What happens to stuff, and the people who make stuff, in the age of an increasingly virtual, dematerialized economy? As automation and the internet change the character of labor and manufacturing, what does the future look like? When financial capital is accumulated in milliseconds through flash trading, executed with the push of a button and seemingly divorced from palpable things, how is real value created, and how does financial value square with our physical, corporeal reality and the lives we live in real time? With The Archaeology of Another Possible Future, Liz Glynn digs into these questions through a fivepart installation spread across 30,000 square feet.
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I. ANALOG As contrasted to a mediated, digital world experienced through L.E.D. screens both large and small, the exhibition opens with a sequence of three “analog caves” that hearken back to basic sensory experiences. Constructed of reclaimed forklift pallets bearing traces of global commerce (which are a recurrent material in Glynn’s work), the first cave, TOUCH, contains hanging stalactites and piles of industrial felt. The second structure, SOUND (full spectrum), features listening stations with a turntable, vinyl records, and a cassette player and tapes, playing recordings made without digital processing. The third cave, SMELL, includes a series of hand-formed ceramic vessels based on platonic forms each containing scents linked to philosophical ideas, such as the Epicurean notion that partaking in pleasure leads to well-being.
II. THE SHAPE OF PROGRESS Part II features a series of abstract sculptures based on models of human progress from the ideas of Plato, through the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, to the present day. Glynn’s forms — scaled to the human body — give shape to these abstractions, many taken from bar charts and statistical diagrams. Their formal treatment seems to echo the thoughts of many contemporary thinkers and writers who challenge the very notion (or myth) of linear progress (see reverse).
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III. SPECULATIONS Three shipping containers — one red, one green, one blue — placed in the middle of the gallery contain discrete installations envisioning both past and future. Emblazoned with company names, including Capital and the bankrupt shipper Hanjin, the containers function as relics of a global economy in acute transition. The first contains a “jobsite office” reminiscent of those of a bygone era. From time to time a “caretaker” — formerly employed in local manufacturing trades — will interact with visitors and discuss how real things get made, and work. Another container features a gallery of drawings of various failed and obsolete inventions. A third container is the backdrop for three videos, including a montage of doomsday predictions that never came to pass, performances of different historical “progressions” enacted in abandoned industrial landscapes, and a cycle of images of workers’ bodies disappearing into thin air.
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IV. THE AGE OF EPHEMERALIZATION
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A staircase leads to a network of three scaffolding towers, each of which hosts a 3-D printer. A nod to the factory of the future, the 3-D printers output objects throughout the course of the exhibition. One produces a model forklift pallet, echoing the pallets used to craft the caves; another prints usable pieces of hardware, while a third produces a prosthetic element in reference to an absent body. These stations are connected by a system of catwalks suspended fourteen feet over the ground, a stomach-churning perspective that evokes both the spectacle and precarity of the dematerialized economy. With this shift in vantage points, we can consider our recent history as a kind of archaeology of all the “stuff” that may cease to exist in the digital age.
V. POST-INDUSTRIAL VACATIONLAND (after Aldous Huxley) Responding to the notion that the machine age would bring the newly liberated population a time of great leisure, Aldous Huxley — the author of Brave New World, the dystopic vision of a society in 2540 that revered Ford as its savior — suggested that humans would in fact experience depression and boredom when machines replaced their jobs. Glynn creates an image of the classic, picturesque ruin with a grid of cast-iron columns removed from the museum’s renovated buildings. Modified stainless steel hospital stretchers-cum-lounge chairs, placed under tanning lamps, propose a post-industrial vacation wasteland, complete with stainless steel tumbleweeds.
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second floor mezzanine
APPENDIX A APPENDIX B A grid of small, stacked forklift pallets supports piles of newsprint posters that visitors are invited to take. One side of each poster features a photographic image of an industrial landscape in transition. The other features handwritten phrases or text fragments that refer to acts of making, and to the idea of human progress. The changing fate of the newspaper industry in the age of the internet and social media is in itself an illustration of the transformative moment that we are experiencing, the threshold between a romantic past tangible with paper and ink, a digital and wireless present, and a still unknown, perhaps entirely unbound future.
Nine color-coded tool racks trace the history of human technology from the stone age to the industrial revolution, framing the tool as an extension of the body. The artist hand-sculpted the objects in paper, scanned them with a 3-D scanner, and then output the tools with a 3-D printer. They are grouped by action verbs: To Cut, To Sow, To Pound, To Pump, To Forge, To Write, To See, To Orient, To Locomote. Presented in a fashion that is part museological display, part garage workshop rack, the tools function as both art and artifact, but they have been rendered fragile and useless for the work they were intended for, produced by a machine like those that have made many of them obsolete.