Artistic Strike

The art strike is a curious figure in the landscape of contemporary art. In many of its most vivid instances it has been a figure of failure and folly. And yet it has also accumulated considerable respect as a decisive configuration of radical politics and art. This panel offers a range of new approaches to the art strike, occasioning a reconsideration of what it has been and what it might be, its stakes and its significance.

Stewart Martin: The Withdrawal of the Work of Art
The 'Art Strike' stands out as a radical - but also contradictory, or perhaps fantasmatic - attempt to combat the subsumption of art by capitalism. But the issues that have attended its realization are as profound than those attending its conceptualization. What conjunction of artistic and political form is proposed by the Art Strike? In particular, what is the artistic significance of the political withdrawal of labour? And what is the political significance of the artistic withdrawal of labour? Moreover, what significance does the withdrawal of labour have for capitalism? And for communism?

Hito Steyerl: Lorem ipsum

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Claire Fontaine: Human Strike or an Art of Revolt
The concept of human strike designates the most generic revolt against any oppressive condition. It is a less defined action than a wildcat or a general strike and it attacks the economic, affective, sexual and emotional positions within which subjects are imprisoned. It provides an answer to the question 'how do we become something other than what we are?' It isn’t a social movement although within uprisings and agitations it can find a fertile ground upon which to develop and grow, sometimes even against these. It is a strike that involves the whole of life and not only its professional side, that acknowledges exploitation in all the domains and not only at work. It is a movement that could potentially contaminate anyone and that attacks the foundations of life in common, or at least what feeds segregation in them. It is a strike with no claims, that deterritorializes the agora and reveals the non-political as the place of the implicit redistribution of responsibilities and unremunerated work. Claire Fontaine will analyze the debt that this concept has towards certain feminisms and certain political and social movements that refused to separate the existential aspect of life, politics and aesthetics.

With Claire Fontaine, Stewart Martin, Hito Steyerl; Moderation: Esther Leslie