Art as Occupation

Let’s start with a simple proposition: what used to be work has increasingly been turned into occupation.1

This change in terminology may seem trivial. But it reveals massive differences between two very different paradigms of activity. In fact, almost everything changes on the way from work to occupation: the economic framework, but also its implications for space and temporality. If we think of work in the sense of labour, it implies a beginning, a producer and eventually a result. Work is primarily seen as a means to an end: a product, a reward or a wage. It is an instrumental relation. It also produces a subject by means of alienation.

An occupation is the opposite to all of this. An occupation keeps people busy instead of giving them paid labour.2 An occupation is not hinged on any result, it has no necessary conclusion. As such it knows no traditional alienation, nor any corresponding idea of subjectivity. An occupation doesn’t necessarily assume remuneration either, since the process is thought to contain its own gratification. It has no temporal framework except the passing of time itself. It is not centred on a producer/worker, but includes consumers, reproducers, even destroyers, time-wasters and bystanders and in essence anybody seeking distraction or engagement.

The shift from work to occupation applies in the most different areas of contemporary daily activity. It marks a transition that goes way beyond the often described shift from a Fordist to a post-Fordist economy. Rather than in terms of earning it is seen as a way of spending time and resources. Thus it clearly accents the passage from an economy based on production to an economy fuelled by waste, from progressing time to time spent or even idled away, from a space defined by clear divisions to an entangled and complex territory.

Perhaps most importantly: occupation is not a means to something, as traditional labour is. Occupation is in many cases an end in itself.

Captive, concept, receipt: these are just three notions related to the term of occupation. Others include catch, purchase and accept. The term occupation is derived from the Latin occupare (to take possession of, seize, occupy, take up, employ). The various meanings of the word occupation relate to activity, service, distraction, therapy and engagement; that is to many of the meanings of the thing formerly called work. But also to conquest, invasion and seizure. In its military meaning, occupation refers to extreme power relations, spatial complication and 3D sovereignty. It is imposed by the occupier to the occupied, who may or may not resist it. The objective is often expansion but also neutralization, stranglehold, the quelling of autonomy. Occupation also makes one think of the countless occupational programmes, which are meant to cushion the full impact of unemployment in rich countries. Programmes that are not designed to create waged labour, but rather involvement, pastimes or activity schemes.

Occupation often means endless mediation, eternal process, indeterminate negotiation and the blurring of spatial divisions. It has no inbuilt outcome or resolution. It also refers to appropriation, colonization and extraction. Occupation is permanent, processual, uneven. From the occupied to the occupier it means completely different things.

But occupation can also be turned around and used in protest, as we have witnessed in the hundreds of occupations of schools, factories, banks, streets and other spaces, which took place over the past years globally.3

Of course these occupations – in all the different senses of the word – are not the same. But the mimetic force of the term operates in all of the diverse meanings and draws them towards each other. If the term occupation refers to all of these situations, then they resonate with each other. There is a magic affinity in the name itself: if it sounds the same, the force of similarity works within it.4

Art is an occupation in the sense of keeping people busy, spectators and anyone else alike. In many rich countries, it is a quite popular occupational scheme. The idea that it contains its own gratification and needs no remuneration is quite accepted in the cultural workplace. The paradigm of Cultural Industries is an example of an economy that was supposed to function by producing even more occupations (and distractions) by people who were in many cases working for free. Additionally, there are occupational schemes in the guise of art education. More and more post- and post-postgraduate programmes shield prospective artists from the pressure of (public or private) art markets. Art education tends to take longer and longer, and creates zones of occupation, which yield fewer ‘works’ but more processes, ‘knowledge’, engagement or relationality. It also tends to produce more and more educators, mediators, guides or even guards, whose occupation is again processual (and ill- or unpaid).

In poorer areas, the immediate grip of art seems to be lessening. But art-as-occupation in these places can be part of ideological deflection, or even very concretely profit from labour stripped of rights.6 In turn this or any other squalor can be exploited by artists who use misery as raw material. Art ‘upgrades’ poorer neighbourhoods by aesthetisizing their status as urban ruins and drives out the inhabitants after the area becomes fashionable.7 In many cases it is interesting to note that the ruined character of these places itself derives from a status of occupation. Buildings need to be at least marginally occupied in order to retain some functionality. So janitors or security firms are brought in to ‘occupy’ the space – that is, to keep it empty in order to safeguard its function as private property. This allows in turn for the development of artistically viable ruin architecture – referred to as a ‘photo opportunity’8 on a Detroit street sign; material for countless coffee table books.

Generally, art is part of an uneven global system, that underdevelops some parts of the world, while overdeveloping others9 – and the boundaries between both areas interlock and overlap. Some parts are forcefully immobilized, their autonomy is denied and quelled – in order to keep other parts mobile and autonomous.

But, you may ask, apart from occasional exposure, I have nothing to do with art whatsoever. How can my life be occupied by it?

Here is a checklist: Does art possess you in the form of endless self-performance?10 Have you found yourself curating your Facebook friends? Or wondered how you got caught up in the endless production of productivity and the subjection of subjectivity? Do you wake feeling like a multiple? Are you on constant auto-display?

Have you been beautified, improved, upgraded or attempted to do this to anyone/thing else? Has your rent doubled because a few kids with brushes were relocated into that dilapidated building next door? Have your feelings been designed, or do you feel designed by your iPhone?

Or is access to art (and its production) on the contrary being withdrawn, slashed, cut off, impoverished and hidden behind insurmountable barriers? Is labour in this field unpaid? Do you live in a city that redirects a huge chunk of its cultural budget to fund a one-off art show? Is conceptual art from your region privatized by predatory banks?

All of these are symptoms of artistic occupation. While on the one hand artistic occupation completely invades life, it also cuts off some of its parts from circulation. Occupation means both: forcefully seizing and keeping out, inclusion and exclusion, managing access and flow. It may not come as a surprise that this pattern often follows fault lines of class and political economy.

Why should that be the case? Let’s start with a small detour on artistic autonomy.11 Artistic autonomy was traditionally predicated not on occupation, but on separation. More precisely: on art’s separation from life.12 As artistic production became more specialized in an industrial world marked by an increasing division of labour, it was also more and more divorced from obvious functionality.13 While it became seemingly independent from instrumentalization, it simultaneously also lost social relevance. As reaction, different avant-gardes set out to break the barriers of art and to recreate its relation to life.

According to their hopes, art was supposed to dissolve within life and to infuse it with a revolutionary jolt. What happened was rather the contrary. To push the point: life has been occupied by art. Because gradually, art’s initial forays into life and daily practice turned into routine incursions and then into constant occupation. Nowadays, the invasion of life by art is not the exception, but the rule. The autonomy of art was the idea to separate art from the zone of daily practice, as well as from mundanity, intentionality, utility, production and instrumental reason: in order to distance itself from all social coercion and the rule of efficiency. But this incompletely segregated area then ended up incorporating everything it seceded from in the first place; but this time within its own aesthetic paradigms. The incorporation of art within life was a political project (both from the left and the right). The incorporation of life within art is an aesthetical project, which coincides with an overall aestheticization of politics.

A similar process of over-inclusion of life also characterizes the museum, as art’s default institution. By first including more and more mundane objects as well as non-objects and then transgressing its own borders, the museum has wound up expanding way beyond its initial boundaries. It has proliferated in places where society has been abandoned (or never existed), replacing former public spheres and factories with sites of occupation. Many of these art spaces emphasize education and engagement of audiences and tend to downgrade the production of content (which is often assumed to be for free). Spectatorial attitudes are closely managed to turn from reflection to engagement, from contemplation to immersion, from passing aesthetic judgement to being entangled in social networking and competing economies of attention. An art institution becomes a way of life, instead of a site separated from everyday life. And it turns its focus away from traditional works of art to emphasize overall occupation.

It has often been described how artistic activity has become an occupational role model.14 Networking, endless meetings and greetings, all-out affective and performative labour: all of these have entered the repertoire of the former work force.

On all of these levels art has not only invaded life, but occupies it. This doesn’t mean that it’s omnipresent. It just means, that it has established a complex topology of both overbearing presence and gaping absence – both of which impact on daily lives. The uneven occupation of life by art is not exactly what avant-gardes had in mind. Yet nobody would doubt that it is quite effective. A fractured map is created which features varying degrees of occupational intensity. These zones are very much shut off from one another, yet interlocked and interdependent. It is a check-pointed system, complete with gate keepers, access levels and close management of movement and information. Its architecture is astonishingly complex.

One example of this complicated topology is the figure of the intern (in a museum, a gallery or most likely a project). The intern is a prime figure of contemporary occupation. The term intern is linked to internment, confinement and a detention which may be involuntary or voluntary. She is supposed to be on the inside of the system, yet she is excluded from payment. She is inside labour but outside remuneration: stuck in a space that includes the outside and excludes the inside simultaneously.15 As a result she works to sustain her own occupation.

If the origin of artistic autonomy lies in the refusal of the division of labour (and the alienation and subjection going along with it), this refusal has now been integrated into neoliberal modes of production to set free dormant potentials. Thus autonomy has spread to the point where it tipped into a new dominant ideology16 of flexibility and self-entrepreneurship. During this transition, autonomy started acquiring new political meanings, too. Workers, feminist and youth movements of the 1970s started claiming autonomy from labour and the regime of the factory. Capital reacted to this flight by designing its own version of autonomy: the autonomy of capital from workers. This transition has been described in detail by many different theorists in the case of Italy17 departing from the movements of the Autonomia Operaia. The rebellious, autonomous force of those struggles was turned into a catalyst for the capitalist reinvention of labour relations as such. The desire for self-determination was rearticulated as a self-entrepreneurial business model, the hope to overcome alienation was transformed into serial narcissism and over-identification with one’s occupation. Only in this context does it become clear why contemporary occupations that promise an unalienated lifestyle are somehow believed to contain their own gratification. But the relief from alienation they suggest takes on the form of self-oppression, which arguably could be much worse than traditional alienation, which at least exposed subjects to something other than themselves.18

The struggles around autonomy and above all Capital’s response to them are thus deeply ingrained into the transition from work to occupation. As we have seen, this transition is based on the role model of the artist as someone who refuses the division of labour and leads an unalienated lifestyle. This is one of the templates for new occupational forms of life that are all-encompassing, passionate, self-oppressive and narcissistic to the bone.

How then can we salvage life from art as occupation? How can life regain its autonomy from art?

The problem is obvious: if art is occupation; then there is hardly any place to hide from it. There is no way to escape being incessantly linked to the production, consumption or discussion of art, to reproduce or mirror it as life or style, of being forced into the relentless performance of art, self, value, education, life or to prevent the collapse of all these categories into each other. No escape from being drafted into an incessant, stultifying and inflationary circle of reproducing life as art and vice versa. As Robert Smithson once soberly stated: life in a gallery is like fucking in a cemetery. We could add that spreading the gallery into life is even worse: like not fucking anywhere else.

This might be the time to start exploring the third meaning of occupation: the meaning it has taken on in countless squats and takeovers historically. As the occupiers of the New School in 2008 emphasize, this type of occupation tries to intervene in the form of occupational time and space itself, instead of simply blocking and immobilizing a specific area.

‘Occupation mandates the inversion of the standard dimensions of space. Space in an occupation is not merely the container of our bodies, it is a plane of potentiality that has been frozen by the logic of the commodity. In an occupation, one must engage with space topologically, as a strategist, asking: What are its holes, entrances, exits? How can one disalienate it, disidentify it, make it inoperative, communize it?’20

To unfreeze the forces that lie dormant in the petrified spaces of occupation means to rearticulate its uses, to make it non-efficient, non-instrumental, non-intentional, to disable its utility, capacity of being efficient, utilitarian and a tool for social coercion. In short: it means to reclaim its autonomy along the lines of what used to be thought of as artistic autonomy. Now: to free an art space from art as occupation seems a paradoxical task, especially as art spaces have spread way beyond the traditional gallery. But on the other hand it is not too difficult either to imagine how any of these spaces might operate in a non-efficient, non-instrumental and non-productive way either.

One example: an unexplored potential for autonomy unexpectedly lies in the cinematic Black Box in or outside an art space. As artists emptied out the White Cube to reveal its framing and its power, exposing the horror and narcissist spectacle of artistic autonomy running empty – so can we partially oppose its results by using the Black Box. If the White Cube was about highlighting and producing art as sacralised commodity – perhaps the Black Box can help achieve the autonomy of life from art-as-occupation. Because, if we unplug the Black Box and stop any projection, constant visibility and performance cease. The Black Cube becomes a zone of respite. Turn off the lights. No wifi, no context, no show, education, iPhone, discourse, network, distraction. Go there to disengage, uninvolve, deproduce or simply breathe. Nobody can see you: there’s no point in producing yourself as subject/spectacle. A place to sleep, to whisper, sleep again. Play hide and seek. Have sex or prefer not to. Swap files or kisses. Close your eyes. Unperform. Enjoy the autonomy of life from art and its countless derivatives. Of course, this is not going to solve the problem. But at least it provides some quiet to think it through. The result may be quite simple: if art is occupation of life – why don’t we turn around the tables and go occupy its spaces, too?21