Previous Mellon Collaborative Fellowship
Economic Objects: Capitalism as Medium
Fellows: Seth Kim-Cohen, Leigh Claire La Berge, Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky
Course: Economic Objects: Capitalism as Medium
Fellowship Description
Collaborators Seth Kim-Cohen (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Leigh Claire La Berge (Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY), and Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky (University of Chicago) spent 2021 producing, critiquing, commissioning and teaching the problem of what they call “the economic object.” “Economic Objects: Capitalism as Medium” collated a series of performances, palavers, and commissioned artistic works to explore how shifting modes of the representation of the economy have transformed medial practices and their critique, as well as opened new questions about the very representability of capitalism itself. They began with the premise that the constituent problem of modernity has been the division of life-worlds into economic and extra-economic spheres, for example labor and the aesthetic, in one tradition, and art and life, in another. Only in a world so fractured would calls for “totality” even be possible; only in a world so divided, would it fall to art itself to address the concomitant problem of transmitting meaning and power between discrete arenas. This problem of capitalist fracture and the hope for a reconstitution–even if only at the level of representation—takes a number of medial forms: narrative and temporality in film and literature; signification and representation in music; abstraction and figuration in poetry and painting.
For their part, critics interested in these questions have focused on particular aspects of a capitalist economy as it both transforms and is represented by the sphere of culture. “Labor,” “debt,” “finance,” “money,” “logistics,” and “commodities,” have all been subjects of hermeneutic investigation, while “neoliberalism” “globalization,” and “financialization” have been used to delineate a time/space of economic-cultural transposition. While they found such conversations to be stimulating, and even participated in them, they set out to use their construction of the “economic object” to question these discrete segmentations and representations of the economic, including that of periodization itself.
As part of their project the Economic Objects team worked with artist Zachary Formwalt to create a film entitled, An Industry and Its Irreplaceable Medium, to learn more click HERE.
Course
Economic Objects: Capitalism as Medium
Spring 2021
27821/37821
The last twelve years of financial crisis have had a profound effect on the production and criticism of art across a variety of medial and disciplinary traditions. Whether this shift is located in the rise and institutionalization of social practice art, or the radicalization of art students as they confront their past debts and future wagelessness, practitioners and critics have acknowledged what some have simply but forcefully called “the economic turn.” As we now confront an economic contraction and reconstitution of unprecedented intensity in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, a focus on the possibility of transmedial economic representation and its criticism offers a timely and necessary opportunity to consider what art is and does in our historical moment. “Economic Objects: Capitalism as Medium” explored how shifting modes of the representation of the economy reflect transformed medial practices and their critique. This course sought to complicate the relationship of Marxist aesthetic theory with contemporary habits of criticism including notions of “economic performativity,” debt and finance as objects of artistic analysis, and ongoing debates about the scope and logic of commodification, each of which opens up new questions about the very representability of capitalism itself.
The course was organized around a set of “economic objects,” which range from proper art objects to phenomena (practices, objects, material) not conventionally belonging to the category of “art.” Readings offered students exposure to current debates in aesthetics, critical theory and economic criticism. Economic objects may include: Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon A Time In Shaolin (2014), the Facebook “like,” Rimini Protokoll’s Annual Shareholder Meeting (2009); the year 1973, Cassie Thornton’s Application to the London School of Economics (2012), The Rolling Jubilee (2012) and subsequent “debt strike.” Readings may include: Nicole Shukin’s Animal Capital, Fredric Jameson’s “Cognitive Mapping,” Jacques Lezra’s On The Nature of Marx’s Things, Dara Ornstein’s Out of Stock: The Warehouse In The History of Capitalism, Hito Steyerl Duty Free Art, Lisa Gitelman’s Paper Knowledge, Marx’s Capital, Ben Davis’s 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format, and Jacques Derrida’s The Truth In Painting.
For an article in The Chicago Maroon about the course click HERE.
Fellows
SALOMÉ AGUILERA SKIVIRSKY
Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky is the author of The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor (Duke University Press, 2020). Her essays have appeared in Cinema Journal, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Social Identities, Hispanófila, and in The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema. Skvirsky is currently pursuing two book-length projects. The first is a historical and theoretical treatment of the device of the talking head in nonfiction filmmaking. The second—tentatively titled “Filming the Police”—is a comparativist treatment of the topic of police on screens that brings together the ubiquity of police shows in televisual media with the surveillant and sousveillant recordings of police violence in the digital age. Skvirsky is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.
SETH KIM-COHEN
Seth Kim-Cohen is the author of Against Ambience and Other Essays (Bloomsbury: 2015), In The Blink of an Ear: Toward A Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (Bloomsbury: 2009), and One Reason To Live: Conversations About Music (Errant Bodies: 2005). His art has been presented on all but three continents. Artforum describes his work as “collegial and awkward, a real-world mistake framed by a semifictitious context.” With his bands Number One Cup, The Fire Show, Nil/Resplendent, and names_of_music, he has released ten albums of experimental rock-based music and performed extensively in North America, Europe, and Australia. Kim-Cohen is Associate Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
LEIGH CLAIRE LABERGE
Leigh Claire La Berge is the author of numerous works of economically oriented criticism, including the books Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s (Oxford, 2014) and Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art (Duke, 2019) as well as co-editor or Reading Capitalist Realism (Iowa, 2014). Her journalistic writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Los Angeles Review of Books. In 2012, she co-curated “To Have and To Owe,” a show about art and debt, at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. She has collaborated on multiple artistic projects including New Economic Policy at the Queens Museum (2015), Year of Rearranging at Mildred’s Lane (2019), and Marx For Cats (2018, ongoing). She is an associate professor of English at CUNY BMCC and an ARC Distinguished Faculty Fellow at the CUNY Grad Center.