TALK – I DIDN’T GO TO WORK TODAY…I DON’T THINK I’LL GO TOMORROW
Panelists: Amelia Groom and Gavin Mueller, moderated by Esther Leslie
I Didn’t Go In To Work Today…I Don’t Think I’ll Go In Tomorrow was a panel discussion that took as its focus histories of anti-work, sabotage, fantasies of abundance, and attempts to smash, destroy or mutate linear time – all points of reference that informed Sam Keogh’s exhibition Sated Soldier, Sated Peasant, Sated Scribe.
The exhibition comprised of collage, sculpture and performance, including a series of ceramic reclining figures drawn from Bruegel’s ‘The Land of Cockaigne’ (1567) as well as six large collages, or ‘cartoons’ (as preparatory drawings from tapestries were traditionally called), emblazoned with drawings of flowers, video game avatars, unicorns, worried cartoon clocks and an enormous Microsoft Teams calendar repurposed as a rose trellis.
BIOGRAPHIES
Gavin Mueller is an Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Media Piracy in the Cultural Economy (Routledge 2019) and Breaking Things at Work (Verso 2021).
Amelia Groom is a Berlin-based writer and art historian. In 2018-2020 she was a postdoctoral fellow at ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, and she currently holds a research position at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, 2021-2022 . Groom teaches writing and theory on the Critical Studies degree at the Sandberg Instituut. Her book Beverly Buchanan: Marsh Ruins was published in 2021 as part of Afterall’s One Work series.
Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include various studies and translations of Walter Benjamin, as well as Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (Verso, 2002); Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005); Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage (Unkant, 2014), Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (Reaktion, 2016) and two projects on milk and dairy, Deeper in the Pyramid (with Melanie Jackson: Banner Repeater, 2018) and, for the Limerick Biennale 20-21, the Inextinguishable (with M. Jackson, 2021). Future work includes research for Chemical City, an exhibition at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art on the chemical industries of the North East of England.
Panelists: Amelia Groom and Gavin Mueller, moderated by Esther Leslie
I Didn’t Go In To Work Today…I Don’t Think I’ll Go In Tomorrow was a panel discussion that took as its focus histories of anti-work, sabotage, fantasies of abundance, and attempts to smash, destroy or mutate linear time – all points of reference that informed Sam Keogh’s exhibition Sated Soldier, Sated Peasant, Sated Scribe.
The exhibition comprised of collage, sculpture and performance, including a series of ceramic reclining figures drawn from Bruegel’s ‘The Land of Cockaigne’ (1567) as well as six large collages, or ‘cartoons’ (as preparatory drawings from tapestries were traditionally called), emblazoned with drawings of flowers, video game avatars, unicorns, worried cartoon clocks and an enormous Microsoft Teams calendar repurposed as a rose trellis.
BIOGRAPHIES
Gavin Mueller is an Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Media Piracy in the Cultural Economy (Routledge 2019) and Breaking Things at Work (Verso 2021).
Amelia Groom is a Berlin-based writer and art historian. In 2018-2020 she was a postdoctoral fellow at ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, and she currently holds a research position at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, 2021-2022 . Groom teaches writing and theory on the Critical Studies degree at the Sandberg Instituut. Her book Beverly Buchanan: Marsh Ruins was published in 2021 as part of Afterall’s One Work series.
Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include various studies and translations of Walter Benjamin, as well as Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (Verso, 2002); Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005); Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage (Unkant, 2014), Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (Reaktion, 2016) and two projects on milk and dairy, Deeper in the Pyramid (with Melanie Jackson: Banner Repeater, 2018) and, for the Limerick Biennale 20-21, the Inextinguishable (with M. Jackson, 2021). Future work includes research for Chemical City, an exhibition at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art on the chemical industries of the North East of England.
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