Artistic Inactivism: With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything

Abstract

Arguably, one of the core impulses of modern art and of the 20th century avantgarde, was to abandon its contemplative nature and align itself with the productivist paradigm of industrial societies. In this paper, I will argue that by affirming work, production and social activity as the liberatory horizon of modernity, art conceals and naturalizes the fact that these concepts are themselves embedded in capitalist social relations. I will then turn to artistic gestures of inactivity and non-production to examine their critical potential within the framework of conceptual and postconceptual art practice. The examples I consider register the contradictions and shifts in contemporary social technologies and ideologies of labor and, in doing so, help establish (in)activity as a critical and problematic category. Through the temporality of inactivity, these gestures can serve as critical models for a different rationale of social production.