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<p><b><img moz-do-not-send="false"
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<p><b><a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/1402579911023359">Universal
Prostitution & the Crisis of Labor</a></b><br>
August 25th @ 7PM UK Time, <a
href="https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/91058123523">online</a><br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
More on the book: “In <i><a
href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/universal-prostitution-and-modernist-abstraction">Universal
Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction,</a></i> 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.”<br>
<br>
<b> Bio:</b> Jaleh Mansoor is Associate Professor of Art History,
Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia and
author of <i>Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction
and the Beginnings of Autonomia,</i> also published by Duke
University Press.</p>
<p>Organized by Minor Compositions & COVER<br>
<br>
This event will be edited into an episode of the Minor
Compositions podcast.</p>
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