As Groys states, the problem is that the
resynchronisation with society the aim of every
successful or unsuccessful project entails a feeling
of sickness: what gets lost is the feeling of being
suspended in parallel time, of belonging to excluded life
beyond the general run of things.20 Today, however,
this kind of socially sanctioned loneliness characterises
work of any kind whatsoever. We frequently work as
loners, preparing one project after another while being
solipsistically isolated from the communal practice of
daily life. The basic symptom of this isolation, however,
is the sense of a general lack of time. This state
could also be described as a contradiction of modern
existence. Read terms modern existence social isolation,
springing from the contemporary simultaneous
exploitation of human communicative and social
potentiality, the contemporary alienation of our sociality,
in which social bonds become subject to private choice
and market offer while our common essence is at the
core of exploitation.21
On the one hand, project work, prevalent in contemporary
culture, actually exhausts the present because this kind
of work entails life itself. On the other hand, work as a
material process (practice itself) remains without value
because such work cannot be isolated and included in
the conception of the future. It is always subject to the
flow of unforeseeable time and common relationships
as well as to the entropy of works further attempts and
repetitions. We could then connect the project with wider
changes in the field of the exploitation of human powers
and creativity; human
powers and creativity
need to be constantly
arranged and evaluated
like many other projects.
An interesting part of this
exploitation is the fact
that the project actually
delegates the singular
gesture of the one who
works, that it actually
shifts the authorship
and creative gesture of
the artist elsewhere.
When making projects,
we no longer work as
authors, but delegate our
authorship to a multitude
of evaluative, managerial
and organisational
processes that projective

form we work in; however, it expels any present-oriented


form of work. Work and the project can be differentiated
through an understanding of temporality: no matter how
much they may experiment with the present, all projects
are projections and steps into the future, entailing a
promise of the future and the possibility of what is still
to come.5 In contrast, we can understand work primarily
as the preservation and maintenance of the present or
a life balance that is preserved through a continuous
consumption of human powers. Such understanding
closely connects work with the practice of life and its
consumption. It contains no other promise but that of
having to maintain and preserve life. Life namely tends
towards entropy, contingency and decomposure; this
makes work a self-preserving aimless activity; work is
the temporal activity of duration. This duration is only
possible because work is the way of the community; its
collective and community-based character has already
been discussed by Marx.6 Work is not just an inevitable
human relationship with nature or a passively shared
state; it places us into a relationship with other people:
to work is to work in relation to others. 7 Common work,
however, is also a paradoxical work without properties,
which makes it similar to autonomous work, discussed
by Andr Gorz. Gorz places work without properties
in opposition with productive work; common work is
not collective work or operative work with a common
goal, but something that places us into a relationship
because it does not have any aims or properties its
essence is that of preserving life in an anarchic manner.8
In a short essay, Boyan Manchev elaborates on Gorzs
understanding of life without properties, linking it with a
special kind of temporality that of time of performance
which is in contrast with performance time. In doing so,
Manchev wishes to demonstrate a bizarre shift in the
understanding of contemporary work, which springs
from the perverse understanding of artistic work as a
sort of a leisure experience, with no sign of constraint,
exploitation, physical effort, sensible experience of
matter.9 The future-related promises constantly deceive
us that everything we do in a project is a leisurely
experience in which we experiment with our lives and
sociality for a promise in the future. The project therefore
belongs to the exploitation of common work, to the
commodification of the common, where sociability itself
is in the core of exploitation.
For this reason, many experimental and performative
artistic practices of the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. Allan
Kaprow, the Slovenian group OHO, the time paintings
by Roman Opalka, avant-garde theatres) explored the
current production procedures and opened up artistic
work to work procedures. This was a kind of rebellion
against the future dimension; at the same time however,
these practices have an interesting relationship to the
future they entail a constant emancipatory moment
that commits art to what is still to come and again
opens art to the project. The reflection on artistic
work and the ways in which production procedures
enter and become visible within artistic work, however,
can also clearly reveal the true nature of capitalised work,

temporality needs to be constantly subordinated to.


Furthermore, we can no longer talk about the function
of the author because the commonality of creativity and
the discursive network of various proposals are at the
centre of production. The project should be researchoriented, should contain an individual investment,
and should subordinate life to itself for the duration
of its implementation. However, it ultimately turns
out that its authorisation no longer depends on our or
common creative gesture and investment. The following
questions, also faced by many project proposers, is
therefore extremely interesting: who authorizes the
project, i.e. how do you establish whether the project
has been successful or not, and how do you approve the
financing of a project and according to what criteria?
The exhaustion arising from project work springs from
the fact that the legitimacy of the project is not in its
actual implementation and the implementer, but belongs
to a higher anonymous bureaucratic and managerial
authority, the structural power. Those investing themselves entirely into the project, actually delegate
their life powers to another authority. Such is also the
functioning of todays biopolitical power, which can fully
reject life regardless of its implementation. Project work
accelerates time and intensifies exhaustion because
nobody is the author of their project anymore despite
their considerable investment into it. As Simon Bayly
states, those working on a project are only project
agents. In their project proposal and implementation,
they need to constantly reply to and correspond with
the systems of power, evaluations and intermediation
of the intermediators responsible for the evaluation
and speculative comparison of value.22 According
to this scenario whose agents we have become, it is
also constantly expected that we especially perform
our own selves, i.e. that we ceaselessly perform
ourselves as working subjects and creative beings of
the contemporary world. However, the potentiality of art
ultimately does not arise from the management systems,
but from the temporal contingency and entropy of its
material practice.
So if it wishes to
survive at work, art
needs to rebel against
the project and demand
the temporality of work
as duration.

which becomes increasingly similar to artistic work in the


second half of the 20 th century. We can even claim that,
through its rebellion against capitalisation (of time,
energies, language, forms), art radically attempts to
commit to the present procedures of production and
consumption while creative, cognitive and post-Fordist
work takes over the utopian, future-oriented and
speculative nature of art. The aforementioned type of
work is committed to the creation of the future, to changes
and to the revolutionisation of ways of working, and to
the furthering of creativity. Such capitalised projects
are bound to actualise their speculative excess, including
at the expense of killing the present. In this sense,
many artworks of the 1960s place the visibility of work
at the forefront; in the attempt to somehow distance
themselves from the exploitation of human abilities,
they focus upon production (of the body, materials,
temporality, space). This exploitation, however, is also
deeply ingrained in the production of art, especially
through the investment of phantasms into the artists
life, as discussed in the previous chapter.10
Numerous artistic practices generated as unpredictable
sums of coincidences, maintained material identities,
duration etc. can be read from the perspective of
insistence on the preservation of the presence of work.
We could even say that contemporary production can
be considerably better analysed not so much in terms
of the division between material and non-material
work (lately, this division has even been criticised by
its advocates)11, but in terms of the temporality of work
and the differences that this temporality establishes
between work and the project. With the aid of Henri
Lefebvre, Simon Bayly deals with the difference between
continuous everyday work and project work, the aim of
which is always to change the existing state of things:
what might be a project for, say, the new museums
architect, is merely a temporary work place for the

electrician wiring the fire alarm system.12 According to


Bayly, this difference helps us understand that life in
a project is actually a subjective and existential state,
but that it is today becoming a problematic prevailing
and universal tendency in the understanding of
contemporary work and production. This life in a project
also helps us understand the speculative investment of
contemporary capital into the life of the artist, where the
artists work is viewed as an incessant changing of the
present, a progressive actualisation of life potentialities
and a glance into the future that takes place through
numerous self-evaluations and proposals yet to come.
However, this speculative life is far from the preservation
and daily material process of life balance; it is also
radically divorced from embodied differences and
space singularities, which is why numerous projects
often seem the same.
The acceleration of projects and the activities of
their new beginning and implementation thus make it
possible for change to occur only at the moment of crisis,
exhaustion or retreat. This kind of movement towards
the completion and consummation of the proposal
is problematic because we do not actually talk about
chronological temporality (where one thing follows
another), about the narrative (utopian, dystopian etc.)
or of progress, but rather of the balance between the
future and the present that projects what is still to come:
the project is therefore closer to messianic temporality.
This kind of balance, which actually freezes time into a
multitude of amendments, has destructive consequences
for subjectivity and the communities within which artistic
proposals are created. The artist is increasingly distant
from work contexts, which do not seem not to have any
major differences between their particular articulations.
Differences between creative communities become
invisible, disabling their political power, which is
always based on the particularity of the artistic gesture.

The project
works as a
fatal openness,
full of libidinal
possibilities
of what is still
to come but,
at the same
time, including
the line of death.
The project
can therefore
be analysed
as eros and
thanatos together.

The present is open in terms


of its relationship with what is

still to come, which makes the project a contradictory


temporal constellation. The project opens up the present
in terms of experimentation with the present in terms
of change and duration; simultaneously however, this
openness into the present is limited by the future by
what is not yet realised and still lies ahead. According
to Bayly, the project always contains a proposition of
the future, which is inseparable from the present. In my
opinion, this is also where we need to search for the core
of modernist approaches, despite their obsession with
the present and the reduction of historical avantgardistic
utopias to the material procedures of the production
of artistic work itself, this modernist approach is still
inspired by the historical avant-gardes and the central
utopian project of the entire 20th century: the need
to change the present. In this sense, the genealogy
presented by Gratton and Sheringham is somewhat off
as the project began to become art through historical
avant-gardes, with the basic objective of changing the
present in the name of the future. As we know, the aim
of the 20 th century was to profoundly change the world;
it was forever striving for a special temporality that of
the horizon, which can never actually be reached.4

So if it wishes
to survive at
work, art needs
to rebel against
the project and
demand the
temporality of
work as duration.

The more
possibilities
the project opens
for the future,
the more time
gets sucked out
of the present.

In this text I would like to reflect on the difference


between how the project actually enters into the work of
art work in art and the project as the prevailing mode of
production of artistic work. The project enters art as a
naming for open, processual and interdisciplinary artistic
practices that are supposed to focus on the material
processes of the present on the inherent temporality
of the duration of life that is disappearing from todays
project work. Project work is therefore a means through
which art is supposed to come close to life and open
itself to the heterogeneous processes of life, which are
in turn open towards the future that is yet to come.
Simon Baylys excellent essay The End of the Project
follows the genealogy of the appearance of the word
project in art; one of the most interesting works
presented is the study by Johnnie Gratton and Mark
Sheringham on French contemporary art.1 The two
authors mention the work project as a paradigm of
visual culture from the beginnings of modernism, with
the word especially referring to methods of working in
interdisciplinary artistic practices. The use of this word
can be found in performative, situational, sustainable
and processual works those foregrounding the
experimental and open orientation of artistic work.
The word project should therefore primarily describe a
processual, contingent and open practice, which cannot
be planned or controlled and also entails the possibility
of ending in a disaster, without a result or in something
completely different and unexpected.2 The term project
began to be used in the arts as a description of highly
heterogeneous practices that entail collaboration with
other authors, the blurring of the boundaries between
art and life, and a dehierarchisation of ways of working.
It has been part of artistic production from at least the
1960s onwards. Projects seemingly establish a new
relationship with the present because their relationship
with the present is explorational, experimental and
considerably more playful; despite all these new forms
of project-based work, however,
projects do share a certain new
attitude towards time. According
to Gratton and Sheringham, the
attitude to time is rooted in
the etymological and indelible
make-up of the term project
temporal projection into an
as yet unrealized and open
future is an indispensable
characteristic of anything
regarded or designated as a
project An art of the project
might suggest engagement in
a process that not only takes
time but offers creative ways of
using, experiencing, structuring
and reappropriating time, and of
exploring the effects of time as
change and dure [duration].3

Simon Bayly, The End of the Project: Futurity in the Culture of


Catastrophe, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2,
18, (2013).

This unfinished nature is present in the project in a very


interesting way. Bayly gives the example of a contemporary
scientist working in the field of nanotechnology, robotics or
artificial intelligence. The essential part of his work is that the
project should not end in accordance with the predictions in
the project proposal: the success of the project is measured in
terms of whether the results actually exceed the expectations;
artificial intelligence must therefore do precisely what we
do not expect it to.

3
4

Johnnie Gratton, Michael Sheringam (Eds.), The Art of the


Project, Oxford: Berg Hahn Books, 2005.
This is why the politics of time can be one of essential
resistance dimensions of art; its resistance to the growing
number of projects shows a completely different understanding
of production and consumption. A considerable number of
artistic works employing a different time politics has also been
created in Slovenia; they make strong references to the avantgarde utopias of the future. One of these works is definitely
Noordung by the director Dragan ivadinov, characterized by
a different project logic with a sustainable attitude towards
time. Noordung does not take place as the transformation of
one work into another, but as a holistic concept of the future,
which cannot be implemented in any other way than by
means of a radical re-valuation of the duration of artistic work.
Paradoxically, this duration restores artistic work to the present,
leaving material traces on the work itself. There is another thing
in this project that separates it from projective temporality: this
project is not marked by catastrophy but predominantly by a
utopian affirmation of the future, in which the deadline
is not only a work amendment, but a vision of life.

The word project comes from the Latin word proiectum,


which means before an action.

This is discussed by Marx in Capital in connection with the


species-essence (Gattungswesen) of the human being; work is
connected with the collective condition of existence.

Jason Read, The Production of Subjectivity:


From Transindividuality to the Commons, New Formations:
A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, 70, (2010).

Andr Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason, London: Verso, 1990.

Boyan Manchev, Performance time or time of performance?


The struggle for duration as struggle for the event, Maska:
Projective Temporality, 149-150, XXVII (2012), pp. 118-121.

10 The rebellion of the art of the 1960s against the capitalisation


of human abilities is also discussed by Pamela M. Lee in her
research on the temporality of 1960s art. The author focusses
on the obsession with time in the art of the 1960s in order to
shed light on various temporal politics of art and stresses the
need to a different understanding of the present. Cf. Pamela M.
Lee, Chronophobia, On Time in the Art of
the 1960s, Cambridge, London: MIT Press, 2006.
11 The problems of this difference are also discussed by
Maurizio Lazzarato himself, who actually launched the notion
of non-material work in the 1990s. Cf. Maurizio Lazzarato,
Conversation with Maurizio Lazzaratto, Exhausting Immaterial
Labour in Performance, Le Journal des Laboratoires and TKH, 17,
(October 2010).
12 Simon Bayly, The End of the Project: Futurity in the Culture of
Catastrophe, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 18,
2, (2013).

13 Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man, New York:


Semiotext(e), 2012.
14 This new feeling also gives rise to new symptoms: burn-out,
chronic fatigue syndrome and depression. For this reason,
e.g. Mark Fischer places mental problems and illnesses
connected with the feeling of the appropriation of any kind of
authenticity, the inability to do something new and constant
flexibility, at the very centre of the new style of late capitalism,
which he terms capitalist realism. According to Fischer,
capitalist realism demands that we yield to reality, which is
plastic and capable of reconfiguration at any given moment.
Cf. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, London: Zero Books, Verso,
2009.
15 Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life, Foundations for the
Sociology of Everyday, New York London: Verso, 2002, 183.
16 Boris Groys, The Loneliness of the Project, Going Public,
Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010, 75.
17 Ibidem, 72.
18 The solipsism in choreographic practices and the role of
the idiot is discussed by Andr Lepecki in his analysis by
All Good Spies Are My Age, a performance by Juan Domingez
and early performances by Bruce Nauman. Cf. Andr Lepecki,
Exhausting Dance, Performance and the Politics of Movement,
New York: Routledge, Champan and Hall, 2006.
19 For this reason, a lot of 1960s and 1970s performance art
pieces were like tests of endurance, recognition, code
cracking etc. Early happenings were based on meticulous
scripts of actions. It was these meticulous protocols, however,
that opened art to the project.
20 Boris Groys, The Loneliness of the Project, Going Public,
Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010, 75.
21 Jason Read, The Production of Subjectivity: From
Transindividuality to the Commons, New Formations:
A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, 70, (July 7, 2010), 125.
We could say that we actually spend our social powers
as loners. This is also why it is possible to work with
contemporary means of communication in utter loneliness;
today, this kind of isolation is actually the most sociable.
22 Simon Bayly, The End of the Project: Futurity in the Culture of
Catastrophe, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities,
18, 2, (2013).

The project therefore becomes the ultimate horizon of


experience and it is not unusual that another frequently
used word in cultural and creative production also refers
to the dynamic of this temporality: the word I have
in mind, of course, is deadline. At the end of the project,
there is this line of death; it is a moment of pure
fulfilment, the final consumption of creative life without
an experience that would follow it. To put it another way:
the project is a promise in the future, but it can only be
realised as a catastrophe; one namely needs to cross the
line of death in order to be able to implement the project.
This tension, however, is somewhat alleviated by the fact
that life goes on regardless of that line because so
many other projects remain to be finished; in this way,
the horizon only moves away a little when we wish to
touch it. In this way, the future is radically closed in its
endless possibilities, and the possibility of experimenting
with the present is disabled. In project temporality,
the possibility of the future is actually in balance with
the current power relations. These current power
relations give us the illusion that it is possible to
predict the unpredictable; the future therefore seems
increasingly calculated. In this sense, project temporality
is not directly connected to the time structure of debt.
The time structure of debt is also discussed by Lazzarato;
he states that it is no coincidence that debt has
traditionally been considered as stealing time. The
system of debt must neutralise time; it is necessary to
prevent any kind of potentially deviant behaviour on the
part of the debtor. The economy of debt is therefore the
economy of time and subjectivization in a very special
way; the balance with the future can only achieved in
balance with what already exists.13
The temporality of the project is therefore contradictory.
The project works as a fatal openness, full of libidinal
possibilities of what is still to come but, at the same time,
including the line of death. The project can therefore
be analysed as eros and thanatos together. It is this
catastrophic dimension, the incessant exhaustion
of life forces and the closeness of death, however,
that also mark todays affective feeling of work which
consequently arrises from the exploiting of the human
powers and potentials.14 In project work, the future
dimension of work is catastrophic; every attempt to
change the present in relation to the future brings
calamity and disaster and is inevitably connected to
failure. The projective attitude to the present is marked
by risk and uncertainty; this argument is quite in line
with Lefevbres thinking about work (which was very
close to the critique of project work as early as the
1960s): No matter how close it gets to success,
every endeavour is destined to fail in the end
Every totalisation which aspires to achieve totality
collapses, but only after it has been explicit about what
is considers its inherent virtualities to be. When it makes
the illusory, outrageous, and self-totalizing claim that it is
a world on the human (and thus finite) scale, the negative
(limitation, finiteness) this world has always borne
within itself begins eating it away, refuting it, dismantling
it, and finally brings it tumbling down. Only when a

BOJANA
KUNST
is a philosopher, dramaturg and
performance theoretician. She is a
professor at the Institute for Applied
Theater Studies in Justus Liebig
University Giessen, where she is leading
an international master program
Choreography and Performance.
She is a member of the editorial board
of Maska Magazine, Amfiteater and
Performance Research. Her essays
have appeared in numerous journals
and publications and she has thought
and lectured extensively at the various
universities in Europe. She published
several publications, among them
Impossible Body (Ljubljana, 1999)
and Dangerous Connections: Body,
Philosophy and Relation to the Artificial
(Ljubljana, 2004), Processes of Work and
Collaboration in Contemporary Performance
(Amfiteater, Maska, Ljubljana, 2006),
Performance and Labour (Performance
Research 18.1. ed. with Gabriele Klein),
Artist at Work (Zero Books, London, 2015).

III

Although Kunst articulates many of the real problems


and paradoxes of artistic production today, the slightly
chaotic method that she deploys in order to analyse
such issues, as well as the conclusions that she draws
are questionable. Kunsts basic argument is that the
contemporary artist today, whose work is nomadic,
collaborative and project-based, and whose materials
are her/his subjectivity, language and social skills,
is now at the centre of new models of creativity.
(13) For Kunst, artistic practices take place at a time
when human sociality is at the core of production and
when our cognitive, affective and flexibilities are part
of the production of value; they are something that
fuels contemporary capitalism (42). Throughout the
book Kunst returns to the similarities, analogies and
connections between the rise of new ways of working
(non-material work, affective work, cognitive work),
the primary capital sources of value, (86) and artists
ways of working. This comparative method leads Kunst
to conclude that artistic work is at the very centre
of capitalist interest in generating value. (176) Her
sociological accounts of the artists deeply paradoxical
existence under neoliberal conditions an existence
in which the artists affective and often free labour is
imbricated in institutional and corporate structures of
value-production is generally on point. Where Kunst
fails, for me, is her inability to theoretically ground her
sociological descriptions with a coherent explanation
of why exactly such circumstances are the case.
Is artistic work central to capitalism because artistic
work looks like contemporary work? Is it enough
to say that artistic work is similar and connected to
other forms of work and what does this mean? Is the
artist an ideal post-Fordist worker because their work
resembles each other? Moreover, does this analysis
not beg the question of whether artistic work produces
value in the same way as the wage-labour performed by
a contemporary worker? A London based service worker
at a chain like Pret A Manger is
often a young, nomadic (she or
he has often moved from another
country with high unemployment
or low wages only for the purpose
of getting a job), flexible (often
employed on a zero-hour contract
enabling the employer to ask her
or him to be on standby to sell its
work at any time and day), uses
her or his subjectivity directly at
work (Pret A Manger workers sign
a contract that they need to smile,
touch each other affectively and
joke around whilst working) and
have to collaborate (the customer
is always right.) Such features
of contemporary work, as Kunst
points out, also characterise the
work of contemporary artists.
Yet such comparisons (they look
similar!) fail to distinguish their

We need to
understand the
role of artistss
work in relation
to capital, and not
just in relation
to the broader
sociological or
cultural term
capitalism.

Read symptomatically and as mentioned at


the beginning of my text, Kunsts theoretical
standpoint could, I think, be reconstructed in
the following way: she articulates a post-Structuralist
concept of the Subject from a particular positioning
within post-Marxism in order to delineate the ways in
which the performativity of capital, through the
socialisation of production, functions as various
processes of subjectivisation and de-subjectivisation.
Kunsts concepts of performance and performativity
are derived from a Butlerian framework, accounting for
linguistic, psychoanalytic and larger social processes,
which she attempts to connect, through thinkers such
as Berardi and Virno, to processes of valorisations of
capital. Whilst the latter explore concepts such as
virtuosity, creativity and the performance of the self
they only touch upon the implications of this for real
art practices and artists lives and work. Bringing these
discourses together through the lens of performance
practices (from theatre to contemporary choreography
and performance) Artist at Work attempts to understand
productivity in its broadest possible sense: as the
production of subjectivity, the production of value and
the production of art. Symptomatically, it is the way in
which these discourses are brought together, into an
unmediated whole, which accurately describes the
processes it tries to describe. These discourses present
themselves to the contemporary subject as unmediated
and this is also how they are presented in the book.

fundamental differences; differences which cannot


be gleaned from mere observation. If a wage-labourer
produces value through exploitation, most artists only
produce value in a very limited sense. Although artists,
like most contemporary workers are deeply ingrained in
capitalist life (for instance, using the same technologies
to socialise or within their own art practice) the value that
art production produces, cannot be said to emerge from
the exploited labour time of a wage labourer.
This not to say that most areas of life today have
not become financialised or that art has not become
an industry, which like all other industries contains
exploitative wage-labour conditions, but to point out the
fact that not every single activity in current conditions
produces value in a direct way. If artists were at the
centre of capitalism something Kunst repeatedly
argues every wage labourer, would in some sense,
to quote Joseph Beuys, be an artist. At the centre
of capitalism if capitalism can even be said to have a
centre is the exchange-relation, which can be played
out in the bodily and emotional wage-labour relations of a
Pret A Manger worker or in the abstract flows of a rapidly
expanding financial sphere. We need to understand the
role of artistss work in relation to capital, and not just
in relation to the broader sociological or cultural term
capitalism we need to seriously investigate the type of
labour artists do in order to explain how value is produced
in art by trying to answer some of the questions I posed
above concerning whether art production is waged labour
like other productive labour or not. (As for example
Dave Beech does in his recent book Art And Value:
Arts Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neo-Classical
and Marxists Economic.)6 Artistic work, for instance is not
fully or really subsumed by capitalistic production, even
if, by using the same technologies, it can look like it is.
Interestingly and in slight contradiction to the basic
argument in the book, Kunsts suggestion towards
the conclusion of how artists can use their life as
artists to slow down and produce another community
(communism?) seems grounded in the idea that artistic
labour is not as fully subsumed as other forms of labour
and that because of this relative freedom it can point
towards other forms of life in which neither labour nor
art as we know it exists. It is this enclave of freedom
within artistic production that Kunst excavates an
alternative relation between art and work.
Furthermore it is in these moments when she asks
for the excess of labour and the non-doing of art
making and artistic life where Kunsts analysis becomes
most significant. By demonstrating how artistic work
has the possibility to open itself up to modes of operation
described as lavish consumption (181) (Bataille) or
senseless spending (183) Kunst rethinks the function
of art within a post-capitalist society formation on a
fundamental level. This also touches on when thinkers
like Bruno Gulli by re-reading Agambens understanding
of potentiality through a Marxist critique of political
economy argues that labour needs to return to
itself and become the true potentiality of labour. 7

Kunsts suggestion of artistic lifes potential to produce


a coming community in which passivity and laziness
propels a life in which the potentiality of living human
labour is celebrated rather than alienated and stolen
is radical. The problem for me lies in, how it for her,
seems unconnected with artistic labours relative
subsumption to the value-form. How, so to speak, can
artists point towards other forms of living within the
current conditions? Is it not precisely because they can
take time of work and stage such refusal of work in
the artwork itself? The questions of passivity, laziness
and non-activity of coming future lives in a community
where perhaps neither artists nor workers anymore
exist remained too untouched upon in Kunsts book.
Or expressed differently and somehow returning to
the beginning, I wanted to know more about how it is
that, despite (or perhaps because of) its fundamental
embeddedness in current conditions we can still say that
at the core of artistic autonomy is an awareness of the
unrealized potentiality creative powers. (192)
Thanks to Alex Fletcher for his comments and valuable
remarks on this essay.
1 Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of
Epistemology, Mc Millan Press: London Basingstoke (1978).
[As Rethel writes in the Preface the book was written in the
early 1950s but not published until 1978.]

2 Marx makes a distinction between real and formal

subsumption. Simplified a bit, in the former, old processes


of production (peasants working for a capitalist for example)
are assimilated into the capitalist way of production. In real
subsumption the entire production process is transformed as
a result of the subsumption (industry for example).

3 Negris Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse is the best


and most sophisticated formulation (written in 1978) of this
argument. This was then popularised through his own work
with Hardt and expanded further in the writings of Paulo Virno,
Maurizio Lazzarato and Franco Bifo Berardi in the 1990s and
early 2000s.

4 Although important to mention is the Belgrade based journal

TkHs special issue in 2010 entitled Exhausting Immaterial Labour


in Performance which addressed some of these questions.
Whilst they critically addressed questions such as whether
the term immaterial labour accurately describes working
conditions within the performing arts, they did not, as far
as I could see, make an explicit theorisation between the
concepts of performance with that of labour or production.
Whilst Bojana Kunsts book tries to do this it is less successful,
partly because of its chaotic structure.

5 Bojana Kunst, Artist at Work: Proximity of Art and Capitalism,

Zero Books: Lareford Hunt (2015). [The book was published in


Slovenian already in 2013 with the title Umetnik na delu: bliina
umetnosti in kapitalizma, Maska, 2013]

6 See also my review of this book. Wikstrm, Josefine. Arts

Economic Exceptionalism. Mute Journal. 12 November 2015.


Accessed December 14, 2015. http://www.metamute.org/
editorial/articles/art%E2%80%99s-economic-exceptionalism

7 See Bruno Gilli, Labor of Fire: The Ontology of Labor Between

Economy and Culture, Philadelphia: Temple University Press


(2005), p. 1.

sarma.be

SARMA
laboratory for discursive practices
and expanded publication

Bojana Kunst
Josefine Wikstrm

A
M

In order to demonstrate that artists work is closely


related to capitalist work Kunst spends a substantial
amount of the book detailing the way in which artists
work. Although the term work is never critically
defined or conceptualised in the book, work should be
understood here, I think, in its broadest possible sense,
which could be construed as consisting of at least three
levels: 1) work as a general reproduction of ones life,
2) work as the work of producing art, and 3) work as in
the art work. Moving uncritically between these levels,
Kunst formulates some of the key features of artistic

Kunsts bleak portrait of the contemporary artist,


pictured as a self-harming worker caught between
states of exhaustion and openly exploitative conditions
in art institutions, gives way to more positive account.
This emerges predominately through Kunsts readings
of particular artworks, which have the ability to
demonstrate or stage processes of subjectivisation
under capital; artworks therefore have the capacity
to make such relations visible as well as resist the
specific temporalities imposed by processes of labour
in capitalism. Two examples that Kunst gives are The
Slovenian group Via Negativas performances, which
literally perform the mechanisms of subjectivisation,
which literally connect them with questions on the
relationship between subjectivisation and contemporary
production, (28) and the networked performance
(121) Ballettikka Internettikka: Stattikka by Igor tromajer
and Brane Zorman which she reads as a critique of the
acceleration of time in capitalism.

In addition to the potential of particular artworks
to reveal and simultaneously critique current modes
of working, Kunst also locates strategies of agency
and power in artists ways of living and working more
generally; an argument that is touched upon throughout
the book, but only briefly expanded on in the conclusion.
It is here in this latter part of the book where Kunst more
explicitly articulates strategies in which the artists
work can withstand the exploitation of creative power
and, at the same time, reveal itself as a potentiality of
the common so that the work of the artist may be open
to the lives of everyone, not only to those who work.
(178) Drawing on the idea of laziness or anti-work in two
manifesto-like texts written by artists in different periods
of the 20th century Kazimir Malevichs 1921 Laziness
as the Truth of Mankind and Mladen Stilinovis 1993

Drawing on the work of the previously mentioned


Autonomist thinkers, although not formulated
with their overtly Marxist terminology, Kunst
attempts to set out from a similar problematic: the
question of the role of work under its real subsumption
by capital. She articulates this question as a specifically
political one, drawing from her experience of working
as both a practitioner and theorist within the field
of art (mainly performance, theatre and dance).
Such a politics, for Kunst, is portrayed as an antagonism
between the capitalisation of life and the desire
amongst contemporary artists to make political art: This
antagonism can be briefly described as a contradiction
between the forceful desire to create political and critical
art, and the meek, almost martyr-like recognition of the
total appropriation of art by capitalism (1).

Kunst construes this problem or paradox the
idea that the contemporary artist, through their work, is
fully subsumed to the capitalist logic, yet and at the same
time desires to change its conditions through political or
critical art to carry the seeds of its own solution or
answer. Artistic work, according to Kunst, is the
production of subjectivity, sociality and flexibility, and it
is therefore ambivalently close to capitalism. (191) But it
is precisely because of its closeness or relatedness to
capitalism that artistic work, in Kunsts account, also has
the capacity to transform, change and create other ways
of being together. It is in the excess of the contemporary
artists never realizable potentiality where life can be
re-explored. Thinking alongside philosophers and
theorists such as Jacques Rancire, Chantal Mouffe,
Giorgio Agamben and Georges Bataille, Kunst draws on
their ideas of the political, the public, the aesthetic,
life and the coming community in order to open up
alternative ways to live and exist.

Kunsts main thought, I think, can be boiled down
to the following causal argument: the way in which
contemporary artists live and work mirrors/is connected
to/is similar to the contemporary worker in postFordism. Furthermore, she claims, this is because artists
in general, and artists working in performance in
particular, are constituted by the production of
subjectivity just like capitalism. What is being

In order to demonstrate that the production of


subjectivity is central to capitalist production, as well as
to performance practices and ways in which artists in
performance work, Kunst marries two familiar strands
of thinking. Her claim is on the one hand based on a
model of subject-formation taken from Foucault, in which
the process of becoming a subject is always a double
movement in so far as the subject becomes a subject only
by also being subjected. (This double process of being
subjected and becoming a subject is also famously the
basis for Judith Butlers understanding of performativity
and performance.) Kunsts claim that the production of
subjectivity is a central force in capitalism is also, and
on the other hand, heavily influenced by the idea that
processes of subjectivization under current working
conditions are inseparable from the production of
value and therefore dependent on an expanded concept
of production. Although not mentioned by Kunst, this
expanded concept of production was first formulated by
Antonio Negri in his lectures on the Grundrisse entitled
Marx Beyond Marx and written in the late 1970s. When
capital extracts value from the work we do as subjects
such as socialising, talking, having tastes and ideas
and behaving in different ways and thus supposedly
escapes the measurement of labour in time units the
production of ourselves as subjects becomes inseparable
from the production of ourselves as workers and
value-producers. The performativity of the performing
subject as accounted for by Butler merges in Kunsts
work with the performance of capital and the worker
as described by management theory. The marriage of
post-Structuralism with Italian post-Marxism is, in Kunst,
used as a weapon against neo-liberal management
economics to understand current working conditions of
artists. Expressed differently, the generality of a term
like performance meets the generality of a term like
production in a general observation on the current living
conditions for artists.

work, such as collaboration, projective temporality and


visibility of work. Collaborative work amongst artists is
tightly linked to the changed notion of labour, where
language and the thinking being are at the forefront of
contemporary production (82). As such collaborative
work procedures runs the risk of becoming yet another
capture machine for the privatisation and storage of
ideas. (83) But collaboration can also open to the wide
and unpredictable practice of working together. But only
if it deals with the excess of collaboration and when
the potential of a person or a thing is not realised. (85)
Another key characteristic of artistic work discussed
by Kunst is its project based character which involves
what she terms projective temporality. (157) As Kunst
observes, artists, creative workers and people who are
creative in one way or another are constantly engaged
in projects, often several at once, and move between
the implementation of one project and the completion
of another.(154) Haunted by the ever present horizon
of death, projective temporality makes the project the
ultimate horizon of creation.(157) Other significant
characteristics discussed by Kunst, is the visibility of
artistic work as well as the emotional or affective work
performed by the audience in much so called social or
relational art practice.

JOSEFINE
WIKSTRM
is a writer and lecturer whose research
revolves around performance and labour.
She is a member of staff at DOCH
(Stockholm University of the Arts)
and a visiting lecturer at Goldsmiths,
University of London and has also
taught at Kingston University, Det
Fynske Kunstakademie, and Kungliga
Konsthgskolan.
Her writings have been published in
journals and magazines like MUTE, Texte
Zur Kunst, Kunstkritikk, Afterall, Paletten
and Frieze and she is an associate editor
of Philosophy of Photography.
She is currently in her final year as a
PhD Candidate at the Centre for
Research in Modern European Philosophy,
Kingston University, where she
investigates the concept of performance
within contemporary art and from
the standpoint of concepts of labour
in Marx, Adorno and other thinkers.

Sarma Docs is a series of posters that


announce, articulate and reflect upon
Sarmas online text collection. For this
second edition, Sarma Docs publishes
The Project at Work, a text by philosopher
and performance theoretician Bojana Kunst.
In March 2016, Sarma will launch a text
collection of her most prominent works.
In the Summer of 2015, Bojana Kunst
released her latest book titled Artist at Work:
Proximity of Art and Capitalism. Sarma asked
performance scholar Josefine Wikstrm
to write a critical analysis of Kunsts
elaboration on the ubiquitous relation
between art and capitalism.
COLOPHON: Sarma Docs
Editor Tom Engels
Graphic Design Anne De Boeck, Persua
Copyright All copyrights are with the authors.
Sarma is supported by
Flemish
Community
Commission

Responsible publisher: Sarma, Tom Engels, Koning Albert II-laan 28-30 b125, B-1000 Brussels

In Praise of Laziness Kunst suggests that strategies


of working with mistakes, minimum effort, coincidence,
duration, passivity, etc. (183) should be used by artists
as forms of making work. Doing less, Kunst states,
could also be understood as a new radical gesture that
opens up speculation about the value of artistic life and,
rather than working towards the perfection of works,
starts working autonomously for life itself. (192)

II

speculated on in art, Kunst argues, is not primarily the art


itself, but rather the subjectivity of the artist and her or
his potenitality to produce value. What Kunst sets out to
study therefore becomes the artist at work, where the
latter is understood in the broadest possible sense and
which therefore implies the work the artist does in order
to produce art, the general life of the artist and the work
of the artwork itself. These different aspects of work and
production are inseparable in Kunsts analysis and this
inseparability is key for her argument.

The question whether labour is even more subsumed


through the increase in cognitive work, has not only
occupied thinkers within political economy and
contemporary theory but has also been intensely
debated within the field of art. In an unaccountable
number of books, seminars and discussion panels around
contemporary forms of work and its relation to artistic
labour, such (often hermetically formulated) inquiries
have been repetitively posed to the point of exhaustion.
What does it mean to be creative if creativity is what
is being valued under current conditions? And does
artistic labour function as a critique of abstract labour
or should it be seen as the perfect example of it? Despite
the contaminating spread across the field of art of
terms such as immaterial labour, cognitive capitalism,
labour-power and virtuosity and the overt connection

to ideas around performance and performativity, it is


only recently that more substantial writings on these
topics have begun to emerge. Although Jon McKenzies
2001 Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, set
out from a Foucauldian framework as a way to describe
the changes in work since the second world war and
the increased importance of performance at the work
place, not much has been said about performance within
the field of art, theatre or dance.4 This is where Bojana
Kunsts recently translated Artist at Work: Proximity of
Art and Capitalism5 situates itself. It does so precisely
because it uses the complexity of a transdisciplinary
term like performance and its multiple functions in
order to describe changes that have taken place within
the field of art, the contemporary workplace and the way
in which processes of subjectivization are implicated in
such transformations.

What are the social implications and


economics of a technology which tends to
absorb the work of human labour? Frankfurt
school associated thinker Alfred Sohn-Rethel asked
himself at the end of the Second World War in an age
when science, and especially scientific technology,
exerts an influence upon production and through
production upon the economics and the class relations
of society.1 In the introduction to his book Intellectual
and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology Sohn-Rethel
also asked whether Marxist analysis kept up with the
changes of society we have witnessed since the two
World Wars? In an attempt to answer these questions
questions that seem more relevant than ever today
Sohn-Rethel writes that although Marx referred to the
mental superstructure determined by the social basis
through concepts such as ideology, philosophy and
religion the formation of consciousness is not the
primary concern of Marxs main work. In our epoch
however, he continues, referring to the increased
technological and scientific developments in production
setting of rapidly in the post-war period, it has assumed
crucial importance.

Sohn-Rethels interest in the role of cognitive or
intellectual labour in Western capitalism and in particular
its relation to the exchange-form (as a social abstraction)
can be seen as an important accompaniment (as well as a
rejoinder) to ideas associated with a certain Italian
contemporary post-Marxist theory. Over the past two
decades, such ideas which date back to the late 1960s
have been increasingly problematised by thinkers such
as Maurizio Lazzarato, Antonio Negri, Silvia Federici,
Leopoldina Fortunati and Franco Bifo Berardi. Crucial to
such debates is the concept of real subsumption2;
a concept which has been broadened by many of these
post-Marxists to analyse not merely the subsumption of
labour under capital, as the time in which the worker sells
their labour power, but also capitals ability to subsume
(and therefore transform) our capacities to speak, think
and socialise. If the worker previously only sold her or his
capacity to be at a certain place and perform a specific
task for a specific amount of time, the contemporary
post-industrial worker sells her ability to perform herself
and her unending desires, ambitions and passions.3

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