## WORKING BY THE NUMBERS: PERFORMANCE ART SHORT ON TIME PROPOSES A MATERIALIST AESTHETICS OF PRODUCTION

## Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt

## ABSTRACT

The performance artists Florian Feigl and Fjóla Gautadóttir engage with production conditions of artistic work through their ways of managing time in performances. Informed by Marxist and feminist theories on affective and reproductive work, and with references to the history of performance art, I demonstrate how, contrary to myths of inspiration and virtuosity, production conditions co-create artistic authorship. Thereby, I reexamine what traditionally is termed as the aesthetics of production. An aesthetics of production is, I suggest, not about natural talent and originality of the soloist artist genius but is founded on the interdependency of life and work, and what enables the artist to do work. Feigl and Gautadóttir's performances include what has been excluded as disturbances by idealist aesthetics of production: the sociality, temporality and economy of the artistic work. By proposing a feminist-materialist aesthetics of production, I claim that the artist's work is not only working by the numbers of the present production conditions, but is also performing and intervening within the infrastructures of art.

## KEYWORDS

Performance Art, Feminist-Materialist Aesthetics of Production, Artistic Labor, Maintenance Art, Infrastructure, Florian Feigl, Fjóla Gautadóttir In  a  performance-for-video  series 300 (2009  -  )  the  German performance  artist  Florian  Feigl  is  doing  one  thing  for  300 seconds, or five minutes: washing his hands for five minutes, sweeping the floor with a broom for five minutes, walking down a road for five minutes, fighting with furniture for five minutes, playing chess with his children for five minutes. 300 is a collection of time-limited artistic, bureaucratic, and domestic work that has been equated on a horizontal, accumulative line since 2009. 1 The form of the series exposes the modularisation of everyday activities of the artist as a father.

In the Icelandic performance artist Fjóla Gautadóttir's work, the rhythmised life of a student is exposed: she documents and measures her private life to the extreme in The Masturbation Log (2018). Raised within the economisation of artistic study through the Bologna Process, Gautadóttir has learned to record life as work, and she both exercises upon and comments on this demand, as  she  enumerates  the  seemingly  'free'  act  of  masturbation: 'Third time today,' 'Real quick before school,' or 'Masturbated for three minutes.' 2

Both artists make an issue out of the measurement of time within  the  parasitic  relationship  between  life  and  work.  The artistic forms, the five-minute series and the logbook, portray and reproduce a rationale based on accountancy and an accumulative temporality of work. The temporality and rhythm in which the artworks are produced shape the distribution of time within the  artwork itself.  Both works are thereby determined by and contribute to a materialist aesthetics of production. But in which ways do Feigl and Gautadóttir reproduce measuring standards of production as a critique of gendered and capitalised labour? Rather than proposing a division of life and work, or 'rescuing' leisure time from work time, both artists demonstrate how the life of the performance artist is subjected to the technologies of contemporary work: technologies of self-publication, value-production and measurement of time.

In  the  following,  I  will  argue  that  Feigl's  and  Gautadóttir's works demonstrate how the organisation of time plays a measuring role in their artistic practices and in life. The two works show how the temporality of production predetermines ways of living as an artist, as well as the form of the artwork: both the subjectivity and the aesthetics. Oscillating in my analysis between performance theories and Marxist feminist theories on affective and reproductive work, I suggest that, contrary to myths of inspiration and originality, production conditions co-create the artistic output.

## A TIME OF ONE'S OWN

Since  the  1960s  onwards,  the  inseparability  of  performance art and the life of performance artist has manifested in blood, hair,  cum, and physical pain. Thinking about canonical durational works in performance art history, such as the Taiwanese conceptual body artist Tehching Hsieh's five year-long performances, or the meticulous, time-consuming practice of writing diaries and schedules by conceptual artist Hanne Darboven, it is  clear  that  making art happens while living life. The strictly timed and embodied One Year Performances of Hsieh -taking a photo every hour or being tied to the performance art colleague Linda Montana for a whole year -put the artist's subjectivity at the center of the artwork: he is subjected to the rules and scores he made up himself, such as hourly clocking in and out of work by means of self-documentation. Similarly, in her Pocket Calendar 1966-2009 Darboven  devotes  her  life  to  a  daily  practice  of noting down everything she experiences, following the strategy of  'writing without describing': 'read Brecht,' 'Mom called,' 'Guggenheim,'  or  'didn't  take  Bruno's  apartment.' 3 Almost compulsive  in  her  writing  practice,  she  systemises  her  work and life into schemes as one would write musical notation. Both artists are definitely in the conceptual and 'dry' end of the performance art spectrum and their chosen materials are photos, paper, calendars, and ink rather than blood or cum. Their works put on display 'figurations of temporality through system and seriality' 4 and exercise an obsessive, austerely timed recording of life in and as art. They perform a kind of aesthetics of (self-)administration: the works are full of numeric accounts, working by the numbers as something that can be read both as critique of standardisation and over-measuring of work and as a driving force, a self-chosen rhythm of their practices.

Working by the numbers , the title of this article, means to follow the instructions given with the greatest accuracy. Etymologically, the  expression  stems  from  a  strict  military  formation  in  the American Revolutionary War where soldiers were trained to follow a protocol for positions of their rifles, one by one, numbered in order. Working by the numbers thereby means following a strict routine in relation to materials at hand and to the time. To be working by the numbers is to follow a schedule instead of being autonomous.

For  each  five-minute  performance  in 300 Feigl  does  one thing. He washes his hands until the soap disappears: five minutes are over. He lets his glasses defog for five minutes. He licks a children's bicycle for five minutes. He licks a saw for five minutes. Time is  set  by  an  egg  timer.  Most  performances-for-video  in 300 are performed and recorded live in an art space, and some outside in nature, or at the artist's home. The materials used in the performances are domestic objects: hand soap, a vacuum cleaner, dust, waste, soil, a broom, sugar, tea, butter, oysters, toast, a tea cup, a coffee grinder, wine glasses, a dinner table, a wash bowl, a wardrobe cabinet, an armchair, a saw, a hammer, nails, a pair of  scissors,  a  sledgehammer, a children's bicycle, a toy magic wand, a television set, a book, a rubber boat. Feigl takes everyday objects from the home and into the art institution. Sometimes he even performs with his children in the living room or in their bedroom: unpacking birthday presents for five minutes, playing with chess pieces for five minutes, or delegating the performance to them: for example, when a baby is trying to unpack some wool in a plastic bag for five minutes.

With  the  many  household  objects,  his  performance  series appears  as  an  extended  encyclopedia  of  Martha  Rosler's canonical performance-for-video Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975). Rosler's performance was, similar to Feigl's, a reexamination and denaturalisation of the everyday objects of domestic life through excessive use and acoustic retuning. A similar performance-forvideo format was explored by feminist artists in the 1972 installation Womanhouse : as an accessible media, it was easy and handy to operate, and the performance could be repeated without the artist being present. They recorded everyday life and domesticity as an artistic manifestation of the personal as political, foregrounding the domestic relations as inseparable from artistic production. 5

Where the repertoire of affects  in  Rosler's  kitchen  performance  span  from  passive-aggressive  to  explicitly  aggressive, Feigl's attitude in his performances seems apathetic, pragmatic, functional, neither aggressive, nor joyous nor excited. Is this a special kind of male affect to execute work in a seemingly apathic manner? Similar to the indifferent gaze of Hsieh in the photographs  taken  hourly  in One  Year  Performance  1980-81 ,  Feigl exhibits  an  attitude  of  executing  an  order,  obeying  a  higher demand, as  if  compulsively.  I  think  the  reference  to  Hsieh  is explicit in Feigl's work, in the way he makes time structure his practice, as well as in how he renders time itself sensible through the expansion of the now , beyond the event, by doing very little for five minutes, repeatedly 6 .

What  is  most  significant  about 300 is  the  format  of  five minutes. Obviously, the seriality invites a meditation on time. The simplicity of doing one action, possibly in a repetitive manner, makes me think of the time spent planning the choreographic precision of these five minutes: five minutes of performance, and behind each five minutes, the time for rehearsing and planning. For example, how Feigl disappears out of the frame when walking away  from  the  camera  down  a  road  for  exactly  five  minutes. The simplicity of the format and the limited visual cues direct the attention to what is outside the work of art: the temporality of Feigl's private life, the places where he spends his time, the practices, interests and habits he has off-stage, the social relations surrounding the production (family, friends, audience, programmers). The (mostly) cheap material or found footage which appear in performance art also bear witness to the proximity between art and life. Aligning with conceptual performance art history, he implicitly refers to the serial, repetitive and durational performances by Hsieh, and his tongue-in-cheek way of naming the pieces in series makes them sound like Fluxus scores: Lick Pieces or Sound Pieces 7 . However, just as Hsieh's One Year Performances were a way of documenting, justifying, and re-appropriating life by an artist in exile sans papiers , Feigl's five minutes are also a re-appropriation of a stolen life. He finds the five minutes for himself, five minutes for being a performance artist, in a period where he is a fulltime parent:

What makes a performance artist? For me the question was actually 'did I move [away] from being a performance artist, which is was what I called myself, and now I am a father?' And these two things that exclude each other, thinking that what makes a performance artist, is his practice, like you do things; And continually doing things, you are a part of your artistic process. This became harder and harder at a certain time in my life, and in an act of self-defense, I thought there has to be something left: Five minutes a day! Beyond discussion. I cannot fight for it. This is something I need. I want this. And so, this was what I had out of that situation. 8

The format of five-minute performance art per day comes from the time Feigl was working as a fulltime father at home with three children, where he did not find time for longer rehearsal periods and artistic collaborations. The declaration 'Five minutes of time one should be able to spare' 9 on his homepage is, in that respect, not meant as the time the audience should be able to spare for him, but that Feigl himself and the social institution of the family should be able to spare for his artistic practice.

The title 300 in itself is numeric, consisting of three digits. Three zero zero, or three hundred. It is a sum pointing towards the number of seconds within five minutes. It is the smallest division of time, a dissection of the precious time Feigl has on his own, practicing being a performance artist who works with time. The format exposes the temporality of parental work as a fulltime occupation threatening Feigl's ability to be an artist. Two forms of unpaid or badly paid work -the domestic care work and independent artistic work -are competing for time in the life of the artist. Feigl invents an artistic format responding to the governing temporality in his life, which is the temporality of parenthood. The temporality of 300 is thereby political in two ways, first -in the tradition of feminist artists since the 1960s -by including essential,  if  unrecognised,  work  as  something  central  to  the identity of a worker, and second, by proposing a very short format, which exposes the precarity of independent artistic practice.

The  shortness  of  the  performance  contradicts  traditional expectations and habits within theatre. A theatre performance is expected to last between one and two and a half hours (including a break). As sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel has noted in his book Hidden Rhythms (1981), expectations of quantity (hours of entertainment, number of actors, volume of set design, etc.) are normatively set to match the price of the ticket. 10 Feigl's work ponders on  the  contexts  of  theatre  institutions,  fine  art  galleries  and museums and, therefore, the format of five minutes is an inquiry into the production of the value of time, rather than a consequence of  cheap  ticketing.  In  fact,  the  seriality  of  the  five  minutes  is potentially creating its own parallel economy: one could become a collector of these small performance-for-video units and classify them in themes. There is a certain financial logic in the material, a  futurity,  and  a  not-yet  reached  accumulation:  the  promised complete collection of 300 seconds times 300 is a congregation of Feigl's work over many years. It is a collection of hours spent. And the accumulation of spent lifetime produces value in itself.

Summing up, Feigl's work 300 both explores, and is subjected to,  the  time  between  the  social  institutions  of  the  family  and the  art  world,  between  the  interests  of  the  performance  artist as a worker, as a father, as a producer. Feigl's personal experience of time is torn apart, modularised into units of institutional interests. Through the series of 300 he establishes a stretched temporality  beyond  economisation  and  institutionalisation, and at the same time he accumulates his own personal temporal capital as an artist.

## THE AESTHETICS OF NON-MATERIAL PRODUCTION

Karl  Marx  proposes  in Results  of  the  Immediate  Process  of Production (1863-66), a pre-study of Capital , a division of unproductive  and  productive  labor. 11 Productive  labor  produces immediate  surplus  value  and  objectifies  itself  in  concrete commodities.  As  opposed  to  this,  Marx  writes,  unproductive labor is the work of the singer, the teacher, and the writer, as long as they do not produce explicit commodities. Similarly, he also promotes the idea of 'non-material production,' the making of non-material products to be consumed, which is the work of service workers. Non-material production can be divided into two categories. First, there is the non-material production that results in 'commodities, e.g., books, paintings, and all products of art as distinct from the artistic achievement of the practizing [sic] artist,' and second, there is the non-material production where '(t)he product is not separable from the act of producing.' 12 The second category of non-material production, according to Marx, does not function well in capitalist accumulation, since it cannot be delegated, passed on or resold. Marx gives an example: 'I want the doctor and not his errand boy.' 13 The doctor does not produce his knowledge in one space and then sell it as a product for the market  somewhere  else.  The  doctor  embodies  his  knowledge and cannot delegate his examinations of patients to unskilled helpers, nor can he ask somebody else to perform his personal style of confidence. The same goes for the teacher in the 'learning factory,' as Marx calls the school, 14 who can never become more than  a  wage-laborer  since  he  never  increases  anybody  else's wealth through delivering a product for circulation.

At first sight, the genre of performance art matches Marx's category of non-material production within unproductive labor as something that does not objectify, but remains ephemeral: an encounter, a show (in German, Aufführung ), an experience. As a genre, it is something that at first does not produce commodities. But within the last ten years, we have seen very concrete objectifications of performance art in solo retrospective shows by Marina Abramović and Yoko Ono, with reenactments, scores, documentation  in  photos  and  video,  reliquial  material  traces from performances, and new objects made for exhibition and for sale. The commodification of immaterial work is theorised in post-Marxist literature, and today both cognitive and artistic work can be viewed as productive labor, objectified as something one can privatise and sell, redistribute and gain from. In recent years, Marxist scholars actualised the categories of unproductive labor and non-material production in the notion of immaterial labor and its close relative virtuosic labor, which are both central  to  the  analysis  of  contemporary  artistic  and  academic practices. The notion of immaterial labor is promoted by Italian autonomists  such  as  Antonio  Negri,  Michael  Hardt,  Maurizio Lazzarato,  and  Paolo  Virno.  Within  performance  art  theory, Marx's twofold category of non-material production is very useful in order to delineate theoretical and descriptive nuances between more commodifiable and -at first glance -less commodifiable artworks  of  the  so-called  'unproductive  labor.'  I  am  thinking about the traditional event of the unrepeatable ephemeral performance as ascribing to Marx's category of non-material labor, which cannot be separated from the act of producing. And I am thinking of the documentation within performance art -books, photographs, performance-for-video -as Marx's other category where the non-material production of performance art can be turned into commodities alongside paintings, sculptures, installations, which can circulate independently within the art market, separated from the artist's body.

I  propose  to  define  the  two  categories  of  non-material production  as  performance  and  post-performance  respectively. 15 Performance is when the product is inseparable from the act of producing. Performance is a live event, the moment of Aufführung praised  in  Performance  Studies  as  'authentic' by Peggy Phelan (1993), and specific to this art form, by Erika Fischer-Lichte (2004). The performance is inseparable from the body and the lived temporality of the artist. Post-performance is the performance artwork that can be displayed in object form, distributed,  reenacted  by  others,  and  circulated  without  the artist being present. Post-performance is, as an artwork with the artist absent, an immaterial concept, manifested and recorded in  materiality. Post-performance can be perceived both as the artwork itself and its documentation. A canonical example of the ambiguity of post-performance is when Mierle Laderman Ukeles recategorised art as maintenance work and was photographed by her husband in order to document herself doing the ironing or looking after the children at home. The materiality of her maintenance work was documented and presented as a traditional art object, a photograph. The erosion that comes from performing at home to objectifying maintenance in an object for display gave Ukeles conceptual troubles: 'her photographs, not the labor, were conceived as 'art.'' 16

Summing up, I claim that the genre of performance art, as both  productive  and  non-productive  labor,  can  refrain  from being commodified and, at the same time, can be objectified and create surplus value due to its twofold non-material character as both performance and post-performance. This has consequences when it comes to subjectification of an artist worker. The figure of performance artist has in recent years been criticised as living out a neoliberal work ethos putting flesh, mind, and sociality into investment and never letting a serious (personal) crisis go to waste. 17 Within performance art theory, the performance artist has been characterised as a very productive worker, exhausted by constantly being at work in inconstant structures. Similar to the  doctor  and  the  teacher,  the  performance  artist's  work  and production are inseparable from their life: the performance artist embodies their work, unable to distance themselves from their physical 'products' as opposed to other artists such as painters, sculptors, writers -even if at a later point, the post-performance can circulate with less affective and physical effort.

Performance  theorist  Bojana  Kunst  proposed  a  strategy, whereby the  performance  artist  responding  to  a  life  in  structural precarity and exhaustion should 'do less, precisely when confronted with the demand to do more.' 18 In the Italian autonomist writings, resistance against occupational temporality of immaterial work is proposed in forms of strike, refusal to work and withdrawal. Doing less can be understood as a direct answer to late capitalist demands of constant productivity, competition, and individualisation.  Doing  less,  striking,  or  not  working  at all, are ways to demand autonomy for life itself; or it could be a strategy of naysaying and, as Kathi Weeks says, paraphrasing Shulamith Firestone, a way to start thinking about a re-diffusion between what is love and what is work. 19 However, it is my argument that rethinking and reclaiming non-work is a way to try to separate life and work again, within a genre and in a time where inseparability has become the norm. In my regard, this separation of life from work relies on an antiquated notion of work where the private is an untouchable and institutionalised 'outside.' Rather, I would argue, this 'outside' must be politicised as always-already counting, even when -in earlier times -it was unrecognised. In the late 1960s, feminists, such as Silvia Federici and the Wages for  Housework  movement,  started  politicising  this  separation of life from work, 20 and I take my lead from them. Feigl's 300 accounts for domestic work as a competing factor to the hours spent working as an artist: there is not a life that has to be rescued from work, because life at home, with the kids, is also work -and a possible source of material 'inspiration' for, or rather organisation of, non-material work.

From the perspective of an idealist aesthetics of production where the artist is a genius with natural talent, the artist is seen as somebody who needs to be freed from economic and social dependencies. Is the ideal of artistic autonomy echoed in Feigl's need for at least five minutes a day of being an artist -not a father? Does he want to have artistic freedom, autonomy, undisturbed time, at least five minutes a day? Are the five minutes his justification as a true artist doing pure art? Rather than fighting for more artistic freedom from worldly production conditions, I see 300 as a plaidoyer for a materialist aesthetics of production: art is not a creation channeled by nature-given talent, it is a product of social, temporal, and economic conditions in the artist's life. I propose to depart from a materialist aesthetics of production in order to describe how non-material art is organised by its circumstances. It is precisely the inseparability of non-material art and life -the fact of being a parent, a worker, a money-earner, an application-writer and so on -that co-create the artwork. Rather than going on strike and nostalgically reclaiming lost life, as the Italian  autonomists  would  suggest,  the  question  becomes how the non-material artwork has been 'infected,' or less negatively expressed, 'informed,' and even co-produced, by its working conditions. How do the parergonal structures such as the family situation, the historical context, and cultural policies organise the structures of the artwork? Could one even say that what Kant would understand as disturbances for the artist genius, and what has  therefore  been  excluded  in  his  aesthetic  theory,  actually serves as material inspiration for the performance artist?

## THE ACCOUNT OF AN IDLE DESIRE

Organisng life into schedules, recording time, doing accounts of one's work are all things students have already been trained in during their study since the implementation of the Bologna Process (a 1999 educational reform) in European higher artistic education.  As  an  example,  students  in  Berlin  in  the  bachelor degree course Dance, Context, Choreography learn to calculate hours of their project-related work outside school, and then cash in  'credit  points'  for  the  hours  spent  doing  relevant  activities MAStURBAT oN

L06 ENTRY 480

MASTURBATION LOG ENTRY 96 MASTURBATION LOG ENTRY 105

such as writing applications, having meetings with future work partners,  taking  yoga  classes,  visiting  exhibitions,  or  reading books. Altogether, they have to cash in 180 credit points within the three-year education, equating 25 hours of work times 180. In other words, the students train in economisation of their life and learn to account for all their activities. CAN

The recording of hours can be seen as both a self-surveilling and occupational value production measuring of all the student's activities,  but  also  as  a  feminist  strategy  of  making  visible all  the  hours  of  unrecognised  work  of  artistic  production.  An artistic work which could be read as a direct reaction to the art student's recording of life as work, is The Masturbation Log by Fjóla Gautadóttir. Gautadóttir was a student on Dance, Context, Choreography in Berlin and graduated in the summer 2019. Her artistic logbook is a collection of handwritten pages recording and commenting on her masturbation practice:

The Masturbation Log (2018), entry 48, 96, 105.

MASTURBATED

FOR

THREE MINUTES

What is masturbation? The act of masturbating is something done alone, or in company of a dear object, a pillow in the case of Gautadóttir. It is an act which bears no economic expenses. It provides immediate physical satisfaction and a short moment of distraction from one's responsibilities and obligations. It is regenerative and relaxing, while not providing any material outcome besides pleasure, leaving no traces or objects for others to consume or circulate. Masturbation is also an act of procrastination: it is unproductive and idle. Yet when one talks about one's masturbation practice, it is both transgressive (too private) and, when repetitive,  creates  a  myth of a natural talent of pleasure-making, as well as an abject dependency on one's immediate orgasm. Female sexuality is traditionally associated with reproduction. Yet, the act of masturbation is literally non-productive, as well as non-material, and hardly something that can be categorised as work. Is masturbation, then, an individualist and even egoistic practice, not for making babies but only for personal pleasure? Or is there an act of resistance when one exposes the desire to escape the pressure of displaying the productive self, either as an active art student, original artist, or as a reproductive woman?

Whether  Gautadóttir's  documented  masturbation  is  faked or  not  is  irrelevant.  Rather,  the  (imitation  of)  registration  of such  private  moments  into  an  artistic  accumulative  economy comments on a commodification of life. Each of the 64 pages in the artist's book of selected log entries are numbered and show -with numbers up to 121 -that the book is a collection, perhaps a 'best of' orgasmic events. The numeric account of her desire is similar to the everyday clocking in and out of work at night, which the  students  in  Berlin  exercise  when  collecting  and  counting reading hours in bed or regenerative practices at home compatible  with credit points. Handwritten and numbered, copied on A4 papers, the book is both intimate, standardised, and 'cheap.' Consisting of an accumulation of private physical peaks, the work of  Gautadóttir comments with wit and sarcasm on how she is interpellated by the logic of economic calculation. The mocking attitude demonstrates a critical stance towards the standardised, yet demanding expectations of quantification for young artists trained within the Bologna Process. At the same time, there is a fear of failing, as an artist and as a person, at stake: 'Somehow I managed to masturbate despite paralysing fear of the days to come,' 'At least this is something I can do.' 21 The pressure of professionalisation and the horizon of a life in structural precarity are the contexts of Gautadóttir's escapism when masturbating.

The Masturbation Log reveals the twofold nature of non-material  production  of  performance  art:  the  strategy  to  escape professionalised  technologies  of  work  through  masturbation is performed in each description of the idle act, yet, in the aesthetic form of the accumulated, numbered log, the artist also turns the explicitly unproductive work into a post-performance product. The feminist naysaying to reproductive work, literally no to babies, is exchanged into an artistic value. The student's interpellation by rigid standardisation and self-measurement in artistic education is translated into a witty and sarcastic critique of  numeric  accountancy.  Gautadóttir  shows  how  to  never  let a serious institutional and personal crisis go to waste, and she thereby  performs  both  critique  of,  and  complicity  with,  the neoliberal rationale.

Gautadottir's making the unproductive masturbation productive could be compared with performance artist Eliza Shvarts's exploration of self-insemination and self-induced miscarriages in the durational performance Untitled [Senior Thesis] (2008). For a whole school year at Yale University, rhythmised by her menstrual cycle, the performance art student Shvarts prepared her senior thesis: a presentation of her material and discursive examination of reproduction as installation and video. However, as the work started raising ethical debate, the Yale University administration censored the final presentation calling Shvarts's work a 'creative fiction' and adding: 'Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.' 22 Compared to Gautadóttir's commodification of private pleasures, Shvarts's non-productive performance is extremely painful, but what both works have in common is that they examine the right to do something without any means to an end. Can counter-productive and even destructive reproduction count as work in artistic education? This might be a question of  ethics,  but  first  and  foremost,  both  works  point  towards domestic 'obstacles' that reduce the normatively acknowledged productivity and 'threaten' the temporal economy of the student as a worker in present day capitalism.

The works of Feigl and Gautadóttir in many ways adopt the aesthetic category of the zany proposed by cultural theorist and feminist scholar Sianne Ngai in her book Our Aesthetic Categories (2012). The zany is a complex aesthetic category emerging out of a late capitalist work paradigm, where the performer is occupied by -as in infected, haunted by -their role in a condition where life  and  work  intersect,  and,  as  I  have  argued,  have  become inseparable. 23 The  role  is  characterised  by  permanent  performance, the constant and undifferentiated chaotic activity of doing too many odd jobs of affective work, which Ngai locates both in feminist performance works by Linda Montana in the 1970s and in popular movies like The Cable Guy (1996) and The Full Monty (1997). However, the notion of the zany dates back to commedia dell'arte theatre in Italy in the sixteenth century: a kind of theatre initiated  by  actors  working  in  self-organised  and  precarious troupes. Interestingly the figure of the zanni in  the  commedia dell'arte genre was an itinerant servant, whose life was formed by nature catastrophes and low conjunctures, and thus, similar to the commedia dell'arte actors themselves, a temporary and precarious worker -or as Ngai writes: 'a character defined by a specific kind of labor or relation to labor.' 24

There is obviously a connection between the zanni character and the zany freelance performance artists today, and that is the self-definition  though  precarious  labor.  'The  zany  is  not  just funny but angry,' Ngai writes, 25 as the zany aesthetics faces the working conditions. Despite Feigl and Gautadóttir's charming critique of life being short on time due to societal, private, and institutional demands, they are also attacking the exploitation and the pressure, and with many contradictory affects. The zany performer is both desperate and compensatory in their acting out, Ngai states, but also exposes a post-Fordist in-betweenness of 'gender as a point of uncertainty.' 26 Feigl using his parental role to fight back for his right to work is both a feminist demystification of domestic work, and also perhaps a patriarchal claim for the right to be a 'real worker,' an autonomous artist, for five minutes a day. I read his five minutes as both a feminist achievement proposed through the act of making visible the reproductive work in the domestic institution, and at the same time, as a nostalgic reaching out towards a lost ideal: the solitude of the free (male) artist genius. Here, two temporalities collide: the occupational, domestic time of parenthood, and the independent work time, if really short, of the autonomous artist. Is Feigl performing a mixture of what feminist Mierle Laderman Ukeles proclaimed in 1969 as female 'maintenance artist' and of the autonomous male figure of artist genius? 27 Similarly, several and possibly contradictory gender agendas are at stake in Gautadóttir's work. She is employing feminist strategies of alienation and denaturalisation by dedicating her attention to female intimacy and structural vulnerability.  But  Gautadóttir  also  transforms  the  unproductive, non-material acts of masturbation into a post-performance artwork  for  circulation,  participating  in  the  professionalised economy of 'original' artworks based on personal crisis.

## TOWARDS A FEMINIST-MATERIALIST AESTHETICS OF PRODUCTION

When reflecting on Marx's distinction between non-productive and  productive  labor,  both  Feigl  and  Gautadóttir  are  making the non-productive work of the performance artist productive. Through the materiality of their post-performance works, the performance-for-video-format and the printed book, and unlike the  historically  non-material,  ephemeral  performance,  both artworks can be repeated and circulated; both works can and do accumulate value beyond the temporality of the event, beyond the presence of their bodies. In that respect, both artists have made anti- and non-productive work productive through post-performance.

Bojana  Kunst  calls  for  contemporary  artists  to  explicitly make their particular -not generalisable, nor universal -production  conditions  visible  in  order  to  complicate  the  norm  of  the artist's life as a role model in capitalism: 'In this, it is extremely important  to  make  visible  the  exploitation  within  one's  own methods of production -to work in a way that makes the production conditions visible.' 28

The  works  of  Feigl  and  Gautadóttir  show  how  production conditions such as economy, sociality, and temporality co-author the artistic creation. Feigl works through the conditions of being parent  and  artist.  Gautadóttir  works  through  the  self-managing technologies fostered in the Bologna Process, where the student is trained to keep an account of life and work. Structural precarity, whether gendered, as a result of educational policy, or due to neoliberal professionalisation, are echoed in contemporary artistic works: I see an occupation with numbers and a quantification of life. I see a longing for more time and a restructuring of time. I see cheap materials in poor times. The works of Feigl and Gautadóttir can be understood both as an exposure of the artistic production conditions in our historical present, as well as a critique of a lack of time, an increasing demand of self-accountancy, and outsourced responsibility.

In 300 and The Masturbation Log, the inseparability of life and work -parenthood and institutional standards that define the temporality and enforce numeric accountancy in the artistic practices -is both a production condition and a theme, revealed in content and form of the artworks. However, I wonder whether the fact that Feigl and Gautadóttir expose their tight temporal constraints of production is a way of proposing a re-installment of the separation between life and work? Do they actually still, nostalgically -like in the Kantian idealist aesthetics of production -believe  in,  and  long  for,  an  artistic  practice  freed  from economic, social, and temporal restrictions? Or are the works of Feigl and Gautadóttir first and foremost a feminist plea for a materialist aesthetics of production, in the sense of conceiving the artist not as a (male) genius, but as an artist-as-producer deeply dependent on and always-already in artistic dialogue with time, economy, and sociality?

It  is  my  argument  that  not  only  do  the  works  of  Feigl  and Gautadóttir expose and thereby criticise their production conditions, as already proposed by Kunst. They also intervene in, shape, and re-form those production conditions through the artworks. Most explicit is Feigl's invention of the parent-friendly format of five minutes as a temporal frame for his performances. The five minutes redistributes time both on the side of production and of reception. The temporality and rhythm in which the artwork is produced -in  five-minute units -shape and re-appropriate the management of time within the artwork itself with the series of five-minute performances. As for Gautádottir, she performs a practice of inclusion: she includes taking time off as part of what should and must be recorded as work. She is making her masturbation part of the time sheet and thereby installing leisure-time in the equation of contemporary work.

With this reading of how artists intervene in and reorganise their own production conditions, I propose a theoretical reexamination of what is traditionally termed as the aesthetics of production. Aesthetics of production is concerned with what enables the artist to make work. Since the ancient times, a disgust towards manual and wage labor has paved the road for an exclusive and excluding position of the artist as genius. Following Immanuel Kant in his third Critique, the artist genius is not -and should not be -disturbed either by social or economic interests, but has a nature-given talent for creating original works. 29

One  of  the  most  key  twentieth-century  texts  is  Walter Benjamin's The Author as Producer (1934) -a text that relocates the focus of production from the Kantian genius to the sociality and apparatus, or infrastructure, in which the artist works. Benjamin writes in times of the Great Depression. His ambition is to pay attention  to  the  material  circumstances  of  precarious  artistic production and to the performativity -he  did  not  employ  this word, but would probably refer to transformability (in German, Änderbarkeit) as  did  Bertolt  Brecht -within  these  conditions. Benjamin links the aesthetics of reception to the aesthetics of production when he insists that artists who understand themselves as political -those who fight on the side of the proletariat against capitalism -must 'never merely work on products but always, at the same time, work on the means of production.' 30 The artist and writer cannot just provide political messages and stay content in their writing -this is counter-revolutionary 31 - but must identify as a producer who is able to change how art is made. Benjamin is deeply inspired by the Russian Socialist writer Sergei Tretiakov's distinction between the informing writer and the operating writer. In The Author as Producer , when referring to Bertolt Brecht's epic theatre,  Benjamin  distinguishes  between  representation  and organisation within the artwork. The importance of operation within and organisation of the means of production is that it is a  solidary  act.  The  solidarity  with  colleagues  starts  when  the means of production and the individual specialisation are shared. Today, we could reformulate Benjamin's concepts of operation and organisation as an insistence on an open source of techniques and a redistribution of resources: not as a mere way of sharing but also as a way of showing each other how to change the apparatus. Benjamin refers to Brecht's notion of ' umfunktionierung [functional transformation]:' 32 the transformation of the production conditions in solidarity with other producers.

The  interest  in  and  theorising  of  the  aesthetics  of  production from a materialist and feminist perspective has increased in recent years with certain focus on the recognition and inclusion of domestic labour and maintenance work. 33 The particular feminist contribution here is the act of inclusion and can be understood as an opposition to Kantian aesthetics of exclusion. Where the artist  genius  must be alone, undisturbed, freed from interests, the feminist artist includes their reproductive, regenerative, and affective work in their practice. Whereas Walter Benjamin as a materialist would look at techniques and organisation of artists, the materialist-feminist perspective insists on the expansion of the understanding of 'production conditions' to also include care work outside the art institutions. Proposing a feminist-materialist rather than an idealist aesthetics of production is a political reading of the artwork as something that is not a reflection of one's ideas, but rather resides in the interdependency of life and work.

In the two works analysed, Feigl's restricting parenthood and Gautadóttir's useless masturbation are given time and attention.

Through  my  reading  of  their  performances  and  post-performances, I present the concept of a materialist-feminist aesthetics of  production  as  an  act  of  inclusion:  rather  than  dividing  art from other forms of work, rather than separating art and life, a feminist-materialist aesthetics of production conceives artistic creation on the basis of interdependency. Time, sociality, and economy  in  the  artist's  production  conditions  are  the  actual sources of what was earlier conceived as nature-given inspiration.

Through the works of Feigl and Gautadóttir we can see how the production conditions of parenthood at home or self-administration in higher artistic education help create art. This is not to say that there is no such thing as creativity or sensible intuition. Yet, my argument is precisely that the traditionally categorised disturbances from sociality, time, and economy co-create and re-organise artistic formats such as parent-friendly five-minute performances and zany time sheet recordings of private moments. The works are not just -in  obeying a late capitalist demand -producing 'the new,' but become political through an infrastructural performance: not only are Feigl and Gautadóttir working by the numbers of parenthood and neoliberal quantification, they are also making the numbers themselves move.

- 1 Florian Feigl, 300. Durational performance and performance-for-video. (Berlin 2009 - ). Website for documentation: https://www.florianfeigl.com/ (accessed 1.10.2020).
- 2 Fjóla Gautadóttir, The Masturbation Log (Berlin: 2018), 8, 12, 41.
- 3 Hanne Darboven, Enlightenment - Time Histories. A Retrospective . Edited by Okwui Enwezor and Rein Wolfs (Munic: Prestel Verlag, 2015), 56.
- 4 Adrian Heathfield, Out of Now. The Lifeworks of Teching Hsieh (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009), 14. https://doi. org/10.1080/13528160903319687
- 5 See the documentation of the first Womanhouse exhibition centred around the domestic spaces in 1972 on http://www.womanhouse.net/ (accessed 1.10.2020).
- 6 Feigl also explicitly refers to Hsieh's work with time as material in the performance lecture Die Enzyklopädie der Performancekunst by Wagner-Feigl-Forschung (2006).
- 7 Here I think of Yoko Ono's scored Clock Pieces and Sky Pieces in the artist book Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings (Yoko Ono under the name Wunternaum Press, Tokyo:1964).
- 8 Florian Feigl in conversation with Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt, 'Views on Dance 5.6.2013,' video documentation https://vimeo.com/67818033, min 0:14:06-0:15:57 (accessed 1.10.2020).
- 9 In the introductory text about 300 Feigl writes: 'Five minutes of time one should be able to spare, and 5 minutes should suffice for literally everything. Five minutes cannot be too much to ask,' https://www. florianfeigl.com/ (accessed 1.10.2020).
- 10 Eviatar Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms (Berkley, Los Angelses, London: University of California Press, 1981), 6.
- 11 Marx writes about unproductive labor in the prestudy to Capital , 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production' (1863-66), published post-mortem in German and Russian in 1933.
- 12 Karl Marx, 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production' in Capital , (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 1048.
- 13 Ibid.
- 14 Ibid.
- 15 The category post-performance has also been used to describe a generalized state in contemporary culture, albeit vaguely theorized, for example around the exhibition OVER-EXISTING at Alt\_Cph 18 25-27 May 2018, at Fabrikken for Kunst og Design in Copenhagen.
- 16 Shannon Jackson, Social Works (New York: Routledge, 2011), 91. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203852897
- 17 Here I am paraphrasing the quote 'Never let a serious crisis go to waste' by American Democrat Rahm Emanuel, who proposed to look for the endless opportunities right after the financial crisis in 2008. It is also the title of Philip Mirowski's book on neoliberalism after the financial crisis, published in 2013. The artist worker is a figure that promises creative speculation nurtured by personal crisis, as has been pointed out by, amongst others, Bojana Kunst in Artist at Work (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 193.
- 18 Kunst, Artist at Work , 193.
- 19 Kathi Weeks, 'Down with Love: Feminist Critique and the New Ideologies of Work.' WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly 45: 4 & 3, (2017), 37-58, 55. https://doi. org/10.1353/wsq.2017.0043
- 20 See Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (Bristol: Power of Women Collective and The Falling Wall Press), 1975.
- 21 Gautadóttir, The Masturbation Log , 20, 34.
- 22 Alizia Shvarts, Untitled [Senior Thesis] . Performance. (Yale University, 2008). Documentation https:// alizashvarts.com/2017\_posters.html (accessed 1.10.2020)
- 23 Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 204.
- 24 Ibid, 193.
- 25 Ibid, 218.
- 26 Ibid, 110.
- 27 Maintenance for Ukeles includes domestic labor, gardening, affective work, and cleaning of art institutions, see Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 'Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition 'CARE.'' in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. Edited by Alberro, A. and Blake Stimson (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999), 122-123.
- 28 Kunst, Artist at Work, 150-151.
- 29 Immanuel Kant. Critique of Judgement. Transl. J.H. Bernard (London: 1914 [1793]), http://www.gutenberg. org/files/48433/48433-h/48433-h.htm#s44 (accessed 1.10.2020), §43.3, §46.3.
- 30  Walter Benjamin, 'The Author as Producer' in Selected Writings 1931-1934 , Bd. 2, vol. 2 (Cambridge: The Harvard University Press, 1999), 777.
- 31 Ibid, 772.
- 32 Ibid, 774.
- 33  For a greater theoretical contextualization of aesthetics of production within materialist-feminist theory see Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt, 'An Aesthetics of Production' in Everybody Counts (University of Copenhagen, 2019), 110-128.