What happened to the artist’s body when the labor of art production became alienated labor? Foucault has already drawn our attention to the fact that alienated work produces the worker’s body alongside the industrial products; the worker’s body is disciplined and simultaneously exposed to external surveillance, a phenomenon famously characterized by Foucault as “panopticism.” As a result, this alienated industrial work cannot be understood solely in terms of its external productivity—it must necessarily take into account the fact that this work also produces the worker’s own body as a reliable gadget, as an “objectified” instrument of alienated, industrialized work. As masses of people have become well informed about advanced art production through biennials, triennials, Documentas, and related coverage, they have come to use media in the same way as artists. Contemporary means of communication and social networks such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter offer global populations the ability to present their photos, videos, and texts in ways that cannot be distinguished from any post-Conceptualist artwork. And contemporary design offers the same populations a means of shaping and experiencing their apartments or workplaces as artistic installations. At the same time, the digital “content” or “products” that these millions of people present each day has no direct relation to their bodies; it is as “alienated” from them as any other contemporary artwork, and this means that it can be easily fragmented and reused in different contexts. To be an artist has ceased to be an exclusive fate; instead, it has become characteristic of society as a whole on its most intimate, everyday, bodily level. And here the artist finds another opportunity to advance a universalist claim—as an insight into the duplicity and ambiguity of the artist’s own two bodies. - Boris Groys #Toxicotopia Project Book Arts Photography . Illustration . Printmaking Art Director: Amin Shahmoradi Barhen Studio 2019 https://www.instagram.com/p/B0LBxZCANTa/?igshid=9cre13jvt01a
