“[The chrono-cyclograph] consists of a small electric light attached to the hand or other moving part of the person or machine under observation. The motion is recorded on an ordinary photographic film or plate. The path of the motion stands out in two dimensions. By taking the photographic record stereoscopically we see the path in three dimensions: that is, length, breadth, and depth. It did not, however, contain the time element. This time element is of great importance, not only for comparative or ‘relative’ time, but also for exact time. This time element is obtained by putting an interrupter in the light circuit, so as to cause the light to flash at an even rate at a known number of times per second. This gives a line of time spots in the picture instead of a continuous light line. Counting the light spots tells the time consumed.”
Alice Creischer & Andreas Siekmann Arseniy Zhilyaev Elke Marhรถfer & Mikhail Lylov Liz Magic Laser Patrik Haggren Romana Schmalisch 9.6 - 11.24.13
An exhibition on the spatial, temporal and social characters of movement
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From Here To Afternoon
Enchantment
Only in the eighteenth century, in ‘civil society’, do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. This articulation by Marx in 1844 describes the paradoxical “producing individual” as a discrepancy between the idea of an individual and the collective practice that brings her forward. A subject “can individuate itself only in the midst of society,” and it is in the midst of society that things have ideal-practical existence. From this point of view, the development of social relationships makes concepts, affects and attitudes beyond just ways to implement forms of living and experiencing toward immediate production. Innumerable conceptual constructions, embodied in as many techniques, procedures, schemes and combinations serve as the premise of any sensual operation whatsoever. This contemporary reordering of the historical split between hand and head, manual and intellectual, shakes the rigid matrix of experience which subsumes the material of sensibility and intuition under the categories of understanding. In the reconfigured experience, abstractions become real. Abstractions are lived prior to being thought, and require practical enactments in time and space, which imply that concepts are concrete points of origin for perception and imagination.
The photographic studies by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth form a corpus of visual research into industrial organisation of work. The photographs depict multiple working areas from warehouses to offices, different tools and methods for making, storing, retrieving and transporting, while registering body movement as conducted in various tasks. The Pure Light Cyclegraph series resulted from long time exposures of the photo material to the scene of production. Light bulbs were attached to hands performing in an examined operation, producing a light trace on the surface of photosensitive material. In some cases, long exposures absolutely omitted the context from the photograph, whereas traces of movement became the only content of an image.
From Here to Afternoon borrows a gesture of abstraction from the photographic motion studies that american scientific management engineers Lillian and Frank Gilbreth conducted in the 1910’s and 20’s. Using a gridded space to determine the intensity, pace and timing of an
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effort graphed in light, they strove to visualize movement totally, going so far as to claim that their light cycle depictions of motion were translatable to any material and activity. By transposing material activity to different space-time constellations, such as photographic images, sculptural models and symbolic notations, different forms of movement encryption were to elaborate an abstract unit of measurement, making it possible to project physical activity into different media. Although open to Taylorism as an application that sands off the rough edges of particularity, making individuals interchangeable and disciplined, the Gilbreths’ mode of abstraction forces a common excess from the determinate existence of a concrete body or task, augmenting the subject by connecting it to the medialized self. Abstraction exists on the surface of their photographs and models, and it is mediality itself that performs abstraction by corresponding different heterogeneous concrete actions. This indicates a model for non-sensible similarities established through movements that carry their own measure and articulation, which in the exhibition is used as a formative element both contradictory and productive. Divisions and composites of hand and head, man and machine, potentiality and initiative, organization of labor and struggle against it, are the trajectories that connect and traverse works in the exhibition. While formally expressing correspondence between space and time, From Here to Afternoon - which references a military imperative to dig a ditch - also proposes that an action results as unpredictably as irreversibly, and thus introduces creation into an exemplary disciplinary situation. Accordingly, action doesn’t follow from orders and movements are immeasurable in terms of form. The exhibition focuses on the nonreciprocal relations rendered by movements and the ambiguity of concepts such as scale and model, whose abstractions require the concrete activities that project people and things, approaches and materials, artworks and historical figures onto one another. Projection of such heterogenous elements on an exhibition surface brings about a form that is both social and a form of thought. From Here to Afternoon considers the art exhibit less a space for disinterested viewing versus the concealment of interest or, on the contrary, a place for the exercise of autonomy versus the deconstruction of situated agendas, than it proposes a model to accelerate the process of abstracting, dividing and recomposing concrete activities to the speed of enthusiastic appropriation. In this respect the abstract quality of the exhibition space would operate not so much in the trajectory of the public museum with its genealogy of contemporary art shows, than that of the industrial fairs of the 19th and 20th century. Art is thought not as a succession and development of representational forms, but as a constellation of productive relationships and their suspension.
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Some photos in the Gilbreths’ archive represent the occasion and set up of their studies. Their investigation into the nature of movement aimed at increasing efficiency of work’s output - thus the task was also to elaborate an interface which would be a system of the feedback to communicate the results of the studies to the examined and to change actual movement. The photo from the Business and Apparatus Motion Study series is overprinted by a grid. It is unclear whether the grid is anomalous to the photograph and accidentally suspends the constructive elements’ relation to the process of measuring, or if it intensifies the purposeful presence of abstract categories at the photo: depth, fixation, measurability, perspective, equivalency.
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A case dedicated to collective struggle against flow production and working conditions in Milano 1969, next to a fragment of A.Zhilaev’s installation, which follows the story of a Russian repressed ego-futurist poet and his individual artistic work and life in the forcedlabour camp GULAG.
Autoriduzione Autoriduzione is a worker-controlled reduction of output that in Italy’s later sixties was also a way to imagine excess of existence within rationalized production. “[The factory] functioned with the regularity of a clock, but the ticktock is more spaced out in time; it has a slowness that exasperates the bosses, who protest about the irregularities of this form of struggle.” Slowing down initiated an undoing of the antagonism between living labor and machinery in both the realm of production and that of experience. Spacing a time within a time, the intensity of their compound structure animated the system of production. This new rhythm of assembly made a composite being that no longer experienced either the appearance of the agency of things or consciously apprehended the reality of men. At Pirelli’s rubber factory self-organized actions were unmediated by the management and unions. Rather than demanding betterments, the objective was enacted. “Without awaiting management permission, they worked at speeds that were less tiring. Whilst the effect on output and profits was considerable, the loss in earnings was relatively little; a 10 per cent reduction of production was costing the workers a mere 150 lire a day, the price of two cups of coffee.”
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Like rubber, the potentiality of labor could be re-purposed toward various strategic purposes. The multiplication effect of collective labor was reversed and used as a lever to push against the corporation’s profits. What the bosses called an irregularity was a ghost management executed by employees; a change of intensity, pace, slowness, speed, aspiration - in a word, the affective components of work. Additionally, the meaning of movements, skills, obligations and positions within production were altered as the results of struggle became concretely observable and imaginable. By 1964 the number of machines operated by an individual had more than doubled, from 8 to 17, reducing the number and technical skill of workers. Overproduction, however, subsequently forced a disproportionate increase in workload, from an output of 15 tires to 390 tires, which was accompanied by a moderation of piece-rate incentives by a collective payment plan. The production of value left the production of subjectivity behind, as discipline based on mutual interest in efficiency was scrapped by management. Whether as imprints on the surface of what exists or in figures that subsume particular matters, compounding abstraction then initiated a relation of fixed and living components to their structuring that exceeded the measure of individual contribution to the whole. Struggle then regarded who had the initiative of abstraction, to make abstraction either the transcendental subject’s division of the labor process that saturates every material, or by rendering the potential that exists in material relations.
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While the Gilbreths’ photos convey a progressive abstraction of working movements visually, the struggle at Pirelli’s rubber factory presents a practical use of the abstract multiplication effect of collective work. Since the results of collective effort always exceed the sum of individual contributions, individual losses following autoreduction strategies were much less than they were at the aggregate level of collective activity appropriated by capital. At the same time, an individual loss was contributing to a general struggle. Different from the general strike, the protest at Pirelli were not based on interrupting and negating activity, but on changing effort and methods in working, which rendered affirmation of action as a protest against exploitation.
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From Here To Afternoon
Notation Of Efficiency
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The slide show by Romana Schmalisch builds a narrative from quotes and educational materials of Rudolf Laban, a choreographer and later movement analyst who created a schematic language for notating movement. In Labanotation, abstraction of movement was not intended to reveal a generic structure that could be fleshed out by individuality; quite the contrary, it was made to capture individual style and creativity.
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Honkong Turbulences by Elke MarhÜfer and Mikhail Lylov aligns itself with ethnographic and anthropological filmmaking while accelerating their methods. Rather than critically examining actions, beliefs or norms of certain subjects, the film concentrates on the affective side of events. Not aiming at a deconstructive approach, the film’s inquiry into the life of Chunking Mansions, shuttle traders and commerce objects is directed by different grades of speed, light, temperature, rotation, flotations, frictions, falloffs.
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On some of the Gilbreths’ Pure Light Cyclegraphs the context of depicted movements is vanished. The line expresses a Movement, but the objective situation that rendered it remains unknown. The indeterminacy between subject and object becomes a quality of the photographic surface. On this surface, perception of labor movements is flat and resists the expressive hierarchy of organic, part-to-whole relations.
Pure Light Cyclegraphs visualise movement totally. Resulted visual figures accumulate all aspects of a concrete movement performing a specific useful operation but freeze it on a photographic surface as abstraction. These figures are concrete abstractions, because they synthesise many aspects of a movement in a packed sum of concrete nuances. In the case of labor this concrete abstraction is imposed as a standard on concrete activity, in creative work concrete abstraction is read as a multiple and dynamic concept.
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Liz M. Lazer’s The Digital Face (Featuring Alan Good and Cori Kresge as former President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama) alludes to a vocabulary of hand gesture in which “digital” refers to fingers. Abstracting gestures from political speeches, The Digital Face redraws the relation between head and hand. From an organically purposeful relation, where the head speaks through the body and holds it together, a body suddenly revealed as discrete weaves and layers motions into complex gestures. The performance by two dancers on pedestals was previously installed as a two channel video, rendering gestures continuous as well as giving opportunity for comparison. The sequence was audibly marked by the clicking of a camera recording the performance in photographic stills. In From Here to Afternoon these photo-interruptions were used to intensify abstraction by slide projecting the stills onto opposite walls in nonsequence and at an extended duration, maintaining that their singularity lies not in a poignant moment but in a concrete situation in which body, record, projection and surface compose sensuously intelligible forms without delineation.
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Mimesis Taken together the human body’s potential gestures make a crystal structure. Notation of actual gestures focuses on the inner effort with which one approaches a position, or carries out a task, in order to rise to concrete action and layer, rather than trace, movement. This composite abstraction doesn’t take away nor add superfluous elements, essentialize nor proliferate empirically, but structures a modality of cognition without specific subject or content. The photographic pure light cycle study abandons dictation of direction and pace for a total continuity without trace of context and purpose of the original motions. Although intended for mimicry, this image is void of sensible similarities. A camera follows the repetitious doings of machines, not as their conscious appendix, but as a pure medium that accustoms its curious eye to a cat’s face and a fluttering toy robot. The act of recording already anticipates the record’s differentiation onto the surface of projection, turning what it sees into lived experience.
From Here To Afternoon
Ferment Of Measurement Babysitting, organizing tupperware parties, mopping floors, money laundering all involve different faculties and abilities that exercise a general capacity, and the general possibility of doing something is different from the material objects or actions that result. When the collective activity of a hundred people assembles one chair a time, it seems idiotic unless they are individually compensated. Isn’t it the same transcendental chair that passes through the stages of production at the assembly line? Work only makes sense for the human, person, free subject individualized from the aggregated powers of collective and machinic composites. People and things are connected by lines of the possible productive relations. The more “things” that are around the more virtual possibilities are brought about. Power arises not from accumulation but from movements that project objects onto others. Many things are assembled in a place, only a ferment shall be added to set them in motion. The ferment will be applied to everything, disregarding of difference. The unity of measurement of the “ferment” and “machine,” implemented by abstract systems of compatibility and scientific organization of the labor process, compounds capacities that can just as well be utilized collectively. When this shift of initiative occurs, capital responds by re-dividing labor in order to separate the immanent composites, thus again making people and things strangers to one another. Because it is ignorant of its subject, scientific management isn’t scientific at all. It is a coercive tool that has nothing to do with concrete subjects and objects but considers only the abstract subject, stretchable and modifiable in any way.
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Texts in the exhibition, such as Ferment Of Measurement, were presented at the same level as objects and images. If the artists’ works were relief components on the exhibition-surface, the texts might have been folded spaces in-between the elements of the “exhibition landscape.” Framed in the same manner as photomaterials from the Gilbreth archive, the texts posited pivotal points of view in fields of movement between and through the works. The texts’ physical positioning concretizes the specificity of relations and partakes in the forming of an exhibition, equal to the content.
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Model The Model is an accumulation of differences that proliferate at the moment of reading. Gilbreth’s pure light cycle photographically concentrates all the concrete circumstances of the study that movement embodies. The photograph obliterates the visually superfluous study equipment grid and clock as well as the tools and materials of specific tasks, while it contains them in the movement. The space devoid of content can give rise to a universal unit of measurement. Imitation in the contextless space, on the other hand, is free from sensible correspondences and constraints of any given system of measurement. Gilbreths’ mode of abstraction forces a common excess from the determinate existence of a concrete body or operation, augmenting the subject by connecting it to the medialized self. “The same identical motions are used in what is normally considered different kinds of [activities]”. Abstraction exists on the surface of their photographs and models, and it is mediality itself that abstracts by corresponding different concrete actions. With the motion model, the act of looking was made into a tactile gesture for those blinded in WWI. These two efforts affectively combine head and hand in the “unpacking” of print or wire.
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When the body is reduced to a pure medium transmitting gestures of power, these gestures are transformed in turn as they loose connection to concrete bodies. A gesture’s separation from a body might result from biometric methods, but once made it also brings about gestures of power travelling through the world looking for bodies. It is anything but rational to believe that correct repetition of proper gestures will make you to posses presidential power. Simultaneously, affects that are behind gestures form part of any power.
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Mode of Exposition Reproduction of existing relations, as for example implementing the model of going to work everyday, makes a working subject. Visiting an exhibition space makes one an audience member. Positivist science categorizes and divides by attributing relations to people and things and proceeds to describe them by the particular activities produced in these relations. According to this science, an actual quality fully makes out the potential agency of any thing. An engine and a ground breaking telecommunication service at an industrial fare exhibit the same immediate purposefulness, although their function is unrealizable by the mode of display. They are ready to be implemented elsewhere. As for art exhibition spaces, it is now quite hard to determine what their effective implications - though they obviously exist - consist of. They are neither places for disinterested viewing nor for the concealment of interest, neither for the exercise of autonomy nor the deconstruction of situated agendas. They nevertheless persist as dissociators from contexts. It appears that abstraction, that is purposed towards an interested appropriation of the process of dividing and recomposing concrete activities, is the most valid feature of exhibition. As if engines and softwares, agricultural tools and chemical fertilisers would start to have their own agendas and compose new forms of life at the show.
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Standard Standard in production is an absolute disciplinary measure, an example dictating the way to a successful result. A standard is therefore unobtainable and never quite present. Disciplined by measure and constraint, activity develops through guidelines that are external to it. Understood as a positive form of activity, production brings new forms into being. When it encounters discipline, however, it recognises both its origin and limit. One has to be disciplined to be productive. Follow the instruction punctually to achieve the best results embodied in the product. The product will be a monument to the endeavours of following an instruction. Yet the industrial object remains a secret in itself, it does not fully represent itself, its youth remains a secret while its profession is what really matters. Its surface does not tell how it was made, any obviousness of function does not lead elsewhere. Complexity or simpleness of configuration do not matter. A recognition of it’s author is not guaranteed and there are no regrets. In the cell, the unreasonable discipline of detention is fully accepted and accelerated into a merger with production. The product of accelerated discipline diverts from the standard and is no longer a monument it.
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The light imprint fixated not only the cross-like symbol but also the very conditions of the labor camp discipline. Through endurance of movement restrictions and limited materials, disciplinary measures became reinvented as productive forces. The operative contradiction of Boyko / Zhilaev is that they do not negate work as such, rather they productively use the conditions of forced labour, and accelerate them. The artist is not producing herself in opposition to work as such, rather she will negate and escape discipline. Material, light waves, molecules and subjects are producing experience through interactions that are recorded on their surfaces or in their trajectories.
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From Here To Afternoon
Plan
A photo from F.Gilbreth archive R. Schmalisch “Dry Work”
E. Marhoefer “Manyfold Nature”
R. Schmalisch “Kinesphere” A.Creischer & A.Siekmann “Actualisation of Chapter 14”
A. Zhilaev “Save the Light p.1”
Liz M. Lazer “The Digital Face”
Alice Creischer & Andreas Siekmann Arseniy Zhilyaev Elke Marhöfer & Mikhail Lylov Liz Magic Laser Patrik Haggren Romana Schmalisch 9.6 - 11.24.13
From Here To Afternoon
R. Schmalisch “Excercise with Tires”
R. Schmalisch “Notation of Efficiency”
Curatorial intervention “Autoriduzione”
The space of the exhibition has two entrances making the circulation of bodies happen in both directions; there is none of the directionality that characterises narration. The exhibition has the only surface where infinite configurations appear for reading. Any art work is a configuration, its surface is the surface of the exhibition.
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1. Romana Schmalisch Exercise with Tyres 2013 Video projection and car tires. 2. Romana Schmalisch Karussell der Berufe 2013 4 monitors video installation 3. Arseniy Zhilaev Save the Light part 1 2013 Paintings on canvas, ephemera objects and print on paper 4. Alice Criescher and Andreas Ziekman Actualization of Chapter 15 / Capital Vol 1 Part 4 by Marx 2013 Inkjet print on vinyl 5. Liz M. Lazer The Digital Face 2012, Featuring Alan Good and Cori Kresge as former President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, Two slide projector installation 6. Elke Marhofer and Mikhail Lylov Hongkong Turbulence 2013 16mm film transferred to HD video 7. Patrik Haggren and Mikhail Lylov Gilbreths’ Solar Anus Narrative 2013 Inkjet print on paper 8. Romana Schmalisch Notation of Efficiency 2013 Slide projection and model (bamboo sphere) 9. Patrik Haggren and Mikhail Lylov Autoriduzione 2013 Inkjet print on paper, coal frottage on paper 10. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution Business and Apparatus Motion Study, Pure Light Cyclegraph
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