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Thesis Info
- LABS ID
- 00368
- Thesis Title
- Human Resources: Artistic Labour and the Limits of Critique in North American and Western European Art of the 1990s
- Author
- Bill Roberts
- E-mail
- billrob AT gmail.com
- 2nd Author
- 3rd Author
- Degree
- PhD
- Year
- 2010
- Number of Pages
- 372
- University
- Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London
- Thesis Supervisor
- Professor Julian Stallabrass
- Supervisor e-mail
- Other Supervisor(s)
- Language(s) of Thesis
- English
- Department / Discipline
- History of Art
- Copyright Ownership
- Bill Roberts
- Languages Familiar to Author
- English
- URL where full thesis can be found
- Keywords
- Contemporary art, artistic labour, technology, 1990s, institutional critique, activism, networked art
- Abstract: 200-500 words
- This thesis examines the strengths and limitations of political critique in North American and Western European art during the 1990s, as these are revealed and refracted through both artistic and critical attention to the forms and conditions of artistic labour. I argue that the weight of significant practices and trends in critical art of the 1990s registers a gradual (tendential rather than total) shift away from a melancholic, recursive focus on the public, democratic ideal of the museum (as the dominant or determinant form of the art institution) as the salient model of artistic critique, amid profound social, art-institutional and technological changes during the decade. Gaining momentum especially towards the millennium, and to a considerable extent laying the foundations for the renewed visibility of diverse socially engaged and activist practices since 2000, the key shift in critical art during the 1990s takes the shape of a gradual expansion or redirection of critical energies towards a more explicitly political, and above all anti-capitalist, arena, following what amounted to the relative eclipse of this by the end of the 1980s. Changes at the levels of art’s form and forms of production are key indexes of this shift, marked by the new prominence of diffuse, collective authorship and the unravelling of the unity of the net-/artwork in emergent activist work. Moving from a ‘context art’ that is heir to the deconstructive ambitions of critical postmodernism, through ‘design art’ and ‘relational art’ currents, to the rise of networked anti-capitalist practices, the thesis pictures the 1990s as a decade during which institutional critique is progressively unsettled by, and squeezed between, the ongoing corporatisation of art institutions, the emergence of the art industry as a sophisticated economy of production, the derealisation of experience in postmodern society, and the rise of a counter-hegemonic network culture.