The Working Day in Contemporary Art

Labour is now well-established as a core theme in contemporary art, but what happens when a temporal perspective is prioritised? Thinking together with a selection of artworks, this paper will examine how the working day continues to shape and discipline capitalist life across contexts including factories and offices, nighttime, creative and platform economies, and in the hidden labour performed (usually for free) in the home.

The seminar will test material from Contemporary Art and Capitalist Life, a forthcoming book that interrogates artists’ use of documentary strategies to negotiate the most pressing issues of the early 21st century from class, climate and the legacies of colonialism, to housing and healthcare.

All welcome. No booking required.

Image credit: Eastern Surf, ilovemyjob! (2017) Image courtesy of the artists

The Marxism in Culture seminar series was conceived in 2002 to provide a forum for those committed to the continuing relevance of Marxism for cultural analysis. Both "Marxism" and "culture" are conceived here in a broad sense.  We understand Marxism as an ongoing self-critical tradition, and correspondingly the critique of Marxism's own history and premises is part of the agenda. "Culture" is intended to comprehend not only the traditional fine arts, but also aspects of popular culture such as film, popular music, and fashion.  From this perspective, conventional distinctions between the avant-garde and the popular, the elite and the mass, the critical and the commercial are very much open for scrutiny.  All historical inquiry is theoretically grounded, self-consciously or not, and theoretical work in the Marxist tradition demands empirical verification.