In such times as these, does art accept the injunction to speak the language of labour, useful and efficient, the province of communications and productivity? From willing servitude to an ability to subvert the system, the language of art can instead provoke unexpected reversals. Here I present the works of Jean-Charles Massera, Liv Schulman, Romana Schmalisch, and Robert Schlicht, who use humour to examine art\u2019s ability to inflect the machine and caricature the counterproductive instrumentalization of its vocabulary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a time when artists, willingly taken for mavericks, seemed alien to the domain of labour, its methods, and its discourse. Times have admittedly changed: exhibitions and publications, with governmental inducements and corporate solicitations, are proliferating. I shall not adumbrate the genealogy of artists\u2019 relationships with labour from the nineteenth century up to the struggles of the avant-garde, to fulfil the status of art as a social act. I will note, however, that our era is not as concerned with the representation of labour and its associated emancipatory values and societal edification as with re-evaluating the artist\u2019s position. As early as the 1960s, various artists gauged their own work in terms of professional standards and of the notion of profession itself. Marcel Duchamp, Robert Filliou, and the later \u201centrepreneurial\u201d artists^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - Among them, the Artist Placement Group, Francis Al\u00ffs, Christopher D\u2019Arcangelo, Jean-Baptiste Farkas, Peter Fend, Andrea Fraser, Jenny Holzer, Fabrice Hybert, and Peter Nadin.<\/span> never tired of deconstructing the romantic figure of the creative genius, withdrawn from economic realities. Instead, their experimentations bring art face-to-face with its commercialization and operation, from the manufacture of goods to the marketing of services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\n

<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\n