R O U N D T A B L E

Art AND cLAss strUGGLE

This roundtable considers the relationship between art and class strug-
gle in theoretical, art historical, intellectual-historical, or poetic terms.
It is evident that class struggle continues. 然而, looking back at the
most notable works of social art history from the 1970s, it seems that
the classes in question are different ones today, and that perhaps art no
longer plays the same instrumental role in effecting the worldview of
the ruling class that it once did.

In the 1970s, in an attempt to reformulate the mechanistic or
deterministic views of an earlier generation, Marxist art historians
assumed or invoked ideology as a way of squaring art with class strug-
gle. 拿, 例如, Nicos Hadjinicolau’s defi nition of visual ideology
as “the way in which the formal and thematic elements of a picture are
combined on each specifi c occasion [这样] this combination is a
particular form of the overall ideology of a social class”1 or John Berger’s
assertion that “the art of any period tends to serve the ideological inter-
ests of the ruling class.”2 Visual art, 尤其, seemed to hold a heu-
ristic key capable of revealing and historicizing ideology.

Over the last forty years, Marxist and post-Marxist art historical

Nicos Hadjinicolau, Art History and Class Struggle, 反式. Louise Asmal (伦敦: 冥王星
按, 1978), 95.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (伦敦: Pluto Press, 1978), 95.

https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_a_00302

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approaches have alternately contemplated or acted out the tension
between class struggle and the purportedly totalizing nature of capital-
主义. 考虑, 例如, the call for an aesthetics of cognitive map-
平 (Jameson); the propaedeutic role assigned to art in revealing the
real abstraction of social relations and in questioning the valorization
of immaterial labor under capitalism (Althusser and Sohn-Rethel);
or the formulation of tactical responses to the omnipresence of surveil-
lance technology that purports to leave nothing unseen (Hito Steyerl).
While each of these approaches underscores the different “ways of see-
ing” specific to capitalism, one could argue that they do so at the cost
of a potentially more polemical view of social relations or their bearing
on sense or representation.

We asked participants to submit texts in response to one or more

of the following questions, or to reformulate them as they saw fit: 如果你
have addressed any of the questions described above in your work, 如何
might you summarize your position now or at the time that you wrote
your previous work? What do we need to know about “art” or “class
struggle” before considering their relation to one another? Could you
describe a specific work or text that might serve as an illustration of
class struggle or as an exploration of the problem of representing it?
Let us say that visual art, broadly speaking, does express the worldview
of the dominant class. What kind of art then expresses the worldview
的, 说, hedge fund managers? Does the dialectic of the visible and invis-
ible still hold for conceptual and post-conceptual art? What alternative
critical apparatus would you propose, since neither Lenin nor John
William Cooke seemed to care much for art. Why should we?

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artmargins 10:3

jacQUes lezra

University of california, riverside

I’m standing in front of Velázquez’s Las hilanderas, o la fábula de
Aracne, from roughly 1657, as I have so many times before. A motley
assortment of interpretations is before me, 也: iconographic, formal,
historicist. I find war and classes: Arachne against Athena; humans and
gods; Jupiter and Europa; the purchasing class and the weaving class,
in the twinned spaces of the tapestry factory of Santa Isabel, in Madrid;
the clash between the line drawn by the gazes that draw me in or draw
me to the different spaces (the woman in the middle plane looking
出去; the bull’s one eye, reaching out from the tapestry) and the spiral
that winds from the uncarded wool hanging, massive, unformed, 在
the wall; through the whirl of the thread’s production in the first plane;
up the steps and into the matter of the tapestries that form the canvas’s
third plane, hung on the virtual plane, the canvas, that’s both a fourth,
receding plane and the material support for the whole fraught architec-
真实. (Icons: the spinning wheel; the ladder; circle/line).

Today my eyes come back to the blank wheel in motion almost on

the plane of the canvas.

Let’s translate Marx’s famous proposition that “The ideas of the
ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” Our translations of this
sentence from The German Ideology sound very much like restatements,
and go like this: “The aesthetic of the ruling class is in every epoch the
ruling aesthetic” and “The art most valued is in every epoch the art of
the ruling class,” by which we mean “the art valued by the ruling class.”

Our translations run into four classes of problems.

1. Topological. To what extent and in what way is the aesthetic a
subset of the class of ideas? Can we in fact substitute one in place of
另一个, and deposit thought about “art” or “the aesthetic” into the
place occupied by “the idea”? Marx himself does not use the term idea,
Idee, but Gedanke or Gedanken, “thought or thoughts.” A proper version
would then be: “In every epoch, the dominant thoughts or ‘thinkings’ or
thought products are the thought products of the dominant class.” The
distinction is an important one. An idea is an object of thought; it is pro-
duced as such, with the name idea, by philosophers who borrow their

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dominance over other producers of thought from the qualities
with which they endow the idea—a hieratic eminence, permanence,
abstraction, capaciousness. The idea of the philosopher shines with
light borrowed from the “idea” that the philosophers spin into the nor-
mal form of thought. Differently put: philosophers, famously charged
with just interpreting the world, install a regime of ideas preponder-
ant over thought. They create an ideal class of idea producers whose
“ideas”—foremost the idea of class or a class—are simultaneously more
capacious, more capable of describing the world, and accessible only
through the sovereign disposition, in the domain of thinking, of that
class of thoughts, and in the world of disciplinary and institutional rela-
系统蒸发散, of the faculty of philosophers who produce and protect them.

Our first class of problems, 然后, flows from the unsettled status
of terms and their relations: ideas, thoughts, 班级, 艺术, and aesthetics. 什么
relations these terms bear to one another, and what relationships of
包容性, extension, and order of generality might be implied when we
make a statement concerning “the dominant aesthetic” or “the art of the
dominant class”—these questions are, for the moment, left unaddressed.

2. Conceptual. What value do we assign the possessive—the
figure of ownership, of private possession: “of the ruling class”? 什么
does it mean for a class to possess ideas or an aesthetic? (If a class is
defined by the ideas it “possesses,” can it be said to be distinct from
those possessions?) Do we imagine possession on the model—accord-
ing to the diagram—of what I myself can own, under specific circum-
立场, according to a socioeconomic frame that associates my possess-
ing of this or that, 说, with my individual standing? (Icon: McPherson.)
The first recorded owner of Las hilanderas was Pedro de Arce.

3. Philological. Take the German for class, Klasse. 它以前如何,
what did it mean, and for whom, at the time when Marx was writing The
German Ideology? Klasse covers the meanings of “group,” “race,” “type,”
“a collection of similarly aged schoolchildren,” and in a naive sense, A
“set.” It’s to be distinguished from Stand, an “estate” or “order”; it’s not
a “caste.” To use Klasse for a group with similar economic interests, 西米-
larly emplaced in the circuit of extraction-production-distribution and
consumption and aware of that emplacement, involves doing work with
and on the term, as well as on terms contingent on it. What’s the nature
of that work? What do we say about the class of people or of institutions,
or of people working in institutions, who perform this work?

100

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artmargins 10:3

4. Historical, historicist. How has the semantic drift of idea,
possession, 想法, aesthetic, class into today’s settings informed the way
I understand the work these words did then? (“Today’s settings”—For
whom? 在哪里? Whose “day,” and what, 毕竟, is a “day” for you and
我, 今天? Icon: workday)

A diagrammatic imaginary shapes the field on which our four
problems braid. When I say, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every
epoch the ruling ideas,” or in my version, “The aesthetic of the ruling
class is in every epoch the ruling aesthetic,” I make sharp enough dis-
tinctions between the regions of this diagrammatic space.

Think of the line that runs from Euler to Boole and Venn. A col-
lection of elements forming a class, a set, is figured in the following
方式. (Icon: “elements”—the members of a class, proletariat, bourgeoi-
sie; accountable, substantially self-identical, “possessing” shared defini-
tive properties; distinct from nonmembers of the class or members
of other classes who don’t “possess” those properties, with whom they
can enter into conflict).

The naïve diagrammatic imaginary of the line-set-field is the ver-

nacular space in which classes take shape for us, stand before each
其他, cross or fail to meet, enter into struggle. Here is Venn’s expanded
桌子:

“Comparative Table of logical Propositions,” illustrated in John Venn,

symbolic logic (london: Macmillan, 1881), 30.

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101

The most substantial transformation in the concept of class, 和
in the concept of concept, is a transformation of the diagram. It’s due
to Bourdieu and Wittgenstein, and follows Velázquez’s counter-diagram.
(Icon: Cantor vs. Boole; incompleteness; 维特根斯坦, ostension and
“blur” in Philosophical Investigations § 71: “The concept ‘game’ is a
concept with blurred edges [mit verschwommenen Rändern]—‘But is a
blurred concept a concept at all?’—Is an indistinct [unscharfer] photo-
graph a picture of a person at all? . . . Frege compares a concept to an
area and says that an area with vague boundaries [unklar begrenzt] 能-
not be called an area at all . . . But is it senseless to say: ‘Stand roughly
there’?”1 But also, from Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour: “What then
is the essential nature of cloudiness [Trüben, Trübe—cognate to French
trouble; cloudiness, tarnish, murkiness; 斗争, 战争]? For red or yellow
transparent things are not cloudy; white is trübe. Is trüb that which con-
ceals [verschleiert: what veils] 形式, and conceals forms because it oblit-
erates light and shadow?”2 Bourdieu: “In the reality of the social world,
there are no more clear-cut boundaries, no more absolute breaks, 比
there are in the physical world. The boundaries between theoretical
类 . . . are similar . . . to the boundaries of a cloud or a forest. 这些
boundaries can thus be conceived of as lines or as imaginary planes,
such that the density . . . is higher on the one side and lower on the
其他 . . . [实际上, a more appropriate image would be that of a flame
whose edges are in constant movement, oscillating around a line or
surface].”3) A flame: the destruction of the line and the signature of the
point-field. Here Velázquez’s spinner spins the figure of labor-time that
distinguishes the painting’s first plane from the arrested times of the
second and third planes. (And the fourth plane?) At the side of the figure
here is a possible reference: Stradano’s Penelope at the Loom, 中央
tondo on the ceiling of the Sala di Penelope, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.
Note the immobile, stationary spokes, the instantaneous wheel.

The spinning wheel, the moving point. At every moment, 这
area designated by the line the spinning point forms is both open and
shut—troubled, rough, unclear, indistinct as to its edge. Materialization

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe (牛津: 布莱克威尔,
1999), 14.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, 编辑. G.E.M. Anscombe, tr. Linda L. McAlister and
Margarete Schättle (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 15.
Pierre Bourdieu, “What Makes a Social Class? On The Theoretical and Practical Existence Of
Groups,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 32 (1987: 1-17), 13.

102

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artmargins 10:3

diego Velázquez. las hilanderas, o la fábula

Giorgio Vasari and Giovanni stradano.

de aracne, 之间 1655 和 1660. 油

Penelope at the loom, surrounded by

on canvas, 220 × 289 厘米. Madrid, Museo

river Gods, 1561–62. Oil on wood.

nacional del Prado. © Museo nacional del

Florence, Museo di Palazzo Vecchio.

Prado. Image courtesy of Museo nacional

del Prado.

courtesy of Museo di Palazzo Vecchio.

of labor-time upon the dialectic between the point of, 作为, the spinning
edge and the destruction of the spokes of the wheel. Production of the
氧, not as the diagrammatic figure of enclosure but as the troubled and
troubling motion of a point in time, an index of labor-time. The empty
container of the spinning wheel balanced upon a set of spokes, ele-
ments supporting the trace of the point in motion, labor-time erasing
the linear supports of its imaginary production.

No class can “dominate” without a diagram. The O of the spinning

wheel: the trouble of the counter-diagram, its struggle, its war—the
temporalization, as labor-time, of the production of class’s edge. (Icon:
thought-product as color field; “field” unpossessed; “possession” of the
quality “belongs to the field,” predicable-unpredictable of substance-
elements “in” the field.)

Jacques Lezra teaches in the department of hispanic studies at the University

of california, riverside. his publications include República salvaje: De la naturaleza

de las cosas (2020), On the Nature of Marx’s Things: Translation as Necrophilology

(2018), Untranslating Machines: A Genealogy for the Ends of Global Thought

(2017), and “Contra todos los fueros de la muerte”: El suceso cervantino (2016).

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103

josé maría dUrán

文化学习, hfm hanns eisler, berlin

I am interested in works that predicate class positions, and my
analysis focuses on art from the angle of the social causal bond in
a dia lectical manner, so that the work is seen as a complex structure
of determinations.

The line of thought that interests me begins with the linguist
and literary theorist Valentin Voloshinov (today largely neglected),
travels through the work of Louis Althusser and Pierre Macherey
(both poorly understood), and is articulated in the art historical
analyses of Nicos Hadjinicolau and Michael Camille.1 All these
authors understand art as an ideological practice, part of the ideologi-
cal creativity of society. Their analyses focus on the process of social
exchange—the dialectical interactions with the material basis that
occur in the work of art—because art reworks, reproduces, reflects,
or alludes to reality, even as it does this through the lenses of an
artistic medium that has its own history and laws, implying a process
of emergent qualitative transformation rather than mechanical cau-
站. This thinking is crucial for the materialist analysis of art, 但
it has been misrepresented and thought of as deterministic by main-
stream art historians who are ignorant of the important philosophi-
cal debates that run in the background of notions such as practice,
反射, ideology, 和班级. When the work of art is considered as
the playing field of the subject (the distinctive character of the bour-
geois legal ideology), then practice is transformed into creation and
ideology becomes a worldview, while class is a fiction. Postmodern
debates have complicated things even more, as in the theoretical
framework that Grant Kester has put forward by the name of “dialog-
ical art practices,” favoring flexible identities that strive for reconcilia-

I have outlined the similarities between Voloshinov’s and Althusser’s understanding
of the relation between art and ideology in José María Durán, “Arte, ideología y materia-
lismo en Valentin Voloshinov, Bertolt Brecht y Louis Althusser,” Demarcaciones: Revista
Latinoméricana de Estudios Althusserianos 6 (可能 2018), http://revistademarcaciones.cl
/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/12.-Dura%CC%81n.pdf. On Hadjinicolau, see José María
Durán, Hacia una crítica de la economía política del arte (Madrid: Plaza y Valdés, 2008), 19–31.

104

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artmargins 10:3

的. Kester’s move has had the effect of displacing class struggle,
moving it out of the analysis.2

Let’s think of art as a device that projects an image of reality,
but a distorted one, as in Marx’s well-known metaphor of the camera
obscura. At the time Marx wrote the famous line deploying this meta-
phor in The German Ideology, the camera obscura was a fashionable
device and, as W. J. 时间. Mitchell has suggested,3 Marx could not have
ignored the fact that the camera obscura was used as a leisure item by
the proprietary classes and well-to-do bourgeois, who enjoyed the repre-
sentation it produced of their wealth and who fell into the illusion that
this representation was fact-based. The pictures weren’t false per se, 但
as Marx pointed out, the real-life processes, the social relations upon
which the wealth rested, were left out of the picture. What the camera
obscura did was fix the idea that the well-to-do classes had about their
wealth. The device worked as a mirror, in which a false consciousness
was reflected; we could go so far as to say that the image was the pro-
duction of such false consciousness. 今天, Instagram can be seen as
a mirror-device for the production of false consciousness too. 但, 什么
if we go beyond appearances and look at what does not come into view,
acknowledging that the representation of wealth has turned a blind eye
to the social relations that make wealth possible? Fred Wilson did so
in his installation Mining the Museum (Maryland Historical Society,
巴尔的摩, 1992), by arranging a showcase, Metalwork 1973–1880,
where silverware was displayed alongside shackles, bringing together
two material witnesses of history that are rarely exhibited in connection.
This element of class struggle, of economic and political violence, 是
also present in Regina José Galindo’s use of her own skin and gender;
in how Minerva Cuevas thematizes corporations and borders; or in the
way Daniela Ortiz addresses racism, xenophobia, and colonialism. 什么
follows from all these examples is an analysis of the work of art in all its
复杂, a view of art as space for differently accentuated voices, 一个
arena of class struggle.

José María Durán, “Brecht, Dialectics and Dialogical Art: An Engagement with Contem-
porary Art Practices,” in Philosophizing Brecht: Critical Readings on Art, 意识, Social
Theory and Performance, 编辑. Norman Roessler and Anthony Squiers (Leiden and Boston:
Brill and Rodopi, 2019), 145–78.
瓦. J. 时间. 米切尔, Iconology: 图像, Text, Ideology (芝加哥: 芝加哥大学出版社,
1986).

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105

As Erik O. Wright has pointed out,4 the most basic criterion for the
Marxist tradition of class analysis is material interests. Material interests
are related to social positions, and the class positions of artists within
the system of art have been for the most part neglected by a scholarship
dominated by a neoclassical bias and by a sociology à la Bourdieu that
has been stripped of class struggle.5 One of my favorite artists who has
established class positions in her work is Mierle L. Ukeles, because her
work points to two fundamental ideas in this respect: class solidarity
and contributive justice.6

最后, I would further mention two works, not of contemporary
visual art but mainstream film masterpieces, where the class positions
of cultural workers come to the fore and are expressed within a complex
set of ideologies encompassing gender, 性别, 和比赛. The films I have
in mind are Dirty Dancing (1987) and Staying Alive (1983). Take the final
dance in Dirty Dancing (“(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life”), when Patrick
Swayze lifts Jennifer Grey off the ground: it’s as if we see a powerful
image of the basis-superstructure metaphor, implying the cultural work-
er’s acceptance of the need to support the economic edifice embedded
in hierarchical class divisions. In Staying Alive, after having experienced
firsthand the miseries of the cultural industry, John Travolta figures out
with whom he is going to side: he positions himself alongside his own
class and struts with pride, walking the streets of downtown New York
after having freed himself from the golden chains of the art system. 在
我的看法, these are two powerful images of class struggle.

José María Durán teaches in the department of cultural studies at the hochschule

für musik hanns eisler in berlin. he is the author of Iconoclasia, historia del arte y

lucha de clases (2009), La crítica de la economía política del arte (2015), and sev-

eral articles on the political economy of art, including “artistic labour as a Form

of class solidarity and contributive justice: revisiting mierle laderman Ukeles’s

work” (2019).

4
5
6

Erik Olin Wright, Understanding Class (伦敦: Verso, 2015).
José María Durán, La crítica de la economía política del arte (Murcia, 西班牙: CENDEAC, 2015).
José María Durán, “Artistic Labour as a Form of Class Solidarity and Contributive Justice:
Revisiting Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Work,” Parse 9 (春天 2019), https://parsejournal
.com/article/artistic-labour-as-a-form-of-class-solidarity-and-contributive-justice-revisiting
-mierle-laderman-ukeless-work/.

106

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artmargins 10:3

nico baUmbach

columbia University

I will start with art. I do not mind the word art, provided that we insist
that art is not limited to what you find in galleries or museums. I doubt
I have anything of interest to add about the “art world” and its contradic-
tory relation to finance capitalism—as both a perversely exaggerated
manifestation of finance capitalism and the place where it is often most
explicitly critiqued. I’d tentatively note that if the art world is interesting
根本不, it is interesting to the extent that it exploits this contradiction and
becomes a site for experimenting with what work and “a work” might
mean in relation to the idea of value.

In my own writing I have primarily focused on cinema and the
ways it has been understood as political. Cinema poses its own version
of the contradiction between the relation to capitalism and the explicit
politics of an art form—the more an art is mass democratic, 可用的
to everyone, the more it is imbricated with the commodity form, 和
the more it is “likely to respond to the aspirations of big capital,“ 作为
Fernando Solanas stated in 1969.1 These contradictions give the theo-
rist something to do—for instance, by finding the cracks or fissures
where the film écriture undermines the explicit ideology of John Ford’s
Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), or by revealing the unconscious class allegory
in Dog Day Afternoon (1975).2 另一方面, the more cinema
exposes its own devices and critiques dominant ideologies, the more
it is restricted to educated elites and associated with cultural capital.
在这种情况下, the theorist enjoys a close proximity to the filmmaker by
becoming the latter’s explicator, while the filmmaker in turn must
instrumentalize his or her work to make it legible as counter-cinema.
The discipline of film studies has often been keen to disavow the
category of art or to restrict that category to a certain genre, so-called
“art cinema.” Art here is code for bourgeois. But I remain attracted to

Quoted in Paul Willemen, “The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections,“ 在
New Latin American Cinema, 卷. 1: Theories, Practices, and Transcontinental Articulations,
编辑. Michael T. 马丁 (底特律, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 229.
See “Cahiers du Cinéma, John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln: A Collective Text by the Editors of
Cahiers du Cinéma,” Screen 13, 不. 3 (秋天 1972): 5–44, and Fredric Jameson, “Class
and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film,” College
英语 38, 不. 8 (1977): 843–59.

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107

Walter Benjamin’s suggestion—with some ambivalence—that the issue
is not whether film is an art but whether it is an emblem for a transfor-
mation of the very idea of art to one that is essentially democratic. 后
全部, for all the attempts to bring Benjamin into the digital age, nobody
seems quite able to articulate what that new, more egalitarian concep-
tion of art might be without devolving into a TED talk fantasy about par-
ticipatory culture that is fully in line with the ideology of Silicon Valley.
The question is how to maintain a concept of art as distinct from infor-
mation or communication that, as Benjamin put it, everyone has a
claim on.

Class struggle: I do think it is important that we do not forget to
think of class in terms of struggle, 也就是说, as not being predeter-
mined or subject to inexorable laws of evolution. But there are two sides
to class struggle: the attempt to maintain the relations of production
and the attempt to abolish them. 例如, what is being called
“neoliberalism,” the ideology that has justified the global economy of
the 21st century, is not the elimination of regulations or the handing
over of everything to the market, but rather an aggressive form of class
warfare effectively designed to redistribute income upward, 从
poor to the rich.

I would introduce two other words into the discussion, not to
replace class struggle, but to supplement or interpret that term. 这些
words are equality and contingency. The goal of class struggle from the
point of view of the proletariat is the elimination of class, or to use
another word, 平等. What is the relation between art and equality?
这里, I think contingency is fundamental. Art cannot provide the blue-
print for revolution; 然而, it can say, “this world is not the only pos-
sible one.” Art, it seems to me, should not be put only in the service of
reminding us of the fact of class stratification, of pointing to it and rein-
forcing its inevitability. If art can, in its own way, participate in class
斗争, then this happens through suspending class hierarchies and
inscribing a precarious form of equality. The problems with what I have
just said will seem obvious: it is a bourgeois privilege to imagine that art
somehow is able to access a realm of experience outside of class. 什么
is the difference between suspending and disavowing or repressing?
This is not an easy question, but artworks are where we might look for
an answer.

There is no necessary relation between art and class struggle. 但
at the risk of indulging a paradox, I believe that this lack of a necessary

108

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artmargins 10:3

relation is fundamental to how art relates to class struggle. For while
it seems obvious that art cannot be completely dissociated from class
斗争, 同时, the relationship between the two cannot
be immediate. 换句话说, art cannot effectively contribute to class
struggle merely by signaling commitment to the critique of capitalism
or by showing awareness of exploitation or empathy for the oppressed.
Critique and knowledge are not themselves art. If art means anything
根本不, it means something not reducible to an intended message.
“Empathy machines” are the opposite of art. They are the business
model of social-media platforms and require resentment as the base
affect for which empathy (feeling/sharing the other’s resentment) 是
posited as the antidote.

Let’s be crude about this: what bad art does is negate the experience

of contingency, make class not into a struggle but into something inevi-
table and insurmountable. This is why art that explicitly identifies as
anticapitalist may be just as reactionary as art that identifies as apoliti-
卡尔. What good art makes possible is an experience of the contingency
of class relations, or of all relations. In the phrase art and class struggle,
the most difficult word may be the and. If art can do anything, its power
relates to this question of the and—constructing a different way of
understanding how art and class struggle might be linked.

Nico Baumbach teaches film and media studies at columbia University. he is the

author of Cinema/Politics/Philosophy (2019).

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109

steven marsh

University of illinois at chicago

这 1974 Portuguese Revolution was both the culmination of the
global upsurge in political militancy from the mid-1960s to the mid-
1970s and a direct consequence of the success of national liberation
movements that led to the independence of Portugal’s African colonies
in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. This revolution also coin-
cided with the rise of Third Cinema and other forms of committed film-
制作. The events in Portugal between 1974 和 1977 were filmed live
by multiple leftist filmmakers from elsewhere who flocked to Portugal
after the fall of the dictatorship. Glauber Rocha, Robert Kramer, 和
Thomas Harlan, 除其他外, produced a body of work that revealed
class struggle in action, the euphoria of the revolutionary process, 和
that also posed questions regarding the politics of representation itself
(both political and filmic). Harlan’s Terra Bela (1977), probably the most
celebrated film to emerge from the revolutionary period, documented
farmworkers’ occupation of an estate belonging to an aristocratic family
in a preemptive strike for agrarian reform, in collaboration with the res-
idents of nearby villages in the Ribatejo region.

I want to reflect on the degree to which this cinema has left its trace

on contemporary filmmaking in Portugal, a country where bourgeois
democracy eventually defeated the revolution and laid the groundwork
for the current neoliberal order. Portugal today has some of the world’s
most interesting cineasts currently at work—most notably Pedro Costa,
Rita Azevedo Gomes, and Miguel Gomes, but there are many others.
Contemporary Portuguese filmmakers, I suggest, are not any less politi-
cal or critical than their predecessors. 然而, the times, the context,
and above all else, the political climate—and with it, the balance of class
forces—have changed; 的确, it is that taut and complex relation to the
现在, to the contemporary, that makes the current filmmakers’ politics
interesting. These two generations of filmmakers have engaged in a discor-
dant and disconcerting dialogue marked by the distortions of time and dis-
坦斯, between the then and the now, between what Rancière has called the
“here and elsewhere”: a sense of the untimely, marked by displacement.1

Jacques Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema, 反式. John Howe (伦敦: Verso, 2014), 136.

110

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artmargins 10:3

At least two elements intensify this dialogue. The first is the common
interest and importance attributed to the material elements of filmmaking
and the way the films disrupt teleological narrative, showing a concern for
the politics of the image itself. The second is a disputed concept of place
and the aura that surrounds it.

Linha vermelha/Red Line (dir. José Filipe Costa, 2012) revisited
Harlan’s film Terra Bela shortly after the German director’s death in
2010. In a series of interviews with some of the surviving protagonists
of the occupation and with members of the original crew of Terra Bela,
the thesis of the new film—sympathetic to its subject matter—is that
Harlan sought to stage-manage the dramatic moments of the occupa-
tion and exaggerate the revolutionary message of the film itself. Roberto
Perpignani, who edited Terra Bela, recognizes these manipulations and
refers to the “power of the image.” Elsewhere José Costa has supple-
mented his film with an essay tellingly titled “When Cinema Forges
the Event: The Case of Torre Bela.”2 Forty years later, the heady efferves-
cence of the films of the revolution has given way to a more muted, 子-
tle, less combative, yet still explicitly political cinema. What José Filipe
Costa identifies as the analog era’s potentially tendentious editing-room
practices continue in our own digital age.

If Terra Bela became an iconic site of revolutionary fervor thanks
to Harlan’s film, today’s Portuguese filmmakers tend toward a poetics
of place. Tarrafal, the location of the notorious concentration camp on
the island of Santiago in the Cabo Verde archipelago, where the Salazar
regime sent its political opponents to their death, haunts the cinema of
another director, Pedro Costa, in its focus on marginalized, immigrant
workers from Cabo Verde and on white drug addicts in the slums of
里斯本. The prison is a constant, generally unspoken presence that con-
denses particularly in the figure of Ventura, who appears to a lesser or
greater extent in all the films shot in Fontainhas, a poverty-stricken
Lisbon neighborhood, prior to its demolition. Pedro Costa has followed
a spiraling trajectory since his second feature, Casa de lava (1994), 哪个
was haunted by the secondary presence of Edith, a white woman who
moved to Tarrafal to be near her imprisoned lover, who would die in his
转动. Imbued with historical nuance, this feature marks the point from
which Costa’s films focus on dwelling, 地方, displacement, 和
transitory, as well as on the methodology of film itself. Not long after,

“When Cinema Forges the Event: The Case of Torre Bela,” Third Text 25, 不. 1 (2011): 105–116.

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111

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susana de sousa dias. Fordlandia malaise. 2019. Film still.

disappointed with the results of using intrusive large-scale sets with
professional crews and actors, Pedro Costa reassessed his filmmaker
实践. After the first of his Fontainhas films (Ossos/Bones, 1997),
he opted to use smaller digital cameras and minimal sound equip-
蒙特. His dense 2007 short film Tarrafal is exemplary of this different
方法. With the film’s stories of ghostly mythic bloodsucking fig-
ures—corollaries of the state—its sense of exile and longing, 和
harsh realities of racist violence, prison, and expulsion, 导演
records a group of Cabo Verdeans—among them Ventura—in and
around a hut on the outskirts of Lisbon. Shifting from dark to light,
interior to exterior, life to death, via a series of letters or messages, 这
film ends with a shot of a deportation notice pinned to a wall. Amid a
constant sense of dislocation and swirl, the concentration camp goes
unmentioned, yet its presence is inescapably embedded in the title
and the allusiveness of the filmic text.

A contemporary of both Costas, Susana de Sousa Dias, has directed

documentaries that address the Salazarist repression and how to repre-
sent it.3 Her early films use archive material, and particularly still
photography, to detail the testimony of political prisoners from the dic-
tatorship. 相比之下, her most recent work, like Pedro Costa’s Tarrafal,
combines 21st-century technology with mythical narrative in ways that

Her work includes Naturaleza morta/Still Life (2005), 48 (2010), and Luz obscura/Obscure
Light (2017).

112

artmargins 10:3

complicate memory. Shot in Brazil, Fordlandia malaise (2019) focuses
on an abandoned settlement—a company town and corporate utopia—
carved out in 1927 by Henry Ford on the banks of the Tapajos River
in the Amazon rainforest, to obtain rubber directly from the source
and thus break the British monopoly. Simultaneous with the visual
images—a mixture of archival material and drone footage of the
denuded current landscape—the voice-over narration recounts the
ancestral myths of the indigenous people of the region, blending them
with the reminiscences of local people. The disjunction between voice
and image points to the malaise of the film’s title; it is a spectral investi-
gation of neocolonialism, 首都, and the violence of extraction and
开发.

Steven Marsh teaches spanish and Portuguese film in the department of hispanic

& italian studies at the University of illinois at chicago. he is the author of several

出版物, including Spanish Cinema against Itself: Cosmopolitanism, Experi

心理状态, and Militancy (2020). marsh is currently preparing a book on judicial

politics in contemporary spain and a series of essays on spanish and Portuguese

cinema.

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113

alberto toscano

simon Fraser University, vancouver

This class has nothing to safeguard for itself.

To the contrary, any individual safeguard it has to destroy.

—Bertolt Brecht1

The specter of class haunts our present, but in ways no communist
would deem fit to applaud. Long after the cynical grandchildren of the
Second International promoted the euthanasia of social antagonism
for the sake of glossy vistas of financialized affluence, and long after
myriad farewells to the proletariat were sung in the halls of academia,
that apparent industrial anachronism, the working class, has made a
number of grotesque and spectacular returns.

国家的, 白色的, male; this is a class whose discursive prominence
is proportional to the ambiguity of its referent. Propped up by the dubi-
ous objectivity of marketing and polling taxonomies—such as those
that divide the British body politic into ABC1 and C2DE—it is a potent
fantasy of (受到威胁) identity and belonging, emphatically not a rela-
tion to the apparatuses of production, 开发, and accumulation
(which would reveal a proletariat neither predominantly national, 也不
male, nor white). Labor and production have returned as objects of
nostalgic ressentiment: the base as the dream of the superstructure.

Far from amounting to a betrayal of an unsullied history of con-
flict and emancipation, the reactionary trope of the abandoned work-
ing class is a legacy of the capture, 一体化, and promotion of class
as a crucial operator in the workings of the national-social state, 谁的
reality and representation continues to shape and constrain our pres-
耳鼻喉科. It is not simply that, as Marx famously avowed, class was a prod-
uct of bourgeois historiography and political economy; a defense of the
working class can very well be articulated in exclusionary and reaction-
ary terms, a fact that is not properly accounted for by the idea of a
“betrayal” of some naturally progressive impulse—what Leo Lowenthal

Bertolt Brecht, “The Manifesto,” trans. Darko Suvin, Socialism and Democracy 16, 不. 1
(2002): 9.

114

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artmargins 10:3

once called “the myth of the spontaneous and creative forces of the
exploited.”2

The contradictory, internally antagonistic history of the working

class is not just a story of solidarity against the odds, triumphs of disci-
满的, Sisyphean efforts to civilize capital, and epic insurgencies to ter-
minate it; it is also a record of “hate strikes” for racially exclusive trade
unions, passionate attachments to empire, chauvinism bolstered by ide-
ologies of labor, anti-immigrant demands for a national preference in
the labor market, and fascism taking on the mantle of the “proletarian
nation.”

It is the latter history that we find indicted in Lenin’s fulminations
against social imperialism and the labor aristocracy, in Du Bois’s endur-
ing diagnosis of the psychological wages of whiteness, in radical and
third world feminisms agitating for wages for housework and revealing
the intimate bonds between patriarchy, 种族主义, and capital. Class is not
just a name for social and politi-
cal division; it must itself be
分为, its historical fault lines
traced, its ethical ruptures
identified.

One precious clue for such a

division can be drawn from a
footnote to Walter Benjamin’s
inexhaustibly influential essay
on the artwork in the epoch of its
reproducibility. Chiming with,
while innovating upon, com-
munist identification of the petty
bourgeoisie as a key conduit for
the politics of fascism, 本杰明
operates a détournement of anti-
socialist theories of the crowd to
argue that it is not the proletar-
iat, the lumpen, or the poor who

John Heartfield. Mimikry, 1934. rotogravure.

The Metropolitan Museum of art, new york City.

Leo Lowenthal, “Letter to Theodor W. Adorno, 13 October 1944,” in Critical Theory and
Frankfurt Theorists: Lectures–Correspondence–Conversations (New Brunswick, 新泽西州: Transaction,
1989), 132.

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115

make up the modern crowd, but a fearful, reactive, compact grouping
best captured in the figure of the petty bourgeoisie. As Benjamin
observes:

The mass [or crowd] as an impenetrable, compact entity, 哪个
Le Bon and others have made the subject of their “mass psychol-
ogy” is that of the petty bourgeoisie. The petty bourgeoisie is not a
班级; it is in fact only a mass. And the greater the pressure acting
on it between the two antagonistic classes of the bourgeoisie and
the proletariat, the more compact it becomes. In this mass, 这
emotional element described in mass psychology is indeed a deter-
mining factor. . . . Demonstrations by the compact mass thus
always have a panicked quality—whether they give vent to war
fever, hatred of Jews, or the instinct for self-preservation.3

In his incisive 2019 book Class, Andrea Cavalletti has glossed Benjamin
in the following terms:

When there is no solidarity or consciousness, there is no class;
there is only the petty-bourgeois mass, with its well-behaved psy-
chology. . . . The petty bourgeoisie is not, as Benjamin teaches us,
a class: it is only a compressed mass between the rich bourgeoisie
and the proletariat. From this non-class, every fascism will produce
its “people,” masking this mere compression in the archaic and
inseparable names of community, fatherland, 工作, 血, leader.4

Benjamin’s suggestion that class consciousness should be under-

stood in terms of a loosening rather than a becoming compact, 然后
class solidarity is pitted against identity and belonging corroborates
Adorno’s words of praise in his otherwise sharply critical comments to
his friend’s work in progress on Baudelaire and the Paris Arcades: “your
few sentences about the disintegration of the proletariat as ‘masses’ are
among the profoundest and most powerful statements of political the-
ory that I have encountered since I read [Lenin’s] State and Revolution.”5

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (第二
Version),” in Selected Writings, 体积 3, 1935–1938, 编辑. Howard Eiland and Michael W.
Jennings (剑桥, 嘛: 贝尔纳普出版社, 2002), 129.
Andrea Cavalletti, 班级, 编辑. Alberto Toscano, 反式. Elisa Fiaccadori (Calcutta: Seagull
图书, 2019), 55.
Letter of March 18, 1936 (sent from London): Theodor W. Adorno, “Letters to Walter
本杰明,” in Aesthetics and Politics, 编辑. Ernst Bloch (伦敦: New Left Books, 1977), 126.

116

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artmargins 10:3

To cleave any conception of the proletariat away from the petty psychol-
ogy of the masses is especially vital when our political imaginaries,
across the spectrum, are saturated by strange replicas and refractions
of a “classical” class struggle that abides as an object of nostalgic desire
and stubborn misrecognition. Class politics as the practical negation of
mass psychology: this horizon remains profoundly, painfully contempo-
rary. Benjamin once famously spoke of making concepts “completely
useless for the purposes of fascism.”6 Our current moment has made
it urgent to carry out this operation for class, 也.

Alberto Toscano teaches in the school of communication at simon Fraser Univer-

城市, and the department of sociology at Goldsmiths, University of london. 他是

the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (2017, 2nd 版。) 和, with jeff

Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (2015). he is a member of the editorial board

of Historical Materialism.

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117

本杰明, “The Work of Art,” 102.

marina vishmidt

Goldsmiths, University of london

It is important to focus on labor in the field of art, however labor is
defined, so as to counter mystifications of art as genius, 以及
question neoliberal ideas about human capital in creative industries.
The analysis of labor in art should be undertaken with a negative
(批判的) 范围, rather than an affirmative one. This goes for labor poli-
tics in general, insofar as they represent one aspect of a revolutionary
orientation toward the present—“revolutionary” in the sense of taking
up the perspective of the overcoming of this present. This is no doubt
a both/and question, since organizing around material conditions of
injustice requires affirmative moments for anything like a counter-
vision to the existing order to take root among large groups of people
who are conditioned both professionally and socially to see themselves
as individuals in competition for scarce resources in a “meritocratic”
市场. Labor in art thus instantiates a form of “double consciousness”:
it affirms itself as an organizing tactic in a field that denies it, 但它也
contests itself, as well as the field of art, as an aspect of its speculative
力量. Labor politics in art have to overcome both labor and art, 哪个
is institutionalized as the antimatter of labor.

A lot of the ambiguity regarding artistic labor has to do with the
structure and organization of this labor, with how it is deemed to be so
different from other kinds of labor that it cannot be regulated or provide
a ground for organizing in anything like the same way that other kinds
of labor do. This stems from the assumption that nonartistic labor is
homogeneous, as opposed to the incalculable particularity of artistic
劳动. Yet this is hardly the case when the dominant trends of hyper-
fragmentation and the precarity of contracts and conditions are taken
into account, from the gig economy of food delivery to the gig economy
of academia. These differences are also at the root of the disavowal of
labor in art—hence the super-exploitation of this labor, as in any other
field where collective or structural conditions are mystified or hidden.
The basis of this mystification is the resistance to recognizing the artist
as a subject of labor or including the artist among other cultural work-
ers whose labor is often waged, albeit lightly regulated. Both of these
exclusions are premised on the willful refusal to separate artistic work

118

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artmargins 10:3

from artistic labor—that is, to separate art as an activity from the
working conditions in the field—and thus, 最终, to refuse to see
one’s work and one’s activity as imbricated in power relations along an
axis of responsibility and negation, or in other words, in shared con-
ditions that can serve as a basis for political organization. Common
approaches to art and labor protect the threatened status of the artistic
主观性, which many in the field have been educated and socialized
to believe is exceptional and an escape route from meaningless forms
of employment. This may be the reason why, when artists find them-
selves in labor situations with the humdrum characteristics of service,
standardization, and exploitation that they had sought to escape by
going into the arts, they don’t identify with these situations enough
to do anything about them. This is increasingly true for nonartists, 作为
出色地, and is a mindset very difficult to shed, regardless of the political
contents of any artistic work that is being produced. Because the auton-
omy of art is a social institution with material effects, it is not a personal
belief or sectoral ideology that individuals may or may not choose to
采纳. This is why, 正如我在其他地方建议的那样, the contested auton-
omy of art is structurally similar to the realized autonomy of financial-
ized capital.

We need to distinguish between the labor of the artist as author and

all the other kinds of the labor included in the social materiality of art,
as well as in the technical or institutional conditions for the circulation
of art, from fabrication to exhibition to pedagogy. But then, 问题
of the technical and political composition of art also emerges, 如在
class-composition analysis developed by autonomist Marxism. Briefly,
the technical composition of a field refers to how the field is organized
institutionally and economically, whereas its political composition rep-
resents the potential to reorder or refuse those conditions. 因为
there are many ways to articulate the politics of artistic labor, the act of
“calling out” the invisibility of labor in the field of art, as with any other
injustice or element of structural—and structuring—violence, 不是
useful if this is the extent of the intervention, hoping only to regulate an
intolerable situation. If that approach is limited by its gesturality, 如何-
曾经, the politics of artistic labor do not need to be thus limited when
strategies of transversality can be developed and deepened with other
工人 (horizontally) and with the dominant conditions of accumula-
tion and value in the field (vertically). Both these directions describe
class struggle in the field of art.

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119

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Goldsmiths Justice

for Cleaners campaign,

2018. Photograph

by José da silva.

José da silva.

We find a local example of artistic class struggle in 2018, 在里面
blockade of the opening of the Goldsmiths Centre of Contem porary Art,
as part of the Justice for Workers student and staff solidarity campaign
for the struggle of cleaners to be in-housed by the university. 其他
example can be found in the coordination, however preliminary,
between activist groups campaigning against current manifestations of
the military-industrial complex that supports art institutions, exhibiting
artists, and the workers in art institutions. An example of this would be
the relatively recent case of Warren Kanders and the Whitney Biennial
in New York, which is different again from the somewhat similarly
motivated Sydney Biennale boycott of 2014, called by the exhibiting art-
ists and not initially by a coalition. The need for a coalition seems pretty
basic, but it’s not always clear from a lot of the activism around art insti-
tutions in recent years, including eco-activism, that coordination of dif-
ferent groups is necessarily sought or even desired. Perhaps workers are
tacitly on board with standing aside to let protests take place, 如在
action of the protest group BP or Not BP? at the British Museum, 和
perhaps there are concerns about exposing workers to managerial retri-
bution with too-visible forms of coordination on the part of activist
团体. But most of the time, the conditions and demands of institu-
tional employees, who are frequently super-precarious or indirectly
受雇的, are not part of the campaigns targeting the atrocious invest-
ments and alliances that characterize powerful cultural institutions.
I conclude by raising another, related question: how does the
labor of cultural workers reproduce both the physical and the “social
and moral element” of art institutions? This question could provide

120

artmargins 10:3

a basis for cultural workers to consider coordinating their efforts
with those of socially reproductive workers operating in wholly dif-
ferent coordinates of race, 班级, and social status—namely, 服务
workers whose reproductive labor is not even mystified, just constantly
degraded. Certainly a discussion cannot be had, in a space characterized
by its attention to the ethical, as the art world purports to be, about what
prospects a more material politics have for taking hold if these politics
do not address a wider horizon of injustice. That wider horizon is of
course reflected in the working conditions and represen tational moves
of the art world, as has been abundantly evidenced by unionizing cam-
paigns both pre- and post-COVID in Western art institutions, 也
by these institutions’ paper-thin commitments to racial justice, so often
exposed by the George Floyd rebellion. In the liberal infrastructure of
political thinking, or feeling, 也许, in the institution of art, 劳动
struggles are considered to be narrow and particular rather than to be
instances of a concrete universal. I argue that the generalization of pre-
carity can make these kinds of coordination both more politically obvi-
ous and more materially difficult to realize.

Marina Vishmidt teaches in the media, 通讯, and cultural studies

department at Goldsmiths, University of london. she is the author of Specu

lation as a Mode of Production (2018) and Reproducing Autonomy (2016, 和

Kerstin stakemeier).

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121

Genevieve yUe

the new school, new york

The art establishment is unaccustomed to talking about labor. 尽管
there exists a robust modernist tradition of institutional critique, the kind
of labor activism that follows often remains within the practice of art.
This includes the members of the Art Workers Coalition (1969–71);
Occupy Museums’ Debtfair, a survey of 500 artists’ financial debts; 和
the Gulf Labor Coalition, which advocates for migrant-worker protections
at international museum outposts on Saadiyat Island.1 Calling such activ-
ities “art” or “political action” matters less than the function the work ulti-
mately fulfills. There is room, and need, for both. But passing politics off
as art blunts the demands of the former, dispersing targeted political
energies into an air of vague discontent that is already the currency of so
much contemporary art. More cynically, it is possible to see such postur-
ing as necessary to the critical appraisal and subsequent valuation of art-
作品. In an era where there is no shortage of “political” art, we must ask
what kind of work such a label is doing, and whom it ultimately serves.
Working conditions, 工资, and job security are rarely treated as
artistic concerns, though they intersect with the museum as a workplace.
Labor organizing has occurred in spaces such as the New Museum, 这
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Philadelphia
Museum of Art, to name a few examples. These efforts have been led by
white-collar workers of the type listed in the Arts + All Museums Salary
Transparency spreadsheet from 2019, a crowdsourced database of jobs,
including curator, conservator, 设计师, and archivist, among others.2
Such workers have some training or otherwise have a vested interest in
艺术, but they hardly account for all museum workers.

Less visible, but no less important, are the many workers required

for museums to function, including those we now call “essential” or

I thank Megan Elevado, Lygia Georgiou, Ramiro Gomez, Dana Kopel, Ben Parker, Maida
Rosenstein, and Brett Wallace for their assistance in the preparation of the manuscript.
See Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (伯克利:
University of California Press, 2009).
艺术 + All Museums Salary Transparency, 2019, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets
/u/1/d/14_cn3afoas7NhKvHWaFKqQGkaZS5rvL6DFxzGqXQa6o/htmlview?usp=sharing.

122

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artmargins 10:3

“frontline” workers: cleaners, porters, HVAC systems operators, 当地的
operating engineers, and security staff. 关于 10,000 layoffs
that had occurred at arts institutions since the start of the COVID-19
pandemic at the time of writing, Dana Kopel observes that this number
does not include “people who are rarely considered ‘employees’ to begin
和: temporary, contract, and gig workers.”3 On some level, these lowest-
paid workers accept invisibility as part of their working conditions, 作为
it is their job to tidy inefficiencies and the traces of human presence,
including themselves. They receive the least union protection, 和
many are not even directly employed by museums, but rather subcon-
tracted through private equity firms, which leaves them subject to wage
theft and other forms of exploitation. In this respect, contemporary art
has entirely failed to engage in class struggle on its home turf.

Brett Wallace, who has been documenting organizing efforts on

his “labor notebook” blog Work and Art within and beyond Crisis,
points to the discrepancy between the stated mission of arts institutions
and the disregard for the workers tasked to carry out those principles.
There is an “asymmetry between the museum as a steward of cultural
vision and the labor conditions that are kept behind the scenes.”4
Obstacles to unionization come not only from boards and administra-
托尔斯, but also from more entrenched internal, cultural barriers. 联盟
organization in the arts is stratified by class of work, rather than verti-
cally integrated within an institution. 直流 37 当地的 1502 represents
clerical associates, secretaries, 教育工作者, 技术人员, security guards,
and graphic artists at the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Children’s
Museum, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. 32BJ SEIU, which orga-
nizes cleaners across many industries, represents cleaners and security
at MoMA, whereas white-collar staff are represented by United Auto
Workers 2110.5 当地的 2110 also represents white-collar workers at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Tenement Museum, and the New
Museum. 同时, at MoMA P.S.1. and the Guggenheim, 设施
workers and art handlers have recently gained representation by the
International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) 当地的 30, 但
curators and other administrative staff are not unionized.

4
5

Dana Kopel, “The Museum Does Not Exist,” Ssense, 可能 13, 2020, https://www.ssense
.com/en-us/editorial/culture/the-museum-does-not-exist.
Brett Wallace, phone interview with the author, 十月 10, 2020.
See “MoMA Salary Minimums 2018–2023,” http://www.2110uaw.org/cbas/MoMA_Salary
_Minimums_2018-2023.pdf.

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123

Wallace describes this as “different swim lanes,” where people

of one work class perform their jobs in parallel with those of another.
Under such conditions, it is difficult to foster a frank conversation about
支付, job security, and solidarity. There are also significant differences in
班级, 种族, 性别, and age among museum workers, and many of
these differences map onto classes of work. The current labor organiz-
呃, who hold white-collar positions, are mostly white, 女性, young,
and native English speakers, and there is a significant obstacle of trust
when it comes to cleaners, who are more often older, Spanish-speaking
Latinos. 同时, the association with 20th-century blue-collar fac-
tory workers can be off-putting to intellectual laborers in a museum,
who feel little connection to these working-class unions. This associa-
tion can also be disingenuous, with white workers sometimes engaging
in what Megan Elevado calls “performative solidarity.” Even with the
same title, white and nonwhite workers may occupy distinctly different
class positions, and more often than not, the white worker better absorbs
the financial and emotional shock of being furloughed or laid off.6

Vertical integration is crucial for a social-justice-oriented labor poli-

tics aimed at achieving the maximum benefit for the most vulnerable,
lowest-paid, and—most often—nonwhite workers. This means leverag-
ing the relative power of those with more advantages. It is one thing to
rail against Dana Schutz’s appropriation of Black suffering, 其他
to advocate for expansive healthcare provisions at one’s own institution.
同时, there is promise for horizontal organization. 当地的 30
includes operating engineers at MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, and the American Museum of Natural History, while DC 37 advo-
cates for a coalition of 150,000 municipal workers that includes blue-
collar employees at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

Beyond unionization, some artists have created new social configura-

tions within museum communities. I am interested in work that short-
circuits the commodity valuation of art by redirecting it to those who
would seem least connected to the activity of art within a museum. I have
in mind certain works by Los Angeles artist Ramiro Gomez. 在 2016,
Gomez was commissioned by the Denver Art Museum to create an art-
工作. He developed a series of portraits featuring Lupita, a janitor work-
ing on site. As a painter, Gomez first reached prominence for his
insertion of Black and brown workers into wealthy, manicured spaces.

6 Megan Elevado, phone interview with the author, 十月 2, 2020.

124

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artmargins 10:3

ramiro Gomez.

lupita 1, 2017. Painted

bronze, 60.25 × 45 ×

11.75 inches. denver

art Museum. 图像

courtesy of the artist

and Charlie James

Gallery, los angeles.

Photograph by Michael

Underwood.

His collaboration with Lupita drew directly from his own life; his mother,
a previously undocumented immigrant from Mexico, is a public-school
custodian. Gomez encountered signifi cant institutional pushback, 包括-
ing an objection to the logo painted on Lupita’s uniform. He later learned
the logo was for a janitorial-services vendor that the museum had since
replaced. Lupita, 也, had left her job before her image was hung on the
walls of the gallery she once had swept.

在 2017, Gomez participated in Figure/Ground: Beyond the White
Field, organized by artist Rafa Esparza at the Whitney Biennial. Working
on a scrap of cardboard, Gomez painted a portrait of Esparza’s father,
who was assisting with the installation. Gomez gave the painting to
Esparza’s father, and he continued to make portraits of cleaners at the
museum and then gifted them to the sitters. Gomez’s actions produced
a column of vertical integration, whereby the museum’s existing social
division was revealed and momentarily altered. 之后, when Esparza
asked his father to bring his painting back for the show, his father
refused. This decision, which resisted the museum’s logic of exhibition
and valuation, helped Gomez realize that the “institution is empty.
[反而] it’s all been about us, ourselves, our journey, our struggle.”7