Masculine Device (The Coal Miner and the Stripped Miner) by Derek Reese

MASCULINE DEVICE (THE COAL MINER AND THE STRIPPED MINER) BY DEREK REESE

The adventure of man does not seem to change. A leap back in time to remote eras shows him as a hunting animal who strikes and runs after great beasts, crosses the plains dragging tools and weapons, and sleeps tormented by the noises of predators in the middle of a night lit only by ancient fire. Doesn’t this prehistoric man already employ the same elements of the masculine story that seeks survival in a century marked by extraction? In this case, perhaps we should rethink the story and its attributions of strength assigned to the virile. This is where the two videos that make up Masculine Device make their incursion.

The reiteration of the basic gestures of a mining worker, whom Derek Reese places before the mirror of his masculinity, takes up again an old struggle to know how much determinism we can see in the elemental and repetitive acts of a man dressed as a man. It is, for one, a question that extends not only through the reiteration of a political economy of survival but, above all, to a problem of gender. The masculine has been consolidated in the idea of a man as the principal agent of labor who fights against the environment to obtain what he needs to live. The male develops his corpulence and reaffirms his options by making his way with the strength of his musculature. Strength and extractivism have been related for too long. Is it the uniform that makes the miner, even if he is only left to dig his own grave?

We move forward, then, the story from the prehistoric male hunter, and now we see the man equipped with metal tools, the same predator in search of sustenance based on strength. He wears a uniform and a helmet. The reflective stripes on the safety equipment also speak of improved risk management. What’s underneath all that paraphernalia, Reese asks in a city whose prosperity is dominated by the widespread presence of the mining industry and its red trucks. Conceived as a tracing account of the history of materials, of the tools of the trade’s exploitation –which includes, incidentally, the uniform– Reese “examines and subverts the hierarchical value (power) of objects and materials to create a personal language,” and does something beyond his own explanation: he links the form of technology of exploiting the landscape with the search for an impotent reformation of habit. Is it the uniform that makes the miner, even if he is only left to dig his own grave with a shovel, as he suggests in his video? The reconversion of the masculine slips an ecocritical bias that suggests a new relationship with the environment where a little less testosterone is employed.