Valuing life

Alistair Rider’s chapter explores how the term ‘lifework’, when applied in a cultural context, activates divergent conceptions of vitality and life. In the first section, he discusses how writers, artists, and critics who use the term have understood the life in question to be the property of a named individual. Conceived in this sense, a lifework is understood to be the animating force within an artist’s body of work. The term feels particularly applicable for creative individuals who refuse to distinguish between artistic and non-artistic pursuits, when doing and living blend into one. The second section turns to Adrian Heathfield’s relatively recent critical definition of a lifework, which espouses a conception of life which is less personal and more biological. Heathfield introduces the term to classify works of contemporary art in which the lived experience of the artist is integral to its content, and he focuses in particular on durational practices, which register traces of the creator’s actual physical transformation in real time. Rider argues that this definition of life – as an indefinite and less differentiated value – shares much in common with Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of life as an immanent force. In the final section, attention is turned to the London-based artist David Connearn, whose drawings can be classified as ‘lifeworks’ in Heathfield’s sense. However, Connearn has recently introduced additional layers of allegorical content into his works, in 2017 creating a series of drawings that refer to the contemporary refugee crisis. In so doing, the laborious, manual work his drawings involve can be read as a sustained act of empathy with lives lived in extreme states of precarity. This example is used to consider how the politicised understanding of life’s value that motivates Connearn’s project differs from the radically undifferentiated notion of life that we find espoused by Deleuze and his followers.