Program for the networking session

TUESDAY, MARCH, 20

10am - 2pm Studiovisits

3pm - 5pm Collaborative Reading:

Walter Benjamin: "The Author as Producer" (please contact me by email in order to receive a PDF file of the short article by Walter Benjamin)

WEDNESDAY, MARCH, 21

10am Lecture and debate: "Art as networks, networks as art"

7pm - 9pm Double feature:

"Dirty pretty things", Stephen Frears, 97 min, UK 2002

Okwe, a kind-hearted Nigerian doctor, and Senay, a Turkish chambermaid, work at the same West London hotel. The hotel is run by Senor Sneaky and is the sort of place where dirty business like drug dealing and prostitution takes place. However, when Okwe finds a human heart in one of the toilets, he uncovers something far more sinister than just a common crime. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301199/

"The American Friend" (Der Amerikanische Freund), Wim Wenders, 127 min, Germany 1977

Tom Ripley has a sweet deal with an art forger. The forger creates the paintings; Tom sells them. But another criminal business associate wants Tom to go in for an even riskier enterprise: murder. Tom suggests his associate ask a local picture framer instead. That man has a fatal disease, or so it's rumored. More, he has a wife and kid that surely he wouldn't want to leave penniless. Let this picture framer be a hit man, and no one will suspect. The terminally ill craftsman may agree to the misdeed, and several more, but he'll end up needing Tom Ripley in a pinch. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075675/

Okwui Enwezor: The Artist as Producer in Times of Crisis

On April 27, 1934 Walter Benjamin delivered a lecture at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris. In the lecture, "The Author as Producer", Benjamin addressed an important question that, since, has not ceased to pose itself, namely to what degree does political awareness in a work of art becomes a tool for the deracination of the autonomy of the work and that of the author?

Benjamin's second point was to locate what a radical critical spirit in art could be in a time of such momentous, yet undecided direction in the political consciousness of Europe: between the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the productivist model of artistic practice it instantiated and the storms of repression unleashed by fascism and Nazism in Western Europe. In a sense, Benjamin's lecture addressed the question of the artist's or writer's commitment under certain social conditions. This would lead him to ask "What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?" Georg Lukács posed a similar question in his 1932 essay "Tendency or Partisanship?".

The conditions of production of the time was the struggle between capitalism and socialism as the driving force behind modern subjectivity. It is my intention in this lecture to extend the questions raised by these two thinkers and apply them to the critical context of contemporary culture today. Ever more so, Benjamin and Lukács are not only relevant, but crucial to understanding a visible turn that has become increasingly evident in the field of culture at large, that is the extent to which a certain critical activism in contemporary art has become a way to pose the questions raised seventy years ago anew through collective practices. My focus is not on activism per se, but on work driven by the spirit of activism that bear direct relationship to Benjamin's and Lukács's essays. To that end, recent confrontations within the field of contemporary art have precipitated an awareness that there have emerged in increasing numbers, within the last decade, new critical, artistic formations that foreground and privilege the mode of collective and collaborative production. Is this return an acknowledgment of the repressed memory of a social unconscious? Is the collectivization of artistic production not a critique of the poverty of the language of contemporary art in the face of large scale commodifications of culture which have merged the identity of the artist with the corporate logo of global capitalism?

These questions shadow the return of collectivity in contemporary artistic practice and in so insistent a manner, across a broad geographic area that to ignore the consequences is to miss the vital power of dissonance that is part of its appeal to the contemporary thinkers and artists who propose collectivity as a course artistic work. Of course, we need not to be reminded that there is nothing novel about collectivity in art as such. It's been a crucial strategy of the avant-garde throughout the 20th century. Therefore, a proper understanding of collectivity today would have to be traced through its affinities with past examples. This story belongs to the history of modernism proper. The position of the artist working within collective and collaborative processes subtend earlier manifestations of this type of activity throughout the 20th century.

Collectivity performs an operation of irruption and transformation on traditional mechanisms and activities of artistic production which locates the sole figure of the individual artist at the center of authorship. Under the historical conditions of modernist reification, collective or collaborative practices (that is the making of an artwork by multiple authors across porous disciplinary lines) generate a radical critique of artistic ontology qua the artist and as such also questions the enduring legacy of the artist as an autonomous, individual within modernist art. This concerns the question of the authenticity of the work of art and its link to a specific author. However, there is a level at which the immanence of this discourse is also evidenced in the critique of the author in postmodernism.

On both levels, I would argue that the anxieties that circumscribe questions concerning the authenticity of either the work of art or the supremacy of the artist as author are symptomatic of a cyclical crisis in modernity about the status of art to its social context and the artist as more than an actor within the economic sphere. This crisis has been exceptionally visible since the last decade of the twentieth century. The political climate of the current global imperium adumbrates it further. If we look back historically collectives tend to emerge during periods of crisis; in moments of social upheaval and political uncertainty within society. Such crisis often forces reappraisals of conditions of production, reevaluation of the nature of artistic work, and reconfiguration of the position of the artist in relation to economic, social, and political institutions.

There are two types of collective formations and collaborative practices, that are important for this discussion. The first type can be summarized as possessing a structured modus vivendi based on permanent, fixed groupings of practitioners working over a sustained period. In such collectives, authorship represents the expression of the group rather than that of the individual artist. The second type of collectives tend to emphasize a flexible, non-permanent course of affiliation, privileging collaboration on project basis than on a permanent alliance. This type of collective formation can be designated as networked collectives. Such networks are far more prevalent today due to radical advances in communication technologies and globalization However, we shall trace the emergence of the artist as producer in times of crisis by first linking up with modernism.

In collective work we witness how such work complicates modernism's idealization of the artwork as the unique object of individual creativity. In collective work we also witness the simultaneous aporia of artwork and artist. This tends to lend collective work a social rather than artistic character. Consequently, the collective imaginary has often been understood as essentially political in orientation with minimal artistic instrumentality. In other instances shared labor; collaborative practice; the collective conceptualization of artistic work have been understood as the critique of the reification of art and the commodification of the artist. Though collaborative or collective work has long been accepted as normal in the kind of artistic production that requires ensemble work such as in music, in the context of visual art under which the individual artistic talent reigns such loss of singularity of the artist is much less the norm, particularly under the operative conditions of capitalism.

found at: http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/000839.php
© Okwui Enwezor

Republicart on "The artist as producer"

Based upon Walter Benjamin's seminal essay "The Author as Producer", a whole range of theorists have developed approaches towards an aesthetics of production. The texts of this issue investigate how Benjamin's arguments may serve as a ground for reflecting and theorizing current art practices.

What about political art's function of "supplying the capitalist production apparatus, not changing it"? What about artistic methods of subverting cooptation after Brecht and Tretjakov? What about new models of artists/intellectuals as producers and "specialists" rather than experts for the universal?

www.republicart.net/disc/aap/

Franco Berardi (Bifo): Info-Labour and Precarisation

"We have no future because our present is too volatile. The only possibility that remains is the management of risk. The spinning top of the scenarios of the present moment." (W. Gibson: Pattern recognition)

In February 2003 the American journalist Bob Herbert published in the New York Times the results of a cognitive survey on a sample of hundreds of unemployed youths in Chicago: none of their interviewees expected to find work the next few years, none of them expected to be able to rebel, or to set off large scale collective change. The general sense of the interviews was a sentiment of profound impotence. The perception of decline did not seem focused on politics, but on a deeper cause, the scenario of a social and psychical involution that seems to cancel every possibility of building alternatives.

The fragmentation of the present time is reversed in the implosion of the future.

In The Corrosion of Character: the Transformation of Work in Modern Capitalism (Norton: 1998; tr. It. L'Uomo Flessibile), Richard Sennett reacts to this existential condition of precariousness and fragmentation with nostalgia for a past epoch in which life was structured in relatively stable social roles, and time had enough linear consistency to construe paths of identity. "The arrow of time is broken: in an economy under constant restructuring that is based on the short-term and hates routine, definite trajectories no longer exist. People miss stable human relations and long term objectives." (R. Sennett: The corrosion of character)

But this nostalgia has no hold on present reality, and the attempts to reactivate the community remain artificial and sterile.

In the essay "Precari-us?", Angela Mitropoulos observes that precariousness is a precarious notion. This because it defines its object in an approximate manner, but also because from this notion derive paradoxical, self-contradictory, in other words precarious strategies. If we concentrate our critical attention on the precaricious character of job performance what would our proposed objective be? That of a stable job, guaranteed for life? Naturally no, this would be a cultural regression that would definitely subordinate the role of work. Some started to speak of Flexicurity to mean forms of wage independent of job performance. But we are still far from having a strategy of social recomposition of the labour movement to extricate ourselves from unlimited exploitation. We need to pick up again the thread of analysis of the social composition and decompositon if we want to distinguish possible lines of a process of recomposition to come.

In the 1970s the energy crisis, the consequent economic recession and finally the substitution of work with numerical machines resulted in the formation of a large number of people with no guarantees. Since then the question of the precarity became central to social analysis, but also in the ambitions of the movement. We began by proposing to struggle for forms of guaranteed income, uncoupled from work, in order to face the fact that a large part of the young population had no prospect of guaranteed employment. The situation has changed since then, because what seemed a marginal and temporary condition has now become the prevalent form of labour relations. Precariousness is no longer a marginal and provisional characteristic, but it is the general form of the labour relation in a productive, digitalized sphere, reticular and recombinative.

The word 'precariat' generally stands for the area of work which is no longer definable by fixed rules relative to the labour relation, to salary and to the length of the working day. However if we analyse the past we see that these rules functioned only for a limited period in the history of relations between labour and capital. Only for a short period at the heart of the C20th, under the political pressures of unions and workers, in conditions of (almost) full employment and thanks to a role more or less strongly regulatory of the state in the economy, some limits to the natural violence of capitalist dynamics could be legally established. The legal obligations that in certain periods have protected society from the violence of capital were always founded on the existence of a relation of a force of a political and material kind (workers' violence against the violence of capital). Thanks to political force it became possible to affirm rights, establish laws and protect them as personal rights. With the decline in the political force of the workers' movement, the natural precariousness of labour relations in capitalism and its brutality have reemerged.

The new phenomenon is not the precarious character of the job market, but the technical and cultural conditions in which info-labour is made precarious.The technical conditions are those of digital recombination of info-work in networks. The cultural conditions are those of the education of the masses and the expectations of consumption inherited from late C20th society and continuously fed by the entire apparatus of marketing and media communication.

If we analyse the first aspect, i.e. the technical transformations introduced by the digitalisation of the productive cycle, we see that the essential point is not the becoming precarious of the labour relation (which, after all, has always been precarious), but the dissolution of the person as active productive agent, as labour power. We have to look at the cyberspace of global production as an immense expanse of depersonalised human time.

Info-labour, the provision of time for the elaboration and the recombination of segments of info-commodities, is the extreme point of arrival of the process of the abstraction from concrete activities that Marx analysed as a tendency inscribed in the capital labour relation.

The process of abstraction of labour has progressively stripped labour time of every concrete and individual particularity. The atom of time of which Marx speaks is the minimal unit of productive labour. But in industrial production, abstract labour time was impersonated by a physical and juridcal bearer, embodied in a worker in flesh and bone, with a certified and political identity. Naturally capital did not purchase a personal disposition, but the time for which the workers were its bearers. But if capital wanted to dispose of the necessary time for its valorization, it was indispensable to hire a human being, to buy all of its time, and therefore needed to face up to the material needs and trade union and political demands of which the human was a bearer.

When we move onto the sphere of info-labour there is no longer a need to have bought over a person for eight hours a day indefinitely. Capital no longer recruits people, but buys packets of time, separated from their interchangeable and occasional bearers.

De-personalised time has become the real agent of the process of valorisation, and de-personalised time has no rights, nor any demands either. It can only be either available or unavailable, but the alternative is purely theoretical because the physical body despite not being a legally recognised person still has to buy his food and pay his rent.

The informatic procedures of the recombination of semiotic material have the effect of liquifying the 'objective' time necesssary to produce the info-commodity. All the time of life the human machine is there, pulsating and available, like a brain-sprawl in waiting. The extension of time is meticuously cellularised: cells of productive time can be mobilised in punctual, casual and fragmentary forms. The recombination of these fragments is automatically realised in the network. The mobile phone is the tool that makes possible the connection between the needs of semio-capital and the mobilisation of the living labour of cyber-space. The ringtone of the mobile phone calls the workers to reconnect their abstract time to the reticular flux.

It's a strange word that with which we identify the ideology prevalent in the posthuman transition to digital slavery: liberalism. Liberty is its foundational myth, but the liberty of whom? The liberty of capital, certainly. Capital must be absolutely free to expand in every corner of the world to find the fragment of human time available to be exploitated for the most miserable wage. But liberalism also predicates the liberty of the person. The juridical person is free to express itself, to choose its representatives, to be entrepreneurial at the level of politics and the economy.

Very interesting, only that the person has disappeared, what is left is like an inert object, irrelevant and useless. The person is free, sure. But his time is enslaved. His liberty is a juridical fiction to which nothing in concrete daily life corresponds. If we consider the conditions in which the work of the majority of humanity, proletariat and cognitariat, is actually carried out in our time, if we examine the conditions the average wage globally, if we consider the current and now largely realised cancellation of previous labour rights, we can say with no rhetorical exaggeration that we live in a regime of slavery. The average salary on the global level is hardly sufficient to buy the indispensible means for the mere survival of a person whose time is at the service of capital. And people do not have any right over the time of which they are formally the proprietors, but effectively expropriated. That time does not really belong to them, because it is separated from the social existence of the people who who make it available to the recombinative cyberproductvie circuit. The time of work is fractalised, that is reduced to minimal and reassemblable fragments, and the fractualisation makes it possible for capital to constantly find the conditions of minimum salary.

How can we oppose the decimation of the working class and its systemic de-personalisation, the slavery that is affirmed as a mode of command of precarious and de-personalised work? This is the question that is posed with insistence by whoever still has a sense of human dignity. Nevertheless the answer does not come out because the form of resistance and of struggle that were efficacious in the C20th appear to no longer have the capacity to spread and consolidate themselves, nor consequently can they stop the absolutism of capital. An experience that derives from worker’s struggle in the last years, is that the struggle of precarious workers does not make a cycle. Fractalised work can also punctually rebel, but this does not set into motion any wave of struggle. The reason is easy to understand. In order for struggles to form a cycle there must be a spatial proximity of the bodies of labour and an existential temporal continuity. Without this proximity and this continuity, we lack the conditions for the cellularised bodies to become community. No wave can be created, because the workers do not share their existence in time, and behaviours can only become a wave when there is a continuous proximity in time that info-labour no longer allows.

http://www.generation-online.org/t/tinfolabour.htm
Translated from the Italian by Erik Empson

Links to "Dirty pretty things"

Some links and references to Stephen Frears: "Dirty Pretty Things"

Frears finds the heart of London's underground
by Philip French

http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Observer_review/0,,8...

"Dirty Pretty Things" is set in a sub-stratum of London inhabited by foreigners, in flight for a variety of reasons (personal, political, commercial) from their homelands. Living invisible lives, they are anonymous faces in the crowd to their mostly reluctant and ungrateful hosts. Strangers to each other, they help and sometimes exploit their fellows. (...) Frears combines the social commitment of the realistic school of British moviemakers from which he emerged in the Sixties with the happy readiness to shift from one genre to another that characterised the best directors of the old Hollywood studio system.

The Invisible London of Dirty Pretty Things
by Ted Hovet

http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/hovet.html

The film’s project to reveal the unseen begins with careful attention to concrete objects -- buildings, neighborhoods, homes, and of course people. Filmed on location in London and in the Shepperton Studios, Dirty Pretty Things takes us to unfamiliar areas and denies us helpful establishing shots that orient us to the city -- never once do we see, for instance, Big Ben, Westminster Abby, or Piccadilly Circus. It uses actors of many different nationalities who, if they speak English at all, speak it with a wide variety of accents and inflections. In doing so Dirty Pretty Things inevitably presents, at least to the typical cinemagoer, a different London -- if, indeed, it is even “London” at all. The film opens with Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) soliciting fares for his cab (not, of course, the iconic and “official” black cab of London but a simple passenger car) at Stansted Airport. He promises his potential customers that he can get them to Buckingham Palace for ten pounds, but instead of following him to this comfortingly familiar locale the film’s next scene takes us back to the cab office in an immigrant neighborhood of South London. As he enters the office, Okwe hands his identification card and license over to another driver, then reminds him to remove the crucifix around his neck: “your name is now Mohammed.” This exchange, in which clearly foreign workers blithely switch documents that disguise their true identity and status, may certainly raise anxieties about safety and the ability of the state to account for (and thus control) the inhabitants of the city-- anxieties that have likely increased in the years since this film was released. Yet this unfamiliar world, one of unstable, fluid identity, also reveals mutual support and camaraderie among its inhabitants. Far from threatening, the film depicts these characters as hard-working individuals trying to forge a living as they provide a crucial service to all of the “official” and “legal” inhabitants of the city.

Like Pulling Teeth (Or Stealing Kidneys): Stephen Frears On "Dirty Pretty Things"
by Erica Abeel

http://www.indiewire.com/people/people_030718frears.html

"If you treat people the way these people are treated in England, then you will create a criminal underclass. In some peculiar way that I can't really explain, England is both a very tolerant country and a sort of neo-racist country. People like this aren't made to feel welcome. It's a paradox. I can't really explain it. The reaction of the British government is to make peoples' flesh creep. Tell frightening stories. Instead of saying, 'These people are really quite harmless. And good for the British economy.' Instead they say, 'Oh, you'd better watch out, these people have three heads.'"

Links to "The american friend"

This is a collection of a few links to useful ressources, reviews and texts on Wim Wenders "The american friend"

Wim, with Vigour, by Walter Chaw

http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/notes/wwendersinterview.htm

Wim Wenders: Wilhelm Wenders, b. August 14, 1945, Düsseldorf, Germany
by Dave Tacon

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/wenders.html

The American Friend is a thriller about an American who hoodwinks an innocent picture framer into committing hits for organised crime. Dennis Hopper cuts an at times bizarre figure as the sinister Tom Ripley, a loner, a cowboy adrift in Hamburg, consumed with existential angst. Hopper's characterisation must have been a shock to Highsmith purists, but highly enjoyable for the rest of us. Yet the chemistry between Hopper and the film's other lead, Swiss German Bruno Ganz, was, at the beginning of shooting, explosive to say the least. Ganz's preparation for his role as Jonathan was as meticulous as the character's approach to his profession as a picture framer and restorer. Hopper had left the entire cast and crew waiting for his arrival and when he finally turned up at Hamburg's airport, direct from Francis Ford Coppola's set of Apocalypse Now (1979) in the Philippines, he was still in his photographer's costume and out of his mind on drugs and alcohol. However, according to Wenders, when he said “action”, Hopper was completely in the character, but back to his prior rather psychotic state after the order “cut!” Ganz took great resentment at Hopper's unprofessionalism and a few days into shooting, his frustration erupted and he punched his American co-star in the face. Hopper however was a far more experienced brawler and soon bloodied Ganz's lip. The two continued to brawl their way off the set into Hopper's Thunderbird only to return to the set the next morning arm in arm, heavily intoxicated, differences settled, but in no state to be filmed. (17) The chemistry between the two very different stars is one of the strongest suits of the film, along with the superb direction—one particular highlight is a masterful scene depicting Jonathan's inept murder of an American underworld figure in the Parisian metro system.

Once again, although the film was predominantly set in Europe, the unifying aesthetic was American. This time, Wenders and Müller decided to model the film's look on Edward Hopper, whose own work had been heavily influenced by American cinema. Wenders was drawn to Hopper's simplicity of framing and the ominous mood of his painting—Hopper's often deserted urban landscapes seemed to capture a moment of quiet “before all hell breaks loose”. (18) The choice of Edward Hopper combined with Jürgen Knieper's brooding score created a sense in the viewer that danger is always just around the corner. Furthermore, the use of a deliberately American aesthetic in European locations brought a peculiar geographic confusion to the viewer with cross cutting geared to accentuate this confusion.

Although heralding a shift towards more conventional genre filmmaking for Wenders, The American Friend still features Wendersian motifs such as the use of rock 'n' roll, with Jonathan singing the Kinks' “There's Too Much on My Mind” to himself in his workshop; motion, as in Jonathan's travels from Hamburg to Paris and Munich, and allusions to the corruptive nature of American movies. Wenders' discourse on Hollywood is at once damning and reverential, as he ironically cast Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller as an art forger and a crime boss respectively.

Ripley Games, by Geoff Gardner

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/6/ripley.html

This essay about a character from film and literature is in part prompted by reminiscence. In 1976 I met Patricia Highsmith at her house in Moret, a tiny village near Fontainebleau. The encounter did not last very long, perhaps three quarters of an hour, and did not lead to any enduring correspondence. Highsmith's distraction at the presence of this Australian enthusiast was not allowed to last. I missed the local train back, walked all the way to Fontainebleau and allowed a couple of things to stick in the memory which I will refer to later. Let me start at the beginning.