 OK, well I think we will make a start, we've got a lot to get through this afternoon. Good afternoon everyone, my name is Sarah Turner and I'm the Deputy Director for Research at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Welcome to Two Days' event, which is part of the art criticism and pandemic part two organised in collaboration with Chris McCormack, Associate Editor of Art Monthly. It's a real honour to be working with Chris and we're immensely grateful for all his energy and his collaboration and the new perspectives and ideas and people that he's brought to the centre's programme. For those of you who are new to the centre in the audience, you can find out more about our work as a research centre and as an educational charity on our website. And there you'll also find recordings of our past events, digital publications and more information about our collections and our future programmes. The centre is physically located in Bedford Square in London and we have our library and our archive and an event space there and we hope that we'll be able to welcome you back into that space for research and for events once we're able to do so. Art and the Pandemic part two is unfolding over two days. Yesterday we considered the idea of safer spaces and today we're thinking about wearing out with a range of art critics, artists, activists, art historians, poets and writers, who will discuss the implications of the current conditions of a global pandemic for their work and the broader field of art criticism and writing on art and culture. Collectively, these two panels will continue and reshape the discussions had at the art criticism and pandemic events organised by Chris with the centre in July 2020, which considered how the structures of a globalised art world had been interrupted or changed and whether, in the context of renewed activism, the art world was addressing problems of inequity and injustice in its own order. These ideas remain just as urgent, if not more so, as the art world negotiates the legacies and ramifications of making, thinking and writing about art in the context of a global pandemic. These events are spaces for testing out ideas rather than final words and there'll also be spaces for questions and discussion punctuating the talks today. The talks will be recorded and hosted by the centre's website. Before handing over to Chris to introduce our panel, we'll just quickly run through some of the housekeeping for the online webinars. You can see that the talks will last around five to ten minutes and there'll also be space for Q&A where we'll invite you to ask questions using the question and answer box, which you find at the bottom of your screen. We really encourage audience participation. We want to hear from you. We know you're out there listening and watching and it's great to have that sense of community and a collective space for ideas and reflections through these events. The event has live closed captioning and if you want to see that, you click on the CC icon control on the panel also towards the bottom of your screen. You can also use the chat box to make comments. You might want to share links and resources as you listen and reflect on the talks that we're going to hear today. The session, as I said, will be recorded and we ask you not to take photographs during it and any offensive behaviour will not be tolerated and attendees can be removed from the webinar by the host, but we hope that, of course, won't be necessary. So without further ado, I'd like to again just welcome you all welcome our panel and welcome Chris McCormack, who I'm going to hand over to now to introduce the theme of today's panel and also our speakers. Over to you, Chris. Many thanks, Sarah, and it's great to be here again for the day. We've, as Sarah mentioned, we've got a lot to get through so I'll try and keep this as brief as possible. Again, I'd like to thank Paul Mallon Centre and Sarah Turner for being such wonderful hosts and for bringing this programme together and which seats to extend last year's talks and to reflect upon some of the urgent subjects raised through the pandemic. I'd also like to thank Shawna Blanchfield for all her hard work behind the scenes as well. If yesterday's talk concerned, consider the recasting or resisting of classificatory burdens that fall over certain lives, questioning the political order that enables or denies access. Today's talks will consider how and the violent normalisation of austerity. The pandemic has exacerbated conditions of increased work surveillance, precarity and chronic exhaustion. And where this cumulative sense of illness as an indebtedness to be repaid through an imagined future of normalised health, including wage possibilities, and the now commonplace discussion of contemporary fatigue, anxiety and depression, or points as as Lauren Ballon states to the way living has also become a scene of the wearing out of life. Speakers today will reflect upon lives more at risk of infections through socio-economic consequences of structural racism and underpayment, wage relations, and the legacies of HIV AIDS activism, questioning how my kinships wear out together and apart, how my artworks and the social relationships they foster, continue to play apart and redefine the public sphere, or enable us to consider the interrelations of equity and collective care. This leads me to welcome to today's panel. It is truly an honour to have you all here, and genuinely, I do appreciate and thank you for taking the time to contribute to this session. You are joined by Dr. Eric Ashery, Dr. Jackson Dabadau, Dr. Lee Clare Labarge, Dante Michaud, Mark Aziz Michael, and Monica Narilla. So, I'll introduce all of the speakers. Dr. Eric Ashery is Associate Professor of Fine Art at Ruskin School of Art, and an artist who works across video, performance, sound, photography, textiles and writing. Ashery narrates stories of precarious identities, combining auto ethnography, collective knowledge, and biopolitical fiction. More recently, Ashery questions how boundaries between illness, life and death are transformed through digital technologies. Dr. Jackson Dabadau is an independent researcher who studies modern and contemporary art and visual culture from a transnational perspective, with a focus on queer, feminist, decolonial and black aesthetic practices of activism and therapy. He received his PhD from MIT with his dissertation titled Viral Visions, Art, Activism and Epidemology in the Global AIDS Pandemic, in which he is currently developing into a book. Dr. Lee Clare Labarge is Associate Professor of English at City University of New York, and is this year's humble fellow at the Freyr University in Berlin starting in June. She's the author of Scandals and Abstraction and Wages Against Artwork, which critically explores the relationship between contemporary labour and socially engaged art. Labarge is currently working on a new book about Marxism and Animality called Marx for Cats, A Radical Beastery. Dante Michaud is a poet and author of Amara Shefford and Sackus, which won the four quartets prize for the Poetry Society of America and the TS and the Foundation. Michaud has received fellowships from Cade Cainham Foundation and the New York Times Foundation, and Mark Aziz McMichael teaches sociology, anthropology and media studies at the American University in Beirut. He has previously taught at NYU and NYU in Abu Dhabi. He's currently writing a book about the history of commercial banking, and in his spare time, he's training as a group analyst. And finally, in curtain ruler, it's from Rex Media Collective, living and working in Delhi. The Collective was formed in 1992 by Monica Javish Bagchi at Sudibrata Sanguta, exhibiting internationally. Rex practice spans numerous media, including installation, sculpture, video, performance, text and curation. Most recently they were the artistic directors of the Yokohama Triennial. So in terms of today's scripture, we will have Lee Clair, Mark and Monica present first followed by a discussion before moving to Dante, Jackson and Rita before opening to further discussion. I did all points through this through this conversation that we're having today that attendees post questions in the chat room and and by all means between ourselves, we can always interject and cut across each other. So if I could kindly ask Lee Clair to start her presentation and we will start things rolling. Great. Before I get started everyone can hear me. Yes. Wonderful. Thank you, Chris for the invitation and Shawna for the administrative labor and thank all the panelists I wish we could be in person. I would love to meet you all but perhaps next year. So I want to start my presentation today with a little story. And that is last year before the pandemic hit. I was beginning work on a new book, which I had provisionally entitled. And it changes nothing. And it was going to be, or it might still be about discourses of rapid change through the tropes of commodification and technology and global warming. And I mentioned this today because, while I was beginning work on this book, the pandemic emerged interrupted my patterns of work interrupted the project itself. And indeed, all of the sudden changed everything for me. So it was a bit of an awkward intellectual conjuncture. As I start to think about reflecting on the past year and sort of asking what happened. I think in particular about how we have come to work this year or how our work has changed this year how our patterns of work have changed this year. What I speak about today is a concept that I developed in my last book. The book was called wages against artwork, and it looked at how socially engaged artists, mostly but not entirely in the United States were critiquing and reconfiguring patterns of work. So what I'd like to do today is present the sort of main concept that emerged from my book and then if we have time and the discussion, sort of ask you to think about or inquire, how does this concept hold up a year into the pandemic. So the concept is called decommodified labor. And I'm going to define that in the presentation that follows. So how do we think labor in our economic present in an age of financialization under the organization of what many commentators have explained as a fire economy so that's finance insurance real estate. So what are our metrics for and what are our theoretical orientations of conceptualizing labor. The past few years have seen the questions of labor's contemporaneity emerge in both popular and theoretical discourses presaging I think a return from its biopolitics based exile. And the questions have started to wonder whether we've seen quote the rise and fall of the job in quote, and also whether many of us will live a quote wageless life in quote to these academic discussions about labor scope and breath. We could add popular publications such as the Wall Street Journal, which has not so subtly declared quote the end of employees and quote, and Forbes magazine, which has wondered quote unpaid jobs, the new normal. So on the occasion of this symposium, I'd like to suggest a return to some of the fundamental questions of labor and a certain configuration of labor in particular. And that's what I call decommodified labor. And it's a way to think labor that becomes available after financialization, and that refers to a sort of emptying out of the same wage relation that nonetheless continues to structure our lives. So the old line working hard or hardly working needs a new conjunction and an age of decommodified labor, one finds oneself working hard and hardly working. I want to suggest today that decommodified labor offers cultural critics a form for isolating labor today that takes account of its religion to the relation to the wage. It's cultural resonances, and that can assist in periodizing our current labor capital relationships. So I want to make two claims today. First, I want to suggest that decommodified labor could provide a terminology and a methodology for thinking of labor and our current conjuncture. Secondly, I want to argue that decommodified labor both generates and is located in some of our most timely cultural and artistic forms. So I hope to demonstrate that for scholars interested in cultural critique, a concept should contain within itself a methodology for its own production. It should be able to be articulated historically economically and aesthetically. So the pervasive decommodification of cultural labor today may be interpreted as a response to what various critics have understood as the late 20th century, shifting composition of value, whether that moment is diagnosed as the ends of the Keynesian compact, the rise of financialization or the neoliberalization of the state. Either way, what has happened is that an emergent financial infrastructure has allowed for an increase in the price of assets, so see any of our current stock markets without either a wage increase or a currency adjustment, and both of those could have sort of transformative social and cultural effects. As with any aesthetic economical historical, which is to say cultural concept, decommodified labor is indexable, but not reducible to an empirical reality. We have multiple discrete data points on which to draw, and most of these will be found in the United States. First in the United States, there's essentially been no increase in real wages since about 1970. From this moment on, a coordinated national and international effort led by the United States has essentially halted wage growth and offered in its place ever expanding forms of consumer credit. We can further qualify how unemployment, excuse me, how employment is generated in such a scene. The economic historian Aaron Beninoff notes that quote, in high income countries by 2010, more than one in six workers and one in four younger workers was counted as surplus to labor demands. So my contention is that in such a scene, people will start working under the structures of the wage, but do so without a wage. This is what I mean by decommodified labor. We now encounter decommodified labor daily in cultural production, cultural consumption, and indeed the content of various cultural texts. Decommodified labor now limbs are present. The Guardian for example reports that 71% of artists in the UK received no wage for their work. Surely that number is higher in the United States. Reality television runs on decommodified labor as often those real people we see on television for go a wage in exchange for exposure. As one of the epigraphs to my book states and it's it's using a quotation from a film production and television production job website quote payment is on an unpaid basis in quote. So that's how the salary for these positions is advertised payment is on an unpaid basis. Meanwhile, it was reported in the United States that the corporate hipster company Urban Outfitters asked its employees to volunteer for six hour holiday shifts. Such volunteerism would be like work, but without the wage. Indeed, the United States now has the highest level of volunteerism and agreement to work without a wage of any country in the global north. Add to that the millions of internships, the fact that nearly between one third and one half of all Uber and lift drivers receive no wage after the expenditures for their employment is included, and the uncompensated dramas of many amateur and college sports. The list goes on. Yet in its very terminology, decommodified labor may appear tautological. Labor, as opposed to work, already is a commodity. Labor implies the incorporation of labor power into a system of economic exchange. And a commodity is something that is made by wage labor and sold on a market. And foremost that describes the worker herself. Why wouldn't decommodified labor simply be labor power that with which humans are endowed before it is sold. Why root labor power through a commodity chain only then to claim an exception to that commodity chain. The answer to these questions is that with decommodified labor, the commodity chain is still in place, as are the presumptions of wage labor and the infrastructure of associated benefits and losses. The only thing missing is the wage itself, which is now deemed in commensurate with the work. So I want to stop there and hopefully we can come back to some of these questions during the Q&A and think about what the status of formal unpaid labor is both during and after the pandemic. So thank you very much. And I look forward to everyone's comments and the panelist presentations. Thank you to Clare for laying out those shifts and strictures around labor and work relations. There's a lot to get going there if we can move on to Mark as he's Michael. If you could show your screen or begin your presentation. Thank you for the introduction Chris and thank you for everyone here today for the conversation. It's a pleasure. It's called this presentation hanging out actually hanging comma out. Partially, because I believe it's something that is becoming impossible. And so I was I was very I found the title of this panel. In terms of wearing out and in relation to Lauren Berlant's text, very appealing, because gestures towards something that isn't a crisis and towards something that has been happening very slowly over time, almost like tectonic shifts that are unnoticeable. I would call it maybe a slow death of the social. And that's what I want to open up for discussion today. Partially when the this is this is coming out of a book that I'm writing, seemingly on banking, but actually on the type of social relations that occur within the financialized system. But it's also coming out. This is a slightly more personal talk in the sense that it's coming out of a lot of my experience of this loss, especially after the pandemic, or after the pandemic began. And so I don't think that the pandemic crisis is necessarily causing this in the sense that it's not trying to dramatize the crisis in such a way. But it's more that the pandemic is highlighting something that has been endemic for a long time. And that thing I think is very well exemplified by zoom. But I'll start with hanging out. So hanging out white white hanging out. So hanging out has a number of contested origins as a term. And one of them is so I'm going to, you know, a number of dictionaries are suggesting that hanging out comes from the kind of early modern practice of hanging shindles out and and kind and opening up for business. So it's the creation of a commercial space, usually that it suggests and then people can come in and hang out in a pub or a tavern or something like that. Once the sign has been hung out. Now, the other potential origin is more conjugal rather than commercial and usually couples that have been fighting in areas of the Netherlands and of the UK. Couples that have been fighting would hang out a broom in front of the window of the house to suggest that one of the two members of the household was absent either of the spouses, and that the other one was therefore available for hanging out. So welcoming a number of friends for no particular purpose within the house just wasting time. Now, English is one of the few languages I know that has this ambiguity between something that seems purposeless as in the conjugal version of hanging the broom out. And the commercial origin of that term. So in almost no other language that I can think of. Can you find a commercial origin for hanging out. So in French, for instance, Trinay would be something like something that would have a very negative connotations in English like lurking or kind of just being around the space. There are no kind of good words for it in English. What I want to get at here is that the idea of purpose less or formally purpose less being together is becoming harder and harder. And that somehow has been embedded even in the English language for a long time. So zoom is a very good example of how this is happening. So the digitisation of social exchange, let's say, has had one of these unfortunate consequences that it's becoming harder and harder to be together without a purpose. So before jumping on the zoom call, I have to think a few times whether let's say the zoom call is worth it. Is it worth it. I'm having zoom fatigue. Is it worth it to be having lower back pain. Is it worth it to be sitting in front of my computer staring at a screen for another hour or two. So we start, I've noticed it in myself and I've noticed it in a lot of other people that we're starting to become much more consciously aware of a sort of accounting logic for our social exchanges. And therefore, of course, the social becomes a domain of exchange in itself. So it is it becomes more even though zoom facilitates meetings or interaction at the same time it facilitates certain types of meetings and interaction, so you're not going to jump on zoom for no reason. I think in this sense, we're dealing with something very similar. I would compare it perhaps to the AIDS crisis, whereby sexual pleasure becomes embedded in the logic of accounting. So because of the risks associated with sexual pleasure, one has to start accounting for the worth of the pleasure, trying to measure the pleasure itself and trying to see if somehow the pleasure stands up to the risks that are entailed by engaging in this activity. And we're still living in the aftermath of the the accounting for pleasure of the AIDS crisis, although, you know, with some AIDS vaccines on the horizon with pep and prep with with a number of ways of coping or managing the disease. It should have subsided, but because of some of the moral aspects of it. It seems not to. And I and I wonder if something similar is happening to social pleasure, or I don't even want to say social pleasure here I would like to say to just the pleasure of being together. Whereby now, I think for the first time, perhaps in history, although they have been other pandemics and we can talk about them in the Q&A if we want to. We are dealing with a logic of accounting that is permeating our interactions with one another so before leaving your house you have to wonder. If you have been doing that for a year, you have to wonder whether it is worth it, whether it is worth the risk and therefore you have to start measuring the pleasure of being together of spending time with another. And and I think this exercise of trying to measure that is not new in and of itself. I think it's something that has been imposed and done imposed upon us and done to us for a very long time, but it has definitely been exacerbated by the pandemic. And the way that has made it increasingly difficult to be together. Now, this, I mean, I could go through, I don't have that much time probably left, but one thing I would like to point out in the history of is the history of hanging out. So you have a long history of hanging out and how it's been criminalized by the state that I could get back to if people are interested, but specifically visible and things like the street terrorism enforcement policies in the US, for instance, steps or asbo's in the UK, right, the antisocial behavioral something ordinances. So, which very per, which very explicitly ban hanging out so groups of friends cannot spend cannot be seen spending time together in certain spaces or at all in some cases. And this is to prevent gangsters. And so we have a criminalization of hanging out within working classes that has been going on for very long time. And we have a ridiculing of the same or purposelessness of being together amongst elites, especially, let's say visible in kind of media depictions of art, especially elite forms of art that are considered to be just wastes of time. The idea of bourgeois accounting of time is not new, once again. So, and it's particularly visible with children and the notion in social sciences and particularly in psychology of unstructured socialization. The idea that idle hands do the devil's work in the 19th century and all the campaigns of by NGOs and by charities to remove kids off the streets and to make sure that kids are not just hanging out and not spending time together, but are actually doing something purposeful doing something intentional doing something that is self building self improving that matters that accumulates human capital, etc, etc. Coming back to wearing out, I believe that, you know, so I work at, I mean, I'm studying and I also work with large groups and facilitating this formal purposelessness of just being together and not quite sure why. And there's something increasingly extremely therapeutic about it, but I think, and I can also talk about this more, but there's also something very political about it and relearning unstructured socialization, because so a lot of studies have found that people take more risks if they're used to unstructured socialization and this is one of the reasons why unstructured socialization is banned and and particularly in a securitised society that we inhabit where risk is born individually and is privatized. There's something about unstructured socialization about being together without a reason and learning to to hold that space learning to be together without a reason that allows us to take more risks and that could be potentially very threatening. And in relation to art, I think my question is a constant definition of the aesthetic as something that is formally purposeless that is somehow an affect freed from consumption or that gives you the impression of purpose but actually doesn't have one. So this aesthetic sense, this appreciation of beauty can be somehow homologically similar to a being together that doesn't also that is formally purposeless but is also doing something that we cannot know to us that is very important. Thank you very much. Many thanks, Mark. I think we can talk a lot about attrition of social spaces and also even stricturing of the art world. I think that relates to what the cloud was saying and how that formulates a sort of social space as well that is stripped. If I could ask Monica to start screen or turn on the camera and start that paper that would be wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you Chris. This is, this is really a fascinating conversation and there's so much to take from what Lee Claire and my disease spoken. When Chris had asked me to come on to this panel, I thought I would speak of ideas, well to think of questions of wearing up, but two ideas of care and toxicity that we had been thinking we have in the Ruxmere Collective and there's three of us, G. Bishop Danai, and we've been working together for Don's, that we've been thinking as sources for the last year of karma time, but as was telegraphed earlier, I am right now in New Delhi and I feel there are some slightly more urgent responses to how we are sort of at this point of time living and dealing with ideas on care, which is what I want to focus my few minutes of thinking aloud on. And I want to begin with this aphorism that we used to hear as kids, water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. I used to think of it as imbalance, generally, that you have to watch out in that sense, do an accounting of what you can and what you can't use, but actually I was thinking the other day that it might be a way of, for the moment, learning to, or it struck me as that it could be a way of looking at and understanding the fact that abundance should not be seen as a guarantee to our deepest life giving needs. I mean, you know, we take things for granted, sunlight, for example, and of course air and oxygen, which are now both speaking to us. And if you know anything about Delhi, if you've seen the newspapers at all, you will have seen photographs, pictures, images of rows and rows of people who are breadless and hungry for oxygen. And you have seen that mediation that is happening between the body and air. One is the technological mediation, of course, the oxygen cylinder, which is right now in the black market and almost impossible to acquire and so on. But also, in this space of mediation that we need to think about is the idea of care or repair. And the crucial question to me is, will the logic of care follow the kind of harshness and hardness of obsessions around production and evaluation, both of which have been talked about in different ways by the first two speakers, or will care find a way to assert itself and alert us to thinking of new axial values and affections. Clearly we are in a moment of rupture, and this moment is forcing otherwise what I've learned sometimes antagonistic lines to dissolve into new contours of thought and presence and of memory. I was really surprised by the fact now in the last year that, you know, wait a minute, 100 years ago, millions more people died of the Spanish flu in yet than the first war. And yet we never actually know anything more about the flu in those four years of the flu than the fact that they passed. So it's a kind of just at the most banal basic factual level, there's a new memory that has definitely entered my horizon. But these new contours, I was thinking we have to find ways of care around them, but poetic care and artistic care and also healing care and nourishing care, because care cannot be a secondary value after the tearing of the scenes that has been happening in our lives, the structure production that it has brought about, but it needs to be seen as a crux value. And from a vantage point that we have to connect after all the body in the machine that I began starting to speak about, and also how do we then bring in micro histories and institutions into this relationship, this space. This probably will slow down deliberations of living, but we all know now again the necessity of care in our bones and in our lungs, literally. And so perhaps it is a time to welcome this. I mean, in a way I'm actually really responding to the moment and saying, what is it that is clearly what, you know, in the last weeks in the last months we have seen as the kind of first principle that is the only reason that we're also surviving and being able to talk to each other. Because as you know the pyramid of healthcare in India has, which has been so well guarded by what can only be, I don't know what we can only call, I don't know, voodoo institutional logics, you know, earn well and succeed and it is completely collapse it has gone to ground in a few short months. And there has been this meritocratic idea, this meritocratic idea around health and education and also if I'm, you know, it's time to say this also in art, which is, which is that there's a production of social goods or outcomes. So health, education, art, are also social goods, social goods and outcomes. And this is standing on incredibly weak ground, which, as we know can collapse it very, very quickly and no amount of national pride or, or exceptionalism can help anyone we have seen this in the last, in the last months. And so, so we think that it's, it's, it's time that art takes a very hard look at its own pyramids, its own models of infrastructure and flow. And it needs to give new imagination to infrastructure, pretty much first, as well as coalitions of binding and how we can create new infections and when I'm using the word infrastructure, I am implying both. I'm implying a combination, I would say, of material and immaterial, both aspects, as well as how we create affective concentrations and how those concentrations get relayed. Because through these affective concentrations and relays through these material and immaterial aspects, there is the nesting and traveling of various diversities of multiplicities and of newer protagonists. You know, I don't think art needs to remind us merely of how we are suffering now. You know that we do have a lot of, it's just not a public secret, but I think what, what we need to think about is art could also be thinking about is how could all this devastation happen so quickly, like why did it take so little for it to fall apart. And we think that to repair, to think on ideas of repair and to repair will need re-apprehension. I mean, so it's not just a question of how one looks, but also changing the contours of what one looks through. How does one re-apprehend things? And how does one even re-apprehend breathlessness? You know, two years ago in 2018 we had made a work called Deep Breath, which really was thinking, which is a 20 minute film, on thinking on the forgetting of air. And it's, you know, it's interesting because we didn't know obviously then that one of us, one of the members of RUX would be in hospital, battling for air so soon. We could call this the artistic intuition, but artistic intuition needs relays of conversations, as well as infra procedures, not just like outward procedures, but infra procedures that help build parallel lines of connections. And these connections have to be across all kinds of people and places. So not only the forgetting of air, but the forgetting of care. That's, if I may say so, that seems to have already begun in certain parts of the world. There's a sort of desperate attempt to go back to business as usual, but these can be only countered by shifting, like what I was calling infrastructure, but as well as infra procedural thinking. And how can we think about making these at the heart of art practice itself? You know, in India, there's been a deep sort of exceptionalism myopia that has led to some of this despair and carnage. And even the courts today are using words like genocide. And I think really is, can we, should we in the art world as well return to this idea that, you know, what is business as usual? It's interesting. I mean, they've been in attempts at sort of art situations, at least a few months ago. And one, you know, and you can walk into this room and you could see a lot of art that had been made possibly earlier, possibly more recently, but sort of not perhaps being as attentive to the moment as I think needed to be. One could say that, you know, it was important for people to feel that, you know, a moment of joyousness, but that is, but that is not what I'm against. I'm trying to talk about how one can, how one can bring certain ideas to the forefront, but certain methodologies, certain reapprehensions to the forefront, so that other habits and cosmologies can transform life. And we can think here of, you know, when I say other habits like other cosmologies, obviously, but also habits such as peer to peer conversations that can expand and envelope many places and dialects and moments of time. And I just want to end with one last point is that what we're seeing is a kind of shifts in intimacies of scale in the last year. A very small virus is making us think of how we're all connected. Connected first through our fragilities, but also connected in the deepest ways to so many other things, right, to the planet, of course, to the whole world, to machines, to knowledge, to limits, and also to pernicious modes of countless magnet and profiteering, if I may. And so perhaps our breathlessness that we are going through, called literal and metaphorical, perhaps in all of this we could discover a new, a new people or a new affection or an art world that can speak, or that speaks of another, not just one, but multiple worlds. Thank you. Many thanks, Mark. And of course, I hope to be, gets better very soon for my best team. I think if I could ask Mark and also be clear to rejoin, and I think it's interesting when we're looking at ideas of, in a way, like the failing of the world first day here on such a big level, and how that is not protecting the interests of so many people, especially in cases such as India, but also as Mark was pointing out in terms of HIV AIDS in the 80s and so on continues to do that across the world and globally. And in a sense, what we're doing is it as artists, producers and thinkers is filling a kind of stop gap, or some, in a way, filling an area that maybe is missing. And I'm interested in maybe talking about that. And also, I mean, what Lee Clair was maybe mentioning as well as sort of ideas around wage and work relations, if that, how is that speaking to you and so on? Is that something you can say about that? I'm happy to take a shot at this question. You know, I think that there is a specific narrative of kind of the victory of liberalism over socialism, communism over the course of the 19th, 20th century, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 90s, and how neoliberalization, therefore, has come up with a kind of in a monopolar world, accelerated exploitation, and some of the things, some of the tendencies that Lee has mentioned. But I think there is another narrative and this is what I was trying to bring out. So even if we look at Union activism, you know, around the logic of community and risk and individuals. So a lot of my research in Egypt has been about the ways in which certain communities function and how the link between affect and materiality is really central to the functioning of communities so that you can't really separate between having affection for someone and also having material duties towards that person in a neat way in the ways in which these two things can be separated in a very financialized system, like the UK or, you know, the US or Switzerland. So in Egypt, only 10% of the population has a bank account. So your surplus is not stored in a bank account, your surplus circulates amongst communities of trust. And so there is a specific, let's say informal knowledge of how to trust and how to relate and how to owe and how to be owed and how to forgive that can't be repaid over time, and how to just circulate materially and combine the material and the affective in a way that has been completely forgotten in a space like the US or like Switzerland. And that allows for a lot of political resistance. So I'm just going to point out one, and it's, for instance, union activism. You know, if you know that you can crash at your third removed three times removed cousins place for five months and be fed. You're going to be without too many questions asked me and there will be tensions but not too many questions asked you will be capable of taking the risk of fighting for what you believe is right and for instance trying to unionize and you might be fired without that and in the absence of a functioning welfare state, it becomes almost impossible for these struggles to be imaginable. So there's really something very important here not about liberalization or the failure of the welfare state but also about financialization and it's kind of change in our imaginary in our way that we behave towards each other and relate to one another where these forms of generosity and non accounting of the self are gone and without these forms of relation I think various forms of political resistance become impossible. I wonder if you had any thoughts about what Mark was raising. No, I mean I think it's. I think it's quite interesting and I can't, you know, speak to the Egyptian or Swiss really context. But of course, I mean my reaction is well yeah I mean obviously there I think there is a certain freedom to be found outside of these sort of, you know, financialized for lack of a better word infrastructures or formally I would say that. And I think this this resonates a bit with what what you just said, Mark Aziz I would say that in my own research on artists again mostly in the United States not completely some in the UK but mostly in the United States. There's a similar freedom found in having no wage right in engaging in these wage like. Collectives or not wage like but but collectives which seek to sort of produce kinds of employment like infrastructures and kinds of material benefits, but do so without the wage, certainly in my work and my discussions with artists who are engaging in these practices. Some of them found a real freedom from I think precisely the form of stricture that you make reference to. At the same time, again, I mean this is this is speaking in the American context. It's also there's there's also a hardship implied and a hardship experienced without the sort of promise of these wage structures right so I mean I think that definitely the point is taken. Just in my own again my own research, say that it's always it's always two sided, you know, Sylvia Federici had her her great comment that, you know, one has to one has to have a wage, right, and yet that's not nearly enough. So I mean I think there's always this sort of contradiction that is implied in these in these economic structures of modernity. I mean, for me, you know your practice has been such a great period of time, you know, since the 90s as you said and also largely quite an international profile. So you're coming at it from a very broad perspective. I was interested in maybe your thoughts on how you've approached subjects of making work, and also participating. And in a sense, what, what that's revealed to you in terms of exchange, and so on. And, you know, you, how has the, the lockdown produced a kind of repetition of a behavior of action, but also, as you said, forged new ways of trying to kind of find you can constellations of thinking and new kinds of ways of practicing. Such great questions, Chris, but, you know, I was just thinking, listening to everyone speak, it's the question really is. When one looks at other modes, like I was talking also about other cosmologies or other habits of living, are these to be seen as kind of not of the now. You see, this is what often happens, like, like Lee said, these are the other contradictions of modernity because that which comes from another time, another place and often another time, another place might be happening at the same time at the same place. And yet we will see them. We will see a teleology there so we will scroll these locations and times of another. How does one then, and that's why I was sort of how does one knit this together, or see if there's anything outside the question of contradiction. And that's why I was thinking and speaking on ideas of like infrastructural thinking and reapprehending and infra procedures, because I was thinking like it's not so much the fact that obviously we all need to live so this this totality that we began with cleave this. What does it mean to be decomodified labor and how liberating it is on the one side and especially as artists I think there has been a kind of this you know there's always that that exhilaration that artists can talk about, but at the same time we all need to live so how does one then so I was thinking of like, for example we were you know we were doing this exhibition in in Delhi called five million incidents. Now it, you know it lasted over a year and you know the point and you know lots of people participating in lots of different ways but I just want to talk about the idea of why we call it five million incidents, because we said like you know you can you can propose any incident that you would like to propose, and so on I mean obviously there would be a process of whether it would be part of the exhibition, which was a nine month or a year long exhibition, but the point so that an incident could be a moment in time, it could be two hours, it could be an evening, it could be three months long, it could be the entirety of the of the year. And I think this became a that was crucial, crucial I think was that one begins by saying that the frames of reference are not as wouldn't are not going to be defined in the way that one thinks that they are defined be the other one was why call it five million obviously there can't be five million incidents but sort of one began with the idea of plenitude that if there can be one incident, there can be five million incidents. And I think for me what was interesting about that process and I would say that as part of the entire year long kind of situations that developed from that was the fact that because of the internalities and because of leakages because things were juxtaposed sometimes by intention and sometimes by accident, and because no one knew exactly what an incident was and yet was trying to figure it out and no one knew exactly how long they needed it to be and yet were exploring that. What you had was the kind of a relation a relational zone between work and people and if I may say of time shared, not just in the way of like over sharing time together but also what does it mean to think of plenitude in in micro movements, if you will. That I think is what I meant was by reapprehending it creates another kind of the terms you know we all need to survive and we are decommodified labor and yet between the two days something else that is being created. And that is perhaps a place where one can look both the decommodification and labor, possibly not differently but at least with porosities and see where that takes us. Any further thoughts, Leica, or should we move on to our next speaker. I think that's a wonderful sort of summation, Monica, so thank you. Yes. Thank you. I think in a nature of time should move on to our next speaker, Dante Michelle as a poet, and you could start your screen down today and your presentation. I'm just going to sort of collect several thoughts around around precarity in intellectual labor. I want us to begin one by considering the asset Queens eponymous aria from the whose 1969 rock opera Tommy, the self identified though no longer politically correct gypsy of white Anglo Saxon Protestant imagination demands. My mind is the demand explicit repressed or otherwise of every artist, more so in a time of pandemic. Pay me before I start in the clip from the 1975 cinematic version of this opera, which you've just seen Tina Turner deathly changes. The townshands lyrics from the impersonal to the subjective and anti capitalist strategy centers the artist over the commodification of her art. Like most clients, or to be reductive purchasers, what Tommy's father thinks he is buying is a product. In this case a hallucinogen and or sex. However, in centering herself seems to say to the contrary, what you are buying is my skill to measure the correct dosage my labor in discerning what will pleasure this virgin. She goes on to say confidently, I guarantee to tear your soul apart. What other reason does the spectator come to art if not to be altered in precisely this way. Her confidence is also rooted in the knowledge that her product is fugitive, and therefore any consumer of it is implicated in that fugitivity. Since the entrenchment of COVID-19 I've watched a fugitive ethics spread as fast as the virus itself. A week has not passed in the last year in which a peer playwright painter dancer etc has written or phone to complain that one institution or another has invited them to contribute their talents for free. This is particularly evident among queer artists of color in our current moment when it behooves historically white institutions to perform wokeness by trotting out token members of staff to proclaim how much my life matters, or suddenly darken the hue of usually all white program rosters. It begs the question. What do these institutions do with a portion of funds from the 2019 2020 budget that was not spent on artist travel and accommodation. Pay us before we started. Not likely. Follow by please for forgiveness as the quote 2020 2021 budget was too heavily hit by the pandemic for us to offer you an honorarium at this time and quote. Though our executive director six figure salary remains intact. And if artists declines work, we usually find ourselves profoundly underemployed or forced into unstable itinerant work. This poem that I'm going to read speaks to that experience for Dixie British participants may substitute rule Britannia or any other colonial anthem. Factotum. Here I am your general servant created in general to aid to think of your ideas before you have them remind you of orders never given retrieve your glasses from the top of your head. Excuse your messes pretend I lack intelligence whistle Dixie for your pleasure. Give advice for which you ask but will not take ignore your dementia. Decline all invitations above my station that you chocolates use the pronoun we in place of me. Smooth your wrinkles admire you think you grand be quiet mask the deception edify you speak only when spoken to be confident of an aptitude shield your flickering flame be unappreciated and serve you all the days of your life. Three. It is important to remember that for the artist the making of a work a ballet a sculpture a song cycle is a mode of intellectual labor. And unlike the rigors of a white collar eight hour shift produces something of cultural significance and value, though unfortunately usually of less monetary value than say a financial product from Barclays wealth management. I think that only the wealthiest artists can afford to decry the hoarding of wealth as the mental disorder that it is should not be beyond the scope of our social thinking. When the collector purchases a sign first edition of Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock, or self portrait by Shen Wei, they're not only purchasing the object, but also the artists time and thought the intangible aspects of their labor. As Tony Morrison reminded us in her 2013 speech the price of wealth, the cost of care art invites us to take the journey beyond price beyond costs into bearing witness to the world, as it is, and as it should be art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it from even the most tragic of circumstances. This next and final poem, a Sestina attempts to make sense of the desecration of the remains of an 18th century enslaved man named Fortune, after the poet Marilyn Nelson's manumission requiem. Skeleton. Anima. White. The bore. Bones black. Black animal bones white bore. The black bore animal white bones. Bones the white black animal bore. Bore bones. Anima. The black white white. Bore black bones the animal. White bones bore the black animal. Skeleton. Anima. Five to end with praise. The last art I experienced outside of my home and in person was a viewing of Lynette Yaron Boache's Fly in League with the Night. All of the critical reception of the artist's work and this show in particular is true. So we walked through the galleries in early December. We mostly talked of the material used for her canvases and the exhaustion of mounting such an exhibition physically and intellectually. The freed Yaron Boache's paintings the background always seems to me as another figure separate from the human figure or figures communicating its own sentience. There's a complete generosity of color and the truest sense I have yet encounter of what I look like in my own imagination or perhaps what we black people look like in our collective imagination. If there is a such thing, and I believe there is. When we exited the tape Britain, Sydney Smith's classical portico and stairs were crammed with a motley assembly of neo bohemians passing around bottles of prosecco and luminaries from the high net worth end of the art world, hardly in compliance of the pandemic's protocols of protective masks or social distancing. All of us enthralling under Chila Kumari sing Berman's lights, it began to rain and one of the bohos started dancing in the downpour near the neon ice cream van. Our souls were torn apart with a guilt and gratitude for the escape art offered us that night. Many thanks Dante for that new description of your story of tape Britain. I've got lots to talk about that. If I could just pass the conversation on to Jackson, if you could start your screen please. Hello. Thank you, Dante, that was incredible. So, first of all, thank you, Chris, for the invitation to participate, participate today, and thank you, Shana, for your amazing coordination. It's a great privilege to converse with artists and writers whose work I've long admired. So after reading the description of the panel, I immediately thought of a specific AIDS activist protest that I love dearly, so I thought I would use it as a historical anchor in my presentation. As opposed to my book project, it's a very local story, but my hope is that it will help us contemplate the meanings of being worn out and weary and of wearing one's politics in our perilous present. And I must say that yesterday I really appreciated the conversation about the relationship between local and global. And I think of Simon Watney, the great British art historian and AIDS activist who in the 1980s at one point commented that there is no AIDS pandemic but rather a multitude of different pandemics, multitude of different health crises. What happens in London is radically different from what happens in Manchester or in Mumbai or in Beirut or in Boston. And I think that this is something that we've all been avidly aware of over the past year as we think about our individual experiences of COVID-19 across different places. So even though this talk attends to Los Angeles as a particular milieu, I hope that it contributes to a larger understanding of how people respond culturally to pandemics. On the evening of January 26, 1989, an anonymous collective of gay artists called Stiff Sheets staged an agit prop drag fashion show outside of Los Angeles County University of Southern California Hospital. Led by a sassy, smooth talking MC, the tightly choreographed 13 minute sequence featured 17 fashion models flaunting memorable looks, tuxedoed escorts ushering them along the runway, and audience members, some of whom were also participants in drag. It is a fashion show the MC assured the audience intended with the worst taste imaginable. The campy performance was divided into the categories of day wear, active sportswear, hospital wear, and evening wear, and of course, bridal gowns. Each outfit crafted with meticulous detail, potent humor, and palpable outraged offered its own critical commentary on the multi-scaler emergencies precipitated by HIV AIDS. Whereas some designs cast light on the cruel absurdity of patient experience, calling out institutional and individual bigotry and neglect, others held more educational and activist ambitions. Some looks praised the unsung heroes of the epidemic such as activists committed night shift nurses and a certain safe sex bride who quote wants to live to see her divorce unquote. Allegedly, the flamboyant styles were the creations of Mike Antonovich, Pete Shabaram, and Dane Dana, members of the LA County Board of Supervisors, whom activists judged to be directly responsible for the mushrooming prevalence of the virus. The collective called their performance a fabulous fascist fashion show because it put on display the politics of the health crisis, which was significantly molded and amplified by the authoritarian inaction of local elected officials. Clearly, the stiff sheets intervention was no ordinary fashion show or drag performance by any manner of means. It was part of a week long around the clock vigil and demonstration programmed by the AIDS coalition to unleash power Los Angeles or act of LA. Shortly after its foundation in December 1987, the grassroots group focused its attention on the alarming situation at LA County USC hospital. At this point in the epidemic, the county had one of the largest populations nationally of people living with HIV AIDS, one third of whom were receiving treatments and services at this very hospital. Yet the institution had neither a dedicated AIDS board nor sufficient staffing. Activists were sick and tired of the many forms of homophobia and difference and hypocrisy they witnessed and felt on a daily basis. The purpose of the January 1989 vigil was to demand the development of a 50 bed ward and six months with 100 more beds to be made available within a year and a 50% increase in staff and facilities at the hospitals outpatient clinic. Furthermore, the group pushed for patients to have access to the same HIV AIDS care and treatments that were available to their counterparts in private hospitals and for the establishment of a detailed training program for all health practitioners serving HIV positive populations. Ultimately, the campaign at LA County USC hospital was successful, giving rise to a proper AIDS ward. The stiff sheets performance sought to provide the protesters with a much needed dose of playful if penetrating entertainment. The collective consisted of roughly 20 gay men from across the creative industries. Many were also active members, similar to how the acronym for the virus kept mutating during the 1980s. The name of the artist collective transformed with each event it planned so as to remain anonymous. Names used on different occasions for the altered boys, which you see here, bad seed and fags and flags. The evocative yet puzzly name stiff sheets was a two fold reference to the sheets covering a lifeless body in a morg, and more perversely to the sheets marked by dried up seminal ejaculations. Indeed, many of the fashion designs reflected this heightened entanglement of sex, death and resilience that characterized a great deal of AIDS cultural production at the time. This remarkable intervention was captured on video by artists and collective member John C. Goss, who I believe might actually be watching from California, where it is very early in the morning. Titled stiff sheets, his tape was screened widely on local, national and international scales. Thanks especially to its inclusion in the influential activist compilation video, video against AIDS, organized by John Grayson and Bill Horrigan in 1989. Because the work of street theater was so compelling, the stiff sheets collective was invited to adapt it for a similar protest at the Cook County Hospital in Chicago in 1990. While as innumerable critics have pointed out that HIV AIDS and COVID-19 pandemics are incredibly different. They have much in common as to their uneven distribution across communities and nations and the ways in which they are structured by historical inequities related to race, class, gender, colonialism and so on. Over the past year I've written a few essays about the cultural politics of COVID-19 via the ongoing history of HIV AIDS and I strongly believe that the archive of AIDS activism remains of acute relevance to our current situation. We find ourselves worn out. Our patients weren't thin. The clothes we wear every day are worn through and covered with mysterious stains that are conveniently invisible to Zoom audiences. My local dry cleaner at least is still closed. Meanwhile, in America, the wearing of a mask tends to be dangerously inseparable from the embrace of a political agenda. Personally speaking, the affectusure oscillates between wariness and rage. I'm reminded of how Roland Barth frames wariness in his lectures on the neutral quote, the paradoxical infinity of wariness, the endless process of ending and quote. This understanding works nicely alongside David Romain's comment from 1998 quote. AIDS begs the question we ask of all dreadful performances, when will this ever end, unquote. To be sure, the stiff sheets performance is one that we hope won't end. It insists that wariness can be a generative force, something filled with potential for remaking the world. Finding humor, joy and political possibility in the devastation of the HIV AIDS crisis, this intervention could be a model for cultural activism and collective care in the age of COVID-19. Thank you. Great. Thanks, Jackson. I do think we've got lots to talk about that. If I could just move on to a read and then we can start a conversation. Hi, everybody. Thank you, Chris, for inviting me. And yes, thank you, Shona, for facilitating all of this and everybody else at the Paul Mellon Centre. And thank you everybody for your contribution and some contributions. It was really great to listen to everybody and sort of feeling as I was listening. Reformulating what I wanted to say, not that I had a very fixed idea anyway, but it's kind of nice to actively think through learning, which I found one more is happening recently in an optimistic way. So, yeah, when Chris asked me about this idea of wearing out, I thought about it as a useful somatic symptom to think about this function, a productive dysfunction that holds the potential for healing and the activation of healing. And it sort of took me back to something I wrote on the first or do a little on the first week of the lockdown, March 2020. I'm going to attempt to share it. Hopefully it will be the right document. Am I sharing it? You go. Yeah, yeah, great. I really can't see it. Okay. So, yeah, I don't perform my writing. I actually quite like to have a distance for me. So I was asking Chris if you're comfortable to, I'm kind of subcontracting labour to you if you're comfortable reading this. Of course I'm happy to read this. Okay. Acknowledging that how we die is how we live only more so. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Sorry. We've been preparing this for our whole lives. Existing daily with the conscious presence of death that measures liveness and life under oppression. Knowing that belonging is everything, particularly when out of reach and in pieces. Playing equal parts in democratic support groups and international networks that serve our recovery daily and exist for decades. Living in a constant state of productive grief. Practising gratitude within and outside the remits of privilege. And dealing always with hypochondria, general anxiety, trauma, neglectful death, chronic illness, underlying fear, and by always I mean for generations, summoning ancestral ghosts. Sharing affinities and solidarity with service workers for as long as we can remember. We don't survive without them and celebrities are nothing but a good distraction from co-dependency. We're living friends and chosen family actively according to myth we chose our biological family to. Acknowledging that how we die is how we live only more so. And owing that and owing that lineage to Palestinian solidarity movements and black life matter and queer deaths. Sickening by extraction capitalism in the body sustaining stillness for parts of the action endorsing solitude. Work about withdrawal out of necessity soft resistance. Recovering tools with complex PTSD. Researching crypt theories about politicised self care and survivance survival plus resistance written by much younger. Refining our politics daily to a tooth while remaining open to change our minds and taking things for granted was never an option. That's for normals. The survivors were born for this crisis. Written during the first week of lockdown London March 2020. Thank you, Chris. I'm trying to come out of sharing. Have I stopped sharing now? Yes, you stopped sharing. Okay, great. Thanks. I'm thinking about writing that a year on and sort of being in that constant. On the one hand, being constant in that state of crisis and being and being prepared for it. And then within that, the pandemic, what about kind of punctuated that state into a structural crisis that really highlighted inequality. As we were talking as I was listening to everybody I was thinking about the productive state of being worn out by structural inequality. But the difference between being worn out and being jaded and I think the art world is almost pride itself and being jaded kind of being done that. Now, my optimistic sense is that perhaps myself and at least sections of the art world are a lot less jaded or less ironic. And I feel like there's a lot less irony around which I really welcome. So yeah, that's me. Thanks. I'm going to ask Dante and Jackson to restart my cameras and maybe we can have a great conversation before we open up to the rest of the group. It's interesting. I was sort of particularly struck by this concept, the reference to this idea of wearing out. In the case of Jackson, this is the idea of the sort of transgression in a sense of even appropriating the kind of vernacular language of medical industry itself and kind of twisting it or clearing it to kind of provoke and kind of celebrate something that would otherwise be marginalized or punished. And Dante, you know, in a sense, you open up a series of fragments around. There's even a co-option and what that means for an identity to be co-opted by various institutional bodies and for those to be racialized. And also for a sense of your poetry to kind of almost run between those kinds of lines and kind of, I suppose, jam them a tiny bit or kind of expose them on some level. I wondered if we could talk about what it means to kind of participate in these scriptures and also then not find ourselves being drawn into them full in a way or kind of finding modes of resistance within these scriptures and also participating within them. I wondered if we had any thoughts on that specifically on what generally. I'm happy to start. I think one of the things that struck me certainly in my last point was emerging from the tape Britain and thinking about the incredible privilege it was not to have just seen an amazing exhibition but the fact that this was still happening in the middle of a global pandemic and seeing these very two distinct groups of people, neither of which I felt I belonged to neither the Boho's or the art luminaries. And I think as a poet, I often find myself in this kind of space because there are very many poets alive who are say recognized on the street. And so when we are in groups, larger groups of various kinds of artists, we just tend to blend in as sort of spectators of the art. And I think that's when sort of the observation gene kicks in and you start to see how the institutions, usually where this art is taking place or being exhibited, is interacting with the various kinds of artists. And I suppose that was what I was sort of trying to get a sense of in my comments around the precarity because I know that, I mean, I know what that social occasion looks like versus what the phone calls sound like or what the emails read like of, you know, not making enough to, to, you know, feed yourself or, you know, ensure shelter for yourself or for your family or for your loved ones or not or being in a in a sort of geographically privileged space like London or New York City and having, you know, responsibilities to family who are in other places where the pandemic is having a much larger devastating effect like India or Brazil and so it's always the sort of weird limbo to find myself in and I hope that that's what I captured in and sort of thinking about the precarity of what it is we do as artists. And to sort of pick up on Mark as these point earlier about structured and unstructured social relations like I sort of interested to kind of think about that in terms of something you were saying Jackson about these kinds of groupings and how they kind of manifested these moments. Do you want to say a little bit about how they actually grouped and how they manifested these actions. Sure. One thing that I've been thinking about throughout this series of talks is perhaps attention between historical models of cultural work and how we're talking about labour today of cultural practitioners. And I suppose looking at the archive of its cultural activism, a lot of these people are not necessarily seeking to participate in an art world system or an academic one, but rather to challenge that and to raise awareness as activists and to enable their own communities to survive as best they could. So they saw themselves frequently and I think it's not to generalize but it seems to me that there's a different debate happening as we look to what Lee Claire was talking about and then some of the really crucial points that Dante was raising too. So I think that these social formations might have something to do with these economic concerns too and there are intersections between this moment of crisis in the 80s and 90s and the global north when it comes to the AIDS crisis and what's happening today. But again, I think that it's a little bit different in terms of how patients were often AIDS patients and those were greatly affected by the virus or leading the cultural conversation surrounding these issues in a way that they're not precisely in the same way today. I think you ended with the idea of when will this end and I think it is interesting when one is always never in a position to find an end because we're not in the position to find it. I think you mentioned something of how there is almost a kind of no option in a way to not wear out. I wondered if you could say a little bit about what that constitutes for you, this demand really. I guess there was a sense particularly as an educator throughout the pandemic where some students were talking about this sort of sense of crisis that happened the kind of a studio or the payage amount of money to come on a course that suddenly hasn't manifested quite as planned and then there were other students that kind of saying the more precarious one that were saying well, it's always been like this for us, it's always, we've always been in that state of crisis and I think these are a little bit of those two positions, something really happened, but at the same time, I think in relation to precarity and labour, some of what happened has already been left. Certain people can never leave the house anyway or can't travel and have to do everything online for example, there are various examples of that. So that's the kind of double age line I was interested in. Also, I'd just like to take the opportunity to respond to a question in the Q&A about the art world because I've used that term. Again, it's that terminology in our state of a slight psychosis where in one way there isn't an art world, each of us have their own art world and we kind of fluctuate between different art worlds. Again, depending on precarity, largely, but there is also this uncanny sense of wherever you go in the world, whatever you go in the world, you go to an opening, it could have been anywhere where these codes around what constitutes an opening, what constitutes an art world event that is so kind of isolated from the geographical geopolitical reality of the space that can be very alienating and when I was talking about a sort of less irony and the hope for less irony was in relation to that, hoping that we can't afford to be the insular anymore. We have been penetrated, I'm saying we. Again, I'm talking about certainly sections of the art world have been called to respond and I'm curious to see what will happen. On a maybe slightly, on a flippant note, yeah, that lack of irony and being jaded, she's so different to being worn out. I mean, being worn out, you earn it. Being jaded, you just like, in a sense, it's a privilege, you know, and there's a difference. That really resonated with me personally. And I think that was something I was trying to articulate towards the end of the presentation. So thank you. Yeah, no, I've heard it in both of, in Danton, you said, Jackson, in a share sense of precarity that I think, yeah, when wearing out is productive. Can I ask the rest of the contributors to start their cameras and we'll, we'll, we'll try and do a quick conversation between ourselves before drawing to a close, I realize we've been speaking for some time now so I do appreciate everyone being here and still being awake, not exhausted. We have one question from the Q&A that's come in. He says how Pete Mahoney asks, I often hear the term new normal psychologically one might argue this mode of thinking could bring fear of the unknown and uncertainty. And what are your thoughts on that. Yes. I think that this idea of returning to something. And maybe that picks up something that Jackson was saying about even this idea of when will something end and rather one is not in a position to find that at this time. If anyone had anything to say. Response to that question. I was thinking on this. If I may. Of course. Just thinking on the fact that sometimes phrases are also deployed strategically right I think this term new normal is kind of a sort of helping people say that this is a pause, but now this pause has to be just dealt with and my question is, I mean my response is much more. How does one ask questions of whether what is what is the normal in the first place and what is new about it I think a lot of that has already been raised in many of the speakers for many people this is not, you know, spectacularly new in so many ways. So many of us live with elements or aspects of what we are living through or what larger number of people are living through. And I think by calling it new normal it's a way of sort of deflecting from from some of that and I think to me this is a strategic deployment of of a concept that sort of papers over by using the word normal. And so I would, I would prefer it if we actually didn't use the word new normal didn't think we could go back to normal and ask ourselves really what is what is truly new and what is truly normal. And so, can I can I jump a bit on this, Monica, thank you. Also, I think it's an expression of hope. I mean, I think one of the long term. I mean there's been a slow death of the social but there's also slow death of the norm. You know, kind of Foucault's theorizing that government security government goes through through norms and it's more effective to manage population via norms and managing deviancy. I think that mode of governmentality has been dying a slow death. And this pandemic has made it very clear how fast norms are dying and I think there's a certain hope that is being expressed that we can go back to being governed by norms. And that we can find new norms that could govern us because it's so, I mean, I think the fear might be how will we have a social order without norms. How can we live without our nice leashes. So, you know, that's how I see it. Any further thoughts so I can move on to the next question that we have from an audience member which I think in many ways we've already, we talked a little bit about this idea but for many. He asks, for many years our workers have been arguing for and or working hard towards slowing down, not necessarily the expense of reducing sources of income. I wonder if you could speak about what it means now when even it's slowing down or being idle, we need to be visible becomes more especially for our professionals who work project project project feet to feet. So it's a sort of inherent contradiction really. I wonder if they're, I mean this question connects to the previous question. I, we're all speaking from this sort of incredibly privileged space, you know, we have laptops or phones and we can see one another and we can talk to one another. And I think I've been fairly critical of all of my sort of privileged middle class social circle in thinking about the pandemic, you know, people are carrying on as if this is the worst thing that has ever happened to him. If this is then they should consider themselves incredibly lucky, you know, bombs aren't falling on us I'm thinking about what's happening in shake jar right now, we are being pulled from our homes, you know we aren't enslaved. And if, if I just look around London, you know, it's sort of like a hipster haven people are still in cues for lattes and you know the sun is out and people are getting ice cream and I just think that to something that Monica was saying about, you know, thinking about different times, you know, this isn't. This isn't comparable certainly our version our meaning us living here in London or perhaps other sort of international cities that aren't hit as hard by the pandemic, this isn't comparable I think to some more historical pandemics as far as the level of suffering, and it isn't even as devastating as I mentioned we you know we're looking constantly at the news from India it isn't as devastating as what is happening there where, you know, something like oxygen has become a commodity. And so I think this idea of slowing down is, you know, frightening to a lot of people because they they are now forced to notice that the lives that they lead are directly related to responsible for some of the disparities, if not all of the disparities that other members of our species are faced with today today, and if anything I I mean my hope is that, and I and I mean I'm fairly pessimistic about it my hope is that we don't go back to any normal that I've experienced before this pandemic, which, which, you know, again, from a privileged place seems rapidly coming to a close. You know, if we believe what the politicians are saying to us here in this country, and perhaps even in my own in the US. But for other people again who are struggling to receive basic medical attention, it probably doesn't feel like it's coming to a rapid end and it might be getting worse. I'll just quote the note that Lee Clair has had to sign off for the day so unfortunately she's just left in the middle of that conversation, but yeah I agree, I see that I mean I agree in terms of the discrepancy or other this sort of disorientation between the life that we're seeing around us versus the true consequences of this pandemic, both in terms of those in hospital also as a broader political positions and so on you know we talked about Brazil and India and so on and so forth. You know we're seeing a kind of almost. Yeah, it is a complete disorientation of consequences around this pandemic. I am interested in Mark Aziz's point around this idea of restricted and unstricted behavior and being and also the ways in which zoom and technology is interfering in that space, or maybe for forging different kinds of attrition. Around that, Mark Aziz, I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that, I'm just very interested to hear something else, what you're thinking about with that particular line of thinking. I mean I guess it's coming a lot from just noticing how much amongst my own friendship circles, it's kind of, I think a lot of my work in sociology has been at kind of analysing the ways in which bonds are formed and relationships are formed and I was very interested in kind of what is part of a relation or not. And that's why I was talking about the material dimensions of affect in the sense that that I spoke about but on a much more kind of day to day level. What I mean is that in a place like Egypt where I'm from. I just saw through the pandemic kind of, so you know Egypt wasn't as affected as a lot of other countries in the world and maybe because we have no idea of the real statistics and the real death toll, perhaps also for other reasons that are kind of incomprehensible and you know we had a lockdown for two, three months and then or I mean a partial lockdown, i shops closed at six or 9pm, but everything was open public transport was available we've never had real restrictions. And that was lifted in July and has never come back so it's like COVID never really happened for a place like Egypt and Cairo is a city of 25 million people and it's one of the densest, it's the densest populated area in the world. What you know what I found fascinating is to see how my friends who were professionals who were connected to the internet who had a lot of work on zoom with other countries started becoming socially paranoid in a way that my friends who were not involved in these in these fears weren't and just kind of did not become infected by this logic of accounting that I've mentioned earlier and so there was no social paranoid there was no evaluation of whether it was worth it or not and trying to quantify the value of the pleasure of a social interaction. And, and the difference was very stark, and a lot of my work is online so I noticed it myself too. And I guess what I would like to end this short comment is that there's something about futurity and it's almost like this closes down the possibility of gifting and I want to relate that back to care. So there's something about if we're going to change the paradigm of care and it's, and we're not going to account for it as care work, or, or the labor of love, or whatever other gendered terms we want to find. If it's not going to be free in that oppressive gendered sense, but it's going to be free as as a gift. I think that we really need to think about time as not something that we spend as not something that is a commodity in expenditure but time as something that we share like space or time as something that we can gift and really take pleasure in and for that to happen. I think we really need to get out of the logic of accounting and death because, you know, there was a question in the Q&A earlier time, asking if we could maybe make idleness more perpsive and I think there's this image of the landline fellow, and, and, or sleep, and how sleep has to be minimized or the landline fellow has to be minimized so we can be more productive in the future so it's like this, this logic of accounting always takes us out. Of the gift it takes us out of the present, in the sense of a gift and in the sense of now so you can't enjoy what you're doing when you're caring for someone you can't enjoy it because you're thinking will they care for me in the future will they reciprocate this so you're not here and now anymore. You're already thinking about reciprocation if and if not, and if having doubts about this reciprocation you you don't really want to engage in what you do. I mean, is that even care, it's just like a chore, but I'm not sure it's, it's care and so there's, I don't know. That's what I'm maybe these were too many remarks and they were too dispersed but I'm trying to give an idea of what I was trying to say. Of course that exposes a lot of different types of tension I think one can equally think of intergenerationality and other kinds of issues spanning a kind of debt and how it's paid and the effects and consequences that are measured across that. Actually, I would quickly ask that someone has asked a further question in response to some of the points you've raised saying I think I read the points are really important. This is the Gordon says she was a bit concerned with the early comparison between the way of the decision to use zoom and that of sexual pleasure and the AIDS crisis. She says it seems to me to deep politicize and decorporalize both, especially in relation to danger and accessibility. The use of zoom has in many ways made events more accessible for differently able people was both in the before times and now leaving the house remains a constant negotiation of possibilities of danger. Jackson's point about pedimology COVID as multiple different epidemics is crucial. More of a comment than a question. I mean, I don't want to, I don't want to hug the mic, but I guess I, it was something I said so I'd like to make it slightly more explicit. I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to deep politicize quite to the country. I'm trying to repoliticize. And I think there has been massive digitalization of sexual interaction and of sexual pleasure through the apps in particular, which is very much similar to what is going on in terms of social interaction and social pleasure through zoom. It's not very different. It's not like there is no contact social contact that is happening offline. And it does come with very serious bodily risks as well. I mean, some people have said these risks are not as important as other pandemics. This may be true, quantitatively, but these risks are really felt and embodied, and the pain of it is very felt and embodied for a lot of people. But I would say the, what I really want to, to point to is, is the mind body distinction that happens between the digital sphere and the actual embodied sphere and and I think there's something about the mind having have to have a purpose. Whenever we're kind of going into the digital sphere, we're looking for something where we're, we're, we're engaging with a purpose in mind. And then the body is this fear of bare life, not necessarily the good. So it's this fear of just like survival purposes. This is where we can start asking questions about lack of purpose and the meaning of existence and creation and why are we here. The mind, in a way, will always try to find purpose in whatever it does and will always try to rationalize. And I think there has been this really nice Cartesian split between the online, which is much more prone to being non-purposive and the offline, which is, I think, much more prone to being non-purposive. And the move towards everything being online is forcing us to be hyper-purposive. And I think a lot of wearing out is happening because of that because the great pleasure of being together doesn't have a purpose. It's just the nature of enjoyment of togetherness. There's no purpose in that. I don't have this time to say something. Yeah, if you've got anything to say. Yeah, I was just thinking about Marcus is kind of talking about gifting and hanging out and not accounting in that way for what we do. And Monica is talking about care and I think in a sense we all talked about caring different way and care for language, not instrumentalizing our positions and all that. I'm just wondering in terms of being artists, what that actually means, like how does care then manifest because in relation to previous questions, I mean, one of the conditions of the art world is overproduction. I mean, it's thrives on overproduction and little reward and it thrives on it because we know in the present because we have it's a capitalist system that dangles a car and they say, oh, if you work more, you'll get more. Then when you get more, you kind of feel that you can get more and be lulled into the sense of overproduction that is extremely unhealthy and culturally embedded. And then at the same time is what we were talking about privilege where some people have to work they can withdraw. I mean withdraw might be a nice kind of cultural strategy, but some people simply have to work as artists to survive. So, I think that a lot of 10 years questions around other production, hanging out what privilege lies in them and I'm just curious about how people feel about because I think about it a lot. It's not like I have an answer. Monica, I wondered if you had any thoughts about what we just said. Sorry, did you see me? Yeah, I did. I wondered if you, in relation to subjects that kind, if you had something to say about a re-raised in that. I mean, she raises really important thoughts, right? I mean this question of, as a freelance artist, what is it, you know, the question of what the, you know, when the pandemic first started, there was this kind of strange time, I think that all of us were in the same time because the whole world kind of was in shock. We felt in the early days that, oh, we're all like frozen, we're all kind of frozen together. So even though it felt like everything had come to a kind of standstill at the same time that empty time was a pleasurable empty time at least for me in the sense that it felt kind of extraordinary, of course, because the world was in an extraordinary place. There was a different time because we were all not producing at the same time it felt. It was of a different order. And I have to say, over the last months, one can see there has been a desyncopation of all of this. There has been a kind of, you know, hastening of in some in, you know, all the conversation around how the markets are doing which seem to have completely no relationship with how people are surviving on the streets, on the one side and kind of the need. Of course, of how does one all, how do we all survive when we're not, you know, that has become a real question in a different way. So I'm just, besides the fact that what Orit raised, I was also interested, partly of what a question was is in the, in the Q&A box, like how was time experience differently and I just want to raise the fact that it's not just a question of idleness, or if you're all idle together, is it different than if you're all productive or if you're all idle out of time with each thing? I don't know what I'm saying. I think this question of sharing the same experience of time that we felt in the early days of the pandemic. I do not, I have, I have much more anxiety, I have much more worry about the, not just besides what's happening in India but also like there are others who are producing because the machine seems to have come back into its own, or it's trying, it's damnedest to convince me that it has come back into its own, which means that those questions are being posed in a way I think much more, in a weird way I think much more harshly, because one feels that aid that you're not productive, that you're not able to be productive, that you feel sort of almost persecuted for being not in some place at some time, which I think is a, you know, since we're talking about some of these ideas because of the pandemic, I would just say add that to what a retraced. If anyone had any final comments to make, I'm conscious of time now, so if you have any further thoughts on this subject, otherwise when I start wrapping up, and that includes the audience, there's still an attendance. I just have to quickly say about what Monica was saying, I think being all idle, I don't know if I used the word idle that was used in the chat but being kind of consciously or strategically productive together is also one of the things I really liked about that period because it felt more like an act of resistance even though it was imposed on us but it was certainly an experimental place in relation to how, as artists, we experience other production and the relief from that. Maybe being available. One final comment from Eleil Jones, he says, if it is a question of care and safety, withdrawal should be an option for everyone. If it is not well, this should be factored in as part of a process of reaching collective solidarity. This certainly applies to burnout, helping those who cannot and should not work, but also to those who, for whom withdrawal is the only option in the context of precarious working conditions, and in regards to personal slash collective harm being perpetuated of any kind. It's more of a comment as well rather than a question. I think we can also agree with that sort of sense of, in a way, a sense of trying to build some sort of solidarity, but at the same time, we're very conscious, I think more and more so of the fragmentations of those conditions. So I think in a way that's why it's important. I hope these kind of conversations that we're having here help at least try and frame something of that in a broad ranging way. There's the aim of both these two talks, and I hope there's some sense of these talks have given a context or a frame through which we can kind of see some connections through both geographically and through time. I hope that the audience themselves have also kind of learned or been given something through these two panel discussions, so I just want to say a huge thank you to Mark Aziz, to Jackson, to Areete, to Dante, and to Monica, and to Leigh Clavage who's left and to Sarah. She's here still, I think, somewhere in the screen. And I just want to say a huge thank you and extend a warm welcome and applause to the whole group and for everybody here for coming.