Speaking the Enemy’s Language (Or Not)

In such times as these, does art accept the injunction to speak the language of labour, useful and efficient, the province of communications and productivity? From willing servitude to an ability to subvert the system, the language of art can instead provoke unexpected reversals. Here I present the works of Jean-Charles Massera, Liv Schulman, Romana Schmalisch, and Robert Schlicht, who use humour to examine art’s ability to inflect the machine and caricature the counterproductive instrumentalization of its vocabulary.