Rindon Johnson
Outputs of the Young Precariats
Online seminar, English, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Tuesdays, 14-16 h, 6 video sessions: 17.11., 24.11., 1.12., 8.12., 12.1., 26.1.2021, online plus self work
Attention: starts a week later: now starts 17.11.!

Gary Carrion-Muriyar curator of the New Museum’s most recent Triennial, “Songs for Sabotage” described millennials “as the generation of the young precariat.” Carrion-Muriyar borrows this term, precariat, from Guy Standing whose 2014 book, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class details the “arrival” of a new class of people across the world with occupational identities that are inherently unstable. As this “underclass” of precariat rises in numbers, Standing warns of political instability; without an occupation to cling to, the precariat will be wooed by thoughtless radicalism. Carrion-Muriyar’s young precariats share this unstable reality of new forms of labor: freelance, subcontracts, part-timers, share-economy, micro-living etc.
In the course we will pull apart the labor politics young artist precariats have found themselves wading in, we will look at how they use their position as artists materially while subverting and acknowledging it within their work.

Requirements for the ungraded Studium Generale credits: There are no prerequisites to taking the course. The entire course will be devoted to writing a long critical essay on a related topic of the students’ choosing. This essay should be approximately 5 pages and may include poetry, fiction, artwork, drawings, theater, design, and more.

Rindon Johnson is an artist and writer. His most recent virtual reality film, “Meat Growers: A Love Story”, was commissioned by Rhizome (New York) and Tentacular (Madrid). He has exhibited and read widely throughout Europe, the US and Asia. He is the author of “Nobody Sleeps Better Than White People” (Inpatient Press, 2016), the virtual reality book, “Meet in the Corner” (Publishing-House.Me, 2017) and most recently, “Shade the King” (Capricious, 2017). He lives in Berlin and is an Associate Fellow at the Universität der Künste Berlin, Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Sciences, there he writes about Virtual Reality.