#(can i imbue some of my passions into the academic side of art? will that help to bring me balance?)

[cptnbeefheart]

last year in my sketchbook: can representational art be more sustainable for me if i take it less seriously? can i balance the two? | my art

[survivingart]

STORY IS EVERYTHING

Be it online or in person, there’s a lot of competition in the arts. And the fact that the art world is much smaller compared to the world of business, law or medicine, only makes it harder for any one artist to succeed. While everybody online is telling us to “niche down”, and explaining why it’s so important, usually no specific tactics are disclosed, and the how is left for us to figure out for ourselves.

 This blunder is intended for anyone who wishes to find their focus and stand out in today’s oversaturated creative market by understanding the immense power of storytelling — especially when positioning ones creative skill and aspirations in the market.

Regardless if you paint, sculpt, make experimental video installations or are a political performance artist, the main goal for all of us is to express ourselves. 

We do so not because it’s the quickest or easiest way of making a living, but because it’s who we 

are. Most of us love our craft in some form or another and follow some internal aspirations that guide our interest and consequently the kind of art we make. 

But while creativity is a general term, it could not be describing a more colourful and rich abundance of personal motifs and ambitions of why we do what we do. 

For example, I could be selling skilfully crafted portraits because of my passion for creating narratives about beauty, intimacy and connection. But it could also be that I just really enjoy painting figures and fabric and am good enough at it to charge for my work. 

Both are great reasons to make a portrait and market ones skill, but even if the end product looks similar in both cases, their target audience couldn’t be more different.

So, let’s put the “art” in artwork.

I’d like to open this conversation with one of the hardest, but probably the simplest of all questions to answer, because we need to get it out of our way to really get the point of why story matters so much. But to find the answer we will have to go all in and drop the proverbial A-bomb. 

We’ll have to ask the big question. The one you can read about in 50€+ books, written by prominent and knowledgeable art historians and theoreticians, whose answers are mostly written so thoroughly, so extensively, that one needs a dictionary to find their point.

Ready?

What is Art?

Boom.

Unlike most other questions like: “What is carpentry?”, “What is music?”, even “What is philosophy?”, we artists and other creative souls appear to have an enormous problem — none of us really seem to know what the heck we are doing in our lives. Not because we are confused, undisciplined or too spontaneous, but because no-one actually seems to know what art is.

If you ask most academic professors, they will usually give you an academic answer. If they’re more on the liberal side, it will surely have to do with the freedom of expression and the lyrical power of images in the fight against social injustice.

Ask a person in the street — anyone you want really — and they might tell you it’s something pretty, something that looks good. And probably also something that is quite expensive. For a wealthy collector it might be freedom; a way of expressing themselves without the need to actually learn how to paint or draw or sculpt. 

A tattoo artist will tell you it’s tattoos. A barber will tell you it’s an exquisite haircut. An IT technician might even tell you it’s a perfectly sorted and laid out collection of ethernet and electrical cables in the server room. 

Just don’t ask an aesthetician — the branch of philosophy that researches art — and they might tell you a lot. Truth be told, they might tell you too much while saying very little. A wonderful example is Tiziana Andina’s prominently titled book: “The Philosophy of Art: The Question of Definition: From Hegel to Post-Dantian Theories”. Read at your own peril.

Art seems to be everything. And we all know that something that is everything is consequently nothing at all.

We have to take a closer look into the production of art; the making of paintings, sculptures, videos and maybe even haircuts and tackle the question by investigating the process of making something an art piece. 

So, let’s see if we can’t fix this mess of tattoos, pretty pictures and ethernet cables into a more workable definition by asking a better question: What makes something art?

In the 1960s the art world had a small crisis, caused by none other than the famous pop artist Andy Warhol. The root of the crisis was his artwork, titled simply: Brillo Box.

It looked exactly the same as a normal Brillo soap pad box, albeit being made out of wood. The question: What made Andy’s Brillo boxes art, but at the same time dismissed the original boxes made by James Harvey (the creator of the design) as mere industrial design?

Surely it wasn’t looks, and it couldn’t have been materials — the prestige of using silkscreen on wood instead of printing on cardboard was not the deciding factor after all. The only real difference that one could discern was the name associated with either product. 

You had Andy Warhol superstar and the other guy.

Apart from being a marvellous posh object to own, Andy’s Brillo box shines light onto an immensely important topic in art, namely that when push comes to shove, the classification of an artistic piece does not have anything to do with its physical composition — be it medium, motif, size, you name it…

This is immensely important, because if we distill the factors that make up art, we can get a pretty rough, yet quite precise equation, that looks a bit like this:

ART = Viewer + Art Piece + Artist

But why does it now seem like the art piece, the central point of the equation isn’t really important? Well, there’s another surprise coming up.

The artist has been regarded as a genius ever since the invention of the cave painting about 40.000 years ago. The master painter, listening to the whispers of his or her muses and transcribing the messages of the gods into reality, for all of humanity to experience the righteous powers of the divine.

As humans, we couldn’t have been more proud of the lineage of artistic mastery that our planet had created over the years, and we had every reason for it. From the Ancient Greeks to Giotto and Titian, then Caravaggio, Monet, Van Gogh and Picasso … all geniuses in the craft, that shaped how we perceive reality itself. 

But then came the trickster. The black sheep, the snake, the devil himself. Then, came Duchamp.

In 1917 as part of The Society of Independent Artists’ exhibition at the The Grand Central Palace, he unveiled his biggest joke of all — a urinal. And even though the organisation of the exhibition had promised that each and every art piece that was entered in the application stage would be shown, they decided to remove The Fountain (as Duchamp named his vertical toilet) from the exhibition. 

It was serious.

But the problem that Duchamp’s art piece created was minuscule compared to the big issue that was yet to come. His simple question : “Is this art?” didn’t just create a revolt inside The Society of Independent Artists, it started a revolution.

Thus, conceptualism was born.

The point he was trying to make was simple: Art is an internal human experience, not an invisible aura imbued into an object by some artistic genius.

The art world though, instead of getting his point, concluded that Nietzsche was indeed correct; the gods of art, beauty and aesthetics truly did perish. The murderer’s weapon was finally found — fully drenched in nothing but bloody ideology, the Fountain stood as proof.

Now, more than 100 years later, this narrative is still the bedrock of many institutions, both commercial and educational. And I feel it is about time we change this. 

Not only could more people start to appreciate art — instead of thinking of it as a pretentious playground for the rich, filled with expensive junk and weird intellectuals — but by removing some of the misconceptions that either artist or artwork are the origin of the artistic experience, we could actually improve the status of us artists in society.

How?

By educating the viewer. By making our artistic process visible to all via social media and other means. By not trying to overcomplicate our work descriptions and artist statements and ending the need to feel like we have to defend our right to paint, sculpt, dance or make videos, with big words and complex explanations.

By connecting with our audience and being strong, sincere and genuine people. And with social media exploding in a constantly connected world, the timing just couldn’t be better.

Art is a multitude of stories, each different from another and all created by every one of our viewers. 

And like good spelling and a decent vocabulary are the bedrock for any novel, we visual artists have a bunch of tools that we can use to build our narratives too.CREATING YOUR STORY (CONTEXT AND CONTENT)

In 1976, artist and critic Brian O’Doherty published his essay Inside the White Cube, that not only created lots of buzz in the art world, but gave this popular mode of displaying art in museums and commercial galleries a catchy new name.

While his wonderful critique of the White Cube is better to read in the original form, I would like to focus on one psychological factor that made his essay become so well known.

People experience things instantly and as a whole, rather than a collection of individual parts. When looking at a red triangle, we can’t just decide to see it as a triangle or just as something red — we always see both of its features at the same time.

Similarly with music; we can’t decide to hear just the tone of a note, while zoning out the colour of the sound (for example hearing the same note being played on a drum compared to a double bass or saxophone).

We as beings need context for just about everything in our lives — even our ability for differentiating object sizes and various temperatures is done by creating context from the surrounding environment.

Ok, but what does this have to do with art? Truth be told — everything.

As art is subjective, we can never really take full control over how a viewer of our show or a customer who bought one of our pieces will understand the work’s narrative. 

A description of the work might help, but some actually prefer to make up their own mind about what a particular art piece means to them on a strictly personal level, rather than listening to the artist describe what it should mean. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that in my opinion. 

But, while we aren’t able to control everything our viewer will experience, there are many aspects of our work that we absolutely can and should be thinking about. Because understanding them makes our job of finding potential buyers or getting a place in an exhibition incredibly easier.  

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

Choose materials carefully, not just as a means to an end but as building blocks of your work’s narrative. 

A marble sculpture and a wood carving of the same motif tell different stories. Both may be a portrait of someone, but marble will always communicate prestige, longevity and may form subconscious connections to Ancient Greek and Roman statues of prominent individuals, making the portrayed look even more respectable and important. Wood on the other hand is softer and warmer in appearance and more suitable for creating intimate portraits emphasising emotion rather than status.

Evoke emotions, then seal the deal with a well prepared concept.

Nothing is worse than a conceptual piece that doesn’t also work on an emotional level. The appearance of your work will make or break its ability to convey your message, so regardless of how brilliant your idea may be, if your work doesn’t first captivate your viewer and make them curious enough to step closer, all is lost.

Presentation is really important when exhibiting your work. 

Adjust lighting, surrounding objects like tables, chairs, plants … to compliment your work, or at least not to distract your viewers attention.

Impressionists used a lot of green leafy plants to compliment the vibe of their paintings, modernists decided to completely remove everything (including the frame of a painting or plinth of a sculpture) to maximise emphasis on their work — hence the White Cube principle.

When showing work online, it is imperative to get it right.

Show your work not just as a clean, shadowless and speckless photograph with good colour correction (because the images should look identical to the real thing), but incorporate it into an environment — even a generic architectural shot of a living room will be better than nothing.

Give your online images enough context and help your visitors understand the colours, size, textures and other features of your work by providing enough visual information; a few detail shots, a side view and maybe even the back of the work (if it’s 2D). For spatial works, maybe make a 360° GIF by stitching together multiple angles — nobody wants to buy a sculpture only to find that they don’t like the rear end of it.

The venue is a big part of your exhibition. 

If you paint a picture of an apple being picked by a woman somewhere in a forest and hang it in an office of a juice company, people will probably see a nice lady picking apples. But hang it in a church community centre and people might see the highly complex concept of Ancestral Sin. 

Same painting, same communication, immensely different results — just by changing the context.

So whenever you have the chance — for example if you are invited to create a show in a certain gallery from scratch — work with the space in mind, or change it if you can to make it a better fit for your work.

Regardless of what kind of art you create, if you make a thorough examination of the materials you use, the message you are trying to tell and the environment you are telling it in, you can use all of this information to reverse-engineer your work to find your target audience. 

It should never be the other way around.

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[benningtonalumnirelations]

A 2017 Bennington Alumni Reading List!

As 2017 wraps up, we’re looking towards a new year full of great books! Here’s a year-in-review of some of the new releases of 2017 by or about Bennington alumni.

- Lydia ’19

From Rockaway (re-release) and Swell by Jill Eisenstadt ’85

"With tremendous tenderness, Eisenstadt captures the traumatized Rockaway of the early 2000s in swirling Technicolor....A whimsical portrait of a still-raw community." --Kirkus Reviews

Honeysuckle Drift by Virginia Johnson, MFA ’12

“The scent of honeysuckle that pervades Honeysuckle Drift is sweet in the in the way things are just before they rot. The story that unfolds for the young, well-meaning protagonist, Ellen, will be both a tragedy and a chance to overcome it. In this fine debut novel Virginia Johnson beautifully evokes the place, the era, and the terrible ties between parents and children, ties that, while invisible, can strangle as well as bind.”—Jim Krusoe, author of The Sleep Garden

Botticelli's Muse by Dorah Blume (Deborah Bluestein ’65)

“Blume’s interpretation of master painter Sandro Botticelli is at once a florid love story and a chilling political drama. Sensuous and provocative as well as mysterious, the novel follows Sandro’s troubled relationship with Florence’s ruling Medici family.” --Publisher’s Weekly

Shock Wave by Florian Louisoder ’82

“Shock Wave took me immediately with it's premise because I love time travel related stories...It's a great journey for the imagination to see how one event can alter the future in so many "shocking "ways. Louisoder has an uncanny knack for fleshing out his characters and making them live and breathe on the page. I really look forward to the next in the series.” --Amazon Customer Review

The Other Island: Ben’s Story by Barbara Kent Lawrence ’65

“The Other Island is as much a reflection and refraction of her first novel as it is a sequel. Islands of Time traced the love affair between Becky Granger, a summer visitor to Mount Desert Island, and Ben Bunker, a year-round resident of Little Cranberry Island — from Becky's point of view. In The Other Island, Lawrence gives voice to Ben's side of the romance: "She's told you her story," he states at the novel's start. "Now I'll tell you mine. They are wound up in me like the way I was in her from the moment I met her."” --The Penobscot Bay Pilot

Sally’s Genius by Brooks Clark, a biography about pioneering educator Sally Smith ’50

“In 1967 Sally Smith needed a school for her son Gary, who suffered from dyslexia, among other learning disabilities. Finding none, she founded one, the Lab School of Washington. In the process, she developed the Academic Club Methodology, by which children with learning disabilities can be engaged and inspired in school, where they had previously suffered only frustration and defeat. While directing the Lab School, Smith taught her system and ran the master's program in special education at American University for 32 years, inspiring a new generation of teachers to pioneer innovations in education.  Smith also wrote books, starting with "No Easy Answers" in the late 70s and in various editions thereafter, that serve as the definitive works in the special education field. Smith was driven, creative, unique, and unforgettable.”--Lulu.com

How Do I Explain This to my Kids? by Ava Siegler ’59

“Child psychologist Dr. Ava Siegler brings together stories by authors and writers...about the conversations they are having with their children in the current political climate...as well as how to raise them to be engaged citizens.” --Bill Moyers & Company

Positive Art Therapy Theory and Practice: Integrating Positive Psychology with Art Therapy co-authored by Gioia Chilton ’89

"Wilkinson & Chilton are synonymous with positive art therapy – I am excited about this book and its potential to revolutionize art therapy theory and practice! It’s a wonderful and much needed contribution to the literature, promoting strengths-based and relational approaches to art therapy practice grounded in positive psychology.”-- Donna Betts, PhD, ATR-BC, president, American Art Therapy Association, associate professor, Art Therapy Program, George Washington University

Heart Smart for Women by Jennifer Mieres ’82

“A terrific, potentially life-saving book that’s a must read for all black and Latina women.” --Jane Chesnutt, Editor-in-Chief, Woman’s Day

Thinking with the Dancing Brain by Rima Faber ’65

“a must read book for educators, artists, and scientists. This gem is revolutionary in its structure. Current brain research and valuable educational theories are interspersed in every chapter with simple movement explorations that make the research understandable and the theories memorable. The book proves once and for all that the body and brain work as one unit and that thought cannot take place without movement.” --Anne Green Gilbert, founding Director of Creative Dance Center

Blue Money by Janet Capron ’69

“Capron writes with the fearless, experiential drive of a Beat poet… This intense, electrifying memoir explores a life of prostitution in 1970s New York City.” --Shelf Awareness

Going to Wings by Sandra Worsham ’06

“Sandra Worsham’s humor, clear-eyed honesty stitch this amazing quilt of meaning and experience together in a wonderful way.” --Kirkus Reviews

I’m the One Who Got Away by Andrea Jarrell, MFA ’01

"Though the settings of Jarrell’s stories range from Camden, Maine, to Italy and Los Angeles, the author’s small-town Americana tone is reminiscent of Joyce Carol Oates. The work’s lasting message is that love, like Jarrell’s prose, is both painful and beautiful. A stunning series of recollections with a feminist slant." ―Kirkus Reviews STARRED REVIEW

Maya Healers by Fran Antmann ’69

“Fran Antmann’s work in Maya Healers, years in the making, is imbued with the depth and texture only great photography can achieve; where the images transcend being mere documents but reach great art. Many of the images, especially of the people in their daily lives, are transcendent and absolutely gorgeous, revealing an empathy and visual perception that is timeless.” --Ed Kashi, international prize-winning photojournalist

Sign of the Apocalypse: Ruminations and Wit from an American Roadside Prophet by John Getchell ’86

“Friends, neighbors, and passersby from all over the country can’t fail to miss “The Sign’s" constantly changing humor and insight. On occasion, The Sign of the Apocalypse (SOTA) traffics in the earnest, but at its heart is rooted in a deep-seated desire to express the sarcastic and snort-worthy. This, and a love of haiku, pizza, Latin, double entendre, and the worst puns ever crafted.” --Amazon

We and She, You and Then, You Again by Leah Tieger ’03

“Leah Tieger examines the human condition with a stark elegance and passion of language that allows us to inhabit the ragged husks of bodies—of seeds—and gives us hope even in our emptiness. Like a gentle farmer, she removes our desiccated husks and listens as we long for more than blankets, for shelter from the sun. She writes the necessary poems of minutia, of lovers forcing approximate passions, of unraveling sweaters hanging in silent closets. She watches the waiting parts in us and reveals them, allowing the small spaces of our lives to shine through, into insightful—and honest—existence.”-- Josh Gaines

Bloodline by Radha Marcum ’96 

“Congratulations to Radha Marcum. Her debut poetry collection, Bloodline...delves into the difficult family history of the work of Marcum's grandfather on the Manhattan Project, building the first atomic bombs in Los Alamos, New Mexico, during World War II—and how that both brave and heavy legacy has affected the women in her family, both then and now.”  --WinningWriters.com, Subscriber News July 2017

The Myrtlewood Cookbook: Pacific Northwest Home Cooking by Andrew Barton ’09

"This cookbook is unabashedly PNW to its core, from the cutting boards carved from native Myrtlewood trees to the mushrooms that pop up in soup, risotto, and pizza. Unlike most cookbooks, Barton’s recipes read more like an actual book; each dish spans multiple pages with paragraphs in the place of ordered steps. Barton’s conversational tone is certainly homey, as is the food itself." -- Seattle Met 

[art-arch-urb]

Refusal after Refusal

What if we acknowledged that we had fallen out of love with architecture and couldn’t remember why we loved it in the first place? That we had given up on building long ago because we had no interest in collaborating with developers, in designing money-laundering schemes or parking garages for foreign capital? And what if we told you that now we even found architectural discourse repulsive? That we had seen the logos for the oil companies emblazoned at the bottom of the biennial posters and couldn’t look away?That we had read the disinterest on the faces of the public and could relate? That we had watched academics lecture about labor practices while exploiting their assistants and overworking their students? That we had tried to warn each other about abusers and assaulters and were reprimanded for it by our heroes? What if we confessed that all this made us depressed, that we could barely summon the energy to get out of bed, let alone to work? What if we told you that we were beginning to think work itself was the problem?

2. The summer was hot. The hottest on record in Los Angeles and Montreal, Glasgow and Tbilisi, Qurayyat and Belfast—though records are easily broken these days. Everything appeared out of focus. The edges of our thoughts were blurred. According to studies, heat makes you lazy and unhappy. But sometimes your unhappiness supersedes your laziness, and sometimes your laziness indicates something about your unhappiness. We decided to try learning from our laziness.

3. It was Karl Marx’s son-in-law, the Franco-Cuban radical journalist and activist Paul Lafargue who first articulated a “right to be lazy.” He equated work, and its valorization, with “pain, misery and corruption.”He argued for its refusal. “A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway,” Lafargue writes. “This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny.”

4. But, as Marcel Duchamp reminds us, “it really isn’t easy to be truly lazy and do nothing.”

5. “Sleep is a sin,” say the architects. Equipped with coffee or speed, they avoid it at all costs—sacrificing the body for the sake of the project, for the eternally recurrent deadline. When finally the suprachiasmatic nuclei demand submission to the ticking of the circadian clock, they curl up beneath their desks. They wear all black to minimize time spent worrying over clothes. They marry other architects for the sake of having a synchronized schedule. According to a recent study, archi­tecture students sleep less than any others, averaging 5.28 hours per night. More often than not, this is a performative demonstration of their dedication to their studies rather than a necessity, a time-honored ritual of masochistic devotion. In his 2013 book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep, Jonathan Crary interrogates the neoliberal dictum that “sleeping is for losers.” Where time is money, sleeping is “one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism.” Architects embody this attitude, imagining the stakes of the project—a luxury condominium, an arts center—as life or death. In fact, considering that sleep deprivation has been linked to premature death, it is their own lives that are put on the line.

6. Yesterday I woke up around 8:30 a.m. and took 450 milligrams of bupropion, 50 milligrams of Lamictal, 5 milligrams of aripiprazole, and 200 milligrams of modafinil, all swallowed in one gulp of coffee. (The modafinil—a medication used to treat shift work sleep disorder, among other things—is new, added by my psychiatrist last month when I complained I was having trouble working, or doing much of anything.) A few hours later, I took 20 milligrams of Adderall. Only then was I able to write this paragraph.

7. Beginning with their schooling, architects are routinely required to invest more money than they will ever receive in compensation and workplace protections. While the typical college student in the United States accrues an average of $29,420 in student debt, the architecture student is saddled with an average of $40,000.After graduation, the architectural employee can expect to work 70 hours a week for approximately $70,000 per year—or $15 an hour. And yet, as Bjarke Ingels has stated about the profession’s long working hours, “That’s the price you pay but the reward you get is that you do something incredibly meaningful if you actually love what you’re doing and you’re doing meaningful work."

8. In other words, architecture is a form of labor that masquerades as a labor of love. It contains within it the promise of fulfillment, of happiness. In her book The Promise of Happiness (2010), Sara Ahmed interrogates the normative function of happiness, how it serves as a means of orienting behavior and, in the process, is often deployed as a justification for oppression. That is, what it means to be happy is circumscribed culturally. “In wishing for happiness we wish to be associated with happiness, which means to be associated with its associations,” Ahmed writes. Work should make us happy and fulfilled—even more so when it’s “creative,” an assumption imbued with classist undertones. This draws young people toward architecture school; it makes the burden of debt, harsh working conditions, and low wages appear as an acceptable “price to pay.”

9. But, as the figure of the dissatisfied “CAD monkey” illustrates, the labor of architecture falls short of this promise. Conditioned to believe that fulfillment emerges from creative autonomy and expression, architects instead find themselves laboring over bathroom details or stair sections, and a sense of alienation emerges. It’s a feeling that parallels that of the industrial laborer described by Marx—more so than many architects would like to admit. In classic Marxist theory, workers are estranged from the fruits of their labor, which are taken away from them in the process of becoming rendered as commodities. Because it is understood as nonalienating work, to feel alienated in architecture becomes a sort of double-estrangement. Not only are you estranged from the labor, you are estranged from architecture itself.

10. While working as a studio manager at a New York architecture firm, my colleagues would often remark wistfully that they could rarely attend lectures or engage with discourse as I was able to do. Models, budgets, schematics, client meetings, site visits, overtime, and weekends at the studio had ravaged both their physical and spiritual capacities to participate in the field in a role beyond producing architecture with a capital A. Their passion had become their drudgery; their very own commitment to architectural work became the barrier between contributing to what they had imagined architecture could do and how it apparently must be.

11. I read somewhere that depression is the failure of your neurons to fire like they used to. There’s something ghostly to it: you have the memory of a feeling, of an association, but can’t conjure it anymore. Is there such a thing as a depression specific to architecture? How would it be characterized? I wrote a note on my phone: “The loss of belief in the possibility of designing a different world. Nostalgia for the future.”

12. To express dissatisfaction or alienation in architecture carries deep risks. For one, it could cost you your job. “If you aren’t happy, then leave. Others would kill to have your job.” It could also brand you as an outcast, as if marked by some internal failure or incapacity for feeling what everyone else does. And such a killjoy would ruin the mood of the office. That is, as Ahmed asserts, happiness is framed as a duty to others.18 Misery is contagious and therefore irresponsible. So, regardless of how overworked you are, how alienated you are from the products of your labor, how underpaid you are, how often the boss touches your ass, you must grin and bear it. There’s a reason why architects rarely organize to fight back against exploitative work conditions. Be happy, or else.13. According to Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, a mandate to appear happy, which they term the “performance/pleasure apparatus,” underwrites neoliberalism more broadly.19 Today, the individual must not only produce more but also enjoy more—and, pivotally, this surplus of pleasure must be performed. Pleasure serves as a signifier of the subject’s value within a socioeconomic system in which self-edification is substituted for the social and responsibility is privatized. The flip side of the burned-out professional is the determined young architect who spends their free time attending lectures or writing essays or designing their own projects. Such work is valorized as a signal of their commitment to the field and an indicator of their value as an intellectual practitioner. This fuels a culture in which the products of extra-professional labor are exhibited in journals or galleries, often without adequate compensation. We’re told we should feel honored to have such work recognized at all. In other words, today, nothing is work, and everything is work. Even our bodies and minds are objects of labor.14. I was working hard on an essay about work—about the disconnect between discourses on architectural labor and the broader economic context in which the discourses themselves are produced. I stumbled upon an interview with Antonio Negri in which he explains how, by 1965, the architecture school in Venice had become a center for political agitation and organizing. In early 1968, students from Venice and Padua joined forces with the workers at a nearby Porto Marghera factory, the largest petrochemical complex in Italy, where “two kilometers from the most beautiful city in the world hundreds of workers were dying of cancer, literally poisoned by their work.”20 Negri states that the union of students and workers “worked out quite smoothly because they had been in constant contact for a decade: the school of architecture was a gathering place for the working class.”2115. This struggle was a major event in the development of autonomia operaia, or autonomism, a political movement that defined postwar Italian politics and in which Negri played a central role. The solidarity between the academy and the factory was a significant aspect of autonomism, which reconceived of the position of the intellectual within leftist politics. Rather than develop theories upon which to base organizing, the intellectual should learn from work, from the workers and their lived experience. In this way, the autonomists transitioned from a demand for better working conditions to a critique of work itself, in which they understood labor as a totalizing process of subjectivization that sat­urated not only the factory but all of society. They thus displaced the centrality of the static figure of the worker and the working class with an understanding of social class as always in a state of becoming, transforming alongside conditions of work. Work itself—its valorization and the power this gave it over the experience of life—was the problem. “Refusal of work means quite simply: I don’t want to go to work because I prefer to sleep,” writes Franco “Bifo” Berardi. “But this laziness is the source of intelligence, of technology, of progress. Autonomy is the self-regulation of the social body in its independence and in its interaction with the disciplinary norm.”2216. But wait, haven’t we had this conversation before? Isn’t the struggle against work what we studied tirelessly to ace our papers? We worked our bodies and our minds through the night to prove we understood what the refusal of work was about, to prove our political awareness, to garner a critical edge, to be diligent students. But clearly this feverish ambition prevented us from recognizing ourselves as the products of its failure. Why regurgitate the past if not in order to understand how it landed us here, at 4:00 a.m., exhausted, verging on panic, and for what? 17. As Berardi elaborates, struggles for autonomy produced a new monster, laying the foundations for neoliberal economics and governance.23 When workers demanded freedom from regulation, capital did the same. The monotony, rigidity, and harsh conditions of the industrial factory gave way to flexible hours and jobs (in the Global North), but also deregulation, precarity, and the withdrawal of social protections. This shift was ideological and cultural, as well as economic.18. “Work is the primary means by which individuals are integrated not only into the economic system, but also into social, political, and familial modes of cooperation,” argues Kathi Weeks. “That individuals should work is fundamental to the basic social contract.” Under the contemporary neoliberal regime, work has come to be regarded as “a basic obligation of citizenship.”24Within the realms of politics, the media, and even sociology, the persistent messaging of its importance has generated a singular world-building experience where working remains the only means of belonging. “These repeated references to diligent work,” as David Frayne remarks, “function to construct a rigid dichotomy in the public imagination.”25 Those who work acquire social citizenship, while those who do not are leeches. Within this dichotomy, work becomes a choice: there exist only those who choose to be productive and those who choose to do nothing. “Which are you? The sleeper or the employee, the shirker or the worker?”2619. What if we told you we don’t refuse much of anything? What if we told you that we ate up praise like a spoonful of honey? What if we said that the validation always evaporates too quickly? Like a sugar-addled rush, we work on the premise that the next project will leave us satiated. We make promises to stop, to slow down, to regroup, to prevent the inevitable burnout, which leaves us languid and shrouded in shame. We wonder what all the research amounts to, what the interviews and panels in galleries and lecture halls even do or mean. 20. If the autonomist refusal of work helped produce a society in which there is nothing but work, what strategies are left for us? What would it mean to refuse after refusal? To stake out a position of alterity to the contemporary work ethic in order to find the room to question where we’re going, what’s driving us, and to what end?21. To work is to be normal. To work is to be socially acceptable. In order to comprehend the commitment to the drudgery and exploitation of working life, Lauren Berlant argues that normativity must be understood as “aspirational and as an evolving and incoherent cluster of hegemonic promises about the present and future experience of social belonging.”27 To rally for any kind of alternative beyond the moral imperative to work would be to cast oneself almost entirely outside the realm of affiliation, and even personhood.22. Architecture, today at least, is like work, an end in itself. It is autotelic—or, more precisely, a constituent element within the autotelic metabolism of contemporary capitalism. The need for shelter is hardly the driving motivation behind the majority of new builds. Rather, demolition and construction serve as the two poles of a coiling system of endless production for the sake of production. Financial speculation, warfare, and environmental desecration belong to its arsenal. All together, this system constitutes a global force responsible for the lion’s share of global carbon emissions. It results in the mass displacement of the poor and marginalized. In short, shelter is not the ends of architecture—it is its collateral damage. It is a question not of architecture or revolution but, rather, of architecture or survival.23. “If design is merely an inducement to consume, then we must reject design,” said Adolfo Natalini of Superstudio. “[I]f architecture is merely the codifying of the bourgeois models of ownership and society, then we must reject architecture; if architecture and town planning is merely the formalization of present unjust social divisions, then we must reject town planning and its cities—until all design activities are aimed towards meeting primary needs. Until then design must disappear. We can live without architecture.”2824. Let’s back up a bit. What produces this all-consuming, obsessive indifference to architecture? On the one hand, the profession and the academy are sites of violence, ridden with sexism, heterosexism, racism, classism, ableism. But, perhaps even more than that, we have yet to find a work of architecture that is capable of changing the status quo. On the other hand, we’re obsessed with the belief that it could, since, at the end of the day, all architecture changes the status quo—converting land into capital, emitting carbon dioxide, displacing people. In other words, we acknowledge architecture as immensely powerful but find ourselves—and all architects or architectural thinkers—powerless. Architecture, it seems, has been swallowed up by external forces and put in the service of the smooth functioning of the city and of flows of capital. We can’t imagine an architecture capable of disrupting this. Formalism is a dead end—novel forms are just a means to produce new terrains for the expenditure of surplus capital. We have little control over program since we’re beholden to patronage. Meanwhile, criticism has no bite; speculation, no value; theorization, no impact. Academia and institutions defang all thought. 25. We believe that the problem of work is at the center of all this. The need to work—a shared condition for all but the very wealthy—means we can’t really turn down a client or an opportunity to exhibit or an adjunct teaching position. Refusal, done alone, is a privilege few can afford. But, alongside that, the culture of work has seeped into our souls. Affirmation produces dopamine. Success signals security (even if, in actuality, it doesn’t offer it). Everything we do is for the sake of capital, whether social or material. We look for opportunities to tear each other down so that we can rise up an imaginary rung on an imaginary ladder instead. We are cowards, unwilling to bite the hand that feeds us strychnine-laced food. We can’t pause to think. We’ve lost all hope in the future.26. When commissioned to write this essay, we were asked to provide “concrete alternatives” to the present—but how could we? All we can speculate on is having the time to do so. All we can imagine is a horizon, hazy and distant, in which we discover, or remember, how to refuse—together.

http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/46/refusal-after-refusal?fbclid=IwAR3OA3zuZGwx0-VuEEM2QWZlP44uF2N6MFKoD8M2fUudNZnkNjnj4brp2nk