This seminar explores the juncture of the ‘body’ in art and art history in relation to feminism, capitalism and its (non-)reproduction. Tracing recent debates on ‘social reproduction’ struggles and their intersection with art history (Vishmidt/Stakemeier, Dimitrakaki), and addressing the ways in which the body is taken up in contemporary art, this seminar will explore how concepts and discourses of the ‘body’ are situated alongside critical questions of gender and feminism, critical theories of race, and labour. The ‘body’ is taken to be a historically contingent concept, up for contestation. The idea of the body connotes tensions: between inside and outside; consumption and excretion; energy and depletion; life and death. At the same time, the ‘body’ is produced historically. Considering how the 'body' has been theorised within discursive frameworks including (but not limited to) Karl Marx’s description of the commodity ‘labour-power’, Silvia Federici’s historical analysis of the female ‘rebel’ body, Hortense Spillers’ emphasis on the flesh and Saidiya Hartman’s emphasis on the body/objecthood of blackness, in relation to a history of artistic practice that engages the body, the aim of this seminar is to track the social implications of artistic investigation of the ‘body’ conducted through a range of media (performance, photography, video, film, etc.), where feminism is understood as part of an ongoing struggle. Considering such theories including their tendencies and the exigent contradictions between them, as well as artistic practices, in this seminar we will pursue a materialist analysis of art’s enduring imbrication in capitalist social relations, as well as its relative autonomy from such relations.

For the remaindar of this semester this seminar will take place via ZOOM. The link to the meeting is available to registered students via the ownCloud.

Sample Bibliography:

• Kerstin Stakemeier and Marina Vishmidt, Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis and Contemporary Art (London: Mute Books, 2016) (excerpts)

• Marina Vishmidt, ‘The Two Reproductions in (Feminist) Art and Theory since the 1970s’, Third Text, 2017, 49–66

• Leigh Claire La Berge, Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art (Duke University Press, 2019) (excerpts)

• Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Routledge, 1993) (excerpts)

• Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, trans. by E. F. N. Jephcott and Harry Zohn (Cambridge, Mass; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 19–55

• Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010). (excerpts)

• Hortense J. Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, Diacritics, 17.2, (1987), 64–81

• Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (New York: Autonomedia, 2014) (excerpts)

• Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, trans. by Bruce Benderson (New York City: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2013) (excerpts)

70% Anwesenheit, Mitarbeit, kurzer Text (Essay)