HOW TO DO THINGS BY THEORY

PUBLIC EDITING SESSION #2:

for joined issue of TkH Journal and le Journal de Laboratoires: Materialist approaches to immaterial labour /(in) performance – Re-materializing immaterial labor

Notes

Participants:

Guest: Florian Schneider – film maker, media activist, writer and curator based in Brussels,

Editorial collective: Bojana Cvejić, Bojan Djordjev, Marta Popivoda, Ana Vujanović (TkH), Virginie Bobin, Alice Chauchat, Nataša Petrešin Bachelez (Les laboratoires d’Aubervilliers), and audience

The second session of Public Editng of joined issue of TkH Journal for Performing Arts Practice and Le journal des Laboratoires on re-materialising immaterial labour in performing arts aimed to move beyond mapping the field of problematics (that has been done on the first session), and was primarily orientated toward identifying examples of artistic practices that tackle in a critical and pro-active way the problematic of immaterial labour as a mode of production in the performing arts field.

PART 1 – ON DIVISION(S) OF LABOR IN IMMATERIAL AND POST-FORDIST PRODUCTION

First part of the session comprises Florian Schenider’s exposé, following by a discussion with the editorial collective and audience. Based on his recent research and text-in-progress on division of labour, Florian Schneider made three main points:

1) Immaterial labour is mainly used as a metaphor, representing the incapacity to deal with a process that takes place on a completely different level – in fact, the reorganization of intellectual and manual labour – so it’s merely a new, different division of labour. For example, in digital production and creative industries intellectual labour (e.g. of programmers) gets the status of manual labour. Usage of the term ‘immaterial labour’ usually points out to a complete unclarity how labour is divided. Immaterial labour is usually considered ‘beyond measure’ (no distinction between work and free time) but that is also a case with post-Fordist mode of production – what is at stake is always measurability, that’s where the struggle is.

2) Florian presented the notion of imaginary property (a critical paraphrase of the concept of intellectual property) that he researches in the project of the same name (http://imaginaryproperty.com/). It is based on the question: what does it mean to own the image today? This syntagm comes out of two thesis:

a) images become more and more a matter of property (copyright)

b) property is more and more a matter of imagination (people owning lands that they never see, etc)

3) At the end of his intervention, Florian proposed the notion of relational value – since the categories such as use value and exchange value don’t seem appropriate in measuring the value of a (digital) image. Relational value is created through users generated meta data – on Youtube, for example – where users participate, share, contribute, tag with no apparent goal. In fact it is a massive expropriation of knowledge again, comparable to the expropriation of knowledge from the worker in Fordist ‘assembly’ line mode of production.

In continuation of Florian’s exposure Bojana Cvejić systematized modes of production in performing arts in recent decades according to division of labour:

1) repertory theatre (70es): state or city owned, hierarchical, bureaucratic institution, with its own space (the building of theater), employees (authors, performers, administration)

2) company (80es): private, hierarchical, institution-in-small, conflation of authorship and ownership –implemented also in the way the work is distributed, owning no space, so being hosted and dependent on other (former repertory) theaters for the visibility of its work

3) freelance (90es on): self-employed, nomadic single author, reduces the number of employees, (impoverishment compensated by collaboration); reduction of manual labour – in dance manual labour could be ‘bodywork’, so conceptual dance appears as a reduction of the material product

Nataša Petrešin added that this logic could also be applied to curators and artists in the visual arts field, referring to the proliferation of artist-run ‘institutes’ in Slovenia – conditioned by the system of financing.

Ana Vujanović pointed out two important theses from Schneider’s Notes on Division of Labour:

Paragraph on Adolf Eichmann with his defense that he is ‘just a specialist’ in the Nazi assembly line for mass destruction of Jews raises the question of division of labour and specialization in the industrial capitalist society as something that through lack of meaning of the ‘specialised’, particular, assembly-line actions eventually brings about the lack of responsibility.

Two opposing ‘de/specialisation’ requirements run simultaneously today: multipractice (‘multitasking’) of freelancers in art and culture vs highly specialized jobs in for example IT. This corresponds to the figure of the self-employed artist who becomes a bricoleur, Bojana added.

Ana has also pointed out to another division of labour that gets blurred in the contemporary modes of production, especially in the field of creative industry and digital production – namely aesthetic and technical production (more on this see http://www.howtodothingsbytheory.info/2010/05/13/ana-vujanovic-what-do-we-actually-do-when-we-…-make-art/).

PART 2: EXAMPLES

The session proceeded by discussion and analysis of examples of critical, problematising, resisting and pro-active approaches in contemporary artistic practice

Alice Chauchat presented everybodys platform (http://everybodystoolbox.net/) that tries to apply open-source procedures in performing arts, for example copyleft, open-source games/scores for performances available at the site. The discussion developed around the issue of accounting for the participation, which by use-value reveals the concrete actualizations of seemingly generic (open-to-content) tools of everybodys. Everybodys cannot be copied, it has to be used!

As an example that is in fact similar to everybodys’ collection of scores but quite opposite, Judith Ickowicz mentioned Hans Ulrich Obrist’s ‘Do it!’ project/publication (http://www.e-flux.com/projects/do_it/homepage/do_it_home.html)

Virginie Bobin presented two examples:

Stefan Brüggemann’s project – show titles http://www.stefanbruggemann.com/

Hybris Konstproduktion – Swedish art collective realising their art as consulting services for the institutions in the art-culture field http://www.hybriskonst.org/

Ana Vujanović presented WochenKlausur http://www.wochenklausur.at/, an Austrian collective whose idea is to move from production of objects (artifacts > commodities) to interventions into the social field. Their artistic practice consists of small, elaborated and concrete proposals and their implementation in improvements to socio-political deficiencies, financed by diverted money from the art institutions and grants.

Also, Marjetica Potrč was mentioned as a similar example (with Dry Toilets project, for example) with the difference that documentation of her social projects enters the art market.

The discussion was concluded with the invitation to the audience to contribute more proposals and texts that would be discussed and that could eventually enter the journal.