Issue 32: [Re/production]
They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.
They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism.
Every miscarriage is a work accident.
Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both working conditions . . . but homosexuality is workers’ control of production, not the end of work.
More smiles? More money. Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile.
Neuroses, suicides, desexualization: occupational diseases of the housewife.[1]
Silvia Federici introduced her seminal text Wages Against Housework with the statement above in 1975, during her involvement with the international Wages for Housework Campaign. Today an esteemed elder of the autonomist feminist tradition, Federici’s work is informed by the understanding that ‘the reproduction of human beings is the foundation of every economic and political system’, and that the domestic labour of women–invisible, embodied, undervalued, and exploited–is what underpins and sustains this foundation.[2]
This issue of Runway takes this key concern of Federici’s–reproductive labour, and its withdrawal–into the field of contemporary art, and traces its influence on and relevance for generations of practitioners. Federici’s renunciation of the role of the housewife was a reaction to post-war patriarchy in Italy and was spurred by the energy of the women’s movements of the 1970s. Yet as the sites and systems that frame and generate forms of reproductive labour change with the times, so too do the strategies and techniques of the artists and activists that seek to make this labour visible, valued, and directed towards emancipatory autonomy rather than the perpetuation of a capitalist system.
Jump forward to the early 1990s, for example, when a new virtual realm of production and reproduction was emerging as an alternate, immaterial sphere of existence. In the murky early days of the internet, cyberspace offered a place of anonymity and reinvention, of post-gender, post-human possibility. From this product of the military-industrial complex run riot, they say, ‘VNS Matrix crawled out of the cyberswamp in the particularly hot summer of 1991… on a mission to hijack the toys from technocowboys and remap cyberculture with a feminist bent’.[3] Their Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century proclaimed ‘we are the virus of the new world disorder / rupturing the symbolic from within / saboteurs of big daddy mainframe / the clitoris is the direct line to the matrix / VNS MATRIX / terminators of the moral code’. Summoning cyberfeminism into existence simultaneously with Sadie Plant in the UK and Nancy Paterson in Canada, VNS Matrix knew that to claim a stake in constructing architectures of autonomy for everyone, the politics and culture of the web could not be left to the (cis white) boys to conceptualise and create.
Today capitalism has soaked deep into Web 2.0, and both realms, the material and the not-so-immaterial (hello server farms), shape our environments, lives, and bodies with ever increasing degrees of complexity and unpredictability. On the 25th anniversary of the Cyberfeminist Manifesto, Runway has invited VNS Matrix to publish their recent Tender Hex for the Anthropocene and co-edit this issue to reflect on the politics of reproductive labour in an age in which the physical, virtual, natural, cultural, human, and non-human are inextricably entangled.
As a result, this issue features a diverse array of contributors, and draws on conceptual touchstones stretching across time and space, to examine women’s labour in the arts and reproductive labour as art, the economics of artmaking, bioart and ecofeminism, artmaking and motherhood, affect and the care economy, the reproduction of queer space, and much more. Fittingly, the online platform of Runway has been heavily utilised by contributors, and issue #32 RE/PRODUCTION is dense with text, image, code, sound, and video waiting to be discovered. Dive in!
– Laura McLean
in tongues of fire
singing the impossible into being
moresing new becomings
Drawing on theories generated by the Italian autonomia movement, Sylvère Lotringer describes ‘abstract intelligence and immaterial signs’ as being ‘the major productive force’ in the post-Fordist economy. He depicts a new class composition of workers whose ‘entire life is live labor, an invisible and indivisible commodity.’ Paolo Virno speaks of ‘virtuosity’, where innate human abilities such as ‘linguistic competence’, ‘imagination’, symbolic thought and abstract reasoning become the productive forces animating contemporary work processes. Add to this heady mix all the forms of ‘affective’ labour outsourced to soft armies of underpaid and unpaid care workers—sex workers, comfort givers, homemakers—and the end result is the paradigmatic form of labour today. Welcome to the flexitariat. We are all precarious!
Why is it vital for artists and poets to reflect on the conditions of labour under the dark star of late capitalism? Surely the economists and technocrats have it all under control, and one day the dry-mouthed mutterances of trickle-down benefits will materialise. Cultural activists and all those who belong to the creative resistance (not to be confused with the abomination of the creative industries) are adroit in bringing their risk-taking experimental blasphemous methodologies to any social inquiry. It’s what they do, day in, day out.
That’s why, when Runway asked VNS Matrix to curate a special (unsealed) section of this issue, we responded by inviting a coterie of queered artists/poets/philosophers/big brains with virtuosity to burn (baby, burn) to unleash their feralmones. This ‘bestiary of We’, a collective nuisance if ever there was one, includes Cigdem Aydemir, Linda Dement and Amy Ireland, Quinn Eades, Helen Hester and Zahra Stardust, Teri Hoskin, and Melinda Rackham. We knew they would surprise and delight us with their refractory gaze and we were not disappointed. We pussy salute them!
work must be perverted, labour reframed,
redeployed in the service of the birds
unking the castles, crown the swans
fly on our feet
towards a new nature
Terminators, unking Big Daddy Mainframe!
– VNS Matrix
[1] Silvia Federici, ‘Wages Against Housework’, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, PM Press, 2012, p.15
[2] Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, PM Press, 2012, p.2
Laura McLean (Sydney/London) is a curator and writer, and Deputy Chair of Runway.
Holding an MFA (Distinction) in Curating from Goldsmiths College, and a BVA (Hons 1) and MVA from Sydney College of the Arts, she also studied at Alberta College of Art and Design and the Universität der Künste Berlin, and has been a resident of, for example, the Helsinki International Curatorial Program, Finland; Slakthusateljéerna studios, Sweden; Nida Art Colony, Lithuania; Casino Luxembourg Forum d’art Contemporain, Luxembourg; and Porosity Studios at Dong Hua University Shanghai, China.
Past curatorial projects include the twin exhibition program Zoe v Bios at Artistic Bokeh, MuseumsQuartier, Vienna, 2015; the Contingent Movements Archive, initiated as Assistant Curator of the Maldives Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale and further developed at UNESCO, Paris, 2013; Crisis Complex, Tin Sheds Gallery, University of Sydney, 2012; and Survey, Eveleigh Yards, Sydney, 2010. Her writing has been presented by journals and publishers including Runway, Photomediations Machine, Arena, FRAME Finland, and the MIT Press (upcoming).
Cyberfeminism is one of many feminisms, and feminism has not gone away.
– doll yoko
VNS Matrix (articulated as V.N.S. a fauxcronym) was a cyberfeminist media art collective formed in Adelaide (South Australia) in 1991.
The most consistent VNS Matrix genesis story is that VNS Matrix crawled out of the cyberswamp in the particularly hot summer of 1991 and via an aesthetics of slime initially generated as porn (by women for women) VNS Matrix forged an unholy alliance with technology and its machines, and spewed forth a blasphemous text which was the birth of cyberfeminism. VNS Matrix was on a mission to hijack the toys from technocowboys and remap cyberculture with a feminist bent. This is one story.
There are also stories about a slime consciousness operating via spiralspace, across the gyne-matrix, and that cyberfeminism had multiple simultaneous spontaneous points of origin. Sadie Plant was a node, working from Warwick University, as was Nancy Paterson who, in 1992 wrote an article entitled “Cyberfeminism” for the Echo Gopher server.
All of these stories are true and not true. What is clear is that lineage was anathema to VNS Matrix, and that co-relations across spiralspace were spawned, and proliferated.
From 1991 – 1997 VNS Matrix presented installations and public art works in Australia and overseas, working with new media, photography, sound and video. Their works include installations, events, computer games and interactive works, imagery and propaganda distributed through the Internet, zines, and billboards. Taking their point of departure in a sexualised and socially provocative relationship between women and technology the works subversively questioned discourses of domination and control in the expanding cyber space.
The first of their works (a large scale billboard), inspired by such theorists as Donna Haraway and Sadie Plant, featured their gyne-canonical text written and distributed across Australian cities in 1991, “A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century”. It was in this manifesto that the term “cyberfeminism” first appeared, and this work was widely distributed. In the manifesto, VNS Matrix stated that, “we are the modern cunt/positive anti reason/unbounded unleashed unforgiving” and that, “we are the virus of the new world disorder/rupturing the symbolic from within/saboteurs of big daddy mainframe/the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix/the VNS Matrix”. The group disbanded in 1997, but occasionally work together on selected projects and presentations. Their parting manifesto “Bitch Mutant Manifesto” gave the finger to all technopatriarchies and capitalist infospheres with the words “suck my code” amongst other blasphemous exhortations.
“… cyberfeminism was a catalytic moment, a collective memetic mind-virus that mobilised geek girls everywhere and unleashed the blasphemic techno-porno code that made machines pleasurable and wet. a linguistic weapon of mass instruction, the vns manifesto struck at the mass erection of the technopatriarchal order. we loved with machines, in a most unholy alliance… “
– Virginia Barratt
VNS MATRIX was and is:
Virginia Barratt, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini, Josephine Starrs
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.