Art and life: Productions of temporality in art

The notion of life has shaped various relations of art to politics for decades; with its convergence with life, art used to subvert and shift its institutional boundaries and question its own autonomy, while, at the same time, the belief in its emancipatory power was closely related to possible new ways of life. However, the ability to neutralise each and every artistic protest is infinitely greater in contemporary systems than it was in the totalitarian systems of the past, which dealt with their critics and opponents with repression. Nowadays, it seems that to call a spade a spade is a waste of breath. Precisely for this reason, it is necessary to rethink the relations between art and life, particularly the question of how this relationship is defined nowadays through a special form of production of temporality that transpires in contemporary modes of work, in the disappearance of the dividing line between private time and working hours, in the investment of subjectivity, the role of debt in imagining the future, in the disappearance of the commons, in the duration of an artwork and/or experience, etc. Art must rethink its temporal constitution, which was so important at the beginning of the resistance to industrialisation and the exploitation of work, for the autonomous creative and aesthetic experience now represents an important source of production value.