Mobile Autonomy: Exercises in Artists' Self-Organization (Antennae) by A Dog Republic

by Pascal Gielen

Autonomous labor and its attendant values have now become familiar tools of neoliberal work has become freelance, flexible, mobile, project-based, hybrid and temporary. If these conditions are novel to the general economy, this way of working is not new to artists, who began experiencing these precarious conditions long before Post-Fordism was a buzzword. The contributors to Mobile Autonomy , drawn from a variety of disciplines including art, political philosophy and sociology, examine the alternate working methods and economic models developed, in theory and in practice, by artists and other creative professionals to make artistic work viable in contemporary social, economic and political conditions. As Nico Dockx and Pascal Gielen put it in their introduction to this “We need to stay mobile to keep our autonomy alive, and we need to develop new autonomous practices to keep our mobility alive.”

Paperback

Published January 1, 1757

Reviews

[manasa k · Rating 5 out of 5]

ive always had lots of questions and only some real answers to how much a person who wants their life to be dedicated to creating things has to give into an increasingly hostile professional structure. this book is so great because it goes past saying the fix is in building collectives/moving past individualism (which it is!!) and offers concrete examples of artists self organizing in so many ways outside of just making space. Especially since making space is complicated in of itself! i really liked the essay on how motherhood can be a shared project, and the piece that compared art to driving. overall i think really optimistic about what artistic freedom can look like in the current climate in an actually very achievable way