Includes bibliographical references and index.

X notes on practice: Stubborn structures and insistent seepage in a networked world, 2004 / Raqs Media Collective --- Immaterial labour, 1996 / Maurizio Lazzarato -- When life goes to work: Andy Warhol, 2010 / Isabelle Graw -- Dirty commerce: Art work and sex work since the 1970s, 2012 / Julia Bryan-Wilson -- Rottenberg pearls, 2016 / Jonathan Beller -- wo/manifesto, 2008 / W.A.G.E. -- The work of critique and normative change, 2001 / Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello --- In conversation with Nicolaus Schafhausen, 2016 / Goshka Macuga -- Real encounters, 2013 / Lamia Joreige -- Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative?, 2009 / Mark Fisher -- In conversation with Christine Fricke, Petra Schwarz and Bernd Ziesemer, 2005 / Tino Sehgal -- Under the sign of labour, 2006 / Sabeth Buchmann --- Bodies in use, 2016 / Isabelle Lindermann -- In conversation with Tom Finkelpearl, 2000 / Mierle Laderman Ukeles -- Brothers in arms: Laboratoire AGIT'Art, 2014 / Clémentine Delis -- Museum of Proletarian Culture, the industrialization of Bohemia, 2012 / Maria Chekhonadshik -- The server/user mode: On Olafur Eliasson, 2007 / Caroline A. Jones -- Postproduction, 2002 / Nicolas Bourriaud -- The spectre of capital, 2014 / Joseph Vogl -- In conversation with Tom Holert, 2012 / Melanie Gilligan -- Mechanics of meaning, or the painting machine, 2003 / Anne Wagner -- Inventing the future: Postcapitalism and a world without work, 2015 / Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams -- CCC: Currency of Collective Consciousness, 2015 / Ahmet Öğüt -- Tucumán is burning, 1968 / María Teresa Gramuglio, Nicolás Rosa, et al. -- To our friends, 2014 / The Invisible Committee -- The Art Workers' Coalition: Not a history, 1970 / Lucy R. Lippard -- Delegated performance: Outsourcing authenticity, 2012 / Claire Bishop -- Donald Judd, 1965 / Robert Smithson -- Producing and its byproducts, 2010 / Marisa Jahn -- How to provide an artistic service: An introduction, 1994 / Andrea Fraser -- A declaration on politics, knowledge and art, 2008 / Chto Delat -- Ten theses on the multitude and post-Fordist capitalism, 2004 / Paolo Virno -- In conversation with Joanna Sokołowska, 2010 / Artur Żmijewski -- WE - Collectivities, mutualities, participations, 2002 / Irit Rogoff -- Politics of art: Contemporary art and the transition to post-democracy, 2011 / Hito Steyerl -- Years without art, 1974 / Gustav Metzger -- Critique of violence, 1921 / Walter Benjamin -- How does/could/would the withdrawal of art affect the world?, 2002 / Rasheed Araeen -- Lee Lozano: Dropout piece, 2014 / Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer -- Tamás St. Auby's strikes, 2016 / Kata Krasznahorkai -- A very careful strike: Four hypotheses, 2005 / Precarias a la Deriva -- In conversation with Friederike Sigler, 2016 / Adrian Melis --Trace, 2009 / Anthony W. Lee -- Moulène, Rancière and 24 objects de grève, 2012 / Paolo Magagnoli -- Notes on the abstract strike, 2015 / Antonio Negri -- Human strike has already begun, 2009 / Claire Fontaine -- Workers leaving the factory, 2001 / Harun Farocki -- The university-factory as a site of reterritorialization, 2013 Gerald Raunig -- In conversation with Heinz-Norbert Jocks, 2015 / Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk -- It's her factory, 2012 / Kodwo Eshun -- On Kay Fido Hunt, Margaret Harrison and Mary Kelly: Women and work, 2002 / John A. Walker -- Against domesticity: Artists and feminists in the kitchen, 2015 / Giovanna Zapperi -- Factories as places of knowledge: Richard Serra and the production process, 2010 / Dietmar Rübel -- The aesthetics of resistance, 2005 / Peter Weiss -- Factory complex: The post-vérité turn of Korean experimental documentary, 2015 / Jihoon Kim -- Distortion, or gay science according to Paweł Althamer / Paweł Mościcki -- Olga's notes: This whole new world, 2015 / Marwa Arsanios -- Is a museum a factory?, 2009 / Hito Steyerl -- In conversation with Teresa Margolles / Santiago Sierra-- The precarious soul, 2009 / Franco 'Bifo' Berardi -- To have and to need manifesto, 2012 / Haben und Brauchen -- For an art against the mythology of everyday life, 1979 / Martha Rosler -- On affective labour, 2011 / Silvia Federici -- Nightcleaners: The ambiguities of activism and the limits of production, 2015 / Siona Wilson -- Artists' boycott of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, 2011 / Gulf Labor Coalition -- Necropolitics, 2003 / Achille Mbembe -- On Steve McQueen: Gravesend, 2007 / Hamza Walker -- In conversation with Iona Whittaker, 2015 / Tehching Hsieh -- Grundrisse, 1857-58 / Karl Marx -- Primitive accumulation as exemplified in Potosí, 2010 / Alice Creischer -- Toxic work, 2015 / Nick Dyer-Witheford -- On the battle of Orgreave, 2002 / Jeremy Deller -- On touch sanitation, 1980 / Mierle Laderman Ukeles -- In conversation with Rudi Laermans, 2012 / Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker -- How to work better, 1991 / Fischli & Weiss -- In conversation with Marie-Josée Corsten, Pascal Gielen and Luigi Coppola, 2009 / Michelangelo Pistoletto -- The good of work, 2011 / Liam Gillick -- Proletarian nights, 2012 / Jacques Rancière -- A brief history of the Women's Workshop of the Artists' Union, c. 1973 / Mary Kelly -- On when faith moves mountains, 2002 / Francis Alÿs -- Occupy, migrate, disintegrate...Carolee Schneemann and Annette Messager's studio abandonment, 2010 / Petra Lange-Berndt -- In praise of laziness, 1998 / Mladen Stilinović -- Statement, 2016 / Maria Eichhorn.

Warhol's Factory of the 1960s, Minimalism's assembly-line aesthetics, conceptual and feminist concern with workers' conditions in the 1970s -- these are among the antecedents of a renewed focus on the work of art: labor as artistic activity, as artistic method and as object of artistic engagement. In 2002, the 'Work Ethic' exhibition curated by Helen Molesworth at the Baltimore Museum of Art took its cue from recent art to spotlight this earlier era of artistic practice in which activity became as valid as, and often dispensed with, object-production. Revealed through this prism was 'dematerialized' art's close and critical relation to the emergent information age's criteria of management, production and skill. 00By 2015, the Venice Biennale reflected artists' wider concern with global economic and social crises, centered on exploitative and precarious worlds of employment. Yet while art increasingly engages with human travail, work's significance in itself is seldom addressed by critics. This anthology explicitly investigates work in relation to contemporary art, surveying artistic strategies that grapple with the complexities of being an art worker in the new economy, a postproducer, a collaborator, a fabricator, a striker, an ethical campaigner, or would-be transformer of labor from oppression to liberation.