Bojana Kunst

Bojana Kunst is a Slovenian philosopher, dramaturg, and theorist of performance, dance, and contemporary artistic labor. She is one of the most important thinkers examining the relationships between art, capitalism, time, labor, the body, and the production of subjectivity. Since 2012, she has been affiliated with the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at Justus Liebig University Giessen, where she holds a professorship in Dance Studies and directs the Choreography and Performance program. Her most important book, *Artist at Work: Proximity of Art and Capitalism* (2015), published in Polish as *Artysta w pracy. O pokrewieństwach sztuki i kapitalizmu* (2016), is one of the key contemporary studies of how capitalism captures not only artistic labor but also life, time, the body, relationships, and creative capacity itself. ### Introduction: The Artist as a Figure of Contemporary Labor Bojana Kunst begins from the recognition that contemporary art and contemporary capitalism have become disturbingly similar. Post-Fordist capitalism, organized around flexibility, projects, mobility, creativity, self-discipline, and permanent availability, has appropriated many qualities historically associated with artistic labor. Artists have long worked outside stable employment, combined life with production, invested in themselves, assumed risk, and organized their own time. Contemporary capitalism has transformed this into a generalized model of work. For Kunst, the figure of the artist has therefore ceased to function as an exception to the labor market. It has become its laboratory. What once appeared to be a marginal form of creative life now returns as the neoliberal ideal of the worker: be creative, flexible, available, committed, self-reliant, mobile, and prepared to turn your own life into a project. ### *Artist at Work* Kunst’s most important book is *Artist at Work: Proximity of Art and Capitalism*. Its central claim is that art and capitalism have converged precisely where art traditionally sought its autonomy — in ways of living, working time, individual expression, experience, the body, and the artist’s subjectivity. Kunst analyzes a situation in which the artist works with her entire life. The creative process encompasses memory, biography, relationships, affects, the body, language, public presence, the production of one’s own visibility and recognizability, and the capacity for continuous self-organization. Cognitive capitalism no longer requires only a finished product. Increasingly, it requires personality, communication, creativity, visibility, and a willingness to self-exploit. ### The Proximity of Art and Capitalism The word “proximity” in the book’s subtitle is crucial. Kunst does not describe a simple subordination of art to capitalism. She is interested in proximity: tension, mutual attraction, similarities of form, and the simultaneous possibility of resistance. Art and capitalism share certain vocabularies: creativity, innovation, project, risk, experimentation, flexibility, intensity, orientation toward the future. This is precisely what makes art so susceptible to capture. Its language of emancipation can easily be rewritten as the language of management. Experiment becomes innovation. Autonomy becomes self-employment. Passion becomes a justification for low pay. Creative life becomes endless availability. ### The Production of Artistic Subjectivity One of Kunst’s most important concepts is the **production of artistic subjectivity**. The artist produces more than artworks, performances, choreographies, texts, or images. She also produces herself as a subject capable of participating in the art field. She must be recognizable, communicative, consistent, interesting, mobile, collaborative, and continually expected to justify her practice. Artistic labor therefore also includes producing and maintaining one’s own position within the field. The biography, portfolio, artist statement, grant application, attendance at events, conversations with curators, networking, communication, promotion, and management of one’s own image all become part of the work. Kunst shows that these are not supplements to artistic practice. They are the contemporary infrastructure of artistic labor. ### Laboring with the Self Closely connected to the production of subjectivity is the category of **laboring with the self**. The artist works with memory, body, language, emotion, experience, and her own biography. Her life becomes raw material for production. This is particularly visible in performance, dance, and presence-based practices, but Kunst shows that the mechanism extends across a much wider field of art. Laboring with the self remains difficult to value because it is often presented as expression, passion, natural sensitivity, or personal need. This is precisely where the political problem emerges: once something is named as expression, the system can avoid recognizing it as labor. Kunst calls for a change in language. What appears to be simply “being an artist” is often hidden, continuous, and undervalued work. ### Life as Raw Material for Production One of Kunst’s strongest claims concerns capitalism’s absorption of life. Contemporary production no longer stops at working hours. It extends into leisure, relationships, rest, identity, affect, communication, and potentiality. The artist becomes a figure of this process because artistic labor has long been difficult to separate from life. Kunst shows, however, that this difficulty has been exploited by capitalism. Where artists once sought freedom from the discipline of industrial labor, capitalism found a model for flexible exploitation. The absence of fixed hours, stable structures, and the idea of work driven by passion began to function as conditions of exploitation. ### The Project Form One of Kunst’s central concepts is the **project form**. The project has become the dominant form for organizing artistic labor: it has a beginning, an end, a budget, a schedule, objectives, a description, outcomes, indicators, and an obligation to account for results. It appears to offer freedom by enabling mobility, collaboration, and experimentation. In practice, it imposes a particular temporality on the artist. A project requires a visible result within a predetermined period. It must be described before it is made. It must promise outcomes before the process has actually unfolded. It must be translated into the language of institutions, grants, strategies, and indicators. Kunst shows how the project form colonizes the artistic imagination by requiring the creative process to become predictable, measurable, and accountable. ### Project Temporality Project temporality is the time of short cycles: application, production, presentation, report, and the next application. The artist lives between open calls, deadlines, rehearsals, residencies, and reporting requirements. Within this model, work never really ends. Every project leads to the next, while the interval between projects becomes a time of anxiety, self-promotion, and searching for the next source of funding. Kunst emphasizes that this temporality destroys the conditions for experimentation. Experiment requires time without guarantees: wandering, unproductivity, silence, repetition, changes of direction, and failure. The project form tolerates experimentation only when it can be translated into the language of the application form. ### The Temporality of Duration Against the project form, Kunst places the **temporality of duration**. This is the time required for work to mature, for sustained engagement with material, for processes without immediate outcomes, for reflection, recovery, and return. Duration does not mean inactivity. It names another kind of work — one that cannot easily be measured and does not always result in a rapid product. For Kunst, reclaiming duration is one of art’s most important political tasks. Without duration, art becomes subordinated to project logic and begins to resemble the production of short-term results. Duration protects process from the economy of immediate visibility. ### Affective and Emotional Labor Kunst participates in the broader debate around affective and emotional labor. In the art field, affect is continually produced, extracted, and consumed. The artist is expected to be sensitive, intense, open, present, available for conversation, willing to share her process, ready to speak about her work, and capable of producing an affective atmosphere around her work and presence. The problem is that this labor often remains invisible. The emotional and affective costs of artistic work are treated as a natural part of vocation. Kunst shifts them into the realm of economics: affect is not a private supplement to labor but one of its resources. ### The Body in Artistic Labor As a theorist of dance and performance, Kunst pays particular attention to the body. In the performing arts, the body is tool, medium, material, and political field. The body works, wears down, remembers, reacts, ages, tires, and is exposed to evaluation. Under creative capitalism, the artist’s body becomes both a source of authenticity and a site of exploitation. It is required to be present, available, flexible, mobile, and prepared to exceed its limits. Kunst shows that embodied labor demands attention to its costs: physical, psychological, affective, and social. ### Reproductive Labor and Maintenance Kunst’s thought intersects with feminist critiques of reproductive labor. Art is not produced only at the moment of presentation. It depends on sustaining life: rest, care, relationships, organization, writing emails, caring for spaces, recovery, cooking, travel, waiting, conversations, rehearsals, and caring for the body and sustaining health. These activities are rarely recognized as part of artistic labor, although without them the work could not happen. Kunst shows that invisible labor of maintenance is one of the foundations of the art field. In this sense, art is far more deeply entangled with reproductive labor than the traditional figure of autonomous artistic creation allows us to acknowledge. ### Precarization Kunst analyzes the artist as a figure of the precarious worker. Artistic labor often depends on instability, short-term contracts, low fees, uncertain sources of funding, mobility, multitasking, and the need to apply continually. Precarity is not a side effect of the system. It is one of its modes of operation. The artist is expected to be free and flexible, yet this freedom is often freedom without security. She may choose projects, but she must struggle for the basic conditions of survival. She may work out of passion, but passion is used against her as an argument for underpayment. ### “Do What You Love” Kunst situates her diagnosis close to critiques of the ideology of **do what you love**. In the art field, the phrase “do what you love” is particularly dangerous because art may genuinely be bound up with desire, passion, need, vocation, and a sense of meaning. That is precisely why these attachments can so easily be used to legitimize exploitation. If work is fulfilling, it becomes easier to pay less. If the artist “has to create” anyway, compensation can be treated as secondary. If participation in a project is presented as an “opportunity,” the absence of viable working conditions can be left unspoken. Kunst shows how love of work can be transformed into an instrument of discipline. ### The Dark Matter of Artistic Production Close to Kunst’s thinking is Gregory Sholette’s concept of art’s **dark matter**. It refers to the vast amount of labor, people, practices, projects, relationships, and failures that sustain the art field while rarely becoming visible within its official circulation. Kunst adds a temporal dimension: art’s dark matter also includes invisible time — preparation, waiting, recovery, learning, abandoning, and beginning again. This shift matters because it makes visible that artistic production consists of more than works and events. It also depends on invisible conditions that make those works and events possible. ### Idleness, Wasted Time, and Less Work Kunst is also interested in the possibility of resisting capitalist productivity. One such possibility lies in defending idleness, wasted time, unproductivity, and less work. This is not a romantic celebration of passivity. It is a refusal to subordinate the whole of life to the logic of productivity. In a world that continually demands activity, availability, and projects, refusing production can become a political gesture. Kunst analyzes such gestures as ways of disrupting the project economy. Time that appears wasted may turn out to be time reclaimed. ### Collectivity Kunst does not reduce resistance to an individual strategy. Collectivity occupies an important place in her thought: shared forms of work, mutual care, economic solidarity, the sharing of resources, and the creation of structures that do not fully submit to the logic of competition. This matters because neoliberal artistic labor isolates. Each person is expected to build her own visibility and professional profile, write her own applications, develop her own profile, and compete for the same resources. Collectivity can weaken this logic, although it too can be captured by institutions as an attractive project format. ### Art as a Critique of Time One of Kunst’s most important contributions is to relocate the debate about art and capitalism onto the level of time. She does not ask only about money, production, and markets. She asks what kind of time makes art possible, what kind of time destroys it, and what kind of time is imposed upon it. In this sense, her theory is a critique of the temporality of contemporary capitalism. Project-based capitalism needs the future as promise, the present as intensive production, and the past as a biographical resource. Art can reproduce this arrangement, but it can also disrupt it through duration, delay, unproductivity, and refusal of immediate results. ### Performance and Dance Kunst’s background in dance and performance theory is crucial to her entire project. Dance and performance make especially visible that artistic labor takes place through the body, time, presence, and relation. It cannot be completely separated from the life of the person performing it. These fields therefore become, for Kunst, sites from which broader capitalist processes can be diagnosed. Performance reveals something that may remain concealed elsewhere: labor is embodied, temporal, relational, and affective. Kunst uses this insight to analyze the broader field of artistic labor. ### Significance for Art Theory Bojana Kunst’s significance lies in the precision with which she describes the moment when art ceases to function as an imagined alternative to capitalism and begins to operate as its model and laboratory. Her work does not deny art its critical potential. It shows where that potential becomes most vulnerable. Kunst makes visible that exploitation in art cannot be reduced to low pay. It also concerns time, affect, the body, subjectivity, language, relationships, visibility, and life itself. This is one of the most important shifts in contemporary critiques of artistic labor. ### Key Concepts **Laboring with the self** — labor performed through the artist’s body, biography, memory, affect, identity, relationships, and presence. **Production of artistic subjectivity** — the continuous process of producing oneself as a recognizable, communicative, and valuable person within the art field. **Project form** — the dominant model for organizing artistic labor, structured around applications, schedules, budgets, outcomes, and reporting. **Project temporality** — the time of short production cycles, deadlines, and measurable outcomes. **Temporality of duration** — the time of process, maturation, recovery, repetition, uncertainty, and work without an immediate product. **Affective labor** — the production of emotion, atmosphere, relationships, intensity, and communicative availability. **Artistic precarization** — a model of work organized around uncertainty, mobility, competitive calls, grants, short-term contracts, and the absence of security. **Less work / idleness** — a strategy of refusal directed against the compulsion toward productivity and project-based efficiency. ### Key Publications | Year | Title | Significance | |---|---|---| | 1999 | *Impossible Body: Body and Machine: Theatre, Representation of the Body and Relation to the Artificial* | Early study of the body, technology, representation, and artificiality. | | 2004 | *Dangerous Connections: Body, Philosophy and Relation to the Artificial* | Development of Kunst’s thinking on the body, philosophy, and the artificial. | | 2009 | *Processes of Work and Collaboration in Contemporary Performance* | Edited / co-edited publication on labor and collaboration in performance. | | 2015 | *Artist at Work: Proximity of Art and Capitalism* | Kunst’s key book on artistic labor, capitalism, the project form, and the production of subjectivity. | | 2016 | *Artysta w pracy. O pokrewieństwach sztuki i kapitalizmu* | Polish edition of *Artist at Work*. | ### Significance Bojana Kunst is one of the most important contemporary thinkers writing about artistic labor under post-Fordist capitalism. Her theoretical project shows how contemporary capitalism captures precisely those qualities that were long imagined as constitutive of art: creativity, autonomy, experimentation, irregular time, the incorporation of life into work, affective intensity, and the production of one’s own subjectivity. Kunst’s most important contribution lies in naming forms of labor that often disappear beneath the language of passion, expression, vocation, and artistic freedom. The artist is working when she waits, recovers, talks, writes an application, builds relationships, works through memory, organizes her own visibility, and produces herself as an artistic subject. As long as this labor remains unnamed, the system can benefit from it without assuming responsibility for it. Kunst does not offer an easy route outside the capitalism of art. Her work matters precisely because it describes implication without moralistic simplification. Art can be captured by the market while still producing gestures of refusal: duration instead of product, collectivity instead of solitary competition, less work instead of self-exploitation, delay instead of immediate results. In this sense, *Artist at Work* remains one of the most important books for asking, with full force, the question: **“Is this work?”** Because once the artist’s life becomes raw material for production, the stakes are no longer limited to the artwork. They include time, the body, the possibility of rest, and the right to exist outside the project.