Perpetual Slavery: Ralph Lemon, Cameron Rowland and the Critique of Work
<p>Mediating and preceding the question about the current state of the relays between art and work – as practices, as institutions, as social forms – is the question of how we are to understand ‘work’, when slavery has (over) shadowed the foundation of capitalism in ‘free’ labour from the ‘rosy dawn’ (Marx) of its expansion. The analysis of art through its ‘conditions’, as Adorno wrote, is an inquiry into its historical possibility, which means that the history of art and the history of freedom must be read through and against one another. This essay will investigate the scope of these inquiries into this philosophical-historical thicket in two bodies of work by contemporary artists working in the United States who work through images of labor haunted and structured by the historical experience of slavery. At the level of form, both artists engage the legacy of modern art’s self-negation by adapting the strategies of anti-art to the demands of their shared content―an inquiry into the experience of freedom in bourgeois society after the world historical experience of abolition.</p>
Authors: Ciarán Finlayson
Editors: Benjamin Fallon, Dave Beech, Kirsteen Macdonald, Marina Vishmidt