Joshua Simon: "Ain't Got No/I Got Life"

Joshua Simon, director at MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam in Israel, talks about Anna Witt?s Beat Body and other works.

Nina Simone’s famous 1968 song “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life,” takes its lyrics from two songs from the musical Hair “Ain’t Got No” and “I Got Life.” The way Simone mixes the two, moves beyond hippie celebration, to make an existential and political claim. Bare life, biorhythm, and black study are some notions that Anna Witt’s Beat Body and Simone’s song share. In her work, Witt explores labor as it is divorced from employment. Under neoliberal protocols of unsemiotized labor, where everything is work but is always defined as something else, Witt develops a practice which examines the way labor can be represented at a time when it cannot be seen:

“I got my arms, got my hands
Got my fingers, got my legs
Got my feet, got my toes
Got my liver, got my blood
I’ve got life, I’ve got my freedom
I’ve got life
I’ve got the life
And I’m going to keep it
I’ve got the life.”

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