[Minorcompositions] Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 37 Universal Prostitution & the Crisis of Labor

[Minor Compositions]

*Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 37 Universal Prostitution & the 
Crisis of Labor <https://youtu.be/3Pe8T_hK9sk>*

This episode is 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/, 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.

More on the book here 
<https://www.dukeupress.edu/universal-prostitution-and-modernist-abstraction>.

Available in podcast format on all the usual platforms.

-- 
Minor Compositions. Publishing the unruly, the radical, and the yet-co-come.
https://www.minorcompositions.info

Linktree of all our stuff:https://linktr.ee/minorcompositions
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