We’ve had another little break...but we did manage to read a couple of great books we would highly recommend! The first is a book by Oliver Ressler, Gregory Sholette called ‘It’s the Political Economy, Stupid’ and is based around an exhibition of the same title, curated by the same two artists. The show was predominantly comprised of video-based political works from many international artists. Its title has an interesting lineage, it appears in an essay by cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek, who adapted the phrase from a 1992 Bill Clinton campaign slogan. Unfortunately, the entire time we were reading it there was a feeling of “this would probably would be better had we seen the show”, this being because it is very much a catalogue – but it is not necessary to have done so; examples of quite a few of the artists’ work can be found on-line, and the several of the essays required revisiting. The idea of exploring the crisis in art and theory is a great one, given the mystique attached to knowledge economies and cultural work in the newly precarious economic order. Well worth a look for those interested in cultural economies, analyses of the crises and the political economy of everyday responses.
Next, the compliment the themes of the first book we had, ‘Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism’. This short book wastes no time in cutting to the chase: contemplating why we enjoy what we enjoy helps us recognise and better understand environmental and market forces that influence our dispositions to certain types of entertainment. The author does not suggest that readers should adopt more "high-brow" forms of enjoyment, like reading complex critical theory, and forsake certain other types of mindless enjoyment (e.g. playing Candy Crush). Rather, he places all enjoyment on a level playing field to be analysed as more or less equal enjoyments. This approach encourages introspection from the reader into what our enjoyments are without the red herrings of analysing how worthless some of our enjoyments are. For example, we all know that playing games on our phones is usually an unproductive waste of time. But had this book made that its central focus, we'd likely miss the larger themes of enjoyment in general. All enjoyment. We'd agree that Instagram is a waste of time, vow to spend less time on our phones, and then let the new goal slowly deteriorate and disappear within a week of finishing the book. However, by not ranking or disparaging certain enjoyments, this book helps the reader recognise that even the book we're reading provides a certain enjoyment that needs to be analysed. Why did we buy this book? What environmental and market forces drove us to purchase this book, and what is it about us that enjoys reading it?
Finally it was Ryan Gander’s ‘Fieldwork, an Incomplete Reader’, the first of his two books that accompany his large installation titled ‘Fieldwork’. The work is a quite something; it feels like the perfect analogy for it is the swan that gracefully moves on a lake is a picture of elegance in motion but what is hidden from the eye is the activity going on beneath the water’s surface. We don’t see the hard work conducted by the swan’s webbed feet which propels the graceful motion we see and admire. Behind this one window is everything but the viewer is only permitted to see a one beautifully displayed item at a time. It reveals playfulness and morbidity in equal degrees and includes the urn that had contained his Auntie Deva’s ashes and a group of Playmobil “Mix ‘em Ups”. The book is a collection of notes by Gander on the individual objects, including a description of Ryan and his daughter’s experiments to make the Playmobil shed its identity, assembling the pieces by chance. The value here is not in the physicality of the objects themselves, but in their heritage.
