ON POST-WORK
Saara Kanerva Tamminen
I wanted to write about Danielle Child’s Working Aesthetics 1, but the more I thought about the concept of post-work, the more impossible it felt. The narrative of something happening later on, after ’something’ that constitutes the latter either by distinguishing from it, or deconstructing its origins, is very problematic to me. This concept of post-work, that carries implicit dreams of overcoming the struggles caused by immaterial work by calling ’non-doing’ to help, is very anti-political in an obscure manner. It doesn’t help my precarious life, not even on a theoretical level – and these kinds of counter actions have been historically tested several times in the field of art: Yves Klein painted a gallery white and presented nothing already in 1956. Not to start with Herman Melville, who prominently stated with Bartleby’s mouth: ”I would prefer not to”. This action of rejecting or abjuring the expected has a vibe of the individual fighting something totalitarian, and haven’t we already seen enough memes with Žižek’s grumpy face? The lesson Bartleby’s story actually carries is this: he died, in hunger, in prison – to not to do, to not to not to do is not a choice, it is a doom.
I do not find this motif encouraging, nor do I find Bartleby’s statement a potential guideline in this field of art, where I will never be Maria Eichhorn. 2 I was not born in Western Germany on the shoulders of massive fossil capitalism, in the era of hegemonic crackles and new realms, with many fewer competing contemporary artists around as today. I will not gain her influence and be able to screen my things at celebrated a gallery in London, or not to screen and provide gallery staff five weeks of leisure. Who the fuck cares, if I ’occupy’ a gallery in Pori and present myself posting emptiness on social media?
Deceased Mark Fisher, one among the many depressed marxist men, would point out the hollow nature of this gesture, placing Derrida’s hauntology, spectres of alternative futures, in the core of this reproduction, where artist’s craving for individualization appears in trying to make themself invisible. The history of workers’ movements is not unwittingly coalesced with collective action: strikes gain their power because of masses, not with the illusion of appearances, especially not through the individual illusory sense of self.
And this is the question that Child’s call for post-work raises: side by side with declining runs the question of instead. Are we just reflecting, or are we demanding? If we’re reflecting, perhaps even mimicking, the complexity of late-capitalist order and mapping the future of art and artist in this terrain, shouldn’t we then also track paths towards action, not away from it? And are we - and now I speak in the context of more or less privileged academic artists - even in the position to demand anything? Aren’t we the prototypes of self-employed people, forced individual entrepreneurship? Long before Uber or Wolt, we were the ones without occupational health insurance or retirement allowance, earning our own means of production and subsistence, by outrageously underpaid compensation. We gave our bread for theory.
As mentioned, I find this very hard to write about. It is too complex for me at the moment. So many days of non-doing during the past year and too many hours of despair for so many artists. Lacking action, I use the weapon of choice I was given in academia. If we follow the footsteps of philosopher Nancy Fraser, can we approach the question of immaterial labour with her claim:
[…] that every form of capitalist society harbours a deep-seated social-reproductive ‘crisis tendency’ or contradiction: on the one hand, social reproduction is a condition of possibility for sustained capital accumulation; on the other, capitalism’s orientation to unlimited accumulation tends to destabilize the very processes of social reproduction on which it relies. This social-reproductive contradiction of capitalism lies at the root of the so-called crisis of care. […] 3
The keyword: care. Frasier, socialist feminist, considers the primarily women-run system of care the most important question when thinking of the futures of work. The metamorphosis of this system from a non-paid, rural, domestic initial setting to neoliberal societies, where Social Reproduction involves not only raising children and caring for the elderly, but also communities’ activities, neighborhoods, networks and friendship, is gnawing its canine strictly on the question of immaterial work.
I wonder, what truly are the effects of post-work or ‘practicing hospitality’ and other attempts to rethink artistic work by non-doing recently so often seen in our field? I see a horizon of even stronger class position where those who do already have a position – though wobbly and quickly changing - in the field of art, can enjoy the privilege of being nursed by curators and financiers. Doesn’t this tendency rather just create a backlash, exorcising the romantic ethos of the artist as a prodigy? And more important, it is not a long-standing strategy in terms of questions of agency. I would even allege that the contemporary art world, with a majority of non-male actors, is deeply reliant on Social Reproduction. This is why I do not even want to approach the question of post-work without reminding, that we have to start by reimagining the gender order - and then take action without the false hope of post-something.
1. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/working-aesthetics-9781350022393/
2. In 2016, established artist Maria Eichhorn did not hold her solo exhibition in Chisenhale Gallery, East End London, but shut down the gallery and asked the staff to withdraw their labor for the duration of the exhibition.
3. Fraser, Nancy. ”CONTRADICTIONS OF CAPITAL AND CARE”. New Left Review 100. July-August 2016. https://newleftreview.org/issues/II100/articles/nancy-fraser-contradictions-of-capital-and-care.pdf