LABOR: TJ Clark, Zachary Formwalt, and Alice Creischer & Andreas Siekmann

The Stedelijk Museum and the University of Amsterdam are delighted to present the third and last installment of the interdisciplinary lecture series Aesthetics of Crisis. Art historian and critic T.J. Clark and artists Zachary Formwalt and Alice Creischer & Andreas Siekmann will share their perspectives on how the aftermath of the global financial crisis has been explored in the visual arts – in particular the problem of representing labor and its crises.

Since labor is the source of financial wealth, the organization of labor is crucial for the questions around the financial crisis. Crises also manifest themselves as crises of labor – of its division, distribution, its social recognition, and remuneration. While it absorbs vast parts of one’s individual lifetime, labor, is a hidden reality that takes place in the arcane worlds behind company doors. The political representation and self-organization of labor, however, has always been at the very center of progressive politics, protesting against exploitation and developing perspectives of economic emancipation. This is, to some extent, an aesthetic question too: what is the visual and bodily reality of labor? Which forms of politics would be adequate to it?

The lectures and discussions during this evening will bring the work of artists Zachary Formwalt and Alice Creischer & Andreas Siekmann in dialogue with one of the foremost representatives and critics of this leftist legacy, art theorist T.J. Clark. His essays on the history and contemporary situation of emancipation and the modernist project have diagnosed the contemporary left, its prospects, and (lost) hopes.

About the lecture series Aesthetics of Crisis:

Economic crises challenge the “aesthetic” on more than one level. In the Netherlands, as in other countries, the dominant political reaction to the global economic crisis has been to implement austerity measures to finance massive subsidies for the leading institutions of financial capital. This has implied massive cutbacks, particularly in healthcare and the cultural sector, which have dramatically affected the institutional landscape of art in particular and the organization of public space in general. These social effects of economic crises – the expropriation of public goods, growing social inequality – also affect the normative essence of aesthetic reasoning: How can claims to aesthetic relevance be justified if access to art and culture is increasingly privatized?

At the same time, economic crises undermine the inner condition of “the aesthetic” (if understood as sensuous representation) because of their deeply “inaesthetic” character. Although economic crises affect the daily lives of many people in dramatic ways, they are, in general, not immediately perceivable: changes in the organization of social interaction, in property relations, in the movement of capital, etc., are rather complex processes that escape immediate experience. The representation of crisis therefore demands alliances between art and theory, theoretical reflection, and aesthetic representation. This series of lectures, presentations, and discussions addresses the question of crisis in three ways – time, labor, and finance – and of the possibility of their aesthetic representation.

More information about the speakers:

T. J. Clark was born in Bristol, England in 1943, took a B.A. in modern history at Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in art history at the Courtauld Institute, University of London. He taught at various places in England and the USA; from 1988 to 2010 he taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair Emeritus. Clark is the author of a series of books on the social character and formal dynamics of modern art: The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848-1851 (1973); Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (1973); The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (1984); and Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999); as well as Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (written with “Retort,” 2005); The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006); Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (2013); and a book accompanying an exhibition at Tate Britain, co-authored with Anne M. Wagner, Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life (2013). A book-cum-pamphlet on current politics, Por uma esquerda sem futuro, was just published in Brazil.

Zachary Formwalt is an artist and filmmaker based in Amsterdam since 2008, where he was a resident at the Rijksakademie until 2009. He is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA) and Northwestern University (MFA) and attended the Critical Studies Postgraduate Program at the Malmö Art Academy. He has presented solo projects at KIOSK, Ghent (2013); VOX Centre de l'image contemporaine, Montreal (2013); D+T Project, Brussels (2013); AR/GE Kunst Galerie Museum, Bolzano (2011); Casco—Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht (2010); Wexner Center for the Arts: The Box, Columbus, OH (2010); and Kunsthalle Basel (2009). He has also contributed to various film festivals and group shows, most recently the European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück (2014); EVA International, Limerick (2014); Liquid Assets at the Steirischer Herbst, Graz (2013); and Image Employment at MoMA PS1. A new exhibition, Three Exchanges, will open at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam on November 27, 2014.

Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann live and work in Berlin. They have worked individually and together in the artistic tradition of conceptual art and institutional critique, focusing on issues of social inequality, labor related struggles, and contemporary forms of imperialism. Furthermore, they have curated a number of large exhibitions together and have published widely in a number of journals including Texte zur Kunst and Springerin. Their last major curated project (curated with Max Hinderer) was the exhibition Principio Potosí, shown at the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2010), and the Museo nacional de arte, La Paz 2011. Both have exhibited works at documenta 12 and at various international venues and biennials. Their exhibition In the Stomach of the Predators, dealing with the social effects of seed monopolies, will open at BAK, Utrecht, on November 1, 2014.