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<p><b><a moz-do-not-send="true" href="https://youtu.be/3Pe8T_hK9sk">Minor
Compositions Podcast Episode 37 Universal Prostitution &
the Crisis of Labor</a></b><br>
<br>
<img moz-do-not-send="false"
src="cid:part1.khrOdHWD.stF5RH66@gmail.com" alt="" width="1280"
height="720">This episode is a conversation with Jaleh Mansoor
on the themes of her new book <i>Universal Prostitution and
Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory.</i> 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>Universal Prostitution and Modernist
Abstraction</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>
Bio: 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>More on the book <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/universal-prostitution-and-modernist-abstraction">here</a>.<br>
<br>
Available in podcast format on all the usual platforms.</p>
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Linktree of all our stuff: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://linktr.ee/minorcompositions">https://linktr.ee/minorcompositions</a></pre>
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