The House of the Lazy

Abstract Since the late nineteenth century, capitalist notions of work, labor, and production have been extensively challenged both theoretically and politically. Such critiques also appeared in early-twentieth-century art movements such as Dada, surrealism, and cubism, which criticized common representational values of the artwork as market-driven and purely aesthetic. Through a series of critical case studies and propositions at the intersection of art and architecture, this article focuses on artistic practices that incorporated definitions of laziness, “lazy action,” and “refusal of work” by the artist, into a broader critique of work, property, and exchange value: Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23), Hannes Meyer’s Co-op. Interieur (1924), Meir Eshel, aka Absalon’s Cellules (1991–93), and Nazgol Ansarinia’s The Inverted Pool (2019–22). These works posit a condition of pure potentiality, in which the focus is not on a division of life, work, and rest, but on a form of contemplative practice and conscious idleness. Liberating life from work becomes a form of resistance interrupting the cycles of exploitation by withdrawing from the system; a mode of inoperativity that enables counterprojects through which new forms of political organization and spatial imagination may be envisioned.