The Artist and the Un-working of Work
Jasmine Guffond’s Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity was produced out of a collaboration with Zabriskie Bookshop in Berlin. Invited participants were asked to select a book from the Zabriskie collection to respond to. Guffond chose David Graeber’s ironically titled Debt: The First 5000 Years. During his career, sadly curtailed by his premature death in 2020, Graeber, a renowned anthropologist and outspoken anarchist strongly attached to the Occupy Wall Street movement, directed much debate to the centrality of work in capitalist societies. As he and an ever-increasing panoply of contemporary critics of neoliberalism’s mantra of endless production, endless competition, have pointed out, much of what passes for waged work these days is in fact, ‘bullshit’. Graeber’s equally ironically titled book Bullshit Jobs, deploys a wealth of research including numerous primary case studies, to illustrate his thesis that capitalism’s obsession with work is largely a ruse: many workers today are employed to do tasks they feel are meaningless and contribute nothing to society. Waged work, even highly remunerated at times, simply becomes a means of disciplining individuals, keeping them in their place day in and day out in order that they don’t find better (re: potentially subversive and/or creative) things to do.
Art as Critique Under Neoliberalism: Negativity Undoing Economic Naturalism
Is contemporary art still a viable medium for socio-political critique within a cultural terrain almost wholly naturalised by neoliberalism? Historically, negativity is central to the project of critical theory. Today, art’s critical acuity is revivified by negatively divesting from art contexts saturated with neoliberal economism. Criticality is then negatively practiced as an ‘un-’ or ‘not-doing’, defining modes of exodus while crucially not abandoning art’s institutional definition altogether.
Work and the Immaterial Labour of Music, Marx 200, KARL records, Berlin
Karl Marx critiqued the domination of life by capitalist labour. Increasingly labour has been dematerialised. Music is inherently immaterial: it escapes true physical capture as much as it is increasingly accessible digitally. Music is temporal and from one perspective, un-ownable: we own the music in a subjective sense. We incorporate its rhythms, textures, harmonies and patterns into the organic circumstances of our own lives. We live the music.
To produce value under Capital is a misfortune because it means producing value for somebody else.