Conclusions of the Trondheim Seminar The Trondheim Seminar This paper presents the conclusions of the Trondheim Seminar on transformative art production and coalition-building, curated in September 2015 by Rena Raedle and Vladan Jeremic as guest curators at LevArt.
I As early as 1984, the art historian Carol Duncan pinpointed a fundamental, though typically overlooked feature of high culture: that the majority of professionally trained artists make up a vast surplus whose utter redundancy is the normal condition of the art market.
In this essay, I will endeavour to outline the connection between the contradictions of the social development of artistic labour in capitalism and the formation of the aesthetic subject in modernity as the displacement of labour from the category of art, bringing it into closer affiliation with the speculative forms of capital valorisation.
Prologue Imagine that you are in your studio, or at the desk of the office where you work, or in the classroom where you study. You are temporarily lost in thought about your creative process, thinking about what you will work on next, trying to make something of value.
On Karl Marx’s birthday this year, a six-month public reading of Das Kapital was iniated not far from a video-installation documenting the thoughts of two leading Marxists of our time – Stuart Hall and David Harvey. On the same day, the same artist who initiated these politically-charged projects launched a preview of a new film.
Historically, the question of the emancipation of the masses through the development of collective power can be seen through two ideas: the communist and the democratic one. Jacques Rancière conducted a critique of both instances in an attempt to bring about the third one, which is based on equality.
During the recent years in Sweden, one of the major issues discussed regarding artists’ conditions has been the MU Agreement, which guarantees payment to the artists for the work done in the framework of exhibitions. This is not just an exhibition fee, but also an hourly pay for all work that the exhibition requires.
(), () It seemed necessary to describe a few personal works and approaches towards a given logic of production, embedded in common formats. The projects Employer and Employee and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday will serve as examples.
When working with art, you are not doing it for the money. But all people need to eat. Most people would presume that if an artist is having a lot of solo shows with established institutions and is participating in group shows during the year, it would secure her or him an acceptable economical situation.
“Paint what you love and love what you paint” Tom Roberts, 1890 “Your money or your life!” – was a threat or a false pick that the 19th century bandits, just about the time when Roberts wrote his credo, used with unguarded passengers on picturesque English countryside roads or in the wilderness of British colonies.
On present-day and historical stakes In the backstage of art fairs, biennales, shows, before artworks are exhibited, sold, collected or gifted, artists, interns, assistants, handlers, curators research and plan, they acquire working materials, necessary tools, to draw, to write, to build, to rehearse, or to film, to publicize and invite audiences on social media.
This text aims to revisit a cycle of struggle that politicised a spectrum of art practitioners in Tallinn and Estonia during 2010–2011. The struggle played out as a collective process of self-organisation, addressing issues related to unpaid labour and lack of social guarantees in the contemporary art sphere.
“A State of Pre-” is a pluridisciplinary investigation into the conditions, subjectivities and agencies provoking a realignment of art, thought and politics in the 21st century.
A story about what can happen when ideas meet across fields This essay is based on my encounter with the art-scene in Trondheim, and the reflections I have made both personally as well as through my academic lens as a researcher in the field of working-life studies.
”Does the rational man think only of himself? Or of the community? Is it in his self-interest to build a stronger community?” Adam Smith’s best-known work was The Wealth of Nations.