Share Your Work: Lola Arias’s Lecture Performance Series and the Artistic Cognitariat of the Global Pandemic

Abstract

Working from the premise that lecture performances produced online during the 2020 lockdown have further heightened the form's similarities to academic and managerial labour in post-Fordist economies, this essay examines the online lecture performance series 'My Documents/ Share your Screen' curated by Lola Arias and hosted by a coalition of theatres and performance spaces in Germany. Featuring the work of prominent artists, such as Rabih Mroué, Tim Etchells, and Tania Bruguera, the series offers the chance to examine how lecture performances participate in what Tom Holert calls the 'epistemization of art' within the global knowledge economy. I discuss how the lecture performances in the series problematised and tried to resist the commodification and hegemonisation of knowledge under cognitive capitalism. Drawing on Liam Gillick's conception of the artists as the 'ultimate freelance knowledge worker', I argue that lecture performances are emblematic of a cultural market that mobilises artistic processes as artistic products and has them stand-in for more financially and temporally costly productions. As the global pandemic has put these conventional productions on hold, this moment presents an ideal opportunity to investigate artists as cognitive workers and to appreciate the ramifications that surround their status as such.