WORK HARDER / 6-channel video installation / Sofia, Bulgaria 2015
a self-referential militant research project
Work harder is a 6 channel video installation and documentation, showing answers and perspectives towards individual and collective experiences in art-production, implying live and work situation, art academy and other art institutions in Sofia/Bulgaria.
The interviews are based on a "Questionnaire for precarious producers" - referring to the methodology of "Militant Research", a engaging investigation between knowledge production and activism. The investigation concerns the reflection about own working and living conditions. The installation should extend or made possible at all a communication and information about this, should identifies commonalities and break individualization. Furthermore an exchange of experiences on resistance possibilities and ideas of resistance and organization should be raised.
Why working with this method in the context of art-production?
Especially the lifestyle of artists, considered creative, autonomous and authentic has become the inspiration of an economy that is more on self-exploitation as a heteronomy. One should believe and demonstrate that your work its for own sake - "l'art pour l'art" and not to secure your livelihood. These
promise fits to "The new spirit of capitalism"(Boltanski/Chiapello). Its refers to the artistic existence since the 19th century by the annulment of the separation between work and leisure, the demand for self-realization through self-determined working hours and an appreciation for creative ideas seems to fulfilled with the new management strategies. The contemporary society is less than earlier societies characterized by rigid standards and prohibitions and no longer rewarded as the disciplinary society of conformity. The social action ideals autonomy and personal responsibility. But it seems, that these values got subverted in a capitalist logic to made our actions the most productive for the capital. Self-control, self-evaluation, self-representation, self-optimization leads to individualization, the removal of boundaries between work and leisure and the acception of a constant situation of precarity are just some keywords and examples within these considerations.
Tragically, the blurring of boarders between work and free-time is a very effective control instrument itself. Success is not measured according to whether a predetermined task has been mastered, but according to whether it was better managed than the competition. The entrepreneurial self of our time suffers from the constant fear of not having enough done. This so called freedom, the promise of self-realization produces pressure and creates even more the risk of precarity. If we can't reach our own self-imposed goals, not meet our own high ideals a sense of inability of the inadequacy arises. In Ehrensberg's book "The Depression", he tapes these link between creation and depression as a pathology of "size" - which he describes as an account for a loss of self-esteem, the feeling we are not grown for the task of individuation, not reaching own ideals and an arising of a sense of inability and inadequacy.
Doing a study exchange in a post-communism country like Bulgaria, my point of interest in this research was how deeply this issues had arrived in young creative art-producers, with the aim to raise awareness about this issues and also get some new perspectives for myself.
This self-referential research took place in the Master of Digital Arts which i intended this winter term 2014/15 in the National Academy of Sofia.
Thanks to my colleagues who participated in this experiment and Krasimir Terziev who supervised this project.
Lena Kauer / Sofia, Bulgaria / January 2015
