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Introduction: Labour and performanceGabriele Klein & Bojana KunstPublished online: 12 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: Gabriele Klein & Bojana Kunst (2012) Introduction: Labour and performance, Performance Research: A Journalof the Performing Arts, 17:6, 1-3, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2013.775749

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2013.775749

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Artistic performance practice has always been tightly intertwined with the exploration of and experimentation with modes of working, collaborating and producing artistic work.

Since the end of the eighteenth century, art in European modernity developed from commissioned art to fine art, or liberal art. Ever since, artistic work has been the subject of artistic productions and public discourses. In cultural and economic crisis as well as in large scale social transformations, the status of art and the social task of the artist were being debated. At the same time, artists themselves critically reflected upon the social status of artistic work. They saw their works and work processes as an experimenting ground for innovative forms of cooperation.

Since the 1960s, the young and new field of performance tested out artistic working practices, and performance artists reflected upon them in their works. This examination altered and differentiated in the course of neoliberal politics and post-Fordist working conditions within the context of a globalized economy of the 1990s and since. Critical performance practice has opened itself up as a broad field of exploration for many creative processes. The focus of such artistic work lies in collaboration and experimentation and in the development of discourse and research. The latter began to be more institutionalized in recent years with the growth of academic programmes and artistic and scientific research in this field. Since then there is a close connection between new processes of work and a belief that with these new modes of working, the institutional and normative boundaries of performance could be critically re-addressed. Furthermore, the potentiality of

performance practice is believed to challenge the established orders of the production and dissemination of artistic products such as institutional critique, the critique of hierarchical organization of work and the emphasis on the process – and not on the product – of artistic work.

One of the important aesthetic and political outcomes of these explorations is that labour has become visible in performance work. Research formats and open forms, educational frames, works in progress, presentations of artistic processes have become an important part of the artistic production and the theoretical discourses around performance. These explorations had a significant influence on new modes of sharing artistic methodologies, producing knowledge and re-evaluating the work itself. However, they did not only provide an insight into how artists work and expand the sensual and aesthetic practice of performance. They also showed how this expansion of performance practice takes place in proximity to the changed modes of labour within contemporary capitalism. The visibility of labour in performance practice therefore corresponds in various ways with broader changes of labour in contemporary society, especially with the immaterial aspect of labour, the production of subjectivity and the performative turn in contemporary culture and society. The reflection upon performance from a post-Fordist perspective or the contemporary production of subjectivity makes many parallels visible between modes of production in performance and flexible, collaborative and precarious modes of working. It is evident that the labour of the performance artist is directly related to the

IntroductionLabour and performance

G A B R I E L E K L E I N & B O J A N A K U N S T

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production of artistic subjectivity, which in turn is in correspondence with changing modes of labour in contemporary society.

In this issue On Labour and Performance we address these similarities among performance practice and explorations of labour and provide an insight into the role of performance in relation to forms of labour and modes of employing human forces under contemporary capitalism. In post-Fordist modes of working, the social, imaginative and affective aspects of human labour came to the forefront, which also demand a careful reflection about the role and consequences of performance practice. Experimenting with modes of working in performance was historically intensely related to the expansion of the common and intersubjective aspect of performance: performance practice is intertwined with the social aspect of labour. The core of the performance work is a sensual and aesthetic diversion of commonality, a distribution of affective intensities and a temporal modulation of the shared perception. In this sense performance practice directly challenges the practices of value-circulation and production of subjectivity in contemporary capitalism. However, it can accept this challenge only when the proximity between performance and contemporary modes of labour is also taken into account and critically approached. This demands a reflection upon the social and economic dimensions of performance as one of the important production forces of today. Nevertheless, performance practice can divert and challenge the affective and temporal modulations of contemporary production and open up alternatives to continual exploitation of the sociality of labour.

In recent years, under the pressure of crisis, a general re-structuring of the cultural and educational fields of contemporary society as well as growing attempts to re-evaluate artistic work in general has taken place. In these social and economic framings, a need to rethink the processes of making performance art exists as well as a need to connect it to questions of labour. Any reflection on the processes of labour is therefore deeply connected with ways in

which the artist’s role is re-evaluated through the economic and political crisis, especially in relation to current cultural and political discussions about the applicability of knowledge and imaginative and creative practices.

The essays gathered in this issue explore the topic as outlined above from various perspectives.

The proximity of performance practice, life and modes of labour is disclosed from a historical perspective in the articles by Gabriele Klein, Katja Rothe and Caroline Radcliffe and Sarah Angliss, whereas Josefine Wikström examines with Marx the relationship of performance and labour.

Inspired by Jochen Roller’s trilogy Perform Performing, Gabriele Klein’s article frames the topic from a socio-historical perspective by outlining the historical genesis of the relationship between art, life and labour from the sixteenth to twenty-first century. She points out how art was subjected to economic concepts, while work was subordinated to an artistic ethos of privileged voluntariness and self-production.

Josefine Wikström understands labour, with Marx, as practice and performance. In a reflection on the historic emergence of performance and the Marxist discourse on labour, the ways in which both characterize relationality are discovered.

Katja Rothe addresses the relationship of work and the art of dance at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her article outlines the concept of rhythm, developed by Rudolf von Laban, Fritz Giese and others in order to increase productivity and job satisfaction.

Caroline Radcliffe and Sarah Angliss describe the performance The Revolution, inspired by The Machinery, choreographed by Patricia Tracey in 1927. With the movement material, which originates from the repetitive movements of workers in the cotton-weaving industry, they demonstrate the interweaving of labour and dance practice.

A perspective on contemporary performance practice is developed in the contributions of Dieter Lessage, Stevphen Shukaitis, Rudi Laermans, Ana Vujanović and Bojana Kunst.

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 17 ·6 : ON LABOUR & PERFORMANCE

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Referring to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Dieter Lesage questions the transition from an industrial to a service economy marked by an ontological distinction between material and immaterial labour. He points out that the distinction of material from immaterial does not apply and proposes to speak instead of a performative product – which is the act itself.

Stevphen Shukaitis asks how value-production in the arts affects social and class composition and – vice versa – how class compositions shape the arts. He uncovers models of value-production in the arts and points out how these get used for other purposes like politics and economics.

Following the shift from the collaborative dance practice of the 1960s, Rudi Laermans examines the approach and impact of contemporary collaboration.

Ana Vujanović defines a ‘lack of methodology’ in current theoretical practice and encourages a discourse setting up parameters for a discipline of critical performance studies.

The focus of Bojana Kunst’s article is the common potential of art, its autonomy and ability to withstand its exploitation for capitalist needs. Taking a view on the relations of art and value or senseless spending, art and work or laziness, she uncovers strategies of appropriation of the arts in capitalist systems.

The contributions of Gigi Argyropoulou, Terry O’Connor, Wendy Houston and Joe Kelleher and WOW are written as examples of specific practices, where labour is disclosed as temporal and spatial practice for the common articulation of the possible.

Gigi Argyropoulou undertakes a review of the occupation of Embros Theatre in Athens in November 2011. She interrogates the ‘(im)possibilities’ of a collaborative occupation whose re-activation is not oriented on a ‘social imaginary’ authorizing the action.

Terry O’Connor, Wendy Houston and Joe Kelleher give an insight into the working process of the collaborative project Say the word and MOVE, in which they explore relations between speaking and moving, language and movement.

Wow – we work here is documenting the thoughts on labour and working conditions

in a letter-writing practice of artists during the festival ‘Performance Platform’ at the Sophiensaele, Berlin. For this issue, a selected insight into the correspondence is printed off.

Mette Ingvartsen and BADco. demonstrate by the example of their own artistic works the exploration of labour as a powerful aesthetic and structural question for performance, where new approaches to movement and performance space are also examined.

For their choreography Changes, the collective BADco. wrote a short dialog that questions the relationship of laboriousness and laziness, inspired by La Fontaine’s fable ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’. Mette Ingvartsen’s essay arises from her interest in immateriality in the arts, urban life and a knowledge-based economy. She questions how an immaterial performance could still include the mental capacity of the performer.

Aldo Milohnić and Sandra Noeth analyse contemporary working conditions: The article by Aldo Milohnić takes a critical look at labour conditions in a globalized world and asks how contemporary performance works create awareness on topics like labour migrations and the global division of work, on how related problems are intermediated here and how performance workers are affected themselves. Sandra Noeth describes the working conditions of dance artists in Morocco and Tunisia. Creating an awareness for a changing political field, she follows the artist’s attempt, and difficulties, in fostering social changes without aiming for a new ideology.

This issue itself is a product of collaboration, which could have not been realized without the good cooperation of many. First of all, we would like to thank the contributors for their kind cooperation. We would particularly like to thank Deva Tamminga, scientific assistant at the department of Human Movement at Universität Hamburg, who excellently supported the working process. We are grateful for the editorial assistance of Sandra Laureri, Rosa Bekkenkamp and Wayne Hill.Gabriele Klein and Bojana KunstHamburg, Giessen, January 2013

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