Mika Rottenberg's Productive Bodies

2016

Il Quaderno: ISI Journal of Architecture, 2020

As the profession of architecture confronts its own threats today, workers and laborers are once again put on display. A few years ago an academic discourse emerged about the role of the labor in architectural production, and it seemed that finally the discipline was looking critically at its relationship with those employed on the construction site. However, the abundance of writing has focused primarily on the architect's labor and rarely on those who actually put their hands on the materials of the buildings. By identifying architects with laborers, we call attention to the increasingly oppressive status of architects within the neo-liberal production of buildings. However, in appropriating the term 'labor' to describe the activity of architects, a class of relative privilege in spite of our poverty, we actually conceal a deep distrust toward those who make our buildings. Laborers are wage workers who have no intellectual or physical ownership over the durable outcomes they produce. If all of us are laborers, do we find more or less solidarity with those on the buildings site?

Blackout Magazine: Art Labour, 2017

Blackout Magazine: Art Labour with contributions by Leah Anderson, Mabe Bethonico, Chrisantha Chetty, Robert Ireland, Guillaume Pilet, David Romero, W.A.G.E. design Christophe Nüssli publisher: art&fiction Lausanne

A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, 2015

There should be a difference between the employed and the unemployed, since a worker gets paid at the end of the month," says a Congolese about the palm plantation workers in the artist documentary Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (Renzo Martens, 2009). But they are not able to live even though they work all the time: "We work hard. But we're not making any money." Things are not getting better, quite the reverse. Increasingly, working does not suffice to support living. The causal link between working and generating an income that ensures that the worker can continue to work in order to generate surplus profit for their employer has become weaker. Interest rates on capital, selling shares, or property make more profit than can be had from working. Oxfam states that "for the first time, more working households [are] in poverty than non-working ones" (Elliott, 2014). But not only has "working" been separated from a living wage, "work" has also been detached from the status of being "a worker." Globally, workers on a contract are made redundant and then rehired under worse conditions and without a contract (Watt, 2014). In the economies of developing and developed nations many people work, without being employed, forever in unpaid internships, particularly in the art economies (Steyerl, 2011: 34). The culture industries are fueled through "free," that is, unwaged, labor and work. In the industries that produce material goods for our leisure, workers die in order to produce garments in Bangladesh (Young, 2013) or football stadiums in Qatar (Pattison, 2013; Booth, 2013). In this context and that of human trafficking, whether for sexual or other exploitation of labor, the term "slave" has been reintroduced for a worker without rights, agency, or pay. In the service industries of the first world workers commit suicide because of deteriorating working conditions. A climate in which a

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2008

The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, 2013

and Keywords This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This article discusses recent experimental nonfiction films about workers and industry. Since the cinema's 1995 centenary, a growing number of films have been responding to the state of labor in the contemporary economy, in which industrial manufacturing has been largely replaced by global finance capital. The article analyzes four examples: Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai) (Ben Russell, 2008), Exit (Sharon Lockhart, 2008), Foreign Parts (Véréna Paravel and J. P. Sniadecki, 2010), and The Unstable Object (Daniel Eisenberg, 2011). Mobilizing a style we might call "conceptual realism," these films explore themes of labor in the face of ongoing crises in global capitalism. Utilizing a digitally informed observational aesthetic shaped by long takes and stationary camerawork, this paradoxical stylistic clarity works not in the service of establishing objectivity or a stable truth, but in the spirit of bearing witness to the innumerable experiences of contemporary labor that lie beyond recognition.

2011

JumpCut, 2022

https://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/SamSmucker/index.html

2017

Technological change has transformed where people work, when and how. Digitisation of information has altered labour processes out of all recognition whilst telecommunications have enabled jobs to be relocated globally. ICTs have also enabled the creation of entirely new types of 'digital' or 'virtual' labour, both paid and unpaid, shifting the borderline between 'play' and 'work' and creating new types of unpaid labour connected with the consumption and co-creation of goods and services. This affects private life as well as transforming the nature of work and people experience the impacts differently depending on their gender, their age, where they live and what work they do. Aspects of these changes have been studied separately by many different academic experts however up till now a cohesive overarching analytical framework has been lacking. Drawing on a major, high-profile COST Action (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Dynamics of Virtual Work, this series will bring together leading international experts from a wide range of disciplines including political economy, labour sociology, economic geography, communications studies, technology, gender studies, social psychology, organisation studies, industrial relations and development studies to explore the transformation of work and labour in the Internet Age. The series will allow researchers to speak across disciplinary boundaries, national borders, theoretical and political vocabularies, and different languages to understand and make sense of contemporary transformations in work and social life more broadly. The book series will build on and extend this, offering a new, important and intellectually exciting intervention into debates about work and labour, social theory, digital culture, gender, class, globalisation and economic, social and political change.

Counterfield #1 , 2020

Counterfield is a PhD research collective based at Goldsmiths Visual Cultures and our publication #1 samples the work of PhD researchers in the Visual Cultures with contributions ranging from essays and papers to images, diagrams and film scripts. (Editors: Debbie Kent & Sanjita Majumder, 2020.)

An overview of feminist approaches to labor beginning with 1970s materialist feminism through recent conceptualizations of biological and digital labor. Written for an undergraduate audience, it provides an overview of feminist critiques of labor, as well as women of color, Black, third world and other feminist critiques of Marxist feminism.

2014

My thesis discusses labour from three different historical and theoretical viewpoints, namely Karl Marx's perspectives on labour, Hannah Arendt's Theory of Action and Jacques Rancière's radical view of workers as an aspirational class, including how their respective philosophies influenced discourse on labour in contemporary art. To examine the aesthetic consequences of these labour theories, my discussion of each writer is accompanied by a case study of a contemporary artist whose work operates in dialogue with the philosophical ideas presented. In conclusion, I bring these theories together by focusing on how they implicate art making as labour, and I point to my own art practice, which aims to collapse 'means' into 'ends' as a possible strategy to address some of the issues raised by the theorists I examine.

The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics , 2015

I wish to explore certain irreconcilable positions which various representative intellectual figures (Baudrillard and Zizek, among others) have assumed on ‘labour’ as an image to be either repressed from or paraded throughout postmodern culture -- positions which mediate obscure and difficult questions concerning the production of value itself in our society. In order to begin thinking these questions in their real complexity, I want to conduct a rapid tour through some recent attempts, in film and fiction, to map the emergence of value in a society driven by a ‘spectacular’ array of commodities from which all traces of production have been erased, and yet still necessarily tied, at however many removes, to the ‘anonymous workers sweating in Third World factories’ without whom, presumably, the entire system would collapse. The texts I want to survey are David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (Japan, 1998), Mark J. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Olivir Assayas’ demonlover (France, 2002), and William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003). My task will be to analyse these attempts at the level of symbolic activity, clumsy and provisional as they may be, to reconnect the products of our ‘simulacrum’ with the realm of ‘material, industrial production’. If any such symbolic attempt has indeed been successful, then it should direct some urgently needed light back on the seemingly imponderable question of value in our world today.

Some of these lines resurface from the 80s, when I was working as a shift worker at Fibrit, a German manufacturer of interior car doors and instrument panels. We assembled doors on huge machines in work gangs, plastic and metal shaped through heating, suction and gluing, our fingers right in there. Hour after hour, I would sing to myself. During my childhood in Germany, some of my family members worked in large fabric factories, and my writing remembers playing at the base of giant mechanized looms, and delving into buckets of fabric remnants in order to get away with small items of pilferage, little icons, forbidden textures. The writing here is part of the song cycle Spherical, and in it, I rework, substitute, reconstitute, reference and reshape much material from other sources, including various alchemical texts, the fashion pages of the Los Angeles Times, Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein, material from Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body, Luce Irigaray’s The Sex That is Not One, quotes from Carl Jung, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa and Lucille Clifton