Synopsis
‘To Make-for-Art as a Not-working…’ pursues further the question of making-for-art’s ‘difference’. The focus is on art-making’s paradoxical relations to both ‘work’ and ‘place’ under the representing institutions of techno-capitalism. Cultural conventions about work and play as they are routinely applied to art are suspended here in favour of alternative terms for approaching making’s generative activities.
Art’s project is offered as a search for an ‘elsewhere’ aside from the culture’s work-play dynamic. Making as a specific kind of ‘performance’ is introduced and offered as a ‘not-work’ that does not ‘take place’.
Amongst other topics ,‘studio’, ‘vigil’, ‘out-performing’, ‘not-quite’, ‘inattention’, the ‘near’, ‘detachment’, and ‘chance’, become occasions for fragmented responses to making’s tactical plight and task.
In passing, the writings of Bishop, Agamben, Blanchot, Nancy, and Brodsky, are called upon as textual support.