Autonomy / Wage: The terms comprising the title of this course form an internally fraught paradigm. The category of “autonomy” could be defined as the absence of work; so what is an artwork in the age of the wage, which is to say in the era of proletarianization, industrialization, and capital, 1844 – now?
The history of the Canadian artist-run centre has unfolded in the past half-century as a negotiation of and over autonomy. The naïve title “artist-run” itself invites interrogation; national cultural policy has overdetermined the relationship between artists, private and ‘public’ institutions, and state bureaucracies as a kind of ambivalent romance, stumbling between dysfunctional triangulation and an impossible synthesis, as in AA Bronson’s chimerical artist-bureaucrat. It is against this backdrop that 221A opens an embedded space to study the entangled histories of aesthetic and political autonomy mapped in Jaleh Mansoor’s syllabus.
221 East Georgia St
6:30 – 8:30pm
If you would like to join us, please email parallax@221a.ca and indicate which sessions you would like to attend. Space is limited.
Session 1: February 15
Hosted by Leigh Tennant
Text: “The Gendered Circuit: Reading The Arcane of Reproduction,” Maya Gonzalez
Session 2: February 22
Hosted by Vincent Tao
Texts: “Chapter 2: Communal Luxury,” Kristin Ross and “Chapter IV: That Property is Impossible,” Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Session 3: March 8
Hosted by Nate Crompton
Text: “Two” and “Three” from Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia, Jaleh Mansoor
Session 4: March 22
Hosted by Jesse McKee
Text: “Romantic Bureaucracy, Alexander Kojève’s Post-historical
Wisdom,” Boris Groys
This program is a part of the Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures Library and Public Program; visit the project page for additional programming.