THE BAROQUE POWER GROUP presents REPOSE: Sleep and autonomy in hypercapitalism
EXHIBITION DETAILS
184 Project Space
OPENING: Friday, October 30th
TIME: 6-9pm
HOURS BY APPOINTMENT
Artists: Trevor Amery, Mary Jones, Charlie Schneider and Virginia Wagner
LEARN ABOUT THE FEATURED ARTISTS HERE.
“Paradoxically, sleep is a figure for a subjectivity on which power can operate with the least political resistance and a condition that finally cannot be instrumentalized or controlled externally – that evades or frustrates the demands of global consumer society… Maurice Blanchot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Walter Benjamin are only a few of the twentieth-century who have meditated on the profound ambiguity of sleep and the impossibility of positioning it in any binary schema.”
— Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
Patterns of consumption, work, and recreation have capitulated to the imperium of the 24/7 schedule. Yet as the separation (both in spatial and temporal terms) between zones of working, shopping and domesticity have collapsed under the pressures of hypercapitalism, sleep continues to resist. In the face of the hand-held digital device and the immanence of wearable and implant technologies, the duration of sleep is ever curtailed by an endless stream of pings, chats, emails and updates, in hand, day and night. As diurnal activity has been prolonged by the invention of electric lighting, now economic participation of the subject is extended by undifferentiated flows of information, all mediated and accessible online and onscreen. In addition, an industry has grown around the management of sleep, including pharmaceuticals; sleep aids, bedding, hospitality, and energy drinks. But sleep as an activity remains a no-go zone for any attempts to bring it under the logic of the market—a sleeping body can neither produce, consume, shop, nor post updates.
Sleep asserts the primacy of the body not as a unit of consumption but as an organism in its environmental and evolutionary context. Embedded in circadian rhythms and neuroanatomy, the logic of sleep has increasingly diverged from the demands of the current market economy and the society that produced it, carving out a site of passive resistance. In short, sleep has become an anti-social activity—it questions the very notion of “productivity.” The artists represented in this show make work that addresses sleep as a subversive act against the oppression of the 24/7 economy we inhabit today.
184 Project Space is an ongoing post-relational esthetics art project that intends to undermine the public/private division implicit in traditional art spaces.
Trevor Amery // How to Power Nap During an Exhibition, 2015 // Photo by Kathryn Zazenski
Charlie Schneider // Prototype for “Dice Roll” // 2015 // Digital composite image
Virginia Wagner // "The DJ” // 2011 // 10" x 12” // Oil on mylar
Mary Jones // "A Woman” // 2015 // 11" x 9” // Oil, silver leaf, spray paint, and X-ray on canvas
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