New Poetics of Labor – Al camello camello y al amor amor

New Poetics of Labor is an independent initiative for artists, which aims to explore the relationship and exchanges between art and labor. The group brings together artists, writers, and scholars from around the world to facilitate a new critical dialogue that reframes local contexts of production. NPoL is a platform for conversation, research, creative experimentation, and action. NPoL is an act of resistance.

Our inaugural edition began in October 2017, which resulted in a series of programs and events: an international Open Call, a one-day performance, a film screening, a culminating exhibition and publication, as well as an online research platform. Our team worked between New York and Medellín with 40 artists and writers from more than 16 different countries.

The title of the exhibition and publication, Al camello camello y al amor amor, refers to unrecognized forms of labor, especially performed by women and artists who work out of passion for what they believe in. The project sought to open a conversation and create a moment for people to separate work from love. If we acknowledge and celebrate the worker, perhaps the notion of love could become clarified. In comparison to recognized, legalized, and regulated forms of work, the labor of artists and female workers is frequently unseen, especially within Latin America.

The works use photography as a theoretical base, where the medium is understood to be analogous to poetry: operating as active thinking, resistance, and transformation. The pieces are made through the labors of reflecting, cutting, stitching, weaving, and carpentry – using the body, the negative, the archive, and the digital.

Here, a selection from the curatorial project Al camello camello y al amor amor, which includes prose and poetry excerpts, video clips, and art.

New Poetics of Labor

New Poetics of Labor,
two-channel, HD video, 11:00 min, 2018

NPoL’s video documents a performance with local workers in front of a convenience store in Medellín. Beginning with the phrase »Pare la escoba y parchemos con una pola…,« members of the community were invited to sit with NPoL and have a beer in the middle of the workday. Thirty-two workers stopped for a moment and sat down with NPoL artists during their shifts. During this time, NPoL and the workers shared genuine conversations about daily routines of labor, finding a common ground.

One result of this pause and reflection was the final collection of 32 used brooms that belonged to the workers, which were sometimes exchanged for new brooms that NPoL had on hand to distribute. These were displayed in the exhibition Al camello camello y al amor amor, which was on view near where this event took place, a few months later. The display poses questions. What might happen if workers stop and reflect on the act of inaction itself? What might examining labor mean for resistance, especially in developing countries? What might reflecting on this reality as a worker mean for the artist, and similarly, what might thinking of herself/himself as an artist mean for a waged worker?

»If we acknowledge and celebrate the worker, perhaps the notion of love could become clarified. In comparison to recognized, legalized, and regulated forms of work, the labor of artists and female workers is frequently unseen, especially within Latin America.«

This was not only an act of intervention by the artists, but a moment in time in which the community displayed unusual openness and warmth as they revealed details about the economic and social reality of their city.

Cristina Velásquez

Velásquez is interested in the way one culture translates another, and how inevitably, a dominant culture sanitizes and reduces the other in a subtle and not so subtle continuation of colonialism. Velásquez explores the way social constructions of value, such as, race, class, and labor distribution, are shaped by images and language, echoing a larger system of power and exchange that goes beyond borders and nationality. Traditionally, labor has been a space of domination and oppression for Latin American people. Through photography and weaving, she envisions labor as a fertile territory where we might find the power to create alternatives based on subordinated knowledge, and emergent models of collaboration.

Darío Ramiréz

In this series, Ramiréz inscribes phrases onto Venezuelan currency. He states: »Altering, modifying and stopping the monetary circulation allows me to poeticize, reflect, indicate, ironize and make visible several aspects about the relationships of money with the economy, the valuation and the ideological circuit it represents, as well as demonstrating the value and faith we have about them.«

Alicja Rogalska and Łukasz Surowiec

Alicja Rogalska and Łukasz Surowiec, Tear Dealer,
HD video, 12 minutes, 2014

In a temporary shop set up in Lublin, Poland, an area of high unemployment and socioeconomic exclusion, people could produce and sell their tears for 25 euro/3 ml. Nearly 200 people took part in the project, which attracted huge media attention and public discussion on issues of affective labor and the commercialization of emotions.

The Overqualified by Joshua Simon

It is very exciting to be able to share here in the context of New Poetics of Labor, this part taken and updated from the chapter on the Overqualified from my book Neomaterialism (Sternberg Press, 2013).

»The Open Call« addresses processes that on the one hand are not solely specific to the art world but at the same time exist within the art world as a model to be used by other industries. The elaborate exploitation of creativity, and the inherent disconnection between work and employment takes a special place within the contemporary art world. From the precariat to the social media persona, this then gets adopted through different variants in other fields of the greater economy. As Franco »Bifo« Berardi put it:

»The development of productive forces, as a global network of cognitive labor that Marx called the »general intellect,« has provoked an enormous increase in the productive potency of labor. This potency can no longer be semiotized, organized, and contained by the social form of capitalism. Capitalism is no longer able to semiotize and organize the social potency of cognitive productivity, because value can no longer be defined in terms of average necessary work time. Therefore, the old forms of private property and salaried labor are no longer able to semiotize and organize the deterritorialized nature of capital and social labor.« ^[1]

Israeli artist and writer Noa Tsaushu rephrased Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster’s “Me and Bobby McGee” to make this same point: “Freelance is just another word / for nothing left to lose.” The fact is that we are people who can write code, heal, play an instrument, photograph, translate, teach, as well as master the software of several graphic design and video editing programs. Eventually, we, the people who were just described here, find a day job for a few hours a week teaching art to kids in a private elementary school and work evening shifts waiting tables in a bar. Art’s direct labour force: studio assistants, registrars, crate builders, framers, art handlers, contract fabricators etc., perform manual work through freelanced temporary contracting. Their labour is of artisanal nature but is done on a scale that is industrial. The blue collar nature of the job, the closed-off nature of the work, and the internal perception of this type of labour as performing art’s dirty work, is met with the ironic fact that these are mainly artists who take on these jobs.

Therefore, what we see here is that intellectual workers and the creative classes are an emblematic group of the overqualified—but this category is not merely a sociological one, but rather a paradigmatic one for the current employment market and labor conditions. We are all overqualified for this employment market. It is not only that we are overqualified for the jobs the employment market can offer us—from indirect employment to corporate professionalism—it is the barbaric nature of our employment conditions that we are overqualified for. Remember how in the 1990s we were told that we were moving on from the Fordist assembly line, toward flexible managerial regimes? And how parallel to that we were sold the dream of the »one-man show«? Back then it was said that one could do anything one wanted: write, direct, perform, compose a score, play, film, and edit the same piece—remember that promise? Well, in reality we do all that but in a dissected manner—we become the assembly line, assembly lines run through us: here we do some subtitles, there we perform, for that project we are payed as gofers, and so on. This is maintained through de-unionized labor of the debt economy, where one goes into debt through student loans. The MFA system being, again, emblematic to this condition—professionalization means in reality indebtedness. As the Invisible Committee wrote in The Coming Insurrection:

»Producing oneself is becoming the dominant occupation of a society where production no longer has an object: like a carpenter who’s been evicted from his shop and in desperation sets about hammering and sawing himself.« ^[2]

»The Open Call« reprinted here discusses processes that like professionalization are supposed to mean one thing but in reality hold a totally different meaning. Here the democratization of the field, as it is understood through the protocols of open calls, come to hold a very different meaning economically, far from what we would consider »democratizing.«

I hope that this reprint from the book will be useful for those who are interested in analysis and organization, the two bases of political work.

The Open Call

I spent time at a curatorial program with peers and colleagues from around the world, at the end of which we were invited to propose a project. We were told that the idea should relate to notions of community, but the setting for this was a competition between us. The conceptualization of community in the form of a competition was very telling. Before even producing any response to this invitation, we were requested to think of ourselves as a community of competitors. For us, it seemed that this was a limited but also the dominant operating framework. We decided to submit a collaborative proposal. After many discussions, the organizers eventually canceled the whole project.

But the conceptualization of participants as competitors is not only an ideological symptom of neoliberal fantasies concerning individualism, meritocracy, and collaboration; through the process it revealed itself to be a structure of an economy of value. Once we assume the role of competitors, we establish the need for a committee to evaluate us. An apparatus of judgment is generated by our willingness and acceptance to compete.

»We all take part but only one is to be named the winner. Yet, like in a casino, when it comes to the open call, the house always wins, because it controls the marketplace. It is the institution constituted by the extraction of value generated from the overqualified that is the winner here. It is the marketplace.«

We, the curators, had known each other in advance and had spent time together, therefore we felt that our experience of being together went much further than competing with one another. Our resistance to the initial invitation brought us to understand that when we accept our relations as those of competitors, an institution comes into being. In order to decide the winner, the participants must constitute the institutional body (with all its operations, from secretaries, judges, funding schemes, and board of directors, to its framing and articulation of value and social value). This experience was a lesson as to how one could explain the economy of open calls.

The unfixable omnipresence of social potency and cognitive productivity of the overqualified generates value. The proliferation of open calls is a phenomenon of contemporary work relations, by which we are faced with a managerial scheme to extract symbolic and actual profit from the value generated by the overqualified.

As Jodi Dean has stressed, the open call, similar to the reality show, follows the model of a winner-takes-all economy. We all take part but only one is to be named the winner. Yet, like in a casino, when it comes to the open call, the house always wins, because it controls the marketplace. It is the institution constituted by the extraction of value generated from the overqualified that is the winner here. It is the marketplace. The single artist or scholar who wins first place in an open call articulates for the institution its notion of individual and social value. But those who control the marketplace are the real winners.

The open call is a commonly used scheme under labor conditions of flexible management, outsourcing, and subcontracting, which dissolve the employee-employer relations. ^[3] This managerial trope is echoed in countless curatorial strategies from recent years. We can see it with mega-curators subcontracting junior curators based on a regional mapping for big survey shows (Based in Berlin, 2011; Lyon Biennial, 2007); as well as with the artist-invites-artist horizontal model by which we are all peers, similar to the openness of the Internet—you poke me and like me as we do on Facebook (ArtTLV, 2009). In actuality, the network is as much a structure of power relations as the pyramid.

Yet, unlike the pyramid, it pretends to be vacant of power relations. Similar to outsourcing and subcontracting, these relations dissolve the accountability of artist-curator relations within the art world. ^[4] As much as we would like to blame curators for this, as has been done in the last decade, ^[5] the appropriation of value generated by the overqualified is executed by the institution and not by curators, who are part and parcel of the overqualified. One example that highlights this is the opening show of a new art space in Israel, which wanted to focus on notions of collaboration. For this, the institution operated managerial methods of subcontracting and outsourcing as its curatorial practice. The exhibition intended to display an international network; the institution issued an international open call for proposals for artworks that would then be executed by local artists. The literal convergence of subcontracting was met here with the outsourcing model of the open call. This was the institution’s parody on participatory practices.

Following this logic, Gordon Matta-Clark’s dissected buildings became the model for low intensity warfare tactics within civilian populated areas, ^[6] and the Sol LeWitt brand with its network of assistants operated parallel to the development of outsourcing as a managerial model. ^[7] Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) became the model for the Palm Islands Dubai, Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981) was the model for the Israeli Separation Wall, and Richard Long’s stone formations was the model for roadblocks and checkpoints. We can see how various heroic gestures of emancipatory aesthetics generated under the understanding of dematerialized Conceptual art have turned under capital’s technocratic fascism into neoliberal nightmares. ^[8]

»It is we, the plural, who make the world at every moment. And while we make it together, we are at the same time subjected by capital to a gradual social death. The precariat is the proletariat.«

In his book Dark Matter, Gregory Sholette borrows the astrophysics term for the world of art and culture. With this term, Sholette describes the art world as a universe in which the gravitational presence of this unseen force keeps it from flying apart. On the one side, there are the celebrated art stars, shining from afar as they exhibit in the most powerful art institutions, and on the other side there are amateur, informal, unofficial, autonomous, activist, noninstitutional, self-organized, and/or marginalized artists, who circulate in the shadows of the formal art world. These figures constitute, among others, the »creative dark matter«: »dark matter, hidden social production, missing mass, shadow archive—all these metaphors are at best a means of visualizing that which cannot be seen: the presence/absence of a vast zone of cultural activity that can no longer be ignored. Nevertheless, no amount of uncertainty relieves us of the responsibility to engage with them politically, as an essential element in a longstanding promise of liberation yet to be fulfilled.« ^[9]

Although they are ignored and dismissed by critics and institutions alike, Sholette suggests, the dark matter is essential to the survival of the creative industries:

»Creative dark matter is neither fully contiguous with, nor symmetrical to the products, institutions, or discourse of high art. However, it is possible to imagine a thought experiment that would measure its aggregate impact on the art world—if, say, one were to organize an art fabricators strike, or a boycott of international art magazines demanding these journals cover creative work made by the glut of artists who go unobserved in the art world, or if art students and faculty walked out of classes and refused to attend exhibitions at the Tate, the Reina Sophia, or the MoMA, or, worse yet, collectively stopped purchasing art supplies until everyone associated with cultural production was in some way recognized by the system, including regional watercolor and sketch clubs.« ^[10]

Sholette aims for recognition and inclusion of the dark matter within art history and art institutions. His book is a history of this bulk of work in New York City since the 1980s. The way he describes the art world is useful when discussing the unfixable, omnipresent labor that the overqualified generates. The open call is a way of managing this huge generator of value.

Out of hundreds of open calls that I have received in my inbox in recent years (most of them posted through the e-flux newsletter service), I chose two that were issued through, and in collaboration with, e-flux. Both open calls explicitly stress the fundamental role of this “dark matter” within the economy of cognitive productivity. One is an announcement by the Art&Education Papers New Prize for Young Scholars: “No Rules—Negotiating Art and Deregulation” (announced on May 30, 2011), and the second is for Agency of Unrealized Projects (AUP, announced on May 13, 2011). The first announcement reads:

»In support of young scholars conducting innovative research in contemporary art, Art&Education is pleased to announce a Call for Papers for its inaugural Papers Prize, which includes a research sum of two thousand USD and the opportunity to present a paper at a conference, organized by Artforum & e-flux co-sponsored by Society of Contemporary Art Historians, on the subject of the deregulation in art practice and history.

What is the relationship between art and deregulation? Over the past four decades, the deregulation of global markets has been accompanied by the rise of flexible labor, the proliferation of highly sophisticated financial instruments, and increasing social complexity. Art&Education wishes to examine the possible links between such economic shifts, the putative rise of post-industrial society, and contemporary artistic practices, taking into account the renewed global interest in performativity, social and technological networks, and collaboration. By considering such topics in dialogue or counterpoint with historical precedents, we hope to arrive at a more sophisticated understanding of artistic production and reception today.«

The move from contract to contest and from wages to prizes is exactly the move of deregulation. When understanding the deregulation of the markets as the regulation of poverty, or better put, the redistribution and proliferation of poverty, then the call for papers performs no more than its own format as the »rise of flexible labor, the proliferation of highly sophisticated financial instruments, and increasing social complexity.«

»What is the relationship between art and deregulation? Over the past four decades, the deregulation of global markets has been accompanied by the rise of flexible labor, the proliferation of highly sophisticated financial instruments, and increasing social complexity.«

The second announcement reads: »unlike unrealized architectural projects, which are frequently exhibited and circulated, unrealized artworks tend to remain unnoticed or little known. But perhaps there is another form of artistic agency in the partial expression, the incomplete idea, and the projection of a mere intention? AUP seeks to document and display these works, in this way charting the terrain of a contingent future.« Artists and curators were invited to contribute their unrealized projects to the AUP’s growing archive. The announcement maintained, »unrealized projects form a unique testament to the speculative power of non-action.« But this speculative power of non-action produced a power-generating action. The AUP was to exhibit through this open call works to join those collected by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Guy Tortosa for their book Unbuilt Roads: 107 Unrealized Projects, and the exhibition of the book project which was presented as a public archive at the e-flux space on 41 Essex Street. Following the long trodden routes of appropriation through display, the AUP opened as a »temporary office« during the 2011 Art Basel fair, banking on the »dark matter.«

Crisia Miroiu

Miroiu explores the state between dream, full consciousness, and reality. She is interested in capturing one man’s daydreaming – to intrude; be enraptured in his reverie, not noticing the intrusion of the photographic eye.

Ally Caple

Caple is a queer biracial photographer and social media content creator in New York City. Her recent photographic work reflects her point of view concerning the political climate in the United States.

Nechama Winston

Nechama Winston, Workhorses of Harbor,
7:17 minutes, digitized super 8 film and HD video, 2017-18

Media footage of shipping-line workers around the NYC waterfront (1930s–50s) is juxtaposed with film documentation of young musicians from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the mid-1980s, protesting to preserve the vinyl record production industry. The film examines the notion of labor and leisure in America. It looks at the American dream and the living conditions of middle and lower-class families, along with the youth culture that was emerging toward the end of the era of the Cold War.

Poéticas del trabajo by Dionisio Varela

Si todo, siempre, está en movimiento, si el mundo, siempre, está mudando, en permanente proceso productivo, generando otras formas o figuras, siempre diversas, los actos de los seres vivos, que son nacer y morir, dejan de ser momentos absolutos o instantes esenciales. El ser humano no es el soberano de la creación, si no un accidente de la naturaleza. El habla y la habitación no son eventos excepcionales que le doten de un atributo extraordinario, mágico o milagroso.

Los eventos celestes han sido observados, en su regularidad, por los pueblos de la tierra, y los eventos terrestres nos han sorprendido y asustado porque parecen imprevisibles y muy crueles. Los pueblos se maravillan con los solsticios y los equinoccios y se conmueven con los terremotos y los maremotos. Aquí y ahora, nos preguntamos por el tránsito del ser vivo al ser humano, ¿Cuál es el acto que marca el salto hacia la civilización: la creación urbana y fabril? La potencia de la alfarería sobre el medio día, en los valles de Persia y Mesopotamia, los sucesos de Arabia y Australia, las multitudes de India y China, los viajes surcando el monzón al cruzar el océano Índico. Toda urbe es una fábrica, una creación común y colectiva de seres vivos y de seres humanos, un proceso productivo ordenado que, siempre, parece jerárquico, donde el orden constituye castas y clases.

Desde la observación del movimiento regular de la naturaleza, de la vida, del cielo y de la tierra, nos parece posible enunciar la regla desde la figura de la ley natural. Los sólidos celestes y los flujos subterráneos parecen moverse por ciclos regulares, así sucede con las esferas y con el océano. Cuando el ser vivo transitó a la forma del ser humano, los humanos de la tierra fueron fabricando el habla y la habitación, la lengua y la morada. ¿Dónde está la distancia de este espíritu y de este espacio que nombramos MODERNO? ¿Dónde?

Si toda urbe es una fábrica, si toda civilización está soportada sobre un terrón de tierra, si la cultura, es el fruto de la alfarería y del alfarero, ¿Qué ha sucedido con el proceso productivo que ha dado albergue a la vida humana? ¿Cómo ha acontecido este distanciamiento respecto a la vida natural? Este modo de presentar la pregunta, este modo de situar la presencia del tránsito al ser vivo, al ser humano, parece crucial para que el entendimiento explique esta alteración de la Naturaleza, del Mundo de la Naturaleza.

No parece posible un retorno al paraíso, al instante inicial u original cuando la vida es natural y aún no es vida humana. Pero, ¿Qué es lo nuevo en este proceso productivo que nombramos MODERNO? ¿Qué nos distancia de la cultura y la civilización del medio día, del oriente próximo y el oriente lejano? ¿Qué? ¿Dónde el proceso productivo ha alterado su tono dominante? ¿Dónde? ¿Es el proceso productivo MODERNO un acto libre? ¿Es la condición del jornalero otro modo de enajenación y esclavitud? ¿Es un extravío de la emancipación?

La urbe fabril, esa apología colosal del volumen móvil, ese elogio del movimiento perpetuo, parece ser una instalación de una circulación sin fin. Todo, siempre, está en movimiento, Nada permanece constante en un estado de sereno sosiego, de imperturbable quietud o de inefable inercia. El temblor de la tarántula parece ser un signo de la época y del espíritu. El espacio es habitado por esta vibración. El trabajo vivo es perpetua alteración de la humanidad. Para algunos un estado extraño, una acción que niega la elemental piedad. El hombre ha dejado de ser el hijo de la madre naturaleza.

Si esto acontece con el trabajo vivo en la sociedad humana, ¿Qué sucede con la multitud del trabajo? ¿Qué sucede con los trabajadores? ¿Qué sucede con los socavones y en los aserraderos? ¿Qué? El jornal es la gracia del trabajador, El jornal es la sal del trabajador. Muchos reclaman la sociedad del trabajo para que no falte la sal en una existencia desabrida, insulsa o sosa. Mucho. Muchos reclaman la plena ocupación como un estado social deseable. La cultura se ha vuelto civilización en la esfera terrestre hacia los polos, Los trópicos, cáncer y capricornio, han sido albergues de esta alfarería, de esta cultura cerámica. No abundan las ciudades colosales en la altura ecuatorial de la esfera. Quizá, sea Brasilia el experimento audaz y atrevido del siglo XX de instalar el instrumental fabril de un espacio urbano para un país muy ecuatorial y amazónico. Quizá.

La revolución fabril y urbana han sido posible por la revolución agrícola u agraria. Los pueblos han dejado de ser rurales. La circulación ha alcanzado la velocidad del vértigo con los movimientos intercontinentales, con el comercio ultra marítimo.

Brasil e Indonesia son pueblos de esta mudanza. Brasilia y Yakarta testimonian esta transformación rural del idilio, del estadio natural y descubren el pavor ecuatorial del vacío y el vértigo, del volumen vibrante. Las tiranías han azotado a estos dos pueblos extraños y enajenados con la metamorfosis MODERNA.

Considerar este cambio en la cultura es el propósito de esta convocatoria que explora las poéticas del TRABAJO, explorar la condición de sopor y de letargo que ocurre en la cadena de producción, ese evento que sucede con la división social del trabajo en el proceso productivo común y colectivo al extender la espacialidad y la especialización, cuando la velocidad gesta el volumen cuando la escala humana del artefacto parece extravasarse, si el globo aerostático fue un anuncio, el transatlántico gigante fue el Ícaro del gran salto y el Titanic fue la tumba en su naufragio. Las dos guerras del Siglo XX fueron mucho más que estruendo.

Si la miniatura es un logro, esta condición mundial de la miniatura virtual y digital me finge la ficción de ser dueño del sueño, amo del destino, soberano de la voluntad. Fábula. No soy dueño del sueño. No soy amo del amor. El furor no viene feliz. La poética continúa tras la hebra de la LIBERTAD, tras el corazón de la HUMANIDAD.

Una casa en el Vallano,
Febrero de 2018

Efrat Hakimi

Hakimi is an interdisciplinary artist and engineer working in sculpture, installation, printmaking and photography. Her work employs material manipulation and humor, and her current collaborative project examines the vaginal speculum to study how the ideology of tools plays a role in gender politics.

List of artists, exhibition & publication, Al camello camello y al amor amor: Paulina y Lebrun (Paulina Álvarez & Andrés Lebrun), Marina Berio, Ally Caple, Stephanie Colgan, Catalina Fernández, Sergio Galvis, Efrat Hakimi, Markéta Magidová, Crisia Miroiu, Ginacarlo Montes, Darío Ramírez, Mind the Heart! (Maya Gelfman & Roie Avidan), Paola A. Tafur, Alicja Rogalska (in collaboration with Łukasz Surowiec), Patricia Silva, Nechama Winston, Mira Dayal, Hugo Díez, Beth Harris, Duy Hoàng, Jeff Lassahn, María Cristina Sánchez, Maria Juliana Soto, Joe Turpin, Abby Walsh, Sharon Webber-Zvik, La Isla en Vela, Ramón Lineros, Topp & Dubio, Michael Poetschko, Marija Markovic, Workers Art Coalition, Christian Nicolay, Alfredo Esparza, and Manuel Correa; Writing contributors: Joshua Simon and Dionisio Varela.

Curated by Cristina Velásquez