Capital Implications: the function of labor in the video art of Juan Devis: and Yoshua Okon
Social Identities, May 2009, v. 15, no. 3, pp. 331-349
Kenneth Rogers examines the inflated global art markets,which are inextricably bound to and dependent upon more informal market systems that operate through the spontaneous organization of exploitable, precarious, marginalized, and ultimately undervalued forms of labour. This article contextualizes the function of labor within two contrasting historical traditions/tendencies of art and cultural production that explicitly reference labour as an essential structuring condition of the work. The debate is developed through a detailed case study of an exchange between two contemporary media/video artists, Juan Devis and Yoshua Okon, both based in Los Angeles. The case study demonstrates the complexities of how the market value of art is implicated within a precarious transnational wage labor system in the neoliberal global economy.
ITEM 2009.159 – available for viewing in the Research Centre
Videos, Artworks and Artists Cited
Inter-State: Video on the Go – Juan Devis
The Petty Curse of Having this Body – Juan Devis
Hielo – Juan Devis
The Belmont Tunnel – Juan Devis
Face-In – Juan Devis
The Digital Migrant – Juan Devis
Washing, Tracks, Maintenance – Mierle Laderman Ukeles
The Wall of a Gallery Pulled Out, Inclined 60 Degrees from the – Santiago Sierra
Ground and Sustained by 5 People. – Yoshua Okon
A Proposito – Yoshua Okon
Orillese a la Orilla – Yoshua Okon
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