TRANSformacije, book no. 49
Editors: Gregor Moder in Aleš Mendiževec
© Maska, Ljubljana, 2023
The book was published in Slovenian with the support of the Scientific Research Centre ZRC and the Slovenian Book Agency.
Katja Praznik: Art Work: Invisible Labour and the Legacy of Yugoslav Socialism
The present work provides an insightful description of how the lack of security which occurred with the withdrawal of subsidies to artists in post-socialist Yugoslavia made artists vulnerable to exploitation by galleries and museums as cheap or unpaid labour; how artists have been used by real estate agents as promoters of new-build construction projects in urban neighbourhoods, and how convenient the maintenance of “artistic autonomy” is for neoliberal capitalism, which increasingly seeks to de-collectivise labour and forces workers to assume all the costs of their reproduction. “Artistic autonomy”, as Katja Praznik shows, is today not only a feeder for the dissociation of art from life, butit is also the basis of artistic organisation, which destroys participation in collectivity and the production of value, and forces artists to compete with each other for the sake of distinction, while depending on low- paid jobs to pay for the necessities of life. […] Katja Praznik’s work provides an essential theoretical and historical context for both the attempts to demystify this last manifestation of the bourgeois concept of art, and for the reactivation of the search for an art that is “more down-to-earth” capable of expressing and intensifying the struggles of artists to make their work visible and to explicitly resist unpaid work.
(Silvia Federici, from the accompanying text)
TRANSformacije, book no. 49
Editors: Gregor Moder in Aleš Mendiževec
© Maska, Ljubljana, 2023
The book was published in Slovenian with the support of the Scientific Research Centre ZRC and the Slovenian Book Agency.
Excerpt from the book
While Yugoslav socialism treated art as work, its challenge to Western ideas of art, autonomy and artistic genius was not enough. When labour policies knelt in the face of economic and geopolitical pressures, bourgeois Western concepts of art and autonomy resurfaced came back to the surface and turned art into invisible labour. Looking at the Yugoslav cultural policies of the post-war period, we can reflect on the inherent conflict between art as work and art as commodity precisely because the state embodied a hybrid socio-political modality in which two seemingly contradictory forms co-existed: socialist self-management and a form of market economy.
Katja Praznik: Art Work: Invisible Labour and the Legacy of Yugoslav Socialism
About the Author
Katja Praznik is a sociologist and University (research) assistant at the Department of Global Gender Studies and Sexuality Studies and the Cultural Management Program at the State University of New York in Buffalo. She is the author of The Paradox of Unpaid Artistic Labour, published by Sophia in 2016, and co-author of Chronotopographies of Dance: Two Essays on Dance (namely the essay Ideologies of the Dancing Body), published by Emanat in 2010. Her work develops a feminist Marxist critique of invisible labour in art, explores the conditions of production and cultural policy in Yugoslav socialism, and critically addresses themes such as the creativity of labour, the neoliberal destruction of the welfare state, etc. She was editor-in-chief of Maska magazine (2007- 2009), participated in the development of proposals for improving working conditions in independent artistic and cultural production within the Asociacija Association, and is an active member of the Syndicate for Creativity and Culture.
– Zasuk
Photo: Jaka Babnik