Jaleh Mansoor, "Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory" (Duke UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the new Books Network.

Hi everyone and welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm Asia Adam-Manis, your host for this episode of New Books in Art. I'm talking today with Dr. Jalai Mansour, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia.

Dr. Mansour is a historian of modern and contemporary cultural production, specializing in 20th century European art, Marxism, Marxist feminism, and critical theory. Her first book, Martial Plan Modernism, Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia from 2016,

considers how abstract painting broke with fascist-associated futurism and functioned as an index of social transition in post-war Italy, refiguring understandings of modernist painting as a project about labor and the geopolitics post-war reconstruction.

Today, I'll be talking with Dr. Mansour about her current book project, Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction, Counter-History, out this week from Duke University Press, which provides a counter-narrative of modernism and abstraction and a re-examination of Marxist aesthetics. By studying gendered and generalized labor, abstraction, automation, and the worker, Dr. Mansour shifts away from ideology, superstructure, and culture,

Puts the Way Art Indexes Crisis and Transformation in the Political Economic Base. So Dr. Mansour, let's just start right at the top here with the book's title, Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction.

This title is potentially a little provocative by way of its reference to sex, but also it might immediately grab the attention of modernists familiar with the work of T.J. Clarke, maybe particularly his essay Olympia's Choice and his 1985 book The Painting of Modern Life.

And in your preface, you situate this book as in dialogue with another of Clarke's works, Farewell to an Idea, as well as Rosalind Krauss's The Optical Unconscious. And from there, you really brilliantly move on to these two introductions to set the reader along these two converging paths.

So to get us started here, I was hoping you could first talk about, first of all, how you developed this research topic overall and how this book project has reached its final form with these key theorists and artists structuring it. And then I'd love to hear how and maybe at what point in the project you determined that double introductions was the right move, because I agree it is the right move.

Wonderful. Thanks so much, Asia. And this is a tremendously generous introduction. So I'm coming down off of my blush here. And firstly, I should just say that I'm chatting with you today in so-called Vancouver, in so-called Canada, on the unceded and ancestral lands of the Tsleil-Waututh, the Musqueam, and the Squamish peoples.

Squamish nations, which are the condition for everything we do, think, say. And that's crucial to situate that before we get going. And then also just to the point you just made, I'd like to note that so much of this work and so much of what I'm saying today is really indebted to the art historian Rosalind Krauss, who

And you're absolutely right to point out that not only does a conversation with her work form one of the introductions, which might seem a little bit eccentric. We can talk about that later.

but also that she really is the primary interlocutor for this work. At the same time, what got me going to do this project after the first book, which is much more geopolitically situated and historically situated, sort of more proper art history, if you will, is that after I finished my time working

in New York and Columbia. It was right around the time of the major crash, the market crash and the whole mortgage crisis and all of this. And something about that moment as I was getting going in the big bad job market of art history really struck me and kind of annoyed me that art history didn't seem adequately motivated these days.

And I was thinking about the question of motivation in a structuralist way. So, you know, what are the conditions within which people advance ideas, thoughts, gestures, words, pictures? And particularly in this moment that I was doing my work on the Italian context, I

What are the material conditions that we don't see in everyday life? So anyway, so that was sort of the first flicker of this idea of, you know, what the heck? What is the role of the market and finance in our history? And one thing led to another. But to the title, to your question, which is really, I really appreciate the question.

Because I sense that the title will land as quite provocative. And that's fine. I'm not either trying to precipitate that feeling or to avoid it.

But it's definitely borrowed. The title is borrowed and struck me as a way to reroute a lot of the familiar Enlightenment language of our history, even after ideology critique and de-centering our history and so on and so forth. There's still a kind of anchored language around universality or de-centering universality and those kinds of debates.

And I wanted to just switch gears and move from that arena into a kind of materialist framework where the question of transactions or points of sale or the whole question of the artist's survival

and how the artist's survival in the conditions in which they're working is or isn't going to motivate what they're doing, especially in cases of the sort of myth of the poverty of the artist, like Seurat and so forth. So anyway, the word universal prostitution comes from a title that Picabia gave to an artwork that is on the cover of the book called

that is owned by Yale University. But it also comes from Marx's, Karl Marx's Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts of 1844.

Now, here's the sort of art historical whirligig that probably wouldn't be legit in other disciplinary fields, which is that, of course, we all know that the philosophic and economic manuscripts aren't even published until after the work and not until 1933 in France. But something about that, especially given Picabia's notoriety as the sort of bad boy of

modernist art, you know, always womanizing and partying and all this sort of stuff, like an odd figure in the avant-garde. It seemed all the more interesting to me that he would hit on that language.

But anyway, so in terms of anchoring the language more responsibly, I lean heavily in my work on the art historian George Baker, who I consider to be the foremost authority on Francis Picabia's oeuvre, who has done all sorts of exhaustive research in the archives and suggests that the language from Picabia's painting actually does derive from

from a close-knit Marxist matrix, and more specifically yet from his friend Louis Aragon, the poet, who had just around the time of the painting shifted far, far, far to the left.

So there is enough historical and contextual support for the idea that Picabia was looking toward a Marxist framework. But the glitch in the actual sequence of the availability of Marx's work makes it all the more interesting to me. It's almost like...

It's almost a kind of unconscious repetition in advance, which, to your point, is why I had to move along two different kinds of axes of interpretation. So then the question is, why is this word universal prostitution so strange? It's already strange when Marx is using it in 1844. And in the same way that I mentioned that

I was kind of on this mission to ground art history in more materialist terms, not least because I was beginning to notice patterns across, you know, 20 years of teaching. So the book does include some new research, archival research, but for the most part, it's a synthesis of this other through line that I was beginning to notice, right?

So that's on the side of trying to anchor art history in a more sort of materially responsible place. But on the other side, on the flip of the dialectic, this is where I think Marx is at his most arty. This is a really creative kind of move of estrangement on Marx's part and

And the language totally falls out by the time of drafting and publishing Capital later. Sorry. So...

The reason I'm saying it's Marx that is most arty is that the language is associated with a particular gendered position in history. So, you know, we know that prostitution and sex work has a very long and complicated history. There are some terrific new histories on this in the long jury that have emerged recently. Yeah.

But it's an interesting way for Marx to begin to theorize the historically emergent figure of the worker. So it's 1844. The workers' movement has just begun in England and France and Germany. The exodus of the peasantry to urban hubs of industry is totally reconstituting collective life on a granular scale and on a grand scale. And Marx is floating an early labor theory of capital.

So his difference from Proudhon and the notion that property is theft or other leftist theorists in the moment, the distance or the gap couldn't be more marked than through this term because it's really thinking about the new ontology of the laborer.

And the primary task contra others is to offer some kind of language through which to describe, first describe, and then explain why the new kind of worker and their work isn't the same as workers and work that have existed since time immemorial. Labor has always been around. And it's also imperative for him to explain why the market is

is not the same within a capitalist mode of production than markets that have existed time immemorial.

So it's notable to choose a term that would be completely defamiliarizing and that would sort of switch gears into something as seemingly natural or fundamental as gender to talk about this new kind of figure. And so what is it about the new market and the new figure that is new?

And that's the fact that the primary object on the market is now labor power itself. So there have always been markets, there's always been production, but this particular juncture that generates a new subject is the welding together of this new condition of

abstract labor time and then abstract labor time that gets realized on a market. The reason that that is so weird is that labor power isn't something that you can just deliver in a barrel or a sack or, you know, in a bushel. It's carried by a person, you know, a sentient person.

And so that, I think, is why this notion of prostitution, which is, again, traditionally gendered, comes in as a rescue for a brief moment before Marx becomes much, much more programmatic and systematized. It's kind of spontaneous language. That's why I'm calling it arty language.

But it's marking a kind of labor where there's a wedge between the labor bearer and the labor bearer's capacity. And that this capacity now is something depersonalized. It's indifferent.

It's not located in any kind of traditional social belonging. And so in a way, this will later come to be calcified in the word alienation. But the word prostitution is interesting at this particular moment because

It's a way of talking about the embodiment of that kind of bringing of metabolic time, fleshly embodied work.

but also work that one doesn't have a kind of intellectual or affective investment in necessarily. I mean, we're not going to bicker about whether sex work is skilled or unskilled. That's a ridiculous and snobby kind of thing. Whatever it is, it is a form of labor where there's a kind of wedge between the bearer and their non-working self.

So anyway, I thought this was really interesting. And the other, the defamiliarizing device that is kind of Brechtian almost, or almost like...

You know how a painter like Cezanne would leave parts of the canvas blank to show that it's a canvas. This is Marx really dislocating bourgeois assumptions of all kinds of things, human behavior, the individual. Gender is one component in a bouquet there.

But what I think it's really doing is drawing together the incommensurability of a kind of bourgeois moralist kind of thinking, which is deeply ideological and one that is kind of bare bones materialist and situated in history, however ahistorical the figure of the prostitute might be.

So, you know, the title comes then from Picabia's painting, but it also became a kind of logic to think about a lot of artworks throughout the book, which again became part of this emergent idea.

through line, which is that the question of labor, embodied labor, gendered labor, is thematized over and over again in modernism. And you brought up T.J. Clark and his analysis of Olympia, and he says in there famously that Olympia is the foundational monument of modernism.

And that, you know, for a very small discourse, a relatively, by contrast to other forms of history, a pretty rarefied discourse like our history, to share a consensus around that is pretty interesting. Yeah.

And so I began to realize or to notice in thinking through Clark's terms where, you know, this painting is the foundational monument of modernism because it's both offering us something that might be kind of scandalous.

But then naked women have been a major figure in representation since the Renaissance. That's what marks secular ideas of beauty, the emergence of the nude, the thematization of Venus. And Clark's point is that what is unconsciously or consciously happening is a feeling of scandal that comes from the fact that the picture is so flat, right?

And so the flatness is a kind of reality principle that seems to trigger a social reality principle that's otherwise hidden. So that to me is Clark at his most formalist. And I began to notice this across modernism, that when artists are really grappling with the strangeness of labor and this kind of, you know,

split labor bearer who is a person, a socially embedded person, but offering something completely abstract, that there tends to be interesting kinds of sea changes or innovations in form. I noticed this about Seurat.

The way that the technique becomes a way to talk about social decomposition and recomposition or the way that the Dada artists use the machine to talk about various forms of labor. And then all the way through performance and most significantly, I think now, the delegated performance of people like...

or Santiago Sierra, who's a chapter in the book or who motivates a chapter in the book, but all sorts of artists like Vanessa Beecroft or...

My God, there are so many. Henri Salat. That this question of forms of contemporary art now are similarly trying to come to terms with seismic crises and

in an economic register that is marked as crises are in a relationship between labor, labor markets, the state and capital. And so it just keeps happening over and over again. And so I thought that I would write something that would try to connect the dots.

So that's the long and short. But yeah, the title became important as a way to signal not just new forms of the sale of labor power, again, prostitution being an ancient form, but how when it gets used in modernism, it's being used as a device to signal a emergent kind of social form with an emergent struggle to

that then motivates new form in aesthetic expression. So, you know, if labor is the form of modernity, it is going to keep sort of prodding artists that are wrestling with it to come up with new forms.

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Yeah, I think that's a great look at the scope of the book and the same, like the key themes that I definitely got out of my reading of it as well and gives us so many paths to follow along, which I would love to get into as we go on, particularly about gender, gendered labor, humanization, also as those three things all sort of come together here. Yeah.

There's so much more to get into the title even because it's not just universal prostitution. It's universal prostitution and modernist abstraction, which gives us a whole nother can of worms to sort of unpack here. So I think this is a good moment before we sort of get deeper into some of those other ideas to turn to the way that abstraction is conceptualized throughout the book. You make a really deliberate distinction between aesthetic abstraction

and real abstraction. And the distance between those two modes of abstraction is really fundamental to understanding your project, as well as to me, I think, really fundamental to raising the stakes of studying modernist art history in the current moment, in this current political moment, specifically in which we're living and working and writing. So before I say any more about abstraction and get into these other topics, would you like to also jump in here and sort of say anything about the distinction between aesthetic and real abstraction?

Yeah, totally. And thank you so much for that. I like the way that you frame that so much because with every passing day, I am living in the firm conviction that we live in a very abstract, very abstract space, both in our relationship to media and representation, but also to everyday life. So yeah, we can, if you want, we can return to the issue of

gender and the model, because that is laterally connected to this question that you ask.

One of the questions or one of the things in traditional understandings of modernist abstraction is that abstraction is all about autonomy and aesthetic autonomy. But then there's always the remainder in what people who use that kind of language, of course, famously Clement Greenberg, there's always this weird kind of residue or undertow where,

where he says, oh, you know, it has a kind of autonomy from ideology, but then it's connected to the bourgeoisie in the market with an umbilical cord of gold.

And that interested me, too, because it's so gendered. It is such a brazenly gendered sort of metaphor. So that got me back to the nude and the model. But, yeah, this this question that you ask, I think, is more primary and fundamental. And why I had to have this this question.

other kind of introduction at the beginning of the book. So yeah, the terms get really confusing. What is abstraction? What's the difference between aesthetic and real abstraction? How do we hold those two categories apart in a way that can keep things fairly efficient and understandable? So while I was writing this, one thing that struck my ear that I was hearing from artists mostly is

is the notion that everyday life is in fact very abstract and that art usually, if and when, or at least since the mid to late 19th century,

When the work of art is grappling in some kind of self-reflexive or self-critical way with its own constraints or with its own materials, whatever those are, you know, again, Clement Greenberg, the famous guy of mid-century modernism, for him, it was flatness, but flatness is something to resist, to fight against. Right.

while still not yielding to conventional representation. For other artists, it's been paint or the frame or canvas itself. These are all really tangible. And so one thing I noticed was the contemporary or the, you know, sort of late modernist slash contemporary artist Liam Gillick

who has insisted in a variety of places that aesthetic abstraction and what we call aesthetic abstraction from Manet or Sora or however you see the beginnings of that in Amalovich or whoever is actually pretty concrete as things go. It

hovers close to its own material conditions and constraints and factor. One that I love is Olga Rozanova's Green Vertical Stripe. That to me is a crucial beginning. And it's about the process of putting paint on a surface in a way that then becomes visually interesting.

So there's that. But then that already is too literal. It'd be silly and literal to just throw in the dice and go with Gillick and say, yeah, we're going to reverse everything. So art is actually very concrete and life is very abstract because we understand everyday life through a Marxist vein, which I'll get to in a minute. So that was too literal for me.

But at the same time, I understand that for most people, especially people outside of our history, again, which is pretty rarefied zone of query, that abstraction is mostly conjugated with thought abstractions or with philosophy in a really confusing kind of way. But then...

We have to kind of remind ourselves that that had been, in a way, modernism's big problem set, which was to continually shift between something very concrete, again, the facture, the picture plane, but then make something else, something optically or visually interesting or politically or ideologically provocative or somehow rupturing our world to come out of that

sort of concrete space. So that to me is modernism's promise, that it's not going to sit still with either of those. What was important to me to flesh out in this book was

was again the question of motivation, that these things that we call a move toward abstraction are often motivated by kinds of abstraction that are coming from everyday life. And those kinds of abstraction, again, is the problem of modern and contemporary labor or labor in the capitalist mode of production where there's a kind of similar structure

Sort of striptease, if you will, to go back to Marx's universal prostitution, where the worker is told that they're free, they're formally free. This isn't serfdom. It's not the peasantry. It's not living off the land. It's not the formally enslaved people.

forms of labor that come with contact and colonization, which leads to the accumulation of wealth that then makes capital possible. This is the idea that the worker is free to sell their labor power.

But then right under that, in the split condition of labor, the worker is anything but free insofar as they're compelled to sell that labor capacity in order to replicate on a daily basis. So that kind of pivot or swivel between the notion of freedom and the fact that that kind of freedom is utterly mystified and a myth that's Marx's philosophy.

debate with Adam Smith, labor is not free because it's compelled by a market. That seemed to be a kind of interesting duck rabbit problem, if you will, that tracks parallel with modern art. So that interested me. And then the other thing that interested me is this question of why when labor capacity or laborers go to a labor market to sell their labor,

That space is so dehumanizing. Why is that space over and over again so dehumanizing? Also in art from, again, Olympia all the way to Santiago Sierra's work, which puts actually living people in incredibly dangerous, cruel and violent situations, right?

So that whereby they are earning some kind of payment or piddling remuneration in such a way that that danger is momentarily suspended and they're willing to enter into that transactional kind of space.

why does that keep happening? Why is that a sub-theme through so much artistic practice? So then the question came up of how or why the market is a place of abstraction. And that's where I had to lean quite heavily on the work of Alfred Zohn Rethels, Intellectual and Manual Labor, which has been kind of a repressed work

well-known and important work, well-known and important in the Italian context, which is how I came to know it. In the context of autonomia and a critique of work,

trying to theorize work not as something where a working class has to be continually affirmed or appeased, but where a working class might eventually want to abolish this condition of humiliation. You know, within that discourse, Zon Rethel was really important. And the reason he was really important is

is that for him, a lot of our weird social relations come from the fact that even though we all meet and greet each other in everyday life or nowadays on the internet or on Zoom or wherever, we have this kind of interface with each other as humans. But what's secretly happening all the time

Is that, you know, insofar as we are thoroughly situated in capital, we have to earn a living, we need a paycheck, we need to get jobs, we need to go on the job market across all sorts of labor, intellectual labor, manual labor, you know, the sort of lateral and vertical lines of the brutal food chain that is capital.

that there's always this kind of undertow where we are compelled by our constraints as workers. And this is really becoming an issue in academia with workers.

the whole topic of free speech that is being really weaponized in an ideological kind of set of debates. But I think it comes down to a condition within which we are all increasingly aware of our market status, our marketability, our employability. And so Zone Rethel was really good at theorizing that

And I thought that I was all, you know, sort of fancy and working on some sort of theoretical vanguard. But of course, artists have been citing Zona Rethel for a long time, one of whom, you know, is the collective Claire Fontaine, associated with Tycoon, who's also a chapter in the book.

And they have a really robust analysis of how, at least especially for artists, this hidden sort of transactional space of the art market or the grants application or wherever the source of money, the umbilical cord to the gold, that that umbilical cord doesn't really get cut. It's highly determining.

And that had been a kind of sub-theme of the book, but it became louder and louder and then became...

really the main argument such that I had to write another intro after I had done all the case studies. So the theory definitely comes from the art, not the other way around, all the way down to, as I mentioned, a point where most of this language comes from artists, including this increasingly, I think, important notion of

that everyday life is already abstract insofar as so much of it is determined in things that we don't even see or notice. It's totally invisible. So that was a way of rethinking aesthetic abstraction and real abstraction, which afforded me more of a through line from 19th century painting to the present

So that instead of seeing modernism as jumping as a series of ruptures, mostly across mediums and so on, that there's kind of a through line whereby as human life gets more and more marketized and abstracted, both through the question of labor, but also the question of

going on a market, as that intensifies and tightens across the century, that's when artists are always casting about looking for new forms through which to articulate that. So maybe I should say something. So you mentioned the artist, or I also mentioned Santiago Sierra's artwork entitled 133 Persons Paid to Have Their Hair Dyed Blonde,

which with every passing day, I'm finding more and more prescient. And that work dates from 2001, from the summer, from the moment of the Venice Biennale where it's set. So that's before even, you know, the, the,

inaugurating event of the 21st century being 9-11. But in that work, what the artists did was notice or locate across Venice people that were selling luxury goods or jewelry

fake luxury goods illegally. And because those persons are often drawn from recently immigrated pools from global sites that are often under a lot of political duress or from Europe's numerous former colonies, North Africa, currently from the Middle East,

Those people are already racialized. And to me, what's important about that is that the artist is noticing crises in late 20th century labor, restructuring, etc.

The way in which primary sites of value productive labor were sent elsewhere, but at the same time, there's a situation within which in the former core, there's a greater reliance on things like service and other forms of work that long landed demographics often won't take.

So there's a kind of question of racialization. But to me, what that really triggers is the historicity of capital itself.

which is that it's racialized demographics that were set into compelled compulsory labor through violence, immiseration, enslavement, to generate the kind of capital that then makes the capitalist mode of production possible for

So there's kind of an arc where the racialized figure is at the inception of the capitalist mode of production, but also marking its crisis as it begins to dissolve for all kinds of reasons. And so Sierra's locating these particular persons is

is important and notable. It's signal to a history and a contemporary crisis. But then he does something where he sets them into a kind of voluntary endangerment. They voluntarily allow their hair to be dyed blonde as part of the artwork in exchange for a minimal sum of money. So there's the transaction.

And the transaction suspends their or anybody's concern for them in a larger social field. And of course, when they go back into a larger social field, they're visibly marked. You know, it's like a highlighter on a person in a way that then makes them all the more vulnerable to the police and

who, you know, the Italian Carabinieri are always, always on patrol to find anyone that they think might be an illegal immigrant and to, you know, detain or, you know, send back. This is part of the narrative of how immigration policies keep tightening in Europe in a way that

that Venice is a nodal point on because of the way that it's historically been such a kind of gateway to other cultures.

that are at the borders of Europe. So this is a really kind of disturbing piece, but one that I thought couldn't be more lucid, despite its cruelty in the forms of cruelty that are happening everywhere all the time, right under our noses, that we deny the

Because, of course, the brutality of the moment on the market, the transactional moment on the market is itself so abstracted. It's not part of our kind of social interface with one another. So...

Yeah, that's sort of how I would summarize that or how I came into contemporaneity and the idea that a lot of forms of performance and delegated performance are thinking about the kind of the increasing brazenness through which the market value of human time eclipses

the humanity of human time. So it's, these are artworks that demonstrate over and over again, the way that the circulation, the production and circulation of value come to dominate over lived, the lived time that everyone always assumes the artwork to be about. So, you know, it's art histories in the humanities. It's about subjectivity. It's about subjective experience. And,

Lots and lots of people theorize aesthetic abstraction as a response, if not reaction, to real abstraction. But for me, it's a much more symbiotic relationship. It's that umbilical cord of gold again, whereby these problems in a kind of

field of remuneration, transaction payment, survival are motivating forms in art.

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That's such a great, rich answer that, again, gives us so much more to sort of dive into from there. I think it's really clear throughout the book, the way that art and theory are working together and art is really propelling the theory, particularly with Sierra's work sort of starting to wrap up the project as you bring together these ideas about

abstraction and technology and labor and surplus value and gender. And you interject this idea that I also think has been present sort of underlying the book, sort of waiting for its moment throughout the previous chapters. And that's the question of race and racialization. Maybe we'll get back to that too. But before we sort of move too far from that, I think I also see it tie really well into sort of the question that's leading the book, which is why Marx's

term or expression for new forms of abstract labor was gendered with the term universal prostitution and why that question is sort of central to this project. I think even as that chapter, the final chapter on Sierra's work addresses race, it also doesn't forget that question about both the gendering and racing of abstract labor. So maybe one last sort of note

or comment or question to lead us through. Also, I'll come back to Tycoon as well and Claire Fontaine as we keep moving. But before we keep moving, I still can't get away from one last question about the muse and about the sort of figures, the gendered figures that really structure this book as well. And I was really taken by your description of the relationship between the artist's muse and the prostitute and between both of these figures and labor.

in these figures as figures, not as individual subjects.

subjects but really as objects um and particularly by the way you describe the trope of the prostitute is desublimating the muse um which is sort of a way i think to tackle this question about questions of labor the abstraction of labor surplus and the worker as object and or subject or maybe first subject and then object as though the figure is dehumanized um

And when I get to this part of the book, or when I got to this part of the book, as a reader, it sort of felt like a key to the rest of the book. The concept of the sublimation of the muse sort of like propelled me forward. I think I'm mixing metaphors here, but I was wondering as we just sort of

maybe transition us from thinking about theory to art objects in a different way here. If we could just get a little deeper into this concept of desublimation as it relates to abstraction, as it also relates to the worker and the issue and almost like the location of surplus in this field of abstraction here.

Yeah, that's really I really love how you formulated that. And it's it's such a you know, it just makes me so happy because this book is kind of experimental in some ways. But from this conversation, it just feels that it's landed. So I'm tremendously grateful to you along along those lines. And you mentioned something else.

that I should just briefly speak to before getting back to the art historical tropes of the nude and this problem of desublimation, which is that one thing that the book traces is precisely those questions of where subjects and objects are located.

And another reason why I think Marx used this language in 1844 and how that connects to the complicated braiding of gender, race, and class now is precisely the way in which there's a kind of unconscious bias

a market unconscious, not an unconscious located in the individual in some classical psychoanalytic kind of way, Freud, Lacan, etc. But this other unconscious that Zone Rethel locates, which is a social or market unconscious, and that is one that tends to see racialized and gendered persons as objects and

And, you know, the sort of centered subject of the European white male as a subject. And I think it's exactly those kinds of unconscious assumptions and dialectics that, again, Marx is tapping into here.

And that moves throughout the book in all sorts of ways. I think in contemporary art, the artist that really puts her finger on that pulse is Hannah Black. And so...

Her work entitled The Meaning of Life ended up being the sort of the crux with which I concluded, especially because she puts these questions in a really joyous, affirmative tone. So she's excoriatingly critical. She's negative dialectical. She's brilliant. She has this kind of lucid take on gender, race and class in relationship to the object in the art gallery.

But her work is also, as the title would suggest, the meaning of life, about ways to abolish and overcome that in order to recover joy and, you know, meaning. So, you know, it's not like the book ends on a down note. But to answer your question more specifically, so one thing that I had always kind of sort of tugged on my mind was,

was this way in which we know as our historians from all of the careful social history of art and work in the archives that we know that the model for Titian's Venus of Urbino, which is sort of, um,

Inception of the genre as art is becoming increasingly secular, the art object is getting moved out of its container in a space of worship or magic, you know, the church, the temple, it's free floating. So what is going to legitimate art today?

as having this kind of free-floating visual pleasure that has no serviceability in communication with other worlds or with gods. So artists immediately glom on to the figure of Venus because she, or Aphrodite, whichever, because she thematizes this idea of surplus visual pleasure.

But, you know, art historians know that the model for Venus over a benobitician was an actual courtesan.

and not presented as such in the picture, obviously. You know, it's the young bride for the patron. But then on the other side of that arc of classical representation, by the time we get to Olympia, the audience all assumed, again, in this moment of scandal, that this was a picture of a street-level sex worker, when in fact the model is Victorine Morin, who was Manet's comrade, a painter herself, never did any sex work.

So, again, there's this kind of strange disconnect between appearances, assumptions and historical fact that I found really interesting, which, again, is just signal to how this figure is a figure. It's a figure for it's a figure in the psychoanalytic sense to sort of.

contain and move all kinds of social anxieties around gender and labor. So

So one other through line, as you note, is that I'm noting in all of these case studies that the traditional figure of the muse or the model, the figure that used to go into a nude, the nude being such an important genre for modernism, you know, every artist has to do their bid for it.

That figure becomes important in modernism because it's a place to work out how the relationship to the work of art or the artwork's relationship to its social field is less and less idealistic or transcendental and is becoming more and more ensconced in

The everyday banal matters of, again, production, circuits of value, survival, social self-reproduction. And it became my kind of sense that the nude was really important in Seurat.

And then figured as it is, as a machine part in Picabia, and then figured as the young girl for Tikkun. Because it's really a place to tease out and disentangle that sea change from this kind of

ideation of beauty, aesthetic value, all sorts of forms of sublimation, sublimation of what, you know, whatever. The argument is usually it's a sublimation of desire and, you know, the drive. So T.J. Clarke falls back on Freud. Krauss falls back on Lacan.

But it seemed to me that this is a kind of contested site because it's a place to talk about what a deeply...

The sort of totalizing feature of a secular world is one that is completely determined by material value, that the place to really show this is to hijack the sacrosanct figure of the nude and turn it into a worker figure.

a worker that may or may not be conjugated with sexuality, that being beside the point, because, you know, again, what makes the worker a worker is that ostensibly they have nothing but quote skin in the game, um, in order to survive, they have to bring themselves to, to the site of, of exchange. So that was why that was important. But then again, um,

the book traces or a through line is a shift from the ideated aesthetic nude into the worker, into the machine part. But then I became interested in how artists start using the

the models in the studio as actual instruments for the execution of the work, like Eve Klein. Or later, an artist like Hito Steyerl is thinking about her own

work as a model in other people's image making and then her labor as a model in other people's image making in this sort of culture production of the bondage model in a very different kind of market in Tokyo she then uses that to theorize labor in general so it just kept fascinating me how you know there's this kind of um uh

migration from a completely mythological figure of a naked woman through the figure of the worker as bared and exposed to labor time as much as to the viewer's vision, and then to all the other forms the worker takes that are equally dehumanizing.

Again, the machine part or Klein refers to the models in his studio as living paintbrushes, which is pretty dehumanizing. But then how artists go ahead and start doing that on their own selves, on their own subjectivity, which to me is signal to just how saturated this kind of

notion of the self as only a self insofar as one can sell one's labor power and go on a job market. And the discourse, you know, so just to be fair, I'm leaning a lot on a lot of Marxist discourse outside of our history. So, you know, having noted that an artist like Claire Fontaine talk about zone rattle,

it then immediately became clear to me that that is a topic, this idea of real abstraction coming out of the transactional trade of human beings among human beings. So we were all in this kind of large sort of chattel scenario where we're all vulnerable to a point of sale, but in this crazy hierarchy along the axes of gender and racialization,

But but this is a kind of abstraction that hits all of us. This this is something that all sorts of writers are thinking about, which, again, I encountered in the Italian context. But it's an issue now. So people like Alberto Toscano and others are thinking about this. But also a lot of people are thinking about work.

as a foundational feature that determines the self in its totality. So, you know, another person I was leaning on throughout this was Jason Reed, whose double shift and the way that work seems to really seep into and saturate every aspect of our life that that had become

key to me too. So yeah, it was just a site or a place to look at the, I'm not going to use the word evolution because maybe that's too linear. There's always sort of a forward wave and an undertow, but the whole problem of transformation of labor as something that motivates the transformation of how subjects and objects are figured in artworks.

to the point of the artist no longer being this exalted or exemplary or, you know, privileged site. But, you know, the worker, the artist as another worker and a worker who, you know, really has very little access to her own work, which some just referencing again, an artwork by Hito Steyerl,

entitled Lovely Andrea, where she returns to Tokyo after some years have gone by to locate an image of herself as a bondage model. I'm skipping because, of course, she goes into a very complicated history where this tradition of bondage is part of a historically entrenched aristocratic culture. But that

Practice changes drastically within the capitalist mode of production as it moves into the culture industry. So she's she's using that practice again to do her own kind of work on the genealogy of of capitalism.

and how things move from, you know, these rarefied and very complicated traditional cultural practices into something kind of really banal in the culture industry sector.

So, yeah, it just kept popping up. You know, what is labor? What is labor now? How does labor impinge on a work of art? How are the most ideologically autonomous or not artworks, you know, so ensconced in a set of constraints? How are those constraints ways, things that motivate artists, that push them to try and figure out things

figure things out, solve problems as much as it might shut them down. I love the way you start with this comparison of Titian's Venus of Urbino to Manet's Olympia and the figures and models behind those two and sort of triangulate that with Seurat's models in the first chapter. And that takes us into Klein and Tycoon's Young Girl, Theory of a Young Girl, all the way up to Sterl. Maybe to sort of

take us towards the end here, sort of take us towards the conclusion, we could focus in on the theory of the young girl. This work by T. Kuhn, the title of the work is The Preliminary Materials for the Theory of a Young Girl from 1999. And a key term from that work, again, seeing the connection between sort of how you're working with theory and artistry, a key term that you use throughout that work is the vision machine. And I think we've sort of

worked around this term talking about machinery and the worker and depersonalization this whole time. But the way you, I'll define, I'll use your words specifically to define this term here. It's, or rather you say that the artworks, you use this term to talk about how artworks hold out the possibility of de-reifying the

our understanding of our de and renaturalized world in order to forge a path towards the trans valuation of values um so i think that really sort of uh gives us some groundwork to sort of build on and and keep moving forward with these this conversation we've already started having here there's a lot contained within the term of the young girl i think but also opened up by the term um so could you maybe just lead us through uh the role that this term has uh

In your book, this term of the young girl, but also this in the preface or acknowledgments, you talk about the young girl of any gender. So maybe you could get into that sort of conceptualization of it, too, as a really important figure in your book that is a figure alongside the nude and the muse and all the other subjects and objects that are discussed.

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Summer Vacation. New Phineas and Ferb starts June 5th on Disney Channel and next day on Disney Plus on DisneyPlus.Disney.com. Yeah, absolutely. So one thing that comes up again and again, which is why I...

really connected with the language universal prostitution coming out of either Picabia or Marx is the way in which labor is figured in all of these artworks as something as divided, again, the division between the social being who is bearing labor capacity and the labor itself is

One thing that comes up again and again is a tension between anonymity and intimacy. I think Seurat's Models is a place where those two things come up against one another to, again, express the strangeness of contemporary labor, market transactions, the labor market, all of that already contained in the term universal prostitution.

but also how that heightens across the century. So by the time we get to Eve Klein, one of the, one of, very briefly, but for a period, for a spell there, one of his models was his own wife, Ro Trout. Now she's Ro Trout Klein Mokei.

And so there's a way in which this kind of estranged relationship is seeping into even the most intimate recesses of everyday life, which is important, again, because it shows how these relations really suspend anything personal or individual and how they become structural. So, yeah, the young girl is really an important figure here.

because it's Tycoon's kind of gambit and also the artist Claire Fontaine's

that we're not going to be able to overcome or overturn these forms of abstraction that dehumanize us and cause a lot of antagonism and crisis in the social field, mostly crises that aren't, you know, good crises. It's not like fun antagonism or effervescent antagonism. These are really deep social crises that

And that comes from this tension of the way in which we are persons, but we come to be increasingly – we willingly and voluntarily almost reify ourselves to make ourselves as market-ready as possible so that we can be –

absorbed by the not just capitalist social relations or a job market, but the way that a job market ends up ramifying across an entire social field or social factory, as Tronte and the Italians called it. So, for example, dating apps become a form of shopping or, you know, the issue of shopping and a person on a market

becomes thoroughly totalizing in all kinds of ways in intimate life, social life, romantic life. And the young girl is a very disturbing figure who is thoroughly identified, unconsciously identified with her own status as an object to go on a market. And what they know is that this figure of the young girl is, again, it's a figure of

That describes a relationship to capital, which again is what Marx was getting at with universal prostitution, is that the labor bearer has to thoroughly objectify their laborer.

in much the same way that one assumes the traditional prostitute or the modern sex worker does, where, you know, their thoughts, their feelings, their interiority, their hopes, their dreams might be totally suspended in order to go into that moment of transaction. So the young girl is someone for whom that moment of transaction is the totality of life

And that is a ontological condition that has nothing to do whatsoever with what some people think are the natural conditions of gender or sex. So I love the term universal prostitution because I think Marx is thoroughly denaturalizing all assumptions about sex.

um, anthros humans, all, you know, what down to gender division, um, down to whether, whether we are cultural or natural, uh, he really brings it all down to being a kind of, um,

an ontology that's always related to labor. And so I love the way that Tycoon echo this, and they're looking to Picabia, who's, I think, looking to Marx through Aragon and others, that the young girl isn't a function of any, either a projected or however you might want to locate that, any particular sex or gender. The gendering condition is,

It's an engendering that comes entirely from a relation to capital, exactly like

Marxist prostitute to describe proletarianization has nothing to do with one's genitals or how one understands one's body or those kinds of binaries and everything to do with a vulnerability to transaction, even when they're unconscious, even when they have nothing to do with

you know, a job market, but the way that a job market seeps into how we relate to each other. So one moment, one notable moment is when they say that the young girl looks like her picture. So, you know, in any kind of traditional idea of humans, the human precedes the picture. And they're kind of spoofing the culture of the dating app

But in a way that really leans heavily on Guy Debord and Society of the Spectacle and Spectacle as capital, Frozen as money, which goes all the way back to Marx. This idea that your product self is primary and that your lived self is kind of an afterthought. That's very different than Lacan in the mirror stage.

So then there's this sort of leitmotif into another model of the unconscious where, you know, it has nothing to do with a Freudian unconscious or, you know, the sort of emergence of the subject through a mirror stage relation or a relationship to representation or ideology. It really is this kind of bare bones need to survive, right?

metabolically on a 24 hour cycle or, you know, whatever the cycle is and how there's this whole other shadow world of a market that is always compelling people in ways that they have no idea about. So that I really like that figure for that reason.

because it is quite upsetting and disturbing. But after you read it, you start to see it everywhere. This kind of strange reversal where, of course, we're all reasonably worried about AI and so on, but underneath that anxiety, there's a way in which we objectify ourselves in one another and

so deeply that the question of who or what is an object or who or what is a subject needs to be continually reposed. Yeah, that sort of brings me back around full circle towards the way you describe Picapia's use of the term universal and his titling of the work is almost parodic in that art and aesthetics are

can can never be as universalizing as capital i think is basically how you put it there and i i really that is totally that is a hundred percent there it is right there well maybe we'll we'll take this chance to to wrap up on a high note um with with the time that we have left uh can i just ask you to talk about what work you have in progress right now or sort of what's what's up next on the horizon for you

Yeah, thanks. I love that question because I'm always wondering that myself. So, yeah, I'm just continually fascinated with how artists... Oh, I think the part of the question I didn't answer, though, is how this is a vision machine. So the book isn't just arguing that works of art are signal-to or indexical works.

Or even if you want to drive it in a really far place that I'm not sure I'm ready for, but that these works of art are actually representational, but of a totally new world of representation.

that doesn't correlate to how we experience our world every day precisely because we don't experience our world. We experience it through second nature circuits of value and how those structure our lives. So

The book is sort of pointing out that artworks are onto this, and if we attend to them more carefully, we might understand a little bit more about our everyday life. So, you know, instead of dismissing Santiago Sierra as a brutally cruel, you know, sadistic nutjob, it's useful to think about that artwork as

in as a kind of avatar of the crises in immigration, detainment, the the totally racialized prison industrial complex, the way that this there there is an assumption around which bodies are supposed to pony up their life world to capital and which are to be exempt from

All of these kinds of questions are already there in the artwork. And because the artwork is kind of like a Trojan horse that moves into these bourgeois spaces, the art gallery, the museum, Venice, and so on, that they become really important places to get a read on our world. But then, you know, lest that be totally negative, which it isn't.

The point of that isn't just to be infinitely critical of the world. What I'm trying to say is that artists think things through very carefully, especially when they're innovating new forms, which unconsciously come to grips with new forms in the art world. And if we would just get a better read on that in a more timely way, there are all kinds of ways to overcome that.

For me personally, the young girl was really important as a way to sort of see gender relations operate silently, even in the most ideologically progressive of spaces. And the kinds of assumptions around how one is to arrive to the site of work. So the vision machine really is just my argument for a kind of fighting chance and

to dismantle the totally naturalized world that we're in visually in order to have a kind of more accurate set of strategies and tactics to do something about it. And also my concern is that messaging, a sort of a liberal kind of messaging that is purely about sort of kind of flat forms of representation,

are contributing to an elision, a way of ignoring this kind of problem. So yeah, that was the vision machine thing. And so my other work is really to continue to try and think about what artists tell us about how much agency we do or don't have for all sorts of reasons, not just that our agency is taken away by the state or by capital and so on, but any kind of respectful acknowledgement of what

a problem in an increasingly human modified climate and a climate that's collapsing in response to that is really reshuffling the deck of what agency is, what important forms of agency are. So we need agency against the state and the market. We don't want to use that agency to dominate nature, you know, the old dialectic of enlightenment problem.

And so, again, there's a way in which I think artists are always kind of probing what the limits are that I find really sort of interesting. So I'm kind of going back to some of the old questions of the painterly mark, what it means, whether it's about total depersonalization,

Um, or, you know, if there are these sort of little vestiges left, what the status, basically it's very vague right now. I just started thinking about it, but just, you know, what, what is the relationship of art to the humanities anyway? And, you know, how, in what way can it kind of hold our hand or help us as we exit one model of anthros and move into another, but without totally falling back into, you know,

passive, turning over all of ourselves to AI and to machines and robots. And so I'm just trying to track time and history and sort of think about this. But it's totally vague. There's so much, I mean, even just...

stepping a toe into AI as, as, or into technology as this book sort of does in its own way that we didn't even have time to get into, but there, there's so much horrifying stuff to, to keep writing about and to keep thinking about. So, so thank you so much for this really amazing conversation. I really appreciate being able to talk to you about this and, and, and just

It's just really great that we could join each other together here to have this conversation. So thank you so much. I'm grateful to you. Your questions are really, really helped me organize this. And yeah, just they're incredibly insightful questions.

and smart and helpful questions that are making me a lot less anxious about moving this book and its title into the world. So I'm enormously grateful to you. Thank you so much, too. I've been Asia Adam-Manis talking with Dr. Jalil Mansour today about her latest book, Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction, A Counter History, this week from Duke University Press.

Thanks so much, Shelley. Thank you so much. Take care.