Boom or Bust Card

amateurist1 — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 11:36:46 +0000

The Precarious Workers Brigade’s ‘Bust Card’

Contemporary class struggle

amateurist1 — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:02:10 +0000

Why Marx was Right? Talk at Goldsmiths, October 2011

Nina Power on the implications of youth unemployment and criminalisation suppressing future generations.

Terry Eagleton on how theory is catching up with the history being made on the streets from 1968 (sexual becoming) to Tahrir (political becoming) o here (cultural materialist becoming).

Alex Callinicos on cross-generational comrades in precarity.

Self on Willpower

amateurist1 — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:51:47 +0000

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/18/willpower-roy-baumeister-john-tierney-review

Will Self gives a pithy response to the ICA’s recent discussion on ‘The Trouble with Productivity’;

The life of the professional writer – like that of any freelance, whether she be a plumber or a podiatrist – is predicated on willpower. Without it there simply wouldn’t be any remuneration, period.

Art workers too have to get on with it in order to make a living! All this idle talk makes the AN dispair …

The growing corporatisation of public institutions: News from the US

amateurist1 — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:45:36 +0000

http://www.artfagcity.com/2012/01/16/professors-artists-workers-and-activists-rally-inside-moma/

Nato Thompson (Chief Curator, Creativetime, NYC) suggests a radical proposal;

I work in a non-profit, and I want to clarify that the problem of the one percent being in cahoots with non-profits is extremely structural. It’s the way the system is built. If we want to change that system, we have to radically get rid of the non-profit idea entirely. And simultaneously, the one awesome thing about non-profits is their mission statement to serve the public good. If there is a conflict of interest where the actions of that institution do not meet that mission statement, it’s a strategic opportunity to strike.

Download AMATEUR INVENTION poster here

amateurist1 — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 13:55:46 +0000

OCCUPATION, COOPERATION & SELF ORGANISATION BY AMATEURS

Upcoming AN event at ICA on 2 December

amateurist1 — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 19:48:56 +0000

OCCUPATION, CO-OPERATION & SELF-ORGANISATION BY AMATEURS

Salon organised by the Amateurist Network at ICA on 2 Dec 2011 with invited guests Simon Bedwell (artist), Sion Whellens (Calverts Workers’ Co-op) and Anthony Gross (DIY Art Centre) to discuss the following questions:

- what is the potential of self-organised activity?
- what can we learn from the autonomous status of the amateur?
- how does a self-organised amateur negotiate his / her rights and responsibilities?

To reserve a place at this event please follow this link:

http://www.ica.org.uk/?lid=30945

‘Self-organization links outwardly not as identity, interest, or affiliation, but as a mode of coexistence in space.’

amateurist1 — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 13:12:51 +0000

Having tried to deconstruct what “free” might mean in relation to knowledge, in relation to my hoped-for-academy, I think that what has come about is the understanding of “free” in a non-liberationist vein, away from the binaries of confinement and liberty, rather as the force and velocity by which knowledge and our imbrication in it, move along. That its comings-together are our comings-together and not points in a curriculum, rather along the lines of the operations of “singularity” that enact the relation of “the human to a specifiable horizon” through which meaning is derived, as Jean-Luc Nancy says. (1) Singularity provides us with another model of thinking relationality, not as external but as loyal to a logic of its own self-organization. Self-organization links outwardly not as identity, interest, or affiliation, but as a mode of coexistence in space. To think “knowledge” as the working of singularity is actually to decouple it from the operational demands put on it, to open it up to processes of multiplication and of links to alternate and unexpected entities, to animate it through something other than critique or defiance – perhaps as “free.”

Rogoff, Irit (2004) Free. In: J. Aranda, B. Kuan Wood, A. Vidokle, ed. (2011) Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art, E-Flux Journal, Sternberg Press 183 – 205

(1) Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), xi.

Symposium: Marginalia: Towards an Invisible College Whitechapel 3 Nov 2011

amateurist1 — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:13:47 +0000

The AN is looking forward to attending this conference at the Whitechapel. Here's the description of the event: Through contemporary artists’ practice, this conference examines the role and influence of the peripheral and the marginal on art production and the framework in which it's received. Speakers include Maeve Connolly, Brian Dillon, Sean Dockray, Richard Grayson, Caleb Kelly and Jennifer Thatcher.

‘The Professional Amateur’ by Shumon Basar

amateurist1 — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:53:13 +0000

From the book ‘Did Someone Say Participate?’ by Markus Miessen and Shumon Basar, MIT Press 2006