10 WORKING POINTS FOR ARTISTS IN NEW DIVISIONS OF LABOR

1
Every work of art is political. It does not matter anymore, whether it is produced and made publicly accessible with the aim to interact with certain amounts of people and to achieve certain effects among them. It is constitutive for the current form of society that the apparatuses of communication and surveillance are processing any piece of information, independently from the original intentions of its producers or the actual needs of its consumers. Rather than trying to be properly received, we may have to figure out how to become unheard, in order not to be silenced.

2
Art is resistance against communication. The languages of artistic production carry the potential to refuse the ubiquitous coercions to communicate, insofar as they require singular processes of encryption and decryption. These acts cannot be replaced but need to be performed and repeated in every situation, time and again.

3
Todays globalised world is characterised by increasingly hybrid divisions: the binary divisions of the industrialism of the 20th century, such as: east and west, manual and intellectual, analog and digital, have not been replaced but are currently being overwritten by ever complex, new divisions which combine and compute what was formerly known as alternative into new conglomerations of post-algorithmic power.

4
Our challenge as artists is to figure out, how new divisions of labor are determining completely new roles of the artist in contemporary societies. Over the past two decades a rapidly globalising art world has incubated different flavours of an engaged, allegedly political art. While dealing with all sorts of issues of politics, the crossovers between art and activism have been rather illustrating the humanitarian super power of an all encompassing liberalism or covering up the new borders of capitalism by systematically eradicating any traces of the concept of class. As long as it does not matter, art is allowed to be as radical as it wants.

5
At the same time, the work of artists is confronted with new forms of functionalisation: Local governments are commissioning engaged artists to appease social conflicts in precarious neighbourhoods; biennales and large-scale art spectacles are supposed to serve as sources of inspiration for all sorts of entrepreneurs of a creative self; the label of contemporariness which for a certain period of time seemed rather helpful to distance ourselves from outdated role-models of the artist has meanwhile turned into an automated mechanism which merely ensures the production and expropriation of relational value at any cost.

6
Against this backdrop, I am forced to decide. Can I opt for none of the above choices, neither generously allowed arbitrariness nor forced functionalisation? May I also skip the search for a third point of view which would be comfortable enough to allow me to reimagine and reenact critical distance or cynical neutrality? And how can I avoid then nostalgic invocations of the struggles of the past circling around cliches of romanticism, modernism or conceptualism?

7
Raising these questions is the beginning of their answering: Art has to claim a new autonomy. Rather than imagining independence from general production, autonomy arises immanently out of the confrontations within ever more mediated processes of production. Rather than making things estranged, we need to reflect on the artists new position within a production of virtual commodities and alienate our selves from the accelerating demands by an increasingly bored society after the spectacle.

8
The ideologies of capitalist neorealism and its divisions of labor seem to come along with new economies of sentiment and resentment. Capital exploits the immaterial labor force of collective hope and despair generating surplus value from enthusiasm and depression. As long as we are imagining the preservation of our own integrity and freedom of movement within that system, we will remain its prisoners. Assuming that we could still modify or improve it from within, means that we are just easing our conscience and idealising the fact that we are making a living from it.

9
Making art is making world and opens up again the possibility of potential. I have to consider not only my immediate environment but an entire world with a multiplicity of past and possible relations as the field of my activity. Rather than being satisfied with or limited to what is currently available, I have to make concrete decisions, how other worlds could look like. In doing so, I might be able to offer new ways of how we see this world and what exists in it.

10
We are working for a people who are missing.