MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
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Book Review: Working Aesthetics: Labour, Art and Capitalism
Danielle Child's book tackles the neoliberal penetration of artistic production from a Marxist perspective
Bookshelf
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production that panders – if inadvertently – to Western prejudice against China
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a history that excavates the enormous role played by agricultural workers in recent times
ALEX HALL recommends a book that places empirical evidence at the heart of understanding racism
Working Aesthetics: Labour, Art and Capitalism
by Danielle Child
(Bloomsbury, £21.99)
UNUSUALLY for a young art historian, Danielle Child bases her discussion of the relationship between contemporary art, labour and capitalism on the “Marxian” ideology that art, as part of the superstructure, is defined by its economic base.
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Tracing these to the era’s “prehistory” in the late 1960s and 1970s, she explains how monumental public art projects such as those of Claes Oldenburg were fabricated by new, specialist firms.
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