The Labour of Art: What Drives?

"I cringe at the idea of the hardworking artists. Firstly, I'm not at all diligent, I just have nothing else better to do. The sound of art being hard work just isn't attractive at all.

The idea of being diligent and overcompensating on the effort spent on making art, feels to me a desire to expect something in exchange from art labour. It could be an exchange for the feeling of physical and mental tiredness just to get a sense of a day completely utilized. I do not feel a need of deriving usefulness and value from art. It marks my life, turns it into a story, but that's about all I need from art."

Chun Kai Qun

When making art do you believe in rigour or hard work? 
What drives and motivates a practice?  

In making art, I believe in rigour and hard work. I am aware that this belief might emanate from the conditioning of capitalism and its prevalent hunger for productivity and ceaseless growth; a transactional mode of exchange where an anticipated outcome, profit or product is desired from the labour of art. Admittedly, anxiety often precedes over me, prompting a sense of uneasiness in 'wasting' the day away or a appetite to feel that the day has been shrewdly made use of. I want to resist all of that, but I also believe that while capitalism has defined and consumed much of the discussion around productivity, we not should bastardise the term. Creativity is a productive force, not measured in economic output, but on terms of artistic integrity.

As much as I would like to resist the velocity of capitalism or being absorbed into its rhythm in order to come into one's own pulsation, I also don't want to adopt a position of 'own-time-own-target'. I feel a strong sense of human capacity for proliferation and propagation that is derived from the struggle and challenges in working against one's comfort zone and this may or may not coincide with the deadlines, precariousness or anxiety of contemporary life. This is not a position of flowing with capital nor simply being reactionary against it, but being in constant negotiation with the conditions one is present in. I believe in some sort of oblique usefulness and value in art, something non-quantitative, a sense that art is a process that can take you to some form of higher order and in that search I require myself to have rigour, to work hard.

The question of drive is pertinent. What motivates an art practice? What drives a person to aspire towards certain ideas, where do ambition stem from? 

∞venns∞ After the Internet

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Venn'd no. 6, After the Internet 

⥄After the Internet⥂

This reading group is largely based on Dr. Zach Blas's Spring 2016 module, "After the Internet":
(link)

In 2015, Google CEO Eric Schmidt promises that “the Internet will disappear” into our environments, while artist Hito Steyerl—two years prior—has already suggested that the Internet died. Today, how can the Internet be simultaneously everywhere and dead? What exactly is the Internet—and what has it become? This module addresses these simple yet vastly complex questions through the frame of “after the Internet,” meaning both after the historical emergence and global reach of the Internet and digital networks but also the technical forms of communication that come after the Internet’s supposed death. Throughout the term, we will articulate what occurs “after the Internet” in relation to life, technology, politics, activism, aesthetics, art, and critical theory. Structured into four sections, the module commences with a consideration of 1) the histories, material infrastructures, and political impacts of networks and the Internet, followed by 2) the current trend to theorize our contemporary medial present as post-Internet, post-digital, and post-media; 3) critical frustrations and disavowals of the Internet and the network form; and 4) a series of experimental approaches to theorizing and imagining the technologies and techniques that come “after the Internet."

⥄Week 1⥂

"Networking the World": Globalisation and Assemblage 

- Describe globalisation.
- What is assemblage? 
- What are networks? 

Readings: 

• Manual Castells, “An Introduction to the Information Age,” City (2007), pp. 6 - 16 
• Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Rhizome,” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987), pp. 3 - 25 
• Bruno Latour, “Defining at last what a network is,” Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (2005), pp. 128 - 133 
• Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (2006), pp. TBA

Art:

• Mark Lombardi, Global Networks exhibition, curated by Robert Hobbs (1998 - 2005), http://curatorsintl.org/exhibitions/mark-lombardi-global-networks 

∞venns∞ ConCon1

Some Container or No Container at all

No 4, ConCon 1 \ Concepts of Capitalism

E-mail invite here. 

I I ConCon1

What exactly is capitalism? How can we better understand the mechanics of the system? Can it be comprehended on terms of economics alone, what about additional specificities like morality, politics and history? In ConCon, we explore the concept of capitalism through a designated syllabus and multiple iterations.

I I ExAnnotations 

An exercise in note-taking! 

Notes on A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [link]

(Karl Marx \ ed. Robert C. Tucker), preface p. 3 - 6 

Notes on Capital, Volume One [link]

(Karl Marx \ ed. Robert C. Tucker) p. 294 - 361

Notes on Rethinking Financial Capitalism and the 'Information Economy' [link]

(Duncan K. Foley) 

I I rereflection

In this session, we discuss some basic concepts of capitalism through a Marxist slant. 

I I Terms in circulation

A list of term explored in this session. 

\ Historical Materialism
\ Commodity
\ Use-value
\ Exchange-value
\ Value
\ Price
\ Abstraction
\ Commodity Fetishism 
\ Reification 
\ Labour
\ Labour-power
\ Labour-time
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I I Matters Arising

Further Research
\Historical materialism against Dialectical materialism
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Queries 
\ What are the contemporary forms of production relations, how do they differ from Marx's examples and how would they impact the future? (E.g. the sharing economy, Youtube & content, 'influencer', etc.)
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