The Presencing Tendency: French and American Avant-Garde Strategiesunder the Formal Subsumption of Art

Whether what we call the avant-garde in literature ended sometime in the last century or, conversely, persists to this day is an open question. But rather than coming down on one side or another of the issue, this essay concerns itself with what the avant-garde looks like when, in Bourdieusian terms, it feels its very position to be at stake in the field’s struggle for domination, both internally and externally, with the field of power. Either by historical coincidence or, more intriguingly, by something as nefarious as influence, both the French and the American avant-gardes of the 1950s and 60s witnessed the development of a similar aesthetic tendency in response to encroachments upon the restricted production of their respective literary fields by external forces. This tendency, which I call a “poetics of presence,” is a gambit for textual immediacy—what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht terms “presence effects,” as opposed to “meaning effects.” Through readings of theoretical works by Alain Robbe-Grillet, on the one hand, and poems by Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, on the other, I demonstrate the character of the poetics of presence in the French and American contexts, concluding ultimately that in both cases such strategies function to preserve a formal subsumption of artistic labor under conditions of restricted production, as against the threading incursions of the real subsumption of that labor to which external forces—capital, politics—would subject it.

PREPARATION OF FUTURE EDUCATORS TO LEADERSHIP OF ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE ACTIVITY OF CHILDREN OF PRESCHOOL AGE

An urgent issue for preschool education is the training of specialists in the specialty 012 “Preschool Education” to carry out educational work in the field of art, and creativity. Modern scientific works that cover the issues of training future teachers on these issues have been studied. The article is devoted to the issues of preparing future pedagogues for leadership of artistic and creative activity in artistic labor of preschool children in pre-school establishments. It was found that the acquisition of professional competencies should take place not only through the enrichment of knowledge, skills and abilities of students from higher educational institutions but also through the improvement of their own culture. The aim of the article is to outline the features of professional preparation of future educators to guidance artistically-creative activity of children of preschool age in the process of artistic labor. In the article, some scientific research on the problem of formation of professional competence of future educators are analyzed. The peculiarities of professional training of students to the leadership of artistic and creative activity of artistic labor of preschool children are revealed in the article. The author proposes the use of modern pedagogical technologies to intensify the students’ activity in the course of studying the course “Art work and the basics of design”: educational games, master classes, mini-projects, heuristic receptions of training (“transformation”, “brain attack”, “improvement”, “Direct analogy”, “symbolic analogy”, “professional self-improvement”), receptions of creative training “Karus”: “combining”, “search analogues”, “universalization”, “suggestive questions”. The author discovered the use of various non-traditional artistic techniques that have been included in the work with preschool children recently: quilling, beading, decoupage, sculpting out of salty dough, creation of a lapbook, workshop, etc. The application of the proposed pedagogical technologies contributes to the effective training of future educators for the leadership of artistic labor in modern pre-school establishments. Keywords: artistic and creative activity, artistic labor, training of specialists, competency, modern pedagogical technologies, master class, mini-project, workshop.

Dilemma Work: Problem-Solving Multiple Work Roles Into One Work Life

Scholars have observed workers combining multiple work roles to earn a living to cope with the vicissitudes of the labor market. In studies of creative labor markets, this trend of workers broadening of their skills is termed “occupational generalism”. Previous scholarship has focused on the structural factors that push and pull workers into generalizing and combining multiple work roles. But we lack an understanding of the subjective experience of work as a generalist. I introduce the concept of dilemma work: a form of problem-solving wherein workers who have generalized their work portfolios, attempt to rationalize their professional practices to overcome conflicts that arise from occupying multiple work roles. Drawing on in-depth interviews with professional writers who also freelance as book reviewers, I find that these generalists use three dilemma work strategies: anchoring another role to guide action in the current one; incorporating multiple roles under a higher role or purpose; and compartmentalizing roles in order to act exclusively within a single identity. I propose the general value of a typology of dilemma work for understanding workers’ experience both within artistic labor markets, and beyond.

Inside and Outside the Exhibition Space

This essay deals with issues of citizenship, artistic labor, and belonging in the context of the Dominican Republic. It examines the collaborative work of the Colectivo Quintapata to understand how artistic collaboration is used as a way for generating social transformation and reaching audiences beyond the artistic medium. Analyzing art installations, public interventions, and socially engaged art pieces produced by Quintapata between 2009 and 2014, this essay argues that artistic collaboration works in the case of Quintapata, not so much as a formula but rather as a flexible tool employed to face situations of economic and institutional precariousness, extending the outcomes of each project beyond its original temporality and audience.

Artists as Workers

This article offers a contribution to the political economy of creative labor in socialist Yugoslavia, tracing the emergence of a socialist entrepreneur from the shell of an art worker. It discusses shifts in economic policies that restructured the economic and material conditions of art workers from models based on welfare in the early socialist period to a freelance and self-employment labor model implemented during the last decade of Yugoslav socialism. Linking socialist political economy with the study of art, the article analyzes legal regulation and rare artists’ interventions concerning the material conditions for artistic labor to animate the political critique of relationship between art and labor. The study of Yugoslav art workers’ demise reveals the detrimental effects of the bourgeois ideology of autonomy and creativity. Informed by feminist critique of reproductive labor, the argument is based on an analogy between housework and artistic labor to uncover mutual mechanisms of naturalization and economic disavowal of these types of labor. The author demonstrates that, unlike the ways in which reproductive labor is devalued, the exceptionality of creative work and the unique status of artists, which socialism maintained and glorified, made their form of labor vulnerable to exploitation and disavowal. The dissolution of labor identity of artists pitched creativity and subsistence against each other and became significant for neoliberal exploitation of artistic labor after the violent destruction of socialist Yugoslavia in 1991. Separating art from subsistence in the interest of articulating the value of artistic autonomy reintroduced false dichotomies and situated art at the heart of twenty-first-century forms of capitalist exploitation.

Regarding Artists Regarding Labor

In the wake of the Occupy movement and broader discussions concerning the state of the global working class, a number of contemporary artists have demonstrated a renewed interest in exploring the politics of labor through the form, content, and distribution of their work. The case studies taken up here reveal and interrogate forms of human labor embedded within or affected by digital technology. By featuring the artists engaged in transactional relationships or performing the role of capitalist, these predominantly video-based artworks act as concrete reflections of a capitalist economic system. Foregrounding the system’s problematics through reenactment, these artworks tacitly implicate their creator as well as their viewer within a complex web of social relations. This article examines the shape and significance of artistic labor across these case studies and asks whether the very allowance for this form of recent cultural production might itself hold emancipatory potential.

Seeing Blocks and Crypto Bros

How do cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin work? What is a blockchain? And, what does a typical Bitcoin holder look like? The artist collective Anxious to Make commissioned sixty cloudworkers to draw their answers to these questions. Drawings range from the mundane and stereotypical—a Bitcoin owner depicted as a bearded hipster shouting, HODL!—to the complex and eccentric—the blockchain drawn as connected nodes of random numbers, presumably meant to represent cryptographic hashes. Like much technology, the inner workings of cryptocurrency remain “black boxes” of understanding to most users. As a collective, Anxious to Make remains cautious of any technological apparatus that is believed in without understanding. These series of drawings point to the absurdity and comic nature of technological beliefs and utopic, seamless crypto-fantasies. We offer a subset of the drawings here, together with an analysis of the ways artistic labor is changed by—or mirrors—the practice of outsourcing.

Defending the Standard Contract: Unmeasured Work, Class, and Design Professionalism in United Scenic Artists Local 829

How much is a theatrical design idea worth? Alternatively, how much should a professional theatre designer be paid? For many working today, standard minimum contract scales and “industry standards” help guide fee negotiations. In the United States, United Scenic Artists (USA) Local 829 was among the first bodies to align theatrical design with organized labor activism, and as such, its standard minimum contract for design is an object lesson in the value of artistic labor. These scales were developed nearly a century ago, and were the product of hard negotiation and legal action taken by US-American designers in the interwar period. Lee Simonson and Jo Mielziner are best remembered for their revolutionary use of space, scenery, and lighting, yet their professional advocacy within USA Local 829 provided the basis for today's standard design fees. Further, their defense of fair payment during the Depression and war years preserved scenic design as a form of labor analogous to other backstage crafts and trades.