(Im)Personal Matters: Intimate Strangers and Affective Market Economies

Abstract

© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Within an economic climate characterized by an increasing demand for immaterial commodities, and if follows, a rise in forms of immaterial labor, artists Ann Hirsch, Amalia Ulman, and Marisa Olson mount a unique form of protest. With creeping normality, their episodic, long-form, screen-based works dissect those affective tools and strategies that define both popular entertainment and political campaigns, realizing projects that are simultaneously intimate and impersonal. Activating an intimate strangers model, they cast themselves into public roles, offering a narrativised capture of everyday relationalities focusing on the affective rather than cognitive process by which strangers come to know each other-across the screen as well as before the camera. By replicating the technological mechanisms that tug on our desire for intimacy, all the while jamming frequencies with excessive tears, aggressive sexuality, bad singing, and off-script characters, these artists make palpable the power and the pervasiveness of commodified affect. In this, I argue for an expanded consideration of affect within art historical scholarship by demonstrating the workings of the intimate strangers model within both art and the everyday, thus establishing a more nuanced ground for rethinking our affective relationship with the screen and its unyielding pull.