Affirmative Precarity: Ai Weiwei and Margarita Cabrera

Abstract

Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds (2010) and Margarita Cabrera’s Florezca (2011) are two performative works that exemplify a change in priorities in terms of the ways in which art conveys beauty and truth within the conditions of precarious life. In these works, the subject of the artisan/labourer is staged to complicate the mainstream views of China and Mexico as the derogated zones of labour, whereby the outsource worker and the undocumented worker are perpetually blamed for the loss of jobs in the United States. Ai’s production of millions of ceramic sunflower seeds exported from the ‘porcelain capital’ of Jingdezhen, and Cabrera’s thousands of copper butterflies, created by volunteers enlisted to work in her makeshift maquiladora, depict an ‘affective labour’ that has real consequences. The perspective from the new dialectics of precarity – intervening in art, labour and life – can be viewed in association to Lauren Berlant’s return to ‘affirmative culture’, adapted from Herbert Marcuse’s cultural ideal for happiness, goodness, and solidarity that coexisted with its negation by the material processes of life. Berlant’s emphasis on the ‘sociality of emotion’ as a form of ‘optimism of critical thought’ aligns with the idea that, amidst the oppression of global empire, precarity offers the potential for new socialities and subjectivities.