Abstract
The intersections between philosophy, society, feminism, activism, capitalism, Marxism, neoliberalism, industrialisation, labour, and work have been creatively and comprehensively explored by artists and theorists (Abbing, 2008; Beech, 2015; Camnitzer, 2020; Duncombe, 2016; La Berge, 2019; Sholette, 2017; Vishmidt, 2018), but there has been little study of how artists actively generate new systems of relation between themselves and their communities beyond the creation and reception of their artwork. Our orientation towards the product of artwork and the standard metrics of recognition associated with it (galleries, notoriety, visitation, money etc..) restricts our ability to recognise the value (and resistance) embedded in the shaping of life around artistic practice. My research pushes against the understanding of artists as producers of art objects and instead propose that artists, rather, are tricksters – people who live outside heteropatriarchal understandings of time, labour and capital, and invent new ways of being in the world through ‘the doing’ of studio practice. This ‘doing’ necessitates an ‘undoing’ or withdrawal from standard industrial measurements of value and productivity. Using my research into artistic process and the ‘doing’ and ‘undoing’ of artmaking within the context of late stage capitalism, the paper builds a figure of the working artist as trickster, who, by dedicating time and energy to an artistic process with no known outcome, is actively upturning current systems of labour and accumulation.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
The Arts in Social, Political, and Community Life
KEYWORDS
Artistic Process, Activist Art, Political Art, Art Education, Radical Art
