Seamus Heidenreich at LAILA

(link)

Trend for a pastoral return. Our agrarian retro. A new Blue collar chic. Distinct from "Stonehengification" - which loaned its cred from the eternality of rocks. This is labor as aura. We're so detached from work that it returns as a tahitian exoticism. "At least sticks are still in vogue as symbols of the foraging, our original human toil, production."

Here labor is venerated... The look of craft, of labor, of farming. Concepts so alienated to us that they return as aura, as art. Nostalgia for a time that never existed. Now labor is a fun haycation. A thing for people who don't, to experience as a novel other. 

...it was a concealment: the aluminum clamshell of your laptop being seen as economic product of capitalist innovation itself, rather than the sweat of laborers distanced beneath gloves. A price tag for a face. Almost nothing in this world is actually automated - everything you touch is hand-made by workers. This separation of our social relations we've so completely assimilated that labor itself returns as a literal fetishism, ... look compelling, can be brought out onto white walls, as aura, as artwork. Every cheap object is an equal tapestry. The stitches in time are smoother, hidden. Hold up your child's plastic toy and feel another at its end...

As the world feels closer and closer to destabilization, autocratic leaders, isolationism, far-right tolerance, moves closer towards its end we find solace looking towards the primitive technologies we might find as our future, and the deities we will worship in the trees we once had.

 Is this prep for our medieval future or nostalgia for a fantasy past. 

*a nod to the PR for the lucid essay. One would channel Bourdieu. "The Field of Cultural Production, or: Economic World Reversed": "The cultural producers, who occupy the economically dominated and symbolically dominant position within the field of cultural production, tend to feel solidarity with the occupants of the economically and culturally dominated positions within the field of class relations. Such alliances, based on homologies of position combined with profound differences in condition, are not exempt from misunderstandings and even bad faith."

See too: Stitching Labor, Stonehengification, Hana Miletić at Basement Roma, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Portikus, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Micheline Szwajcer, Magnus Andersen