Art/Commons: Anthropology beyond Capitalism

Description

Art/Commons is the first book to theorise the commons from the perspectives of contemporary art history and anthropology, focusing on the ongoing tensions between art and capitalism. This study is grounded in an analysis of contemporary artistic and curatorial practices, which the author describes as practices of commoning, based on co-production, participation, mutualism and the valorization of reproductive labour. Mollona proposes a novel theoretical approach to current debates on the commons, and shows that art can provide both a language of anti-capitalist and post-colonial critique as well as a distinctive set of skills and practices of commoning. Cover Contents Acknowledgements Part I TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY OF ART/COMMONS Prologue Movement and the political economy of life Commons Capitalism and abstraction Art, labour, slavery and the actions that make the world alive Abstraction and the avant-garde: A historical interlude Conclusion: Part I Part II (AUTO)ETHNOGRAPHY OF COMMON PRACTICES 1 Beyond the cinematic mode of production: Film labour, manual labour and intellectual labour in the making of ‘Steel Lives’, Sheffield The spectacle of labour and working-class cinema in the UK Relations of production, economies of film and modes of circulation Antinomies of realism: Indigenous aesthetics/communist aesthetics and militant cinema 2 Beyond institutional critique: Instituting otherwise with Athens Biennale Past ‘post-occupy art’ OMONIA (unity): Instituting the collective subject The contested political economy of art: Between commons and rentier capitalism Postcolonialism versus neocolonialism: Commoning the South? Art’s structures of feeling: Capitalist realism, cinism and melodrama 3 Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) Naples liberated spaces Madrid: Master in urban commons Athens Conclusion: Part II Art as a living form (Steel Lives) Art as ritual gesture and fieldwork (Athens Biennale) Art as militant research, knowledge and prefiguration (IRI) Epilogue Notes Bibliography Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Index