Archive Newsletter No. 15

October 2025

“WHAT IS IT TO BE A WORKER, A RESEARCHER OR AN ARTIST? WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO SAY YOU ARE A ‘CULTURAL PRODUCER’?”

Johanna Klingler on Marina Vishmidt’s contribution to Atelier Europa. A Small Post-Fordist Drama (2004)

In April last year, art theorist and philosopher Marina Vishmidt passed away after serious illness. With her analyses of art, labor, and value, she significantly shaped the debate on the interconnections between financial markets and artistic production. In addition to her academic teaching—most recently as a professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna—she was involved in various collectives such as the Cinenova Working Group, W.A.G.E., Full Unemployment Cinema, and others. As early as 2004, she participated in Atelier Europa. A Small Post-Fordist Drama at the Kunstverein München, an exhibition and symposium initiated by Marion von Osten and Angela McRobbie, which examined the working and living conditions of cultural producers in the context of privatization and economization.

In spring 2004, Kunstverein München hosted the conference and exhibition project Atelier Europa. A Small Postfordist Drama as part of the curatorial program of Maria Lind and Søren Grammel. The interdisciplinary and multi-layered project involved a large number of cultural figures, including Judith Hopf, René Pollesch, Katja Reichard, Bakri Bakhit, Ulrike Ottinger. It was initiated and organized collaboratively by British cultural sociologist Angela McRobbie and German artist Marion von Osten, who passed away in 2020. The project responded to rising economic privatization and the economization of social life, forces that were also reshaping everyday structures within the cultural sector.

The commodification of creative processes and knowledge production led to a growing dependence of creative work on market-oriented infrastructures. Atelier Europa’s artistic and discursive agenda set out to map the conditions of cultural production at the time, while fostering exchange and networking among cultural producers. Central to the conversations was the notion of ‘immaterial labor.’ The term describes a multitude of social interactions that have been exploited to create economic value since the emergence of ‘cognitive capitalism’ around 1975.[1]

This review unfolds around the figure of the ‘cultural producer,’ a self-designation that spotlights the commodification of creative processes, which was at the core of Atelier Europa. The term will be introduced drawing on a contribution to the Atelier Europa conference by the theorist and activist Marina Vishmidt (1976–2024), situating it within her critical practice. Vishmidt’s contribution discusses the problems and challenges arising for intellectual and creative workers as a result of the economization of affects and social relations.

Vishmidt’s work centers around the exploitation and commodification of subjectivity which she examines through the now widely debated notion of ‘infrastructural critique,’ a framework she has helped shape. Vishmidt’s critical analysis of the ‘cultural producer’ as an economic concept and Atelier Europa’s aim to address the sociopolitical conditions of institutions have emerged from a shared sensibility. Atelier Europa’s critique addressed cultural institutions not only in terms of content but also through their methodology and structure. The collective activity and exchange that took place during the project formed its very foundations.

This spirit connects to a longer genealogy of critically engaged art institutions, which over the past decades has taken shape in Kunstverein München’s program through various formats. During their curatorial program (1992–1995/96), Helmut Draxler and Hedwig Saxenhuber organized discursive and collective exhibitions that focused on social and political activity. Moreover, any history of institutional critique would be incomplete without the artist Andrea Fraser whose work is an important reference for Vishmidt. Fraser’s exhibition A Society of Taste was realized in 1993 by Søren Grammel and Helmut Draxler at Kunstverein München.

While many directors of the Kunstverein have probed institutional mechanisms, its own history and structure were most recently put under scrutiny in Bea Schlingelhoff’s No River to Cross in 2021 and revisited during Kunstverein’s 200th anniversary program in 2023, led by Maurin Dietrich and Gloria Hasnay. Vishmidt’s own structural-critical theory was revisited in the form of a contribution by herself and artist Melanie Gilligan for a reader accompanying the 2020 exhibition Not Working – Artistic Production and Social Class at Kunstverein. Their conversation highlights how political and economic forces have deepened precarious working and living conditions for artists. The pandemic has not only accelerated this trend but also exposed underlying discrepancies and patterns of discrimination. 

IMMATERIAL LABOR: WORK, RESEARCH, AND ART 

In 2004, Vishmidt and artist Melanie Gilligan edited the fifth edition of the publication series de-, dis-, ex-, titled Immaterial Labor: Work, Research, and Art.[2] The volume ‘invokes politicised moments in 20th century art history to act as leverage for the analysis of cultural practices that can be broadly described as socially engaged, and to prefigure some untimely reversals.’[3] Invited contributors included Alice Creischer, Andrea Fraser, Stephan Dillemuth and Marion von Osten. Von Osten’s knowledge of Vishmidt’s interest in ‘affect management and the ideologies that structure perception and agency in the administered world’[4] led her to invite Vishmidt to Atelier Europa.

Besides participating in the conference, Vishmidt’s contribution to the project consisted of a conversation with von Osten, published as Artists are Immaterial Workers in Kunstverein’s member magazine Drucksache.[5] Together with further interviews, essays and images, the transcript forms a print insert on Atelier Europa in the Spring 04 issue of the magazine which is held at the Kunstverein’s archive. The archival documents on Atelier Europa also include preparatory and research material by the organizers.

Among the materials is a script by Vishmidt, written for the April 3, 2004 conference, a rare gem within Kunstverein’s archival records. Immaterial Labor: Work, Research, and Art examines the conditions and mechanisms that influence both contemporary art production and other forms of immaterial labor. Vishmidt avoids fixed answers, instead developing a methodological framework that critically examines social and economic mechanisms through their relations of production. Her strategies of resisting the market’s instrumentalization of creative processes remain open to further development, keeping them relevant today.

In different texts and statements, Vishmidt emphasizes that her intellectual propositions should not be misunderstood as ‘unequivocal conclusions.’ Her main concern is rather an attempt to counter ‘the expanding opportunities for complicity [...] by opportunities for refusal’ and to follow up on relevant positions, such as those in the aforementioned value of de-, dis-, ex as well as to study ‘the responses of those that encounter them.’[6] In her later elaborations on infrastructural critique she does not offer set definitions but rather invites to reflect upon mechanisms at work in social structures and production processes.

In doing so, Vishmidt takes into account the conditions and circumstances that manifest structural violence both materially and ideologically. She seeks to prevent the ‘false totalization’ of criticism, a risk she detects in forms of criticism that act in either ‘rejection or complicity’ towards their object.[7] [8] Vishmidt, by contrast, insists on one condition: critical practice must leave the horizon of disclosure or reference ‘as the normative one for art.’ Otherwise critical practice risks circling back into its own systemic limits.[9] Accordingly, Immaterial Labor: Work, Research, and Art should not be understood as a proposition for a particular solution but as an analytical-methodological moment.

ARE WE INFRASTRUCTURE?

– A SMALL POSTFORDIST DRAMA

‘What is it to be a worker, a researcher, or an artist? What does it mean to say you are a “cultural producer”?’ With these questions, Vishmidt launches her discussion at the Kunstverein conference, framing the self-description ‘cultural producer’ as a cynical-affirmative tool used by workers in the arts and culture sector to resist and expose the contradictions of cultural production within economic institutions. Vishmidt connects the Benjaminian concept of the cultural producer with the principle of capitalist mystification, which describes the deliberate obfuscation that surrounds economic contexts presenting their own constructed, exploitative and often unequal social relations as natural, inevitable and objective principles.

Vishmidt exposes how the notion of ‘cultural production’ is a romanticized misconception; just like tropes such as ‘researcher’ or ‘artist’, ‘cultural producer’ conceals the essence of wage labor which recedes behind a utopia of autonomy. By contrasting commercial production with art’s promise of transcendence, the term challenges the commodification of social and political engagement. Critically unpacking the term ‘cultural producer,’ Vishmidt expands on a main issue treated by Atelier Europa: capitalism’s tendency to appropriate immaterial resources – often those initially directed against it.

As the subtitle A Small Postfordist Drama suggests, both Atelier Europa and Vishmidt ground their examinations on debates about structural changes in the organization of labor and the economic means of production that emerged from the ‘post-Fordist’ shift in the 1970s, which saw the restructuring of the production sector from factory work to immaterial or affective labor. Derived from the Ford Motor Company, the term ‘Fordism’ is associated with the factory's unique mode of production. In Fordism, factory work is understood as alienated labor whose relations of production are organized hierarchically. That is, the workers own neither the means of production nor the end product.

By contrast, the post-Fordist form of immaterial labor that emerged in the 1970s uses the collective and cognitive qualities of workers as a resource, deriving value from their social skills and relationships. In cognitive capitalism, creative skills such as communication, networking, collective knowledge production, etc. are exploited as means of production: ‘This could apply to the plethora of overtly commodified as well as tacitly invisible variants of affective, relational and cognitive labour,’ as Vishmidt puts it, ‘from the artistic service to service with a smile, where the service subsists in the relationship with another.’[10]

In their reflections on Immaterial Labor: Work, Research, and Art, Vishmidt and Gilligan build on theorists criticizing those post-Fordist conditions, such as Paolo Virno, Mario Tronti, Toni Negri and Silvia Federici, who had a strong influence on discourses on cognitive capitalism in Italy. Vishmidt, however, transfers their ideas on immaterial labor into the field of artistic and creative work within which she observes similar mechanisms. With shifting production conditions, market demands now expand into workers’ subjectivity, directly shaping their interpersonal relationships in a feedback loop.

In the creative sphere, Vishmidt and Gilligan see this reflected in the rise of conceptual and socially engaged art.[11] They trace the systematic exploitation of immaterial processes back to the conceptual artists of the 1960s and ’70s, who, in their view, paved the way for the affective workers of the 2000s.[12] Vishmidt and Gilligan draw on their critical analysis of the conditions following the dematerialization of the object – a central paradigm of 1960s conceptual art – to broaden the discourse on immaterial labor from a different methodological angle. By the time Atelier Europa began, the effects of dematerialization were already being actively debated with relation to the care economy, knowledge production, and the communications sector.

THE REPRODUCTION OF INSTITUTION AS AN INSTITUTION OF REPRODUCTION

In numerous essays and lectures, Vishmidt describes how seemingly autonomous institutions perpetuate and maintain the social structure to which they belong. It is precisely their allegedly autonomous position within society that causes them to be perceived – and perceive themselves – as a naturally given entity. Among the institutions transmitting an ideological habitus through social and biological reproduction, Vishmidt emphasizes ‘religion, art, or the state itself’[13] alongside educational institutions and the family. By the late 20th century, a comprehensive discourse on feminist reproduction theory, especially concerning the family, had emerged, providing an important source for Vishmidt’s research.

The categories Vishmidt identifies appear detached from the systems that run our daily lives, making their dependence seem unlikely and their objectivity unquestioned. This supposed autonomy renders social categories within institutions seemingly neutral, and, she argues, primes them to be internalized as natural norms. In case of the capitalist social order, this applies to the construct of a class-based society which presupposes social categories such as ‘class, race, gender.’[14] These categories, continuously perpetuated by the division of labor, are therefore not necessarily perceived as its result, but as given parameters of social reality. Similarly, the apparent autonomy of art reinforces the fact that the economic conditions that shape the ‘cultural producer’ are often not being questioned or criticized but instead perceived as natural.

In her analyses of social institutions, Vishmidt examines how social order is produced and reproduced through the socialization of specific norms as a process of subjectivation. Drawing on Marxist theories of reproduction (e.g., Louis Althusser), she highlights how subjectivity helps sustain social order, framing society as the product of interactions between the material conditions of production and ideological processes. Accordingly, subjects who have been shaped by those material-ideal interactions reproduce the norms they have been experiencing through institutions. She argues that the illusion of autonomous social institutions enables the exploitation of affective and creative labor, since these areas escape scrutiny under the very systems that reproduce categories of subjectivity.

Vishmidt further advances this argument, her key contribution to infrastructural critique, in important texts such as “Only as Self-Relating Negativity”: Infrastructure and Critique, Between Not Everything and Not Nothing: Cuts towards Infrastructural Critique, and Beneath the Atelier, the Desert: Critique, Institutional and Infrastructural. Her work on infrastructural critique stresses processes of subjectivation as central to how institutions reproduce themselves. Following Vishmidt, any description of the means of production in society necessarily involve the mechanisms of subjectivation as a fundamental factor.

Immaterial Labor: Work, Research, and Art reveals an intimate connection between Vishmidt’s view on affective labor, which emphasizes the relevance of subjectivity for cognitive capitalism, and her elaborations of infrastructural critique. Her 2004 critique of dematerialization in conceptual art and the culture industry remains a useful document radically anticipating her later infrastructural critique: ‘Perhaps that was conceptualism’s (as a retroactive totalising gesture) gravest fault, that it did not sustain its interrogation of the art object up to and including the power relations that obtained on the definition of art object, but also on the definition of artist.’[15]

Johanna Klingler is an artist and cultural researcher. From 2019 to 2022, she co-directed the archive of Kunstverein München together with Jonas von Lenthe. In her doctoral research, which was in stages supervised by Marina Vishmidt, she currently investigates the role of subjectivity in socially critical practices.