Review By Molly Hankwitz
Finally, a history of collective precarity from a politicized artist. Author/writer Gregory Sholette, in the final paragraph of Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, at last clarifies the frequently cited metaphors of “zombies” and enormous digital casts, with which the likes of Annalee Newitz have been preoccupied in terms of popular culture, and most notably, the big-budget-extravaganza digital films of recent decades. He writes:
We go on picking the rags, but every now and again, this other social [non] productivity appears to mobilize its own redundancy, seems to acknowledge that it is indeed just so much surplus—talent, labor, subjectivity, even sheer physical-genetic materiality—and in so doing frees itself from even attempting to be usefully productive for capitalism…, though all the while identifying itself with a far larger ocean of “dark matter,” that ungainly surfeit of seemingly useless actors and activity that the market views as waste, or perhaps at best as a raw, interchangeable resource for biometric information and crowdsourcing. The archive has split open. We are its dead capital. It is the dawn of the dead.
This blatant appeal to the use-value of our necrophilia, artistic waste, and the products of our labor and time runs throughout an historical text, alternately conscious of its own limitations and brilliantly pervasive in its political critique and arts research. Sholette devotes himself to describing the animation of a diverse selection of contemporary artists’ collectives and collective projects—American, European, South American, and “other”—for whom relationships, as cultural workers to the neo-liberal art world in the recent decades of the 21st century, have been a central concern. Among this history are crisp critical frameworks for understanding art and its positioning against what he calls “enterprise culture,” or the current era of marked precarity in which artists are force to live, which is also marked by “enforced creativity” imposed on all forms of labor.