Assistances: On Reproductive Labour in Art Production 

This seminar proposes to look into contemporary theatre and art production and analyse it thorough the figure of the assistant. The intention is to open a number of questions around the politics of reproductive labour in the mentioned fields. Contemporary theatre and art production, institutionalised or not, often rely on poorly paid assistants and usually unpaid interns in order to function smoothly, but to be an assistant never means the same. The assistant can be anyone and no-one; they could be a 15th-century painting apprentice, dramaturge, director’s assistant, editor, stage and light technician, secretary, assistant designer, assistant conductor, production manager, production assistant, cleaning staff, student assistant, personal assistant, curatorial assistant, assistant curator, mother, emotional caretaker, professional caretaker, a friend - anyone whose job is to maintain, manage, advise and enable the work of the artist. Assistance, in theory and practice, is embedded in the German and Austrian educational contexts, whereby students may engage in the so-called freiwilliges soziales Jahr. After completing compulsory education, those looking toward careers in the arts, are often expected to work as assistants or interns before enrolling at a university. The aim of the seminar is to rethink infrastructures that hold and shape how we study and prepare for the ’real world’ as artists, writer, and theatre makers. Regardless of the type of production and conditions in which they work, the forever “young” assistant is usually expected to love their work, a work which takes place and ends in the future. When that future arrives (it rarely does), the artist has to carve out and separate themselves from their (inner) assistant, a complicated psychosocial operation that often results in volatile divisions of labour. Meanwhile, the assistant is always available, flexible, ready to jump in for the sick, stressed and exhausted artist, galerist, or other assistant. It could be said that the assistant is in constant training in the arts of service; to paraphrase Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, training becomes the discipline. Assistance has become something like a rite of passage for becoming a worker in the arts sector, and yet discourses around art pedagogy tend to focus on students in institutions as if they were on a linear trajectory toward autonomous artistic or academic subjectivity. Like higher education itself, access to forms of “experience” like assisting, or working underpaid, rendering a candidate more employable, more interesting, or simply more amenable than another, is unevenly distributed, and the rules surrounding them somewhat opaque. The seminar’s aim is to address the contingency and volatility of our need for assistances, while resisting any rationalisation and re-naturalisation of need. Analysing the approches from various disciplines and art forms, the seminar is also marked by a blurring of theory and practice, acknowledging how reflecting about reproductive labour often requires making more implicit forms of knowledge intelligible, sometimes because this knowledge is more quotidian or anecdotal or because it is more embodied and habitual.

Syllabus example:

- Renné Pollesch: Lob des alten litauischen Regieassistenten im grauen Kittel

- Marina Vishmidt: Management and Maintenance, 

-Andreas Petrossiants: Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Maintenance and/as (Art) Work,

-Karen Brodine: Woman sitting at the Machine, Thinking

- Leigh Claire La Berge:  Art Student, Art Worker, etc.

Active participation, presentation, 1400 words text

- The seminar will be held both in English and German and the syllabus is almost fully in English.

- The current syllabus is a proposal that will be adjusted and discussed on the first session of the seminar.