OK’s Disclaimer Gallery comrade Jin is in town from Hawaii and updates us on the situation in Maui, their community care work, and the Be Easy Stay Safe zine made for and by sex workers. Please follow and support Jin’s work on their Instagram. Content warning: we discuss experiences of transphobic and racist discrimination, as well as harassment and assault at work. We also discuss fun stuff like art and care and love!!!
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OK is fresh off #FTP3, and Lucia is getting over a brutal flu so we decided to examine the conversation around self care, community care, and Medicare for All. We’re critical of a clickbaity Mashable article advocating for community care, but are ultimately relieved by its conclusion (“plenty of people don’t have the means and the time.”) We are wary of liberals trying to co-opt grassroots community building and market collectivism as a way to cut standards of living instead of utilizing it to demand universal healthcare. Basically, we really need Bernie to win, we need to ease the suffering, and we need to lessen the boot to sustain our communities and build effective protest movements. The times are pretty dire folks! If you like the podcast and want more, please consider supporting us: https://www.patreon.com/artandlabor. Follow us on twitter and instagram. You can contact Art & Labor at artandlaborpodcast@gmail.com
We read the entirety of the William Morris essay this podcast is named after! If you have already read Capital vol. 1 you may want to skip to the middle were Morris’ speech really takes off, but it’s a good refresher, plus we do commentary throughout. If you like the podcast and want more, please consider supporting us: https://www.patreon.com/artandlabor or https://d.rip/artandlabor. Follow us on twitter and instagram.
We go through the demands of Bad Art World’s A contribution towards a programme for the arts on a brutally hot August evening in NYC. It’s a contemporary application of Trotsky’s manifesto on revolutionary art. “Eighty years ago the world was entering another great opening. Then, too, there was a gap between what was necessary to defeat capitalist catastrophe and workers’ general political understanding.”
READING - Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art
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We’ve decided to start reading art manifestos in full and providing light commentary. First up, of course, is 1938’s Towards a Free Revolutionary Art ghostwritten by Leon Trotsky, signed by Diego Rivera and André Breton. Trotsky was one of the leaders of the Russian revolution, he was famously forced to flee to Mexico. Thanks to funding from the American communist party, he was able to stay near Rivera and Frida Kahlo, but was eventually assassinated there. The manifesto denounces both fascism and Stalinism, and is a seminal text to the history of Muralism and Surrealism/Dada.
A Fucking Didactic Educational AUDIO File! We basically spin a weird collage about surveillance and privacy (a lost cause). A lot of time traveling this episode. We go back in time 5-7 years when folks were rushing Youtube with How To videos like it was the dang gold rush. We receive a prescient transmission from Jack Smith about the commodification of counterculture and the hyper capitalization art fairs were about to cause. We also heed lessons from David Wojnarowicz. Thank you queer history. Folks on the margins are often destroyed by the state, listen to them, and give them space.
We saw Sorry to Bother You and it was THE BEST MOVIE and THE ONLY MOVIE! We celebrate Chairman Boots Riley’s new masterpiece. We try to process the race and gender roles depicted in the film, but we’re way more excited to do a working class analysis. We’re now offering bonus materials on our Drip page! Feel free to skip the first 15 minutes of this ep that is just an ad for it. If you like us please consider donating for bonus writing, memes, and art:https://d.rip/art-and-labor
We had a tweet go viral! Artnet published a pseudoscience garbage article claiming that artists’ brain chemistry causes them to not what to be paid for their work, we told them to fuck off with that noise. This episode breakdown the discourse, and get into plenty of tangents along the way!! This episode was recorded on the streets of Chelsea and Bushwick. Later doodle-bitches!
Welcome new listeners! Art and Labor focuses on the on-going struggle to survive as an art or cultural worker. We chronicle the stories of social justice organizing within the arts, and believe in centering the human cost of the “art world” and advocate for fair labor practices for artists, assistants, fabricators, docents, interns, registrars, janitors, writers, editors, curators, guards, performers, and anyone doing work for art & cultural institutions.
Helpful links that provide context for this episode:
HITO STEYERL DANK MEME STASH! Hey ya’ll, we’ve got some FEELINGS this episode. Half this episode is venting about some strange/shitty art world jobs we’ve had. We also mention decolonization practice, Walter Benjamin, cultural Marxism, and Imperfect Cinema as a foundation for Steyerl’s In Defense of Poor Image. Accessibility is the key word of this ep. It’s extremely hot in New York City! It’s punishingly hard to focus. We drank a couple cold ones and left the AC on so this is a long ep with a little rumbling sound in the background. I’m not going to apologize, we needed that AC to pod.
*UPDATE* ICE has cancelled all hearings for Monday June 25th at 201 Varick in response to #OccupyICENYC. Follow @MACC_NYC for updates. There are other sites of deportation in the city the protest may move to. Apologies for the sound quality of this episode, we decided it felt better to just continue to hold space at the occupation (please see the previous episode for our conversation with some of the organizers). Lucia is back from Berlin and imparts some insights from collectives over there; from the recently raided anarchist library Kalabalik to the direct action performance art group Center for Political Beauty. We also get into tricky intersections of rainbow capitalism and the potentials of queer liberation and socialism (for more come to this discussion: https://www.facebook.com/events/187818712052570/) Oh, and we started a Lupin the Third section.
Article referenced about murderous white supremacists groups that have never been held accountable:
