‘Good-for-nothing’

Introduced by the ‘junk’ and beat aesthetics in the late 1950s, the figure of the dropout or slacker served as a counter-cultural model for artists concerned with precariousness, and took on various forms later in that decade. Celebrating leisure and laziness as a challenge to the capitalist work ethic, artists such as Tom Marioni, as well as groups such as Fluxus or ‘funk’ artists on the West Coast, appeared as concerned with their daily experiences as with creating any specific artwork, thus pursuing an ‘art of living’, as Fluxus artist Robert Filliou called it. Other artists in the 1960s questioned the value of work by developing what Allan Kaprow called ‘useless work’ — types of labour that involve effort, but yield no lasting product or outcome. While such ‘good-for-nothing’ figures pursued the Zen ideal of wu-shih or ‘nothing special’ that had inspired both junk practices and ‘borderline’ art in the early 1960s, other artists looked for inspiration to the ‘adversity’ of some of the poorest members of society (in the case of Hélio Oiticica).

Junk aesthetics in a throwaway age

For Arendt, the fragile balance between labour, work and action that lies at the heart of the human condition was fundamentally endangered by the planned obsolescence characteristic of the new post-war consumer capitalism. Artworks displaying a ‘junk’ aesthetic produced on the East and West Coasts of the United States in the period between 1957 and 1962 can be read in light of Arendt’s perspective, which intersected with both sociological critiques of the new capitalism and the writings of Zen master D.T. Suzuki and other popularisers of Zen Buddhism. Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Dharma Bums resonated with both critiques of consumer society and newly discovered Zen alternatives. This chapter outlines some of the links between Kerouac’s Beat aesthetic and the assemblage and happenings of the early 1960s, by analysing the reception of landmark exhibitions such as The Art of Assemblage in 1961, and the practices of Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Bruce Conner and Allan Kaprow.

Introduction: almost nothing

This introduction introduces the term ‘precariousness’ by contrasting it with the ‘ephemeral’. Precarious practices that explore the ‘almost nothing’ are situated in the context of studies of ‘nothingness’ and empty exhibitions in contemporary art. Such debates focus on the ‘dematerialisation’ of the art object since the 1960s, which will be addressed from a new perspective following Lawrence Alloway’s 1969 definition of ‘an expanding and disappearing’ work of art. Re-readings of the materiality of contemporary art since the 1960s are related to continental debates concerning ‘precarity’ in the 1990s, and traced back to Hannah Arendt’s 1958 remarks on The Human Condition. Two different philosophical books — Vladimir Jankélévitch’s 1957 Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque rien, and Simon Critchley’s 1997 Very little, almost nothing — point to some of the questions and methods raised by the study of precarious practices.

Postscript: on the humanism of precarious works

Arendt’s humanist perspective, which is central to this study, is interrogated in this postscript in two ways. Firsty, it is contrasted with the ‘Chinese’ model of thought proposed by François Jullien in his Treatise of Efficacy, in order to account for the importance of Zen Buddhism for many precarious practices, and to analyse the contradictory drives articulated by each perspective. Another critique of humanism, levied by feminists and post-colonial discourses, inflect my remarks concerning the predominance of white, middle-class male artists in this book. The specific politics of precarious practices are outlined through reference to further debates concerning precarity and precariousness.

‘At the point of imperceptibility’

This chapter hinges on a comparison between George Brecht’s 1961 concept of a ‘borderline’ art ‘at the point of imperceptibility’ and the concerns with invisible forces and energies of an international group of kinetic artists, associated with the Signals Gallery in London between 1964 and 1966. While the evolution of Brecht’s work from 1957 to 1962 was shaped by a search for the concrete and the changeable in which other ‘junk’ artists, such as Allan Kaprow, were engaged at the time, the Signals Gallery artists were more closely linked to a trajectory of abstract and constructive art. Nevertheless, both the Signals Gallery artists and Brecht shared a similar desire to create experimental forms that would reflect a new vision of reality, inflected by both scientific discoveries and Zen Buddhism. In particular, the issue of perception was closely tied to the role of the spectator, whether in Brecht’s participatory ‘arrangements’ and ‘borderline’ event scores or Lygia Clark’s manipulable sculptures and her conception of an ‘art without art’. Brecht’s work is shown to have contributed to Allan Kaprow’s reflections on precarious ‘activities’, while both the artists’ work impacted Lawrence Alloway’s definition of an ’expanding and disappearing’ artwork in the late 1960s.

Futility and precarity

Trapped in a context in which capitalism seemed to have colonised all remaining spheres of everyday experience, the ‘Generation X’ of the 1990s appeared to have given up the utopian aspirations of the 1960s. While some embraced the attitude of the ‘slacker’, however, others became involved in ‘alterglobalisation’ protests and debates surrounding a new ‘precariat’. These two figures of the slacker and the loser frame the discussion of precarious practices in this chapter. On the one hand, situating the works of Hirschhorn, Alÿs, Creed and Orozco within contemporary debates concerning failure, futility and apathy points to the ways in which weakness and stupidity were embraced through positive reversals. On the other hand, works by Hirschhorn, Alÿs and Orozco are related to debates surrounding the rising ‘precariat’ of capitalism, new alterglobalised perspectives inspired by Latin America, and a general interest, at the time, in informal labour and architecture, as well as the figures of the nomad and the refugee.

Joins in the age of ‘liquid modernity’

This chapter provides a reading of precarious practices developed in the 1990s by artists Francis Alÿs, Gabriel Orozco, Thomas Hirschhorn and Martin Creed as both responses to forms of aggressive capitalism that had become widespread since the 1980s, and reactions to some of the more visible art practices that had emerged during that decade. Zygmunt Bauman’s 2000 analysis of the ‘liquid’ characteristics of contemporary capitalism is shown to extend Arendt’s earlier discussion of the modern human condition in its emphasis on ever-faster cycles of consumer gratification at the expense of durable products and stable social relations. This chapter demonstrates some of the ways in which 1990s practices extended the dematerialisation of 1960s assemblage and ‘borderline’ practices, through explorations of a ‘join’ between art and the world, as Martin Creed called it, through discreet interventions (Francis Alÿs, Gabriel Orozco), or sprawling assemblages (Thomas Hirschhorn). Most importantly, this join may serve as a rub in the smooth global flows of capital.