[Minorcompositions] 25/8 Universal Prostitution & the Crisis of Labor

[Minor Compositions]

*Picabia*

*Universal Prostitution & the Crisis of Labor 
<https://www.facebook.com/events/1402579911023359>*
August 25th @ 7PM UK Time, online 
<https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/91058123523>

Join us for a conversation with Jaleh Mansoor on the themes of her new 
book Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory. 
In this provocative work, Mansoor offers a counternarrative of modernism 
and abstraction and a rethinking of Marxist aesthetics. Drawing on 
Marx’s concept of prostitution — as an allegory for modern labor — she 
explores how generalized and gendered forms of work converge in modern 
and contemporary art.

More on the book: “In /Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction, 
<https://www.dukeupress.edu/universal-prostitution-and-modernist-abstraction>/ 
Jaleh Mansoor provides a counternarrative of modernism and abstraction 
and a reexamination of Marxist aesthetics. Mansoor draws on Marx’s 
concept of prostitution—a conceptual device through which Marx 
allegorized modern labor—to think about the confluences of generalized 
and gendered labor in modern art. Analyzing works ranging from Édouard 
Manet’s Olympia and Georges Seurat’s The Models to contemporary work by 
Hito Steyerl and Hannah Black, she shows how avant-garde artists can 
detect changing modes of production and capitalist and biopolitical 
processes of abstraction that assign identities to subjects in the 
interest of value’s impersonal circulation. She demonstrates that art 
and abstraction resist modes of production and subjugation at the level 
of process and form rather than through referential representation. By 
studying gendered and generalized labor, abstraction, automation, and 
the worker, Mansoor shifts focus away from ideology, superstructure, and 
culture toward the ways art indexes crisis and transformation in the 
political economic base. Ultimately, she traces the outlines of a 
counterpraxis to capital while demonstrating how artworks give us a way 
to see through the abstractions of everyday life.”

*Bio:* Jaleh Mansoor is Associate Professor of Art History, Visual Art, 
and Theory at the University of British Columbia and author of /Marshall 
Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of 
Autonomia,/ also published by Duke University Press.

Organized by Minor Compositions & COVER

This event will be edited into an episode of the Minor Compositions podcast.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.aktivix.org/pipermail/minorcompositions/attachments/20250814/2a5a93dd/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 9583b4ce-66dd-4372-8872-4dc8933b3372.jpeg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 83687 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.aktivix.org/pipermail/minorcompositions/attachments/20250814/2a5a93dd/attachment-0001.jpeg>