Readymade or Made [to be] Ready, Replicant or Surplus: Social Reproduction and the Biopolitics of Abstraction Prefigured in Contemporary Art

Abstract

The artist may be one of the last subject-positions within capitalism to determine their own labour under the sign of “creativity,” and to be held at an oblique angle to value productive labour; they are dialectically “free” to be creative (Adorno, Vishmidt, Stakemeir, Beech). But since 1973 if not 1915, artists mark this creative capacity as a process whereby reification has migrated from that of the object to that of the subject, to the artist-subject, now heightened in a post-industrial era of “feminized” and immaterial labour where service eclipses production. Artists in the “post medium condition” elaborate practices that track parallel to the service economy and yet continue to be mythologized as agents capable of delivering exceptional experience, an experience institutionally deemed to be specialized and singular.