SINCE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
of the mid 19th century, labor has been drawn to the higher income and improved standards of living made possible by manufacturing-based economies and specialization. Itinerant farmers moved to cities, and whole populations moved from poor rural regions in one country to commercial trade centers in another; America itself is in many ways built upon the free flow of immigrant labor. But with the liberalization of free trade zones over the last two decades, and with the stunning market-based growth within previously isolated and centrally planned economies like China, India, and Brazil, the world has seen unprecedented changes in the dynamics of work. On one hand, the world has witnessed a vast redistribution of income and wealth from relatively richer,
HISTORICALLY, ARTISTS HAVE ASSISTED THE CAUSE OF LABOR BY BRINGING IMAGES OF THE WORKER & HIS OR HER CIRCUMSTANCES TO A WIDER PUBLIC. developed nations, to poorer developing nations. Within emerging nations, the movement from farm to manufacturing centers has brought gains in standards of living, poverty eradication, and basic human health. But the movement of manufacturing jobs is not without consequences, many of them destructive. Jobs won often come at the expense of jobs lost elsewhere, while pay scales, workers’ rights, and safety and environmental regulations vary radically between countries.
In the United States and Europe industrial labor has increasingly been replaced by administrative, service-oriented, and cultural work—employment that offers a sense of creative autonomy but, in turn, offers little certainty and often demands the long hours that organized labor has historically fought to limit on the assembly line. At the same time work has expanded into all spheres of life; the separation between leisure and work time is not easily distinguished. With the stability of more traditional long-term employment no longer guaranteed, and social safety nets undermined, workers across employment sectors and across cultures share a more precarious existence. And with no one single face of labor to foster identification, community-building and organization are more challenging. Historically, artists have assisted the cause of labor by bringing images of the worker and his or her circumstances to a wider public, such as Gustave Courbet’s realist depictions of laborers of the 1850s. The Workers examines how contemporary artists have represented labor conditions over the past decade while engaging many of the traditions that have come before them, from the Socialist Realism of the Soviet Union to the indigenous icons of the Mexican Muralists made in the 1920s. In fact, the exhibition grew out of a project organized for the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City, an archive and exhibition space located in the former home of the legendary artist and activist David Alfaro Siqueiros, whose depictions of agricultural, industrial, and military workers were a rallying cry for the masses in post-revolutionary Mexico. En cada instante, ruptura (In every
Female employees working at Sprague Electric Company. Archive photo
instant, rupture), curated by Carla Herrera-Prats, (an artist and the co-curator of The Workers) proposed to illustrate new strategies artists are employing to give more complete visual form to today’s changing workforce. Expanded for its presentation at MASS MoCA, The Workers features 25 international artists and filmmakers who approach the challenge of representing today’s labor force through a variety of methods, including documentary videography, fiction, performance, and even abstraction. The show also draws attention to members of the work force who are often little recognized—from volunteers to artists—while illustrating the intersection of labor with a range of social issues such as homelessness, illegal immigration, and environmen-
tal decline, as well as with geopolitical conflicts. Several of the works rely on the collaboration of the subjects themselves who were given the opportunity to shape their own image, including the five female factory workers in Tijuana documented in Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre’s film Maquilapolis. With its roots in Mexico, the exhibition includes works
Sprague Electric Company strike, 1970. Archive photo
that address the substandard working conditions in the maquiladoras along the Mexico-US border where multinational companies rely on cheap unskilled labor and considerable tax breaks. The exhibition also addresses the industrial history of the MASS MoCA site itself—formerly the Sprague Electric Company—and includes four new commissions, two of which address local labor struggles. Once a bustling factory, Sprague closed its doors in 1985 in the face of stiff foreign competition and high production costs, leaving nearly a third of the local population out of work. A strike in 1970 remains a much-contested event, for some the beginning of the end for Sprague, and for others a scapegoat for the company’s decision to close its US operations. It is interesting to note
SUPPLANTED BY AFFORDABILITY, THE NOTION OF RELIABLE, STEADY EMPLOYMENT FOR THOSE WHO WANT IT IS NO LONGER SECURE. INSTEAD, TODAY’S WORKER IS FACED WITH PRECARITY, INVISIBILITY, & THE NEED FOR MOBILITY—A WILLINGNESS TO GO WHERE THE JOBS ARE. that Commonwealth Sprague, a spin-off of Sprague Electric formed in 1986, began sending some of its manufacturing to the maquiladoras in Juárez, Mexico, by 2000. Many of the factories in Mexico
have in turn succombed to fierce competition from China; the historic plight of North Adams’ industrial labor force is therefore not only mirrored in many communities across New England, the US, and the globe, but it has been handed down to many of the same workers that replaced them. Fittingly, The Workers’ title graphic and subheadings are based on the Sprague corporate logo and its motto: “The Mark of Reliability”. Today, the notion of reliability has taken on a new meaning. Supplanted by affordability, the notion of reliable, steady employment for those who want it is no longer secure. Instead, today’s worker is faced with precarity, invisibility, and the need for mobility—a willingness to go where the jobs are. This last condition, however, has a second meaning—suggesting the power of mobilization, as improbable as that may seem given today’s political discourse and environment of economic constraint.
THE WORKERS TYLER ROWLAND b. Reno, Nevada, 1978; lives in New York Drawing on the mutability of both authorship and art history, Tyler Rowland examines the labor of the artist and the limits of realism. His installation All The Objects Needed To Install A Work of Art (Gustave Courbet’s The Stonebreakers) (2004–2006/2011) is directly inspired by Courbet’s Realist Manifesto of 1855 which called for art to depict contemporary realities devoid of nostalgia. For the installation, the artist has assembled the tools required to hang Courbet’s famous painting on the wall of the gallery: a ladder, hammer, tape measure, and hanging hooks. Executed in 1849, The Stonebreakers is one of the first unromanticized representations of the working class in 19th century European painting and is a landmark in the history of social realist art. Destroyed in the Allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945, however, the Courbet work—which depicted two male laborers, their backs to the viewer, breaking rocks by the side of the road—will never arrive to be hung. Its absence shifts the focus of the installation to the work required to hang the missing painting—the usually unseen manual labor of the museum. A closer examination of the objects gathered together draws attention to the labor involved in the artist’s process. Each item is painstakingly hand-made from discarded tape, Tyvek, and other scraps. Rowland crafted each item from materials salvaged from job sites where he was working construction to support himself as an artist. HARUN FAROWCKI b. Nový Jičín, Czech Republic, 1944; lives in Berlin In one of his first installation works, Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades (2006), experimental filmmaker Harun Farocki presents footage from 12 different films displayed on adjacent monitors. The work begins with the short
The Stonebreakers (All The Objects Needed To Install A Work of Art), 2004–2006/2011, trash from job site, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist
film La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon) from 1895. The first motion picture by the Lumière brothers, it documents scores of people at the end of the workday as they exit a photographic plate manufactory. The installation continues chronologically, presenting similar scenes of workers leaving factories in a range of films, including Sortie de la briqueterie Meffre et Bourgoin à Hanoi (1899), an unknown Russian film dating from 1912, the iconic pre-war films Intolerance (1916), Metropolis (1926), and Modern Times (1936), Frauenschicksale (1952), Desert Rose (1964), La Reprise du travail aux usines Wonder (1968), Trop tôt, trop tard (1981), footage of a security gate (1987), and Dancer in the Dark (2000). In bringing this group together, Farocki hones in on the representation of the worker in popular culture and, specifically, the Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades 2006, twelve-channel video installation, momentary shift shown using monitors, with sound, dimensions between the labor variable. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, of the factory New York and private life, emphasizing the division between the two. At the same time, the artist emphasizes the worker’s suspension in this no-man’s land, left as anonymous as the goods leaving the factory. In several instances the films illustrate this space outside the gates as a space of struggle and protest—a location alienated from the site of production. SANTIAGO SIERRA b. Madrid, 1966; lives in Madrid Addressing the inherent injustice of the social hierarchy—what he calls the “remunerated system”—Sierra produces radical performative gestures that make visible economic power relationships. Paying his subjects to perform sometimes futile or objectionable tasks that often require submission to grueling physical regimes, Sierra also makes the hosting institution and its uncomfortable viewers Burial of Ten Workers, Calambrone, complicit in the Italy (detail), 2010, C-prints, 39 3/8 × 69 11/16 global system he inches (100 × 177 cm). Courtesy the artist and prometeogallery, Milan is interrogating.
THE WORKERS
An American Veteran of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan Facing the Wall, 2011, performance. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery, London
For Burial of Ten Workers, Calambrone, Italy, Sierra hired ten day-laborers to be buried in the sand, an action that metaphorically mirrors their own disappearance in a post-industrial economy. For An American Veteran of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan Facing the Wall, Sierra asked the museum to recruit soldiers to take shifts standing in silence against a corner of the gallery during museum hours. By putting the soldier in a position associated with punishment, Sierra seems to be asking the soldier to examine his own actions while simultaneously questioning the ways soldiers are treated by the societies and systems that send them to battle. The general invisibility of the troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan is dramatically inverted within the performance, which foregrounds the soldier’s fitness for service while keeping his identity painfully hidden. SAM DURANT b. Seattle, 1961; lives in Los Angeles Sam Durant mines the histories of American art, culture, and politics to define new relationships between disparate events. The collision of sources as varied as rock and roll history, 1960s social activism, and mid-century modern design functions to reconceptualize the standard narratives of American history and spur new perspectives of
Dead Labor Day, 2010, wood, metal, water dispenser, 192 × 299 ½ × 170
inches (487.7 × 760.7 431.8 cm). Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
both past and present moments. Part of a series investigating the history of the death penalty, Durant’s Dead Labor Day also overlays a range of historical issues related to labor and workers’ rights in a single sculpture. The work’s title references Karl Marx’s assertion that capitalist production subsists upon ‘dead labor,’ or labor value extracted from living bodies, in order to create surplus value. Its monumental structure is meant to recall the scaffold where the Chicago anarchists known as the Haymarket Martyrs were executed in 1887. These labor activists were arrested and sentenced to death following a bombing that coincided with a peaceful rally supporting the 8-hour workday (an entitlement not enacted as law until nearly 20 years later). Durant’s sculpture mimics the gallows—complete with trap door— but doubles as a workers’ break room, featuring a water dispenser from which visitors and museum staff can drink. The work draws attention to the unstable position of the worker and suggests that management concessions such as mandatory breaks might be seen as much as a trap as a right. Addressing resonances between historical and contemporary attacks on organized labor, Dead Labor Day asks us to consider our own relationship to the precedents influencing our attitudes toward workers’ rights. LABORATORIO 060 IN COLLABORATION WITH YORK CHANG Founded in Mexico City, 2003; based out of Mexico City and Paris Laboratorio 060 often engages with local communities to decode communication systems. They have worked with street vendors, labor unions, and cultural minorities in order to facilitate resistance to systemic injustices. For the exhibition at MASS MoCA Laboratorio members Lourdes Morales (b. Mexico City, 1977) and Javier Toscano (b. Mexico City, 1975) organized a workshop with former Sprague Electric Company employees and former union members in order to identify and catalogue the various tactics of resistance used by the workers in the ’70s. These sessions made clear the importance of collectively bargained contracts and the need for their wide distribution among union members of the region. The document framed and presented in the gallery space is an example of such a contract used by Sprague between 1976 and 1979. This agreement was reviewed by York Chang, an artist and labor lawyer who annotated the document with comments highlighting the differences between the contractual obligations of the time and today. A logo featuring a QR code is
THE WORKERS presented in the gallery and was also printed in the North Adams Transcript on the exhibition’s opening weekend. The design was inspired by an emblem that Sprague union members pinned The Agreement (detail), 2011, union to their clothes to contract with handwritten text, url, and newspaper intervention, variable dimensions, show solidarity. works on paper: 11 ½ × 14 ½ inches (29.2 × 36.8 cm) each. Courtesy the artists The code can be read by viewers’ smartphones and links to a contract template which is a downloadable digital file that can easily be shared. This utopian contract is meant to function as a departure point for future labor agreements, a resource for younger generations. YEVGENIY FIKS b. Moscow, 1972; lives in New York Yevgeniy Fiks’ work addresses the legacy of the Soviet era and the lingering sense of denial, mourning, and trauma associated with the failures of Communism. The artist attempts to amend the misperceptions of Communist history and its representation and fetishization in popular culture while simultaneously lessening the stigma attached to the New Left and its associations with radical belief systems. Fiks’ Communist Party USA portrays a diverse group of individuals who work at the party’s headquarters in New York. Depicted in office spaces unremarkable aside from the vintage propaganda posters and memorabilia hanging on their walls, these employees vary in gender and age. With political ideals seemingly at odds with their
Portrait of Adam Tenney (Communist Party USA), 2007, oil on canvas, 36 × 48 inches (91.4 × 121.9 cm). Courtesy the artist
appearance and environments, these individuals even carry business cards detailing their titles and professional responsibilities. This nod to corporate culture, like the Old Navy t-shirt worn by one of Fiks’ subjects, points to the dissolution of communist ideals. Painting from life, Fiks employs a style reminiscent of Socialist Realism, a relic of the bygone Communist era much like his subjects. Instead of portraying these individuals as heroic figures, the artist emphasizes their familiar, unthreatening appearance. In creating these candid portraits, made without irony, the artist emphasizes his sitters’ personal relationships to a belief system in contrast to the propaganda painting he references. MIRCEA CANTOR b. Oradea, Romania, 1977; lives in Cluj Mircea Cantor came of age during Romania’s emergence from Communism and its transition into a capitalist economy. I Sell My Free Time (2006) documents a performance by the artist in which he installed himself at a vegetable market in Cluj with a cardboard sign that read “I sell my free time (price negotiable).” The sign, situated between mounds of produce, suggests that time is just as much a commodity as the other tangible items for sale in the market. As Marx explained, all commodities have a value that is made up of the labor time I Sell My Free Time, 2006, C-print, 15 3/4 × 11 required to 13/16 inches (40 × 30 cm). Courtesy the artist and produce it. Yvon Lambert, Paris Time is the real exchange value. Just as we spend money, Cantor points out, we also spend time. Cantor hints at the paradox of current working conditions: although maximizing efficiency in labor practices is supposed to create more free time for workers, it also creates another saleable product. By indicating that his price is negotiable, Cantor also points to parallel economies and the whims of the market, which reacts not only to supply and demand, but is also susceptible to inequitable power relationships and differing cultural values.
THE WORKERS ODED HIRSCH b. Kibbutz Afikim, Israel, 1976; lives in Queens, New York Born on a kibbutz in rural Israel, Oded Hirsch has adopted the community’s communal way of life as both the subject of his work and a model for his own working method. Founded in 1932 Afikim was devoted to the tenets of equality and shared labor and income. Yet, according to the artist, the current Afikim is no different from any other town. The artist’s video projects reflect both the value of the kibbutz’s founding ideology and also what might seem like its impossibility—or even absurdity—to contemporary audiences. Hirsch collaborates with the Afikim community, as well as many other artists and professionals, to create the films. These collective undertakings are depicted as both spectacular and somewhat futile. Part of a series, Tochka depicts a group walking through verdant hills. When they approach a narrow ravine that could easily be traversed by foot, the group decides to build a bridge with the materials at hand. While their blue uniforms reference a range of manual laborers across cultures, nostalgia for a past way of life and labor is inscribed in the workers’ actions, the results of the work, and the simple tools used to perform it. The absurdity of the task is highlighted by the workers’ nonsensical use of mud to construct both the simple crane and bridge. This dependence on the soil also speaks to a deep connection to the land. The workers’ hats, known in Israel as tembel hats, are a national symbol and typical of the early generation of kibbutzim who worked the land, yet Hirsch has made the hats too long, leaving the workers with limited sight. Obscuring both identity and time, Hirsch abstracts personal experience to access the broader, universal themes of communal work and labor while hinting at current social and political meanings.
Tochka, 2010, single-channel video projection, with sound, 14:20 min. Courtesy the artist, and Thierry Goldberg Projects, New York
ALLAN SEKULA b. Erie, Pennsylvania, 1951; lives in Los Angeles In a career spanning over 40 years, Allan Sekula has focused largely on the theme of labor within global capitalism. Working with photographs, texts, videos, and films, the artist uses realism as a form of social documentation. He typically works in series that span several years, adding a narrative aspect to the work while avoiding the romanticized status of a single photograph. In 2002 and 2003, he traveled to the Isla de Ons on the Galician coastline of Spain, completing a series of photographs titled Black Tide. The sinking of the tanker Prestige
Volunteer on the Edge, 2002–2003, C-print, 29 1/5 × 39 ¾ inches (74 × 101 cm). Rocio and Boris Hirmas collection
earlier in 2002 had left the area saturated in oil. Photographing the volunteers who labored to save the local wildlife and clean up the oil spill, Sekula focused on the emotional devastation and exhaustion felt by the workers. It is through their expressions that the gravity and scale of the ecological disaster become apparent. Continuing in this somber tone, Sekula’s photograph Gravediggers (2006–2007) explores the labor associated with death, photographing the preparation of a gravesite. Like death itself, such workers are kept at the fringe of our consciousness—relegated to a state of disavowal or denial. CLAIRE BECKETT b. Chicago, 1978; lives in Boston Claire Beckett began depicting soldiers in 2004. At the time, news coverage focused on a lack of armored vehicles and other items necessary for the army’s protection. The lack of photographs shared with the public of the coffins of deceased soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq inspired Beckett to create work that would increase the visibility of such issues. Her series In Training: Soldiers Before War depicts male and female soldiers from
THE WORKERS the time of their enlistment and basic training to their deployment. Captured in a variety of situations both posed and candid, the youth of these soldiers is striking. In the girl’s makeup and the boy’s pimpled face, the Private Nicholas Greene, Buzzard’s Bay, awkwardness of MA, 2006 2006, archival ink jet print, 40 × 30 these teenagers inches (101.6 × 76.2 cm). Courtesy the artist and Carroll and Sons Gallery, Boston contrasts sharply with the weight of their jobs. Before creating the series, the artist admits she did not know a great deal about the soldiers’ biographies, motivations, and politics and assumed that their enlistment was influenced by an unjust socioeconomic system that offers little other choice for many. However, after working with the soldiers, the artist found a variety of motivations compelling their service, from personal patriotism, to enthusiasm for adventure, to the desire to earn college tuition. In portraying each of these soldiersin-training, the artist re-inscribes individuality and personal choice into her subjects even while exposing their vulnerability. HUGO HOPPING b. Mexico City, 1974; lives in Los Angeles and Copenhagen Hugo Hopping’s practice departs from a legacy of conceptual art in order to address social and political concerns. In A Few Thoughts on Resignation and Loss (2010), Hopping restages a 1924 chess match played between artist Marcel Duchamp,
A Few Thoughts on Resignation and Loss, 2010, Single-channel video, with sound, 16 min. Courtesy the artist
who famously retired from his career in art to pursue his love of chess, and Italian chess master Massimiliano Romi. The events of the game, and Duchamp’s ultimate loss (he forfeited to avoid an embarrassing checkmate), are analyzed by Lieutenant Hugo Alejandro Tapia Augustin of the Mexican Armed Forces. In this work, chess is a metaphor for society in which the system of pieces on the board reflects class hierarchies, institutions, and positions of power. The pawns represent the working class, and although holding the least power, their unified movements are crucial to the ultimate outcome of the game. Hopping connects this analogy to the position of the people of Mexico and Latin America. JASON DODGE b. Newton, Pennsylvania, 1969; lives in Berlin Jason Dodge mines everyday objects for the extraordinary narratives within them. In order of imaginary altitude, an astronomer, a meteorologist, an ornithologist, a geologist, and a civil engineer cut pockets from their trousers (2009) is a quiet, humorous ode to the aspiration of the worker. Dodge playfully references the associations between clothing and status while commenting on the implied pecking order established between professions. Mapping the imagined vertical space from earth to sky that each worker would occupy, In order of imaginary altitude an Dodge attempts astronomer, a meteorologist, an to assign reason ornithologist, a geologist, and a civil engineer cut pockets from their trousers, to the hierarchy. 2009, cut fabric, Dimensions variable, app. 3/4 × 8 The distinctions × 8 inches (2 × 20 × 20 cm). Courtesy the artist and between the Casey Kaplan, New York occupations are collapsed, however, in the intimate stacking of the five pockets. Carefully arranged atop a pedestal, they are barely distinguishable by the slightest of variations in color, fabric, and size. STEPHANIE ROTHENBERG b. Newark; lives in Brooklyn and Buffalo Focusing on new technologies and their social ramifications, Stephanie Rothenberg’s recent works have addressed the labor injustices of the global computer game industry. Her Portraits: Second Life Workers depicts a range of avatars and the jobs they have found on the on-line platform
THE WORKERS Second Life. Accompanying descriptions detail the workers’ occupations which are as diverse as architect, museum docent, nurse, escort, EMT, and wedding planner, and outline the real wages these workers can earn in the virtual world. Along with this alternate economy, however, come many of the labor issues encountered in real life. Rothenberg conceived of a “mixed reality” talk show as a forum to settle disputes and discuss the exigencies of working on Portrait: Second Life Worker, 2010, inkjet line. Performed prints, single-channel video, with sound, 29 × 22 inches (73.7 × 55.9 cm). Courtesy the artist in front of both a real and a Second Life audience, Best Practices in Banana Time with Dr. Rodenberger explores the problematic translation of values, behaviors, and ideologies related to labor between these two worlds. The “Best Practices” of the work’s title refers to the rise of 1950s corporate culture and a set of rules that all employees should follow, while “Banana Time” alludes to a study by sociologist D.F. Roy in which factory workers created games out of their repetitive work tasks in order to make their time more meaningful. The artist will stage a performance at the museum this winter. YOSHUA OKÓN b. Mexico City, 1970; lives in Mexico City Yoshua Okón’s work often uses humor to critique social and political issues related to identity, class, and race. Mimicking the environment of the maquiladoras in northern Mexico, Canned Laughter (2009) addresses the often dehumanizing conditions of production as well as its dematerialization into service-based economies. A long table with shelves, lights, and video equipment reproduces a mock assembly line where, ostensibly, canned laughter is produced. The videos display workers attending their own assembly line and, led by a German conductor, providing a chorus of cacophonous laughter that is churned out for consumption by sitcom audiences. The installation includes all of the trappings associated with the corporate factory: a logo, uniforms, and specialized packaging, as well as the pyramidal social hierarchy suggested
Canned Laughter, 2009, eight-channel video installation: projectors,
monitors, two racks with uniforms, table, shelves, cans, lamps, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist
by the formation of the choir. Named Bergson (after French philospher Henri Bergson), Okón's factory even has its own promotional videos, which insidiously motivate workers to be more productive. The piece’s perversity also lies in the fact that Okón employed unemployed workers to perform in a defunct maquiladora in Ciudad Juárez; thus they are enacting the labor they lacked. Juxtaposing human emotion with the alienated mass production of goods, the limitations of translating feeling into a consumable product are brought into focus. MARY LUM b. St. Cloud, Minnesota, 1951; lives in North Adams, Massachusetts Mary Lum draws attention to visual moments that often go unnoticed. The urban environment and its wealth of details are frequent subjects: using collage, photography, and her own obsessive collections, Lum layers diverse bits of information to produce complex translations of the city experience. While her work often borders on the abstract, narrative and text play important roles in the stories—both real and fictional—which Lum mines from her surroundings and her materials. At MASS MoCA Lum has installed a work inspired by the history of the former manufacturing site and an assemblage of hand-torn paper bag fragments that the artist has been collecting for nearly two decades. On the bottom of each bag, the name of the individual who supervised or participated in the bag’s production is memorialized in ink. Phrases such as “Made with Pride by” or “A Quality Product By” remind us of the human presence Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor, 2011, paper bag fragments, paint, site-specific dimensions. behind industriCourtesy the artist, Carroll and Sons, Boston, and Frederiecke Taylor, New York alized production,
THE WORKERS making both work and worker more visible. With Tinker Tailor Solider Sailor (2011) Lum unites the individual names into an organized group (and with the title brings together many types of workers), forming orderly lines which travel across the gallery wall like workers entering or exiting the factory. At the end of their metaphorical march, the names morph into a story, a more personal glimpse of the experience behind the labor. Lum has cobbled together this fictional text from a selection of existing writings, including Don DeLillo’s Libra, Elizabeth Graver’s Unravelling, Graham Greene’s story Men at Work, Haruki Murakami’s The Wind -Up Bird Chronicle, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road. “Don’t let the word ‘factory’ fool you,” ends the hand-painted text; a quiet provocation and protest. Lum has painted the gallery walls in geometric sections of beige, gray and off-white with a bright red band standing out against the
Made with Pride by Terry Russell, 2011, billboard, 125 × 272 inches
(317.5 × 690.9 cm). Courtesy the artist, Carroll and Sons, Boston, and Frederiecke Taylor, New York
more industrial colors. With this bold graphic treatment of the space, Lum is referencing Alexander Rodchenko’s 1925 Workers Club. Following the Soviet revolution of 1917, Rodchenko and his fellow Constructivists gave up traditional painting in order to focus on ‘useful’ arts like graphic design which could be used to communicate to the people—specifically the proletariat. Lum sees her work as a similar call for workers to unite. In conjunction with her installation in the gallery, Lum has also designed a billboard. Located on Route 8 in North Adams, the sign features an enlarged image of one of the bag bottoms proclaiming “Made with Pride by Terry Russell.” Situated outside the museum, the work can be read many ways. Is it an advertisement? A campaign supporting workers’ rights? The name on the board is equally ambiguous, signifiers of gender and race not readily apparent. For Lum it is a heroic portrait of any number of usually nameless, faceless workers.
VICKY FUNARI b. Alexandria, Virginia, 1963; lives in Philadelphia SERGIO DE LA TORRE b. Tijuana, 1967; lives in Oakland Maquilapolis (2006) is a bilingual documentary that charts the lives of five female assembly factory workers in Tijuana. Employed by these ‘maquiladoras’—sweatshops on the northern border of Mexico mostly owned by multinational corporations, the women confront perilous working conditions, illegal layoffs, and the Maquilapolis, 2006, 68 min. daily challenges of raising a family in hazardous ecological conditions. Funari and De La Torre filmed the workers as they brought a lawsuit against a former employer and pushed the government to clean an abandoned factory leaching toxic chemicals into local water sources. The filmmakers also turned the cameras over to the women. In an act of empowerment, these workers enact the repetitive movements they perform continuously on the assembly lines. They create a choreography where their gestures point at a ghostly form of production, where workers never see the final product. ALMUDENA CARRACEDO b. Madrid, 1972; lives in Brooklyn, New York ROBERT BAHAR b. Philadelphia, 1975; lives in Brooklyn, New York Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar’s documentary Made in LA (2007) presents the story of a group of “undocumented” Latina immigrants working in the garment sector. The director was inspired to make the film after reading a newspaper article about the long hours, low pay, and unsafe conditions endured by workers in some of the sweatshops in Los Angeles. Shocked that such circumstances could exist in such a wealthy country, Carracedo wanted to expose the struggles of these workers. The film focuses on three women who mobilize to gain much-needed labor protections and also brings to light how difficult it is for immigrants to recognize their own voices and rights due to their legal status. During a trip to New York to draw attention to the workers’ boycott and
THE WORKERS lawsuit against Forever 21 (a trendy retailer that sells clothes for low prices), the film captures Lupe Hernandez’s visit to Ellis Made in L.A. 2007, 70 min. Island and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Her recognition of the parallels between her own experience and that of the immigrants who came to United States in the early 20th century is a powerful moment. Ultimately the story proves the positive consequences of organizing. The award-winning film has been inspirational to grass-roots and labor organizing movements. ANTHONY HERNANDEZ b. Los Angeles, 1947; lives in Los Angeles and Idaho Since beginning his career as a photographer, Anthony Hernandez has trained his camera on fleeting moments of urban life. In the late 1980s, Hernandez shifted from documenting individuals to recording the spaces that reflect the presence, or absence, of the urban population. One of the first bodies of work that he produced in this mode, Landscapes for the Homeless (1989–2007), is a series that chronicles the physical traces of homelessness along the stretch of freeway between downtown Los Angeles and Santa Monica. In these pictures, Hernandez does not attempt to give voice to the homeless, but rather facilitates an intimate witnessing of the homeless existence. Viewers become acutely aware of the labor—and the physicality—involved in living on the street. A pair of pants hangs to dry in the trees. Scavenged materials stand in for a domestic or work space:
Landscapes for the Homeless #54, 1989–2007, color print on Endura paper, 62 × 74 ¾ inches (157.5 × 188.9 cm). Courtesy the artist
a board functions as a desk or table. A stubby pencil, a leather belt, disposable razors, and a plastic fork suggest the everyday activities of any life. The remains of a chair, rendered temporarily functional by the fashioning of two pieces of abandoned sheetrock, remind us of the precarious existence of those who live on the margins—from the working poor to those who cannot make a living at all. In cataloguing these transient spaces, Hernandez subtly demands that we turn our attention to the disenfranchised subjects who have created them. SUSAN COLLIS b. Edinburgh, Scotland, 1956; lives in London Deeply engaged in the labor of meticulous craft processes, Susan Collis fashions works that replicate what is ordinarily overlooked: the drips of paint on a floor, the lone screw in a wall. Close examination reveals that what appear to be the unintentional marks of manual labor—or the art-making process—are actually facsimiles assiduously crafted from precious materials. The drips of paint may be, in fact, carefully inlaid mother-of-pearl; the screw made of gold and inset with a precious stone. At MASS MoCA a paintsplattered smock Untitled, 2008, overalls, embroidery thread, 60 hangs in a corner inches (152.4 cm) tall. Collection of Vanessa and of the gallery. At John Curry. Courtesy Seventeen Gallery, London first glance it might seem out of place, evidence of the construction or maintenance that is usually completed out of sight. More careful observation discloses that the paint splatters are actually simulated by embroidery. The moment of recognition is significant for Collis: by recreating these everyday objects, Collis shifts attention to unnoticed labor while symbolically assigning it greater value. EMILY JACIR b. Bethlehem, Palestine, 1970; lives in New York Images of forced or voluntary movement reoccur in Emily Jacir’s work which also focuses on the limits of cultural exchange as well as its possibilities. In Crossing Surda, Jacir documented her trek to work
THE WORKERS on the Ramallah-Birzeit Road over the course of eight days. Every day, thousands of people walk this road—which connects over 30 Palestinian villages to the town of Birzeit and its university—to get to school and work. Each time they must pass through the Surda checkpoint, which is manned by Israeli soldiers, APCs, and, sometimes, tanks. The artist’s first attempt at documenting her daily walk was Crossing Surda (a record of going to and interrupted by from work), 2002, two channel video installation guards who held with text. 132 min./30 min. Courtesy Alexander and her at gunpoint Bonin, New York and confiscated her videotape. In her next attempt, she concealed her camera, and surreptitiously recorded her commute. The result is a lengthy record—projected on the gallery wall—of the endless rubble, mud, dust, and fellow commuters the artist encountered on the road. The extended sound of the artist’s rhythmic footsteps and the weight of her gait heighten the monotony and difficult reality of crossing the checkpoint. A small TV monitor plays a sloweddown version of the journey. Here, the otherwise banal routine of getting to work is transformed by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The work highlights both the movement associated with the global workforce and the worker’s vulnerability to larger geopolitical struggles. ADRIAN PACI b. Shkoder, Albania, 1969; lives in Milan Themes of exile, alienation, and conflict are central to Adrian Paci’s art, which often draws on his own biography; the artist emigrated to Italy in 1997 to flee the unrest in his native Albania. Centro di Permanenza Temporanea films an orderly line of men and women as they walk across an airport tarmac. Dressed in casual clothes and heavy boots, the group moves toward a mobile staircase used to board commercial planes. As the individuals mount the stairs, the platform becomes uncomfortably crowded. The camera lingers, waiting for what comes next. As the camera pans out, we see that the staircase is not attached to a plane, and these would-be travelers have no place to go. Though the title of the work refers to the absurdly named camps in Italy used to detain illegal immigrants and refugees, Paci made the film in San Jose, Cali-
Centro di Permanenza Temporanea, 2007, single-channel video
projection, with sound, 5:30 min. Courtesy Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich; Gallery Kaufmann Repetto, Milan; and Peter Blum Gallery, New York
fornia, with a group of immigrants—mostly illegal, who likely work as day laborers or agricultural hands—who find themselves in a similar limbo. With passive, stoic faces isolated against their barren environment under the hot sun, these individuals seem to apprehend the plight of their displacement, an increasingly global condition of labor and immigration. Planes take off and land in the background, but these workers maintain their untenable position. OSMAN BOZKURT b. Istanbul, 1970; lives in Istanbul Osman Bozkurt’s photographs use the language of urban architecture to describe global issues. Inspired by the endless productivity, creativity, and chaos of his native Istanbul, the artist uses images of his own city as well as various other cultural centers to invoke the current conditions of labor, democracy, and social change. DESTRUCTION is an un-staged photograph that Bozkurt took while walking through the streets of Budapest. The artist captured an image of construction workers dismantling the Labor Administration Building of Hungary—a holdover from the country’s Communist past. The tension of the image exists between the heroic figures pictured on the building’s
DESTRUCTION, 2007, C-print, 40 × 59 inches (101.6 × 149.9 cm). Courtesy the artist and PiST///Istanbul
THE WORKERS façade—who labor to construct the edifice—and the real workers below who busy themselves with its demolition. Rife with multiple meanings, the image addresses the obliteration of history and individual and collective memory. At the same time it is a striking metaphor for the dissolution of labor organizations. The simultaneous push and pull pictured also portrays a certain inertia—what the artist sees as an overarching analogy for the status of the worker. Regardless of governmental philosophy, conditions for the laborer are inevitably the same, with apparent changes rarely resulting in real progress. “Power,” Bozkurt points out, “exists somewhere, but never with the worker,” who in the photograph is shown participating in the destruction of the very institution historically formed to protect him. OLIVER RESSLER b. Knittelfeld, Austria, 1970; lives in Vienna Through his videos and installations, Oliver Ressler examines and critiques the conditions of our rapidly changing global society. Functioning as a form of activism, his works propose alternatives to the status quo while exposing the impact of political systems on the individual. In Socialism Failed, Capitalism is Bankrupt. What comes Next? (2010) Ressler documents the frustrations of the traders
Socialism Failed, Capitalism is Bankrupt. What comes Next?, 2010, two-channel video installation, with sound, 19 min. Courtesy the artist
eking out a living in the largest bazaar in Yerevan in post-Soviet Armenia. Known as “Bangladesh,” the market holds over 1,000 vendors who earn little more than 100 to 250 Euros (less than $300) per month. Primarily former factory workers, the traders describe how their living conditions worsened after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the closing of factories, and the termination of social safety nets. A second adjacent video features still images of the factories that have been abandoned or now operate at a reduced capacity. While these workers live in misery, a small but highly influential class of politicians and wealthy oligarchs make profits by transferring state-owned property and licenses for mining to international corporations.
CAMEL COLLECTIVE founded in 2005; based out of New York Camel Collective engages in research-based art. For A Facility Based on Change, the collective used as a starting point the museum’s location in the former Sprague factory and two archival photographs documenting a Sprague strike in 1970. The artists employed a screen-printing process (a technique normally used for mass production) to generate a series of 13 unique paintings. These abstracted images feature fragments of the historic photographs
A Facility Based on Change, 2011, chain link fence, coffee cups, Flashe
on linen, and screen prints on linen, site-specific dimensions, screen prints: 27 × 15 5/8 inches (68.6 × 39.7 cm) each and 70 ¼ × 45 inches ( 178.4 × 114.3 cm. Courtesy the artists
which the artists cut and recombined. Images of Herman Miller office partitions of the same era are embedded in several of the paintings, referencing the transition from assembly line to office work. The new, yet still incomplete narratives point out the difficulties and multiple contingencies inherent in re-assembling history. One of the pictures printed in the North Adams Transcript at the time of the strike captured the workers’ messages written in coffee cups affixed to a chain-link fence. The caption rather anachronistically described the improvised signage system as a “work of art.” Taking this description to its logical conclusion, Camel Collective installed a similar fence across the gallery space of the museum. The installation positions the viewer as the “unidentified pedestrians” named in the caption, potentially unlocking the subject from its historical confines. The coffee cups in the current installation now announce—in a twitter-like shorthand—news headlines connecting current labor struggle with those of the past. These messages will change during the course of the exhibition. Camel Collective is Carla Herrera-Prats (b. Mexico City, 1973), Anthony Graves (b. South Bend, Indiana, 1975) and Lasse Lau (b. Sønderborg, Denmark, 1974).
THE WORKERS JAUME PITARCH b. Barcelona, 1963; lives in Barcelona Jaume Pitarch’s multimedia practice transforms the territory of the everyday into uncanny Dada-like approximations which often upset the usual order of things. In Dust to Dust the artist is seen sweeping the floor of an empty industrial building. A former leather tanning factory in the south of France, it was once part of a lively manufacturing center which began to decline in the 1990s. For Pitarch, the disintegrating architecture—which he likens to a “forgotten corpse”—is a metaphor for the human condition and the cycles of life and death. The work functions as a literal interpretation of its title, taken from the biblical phrase ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ Pitarch captures what he considers the beautiful but ultimately futile attempts to quell natural cycles of change. As the artist sweeps the abandoned factory, dust slowly fills the room, creating a monochromatic image that the artist calls a tribute to painting. Momentarily, the image seems to be still, to stop the march of time. Yet the dust settles, and the air clears, and the process begins again; the work is never done. The repetition references a range of symbolic loops: from life to death, economic boom to bust, or even the creative process itself.
Dust to Dust, 2005, single-channel video
projection, with sound, 30 min. MACBA Collection. Fundació Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Gift of Lady Jinty Latymer
Supported in part by the Massachusetts Culutral Council. Special thanks to the North Adams Transcript, Lamar of the Berkshires, Jack Boulger, Bill Lanoue, Rose Marie Thomas, and Mike Wilber. Curated by Susan Cross and Carla Herrera-Prats. Texts on the artists by Caitlin Condell, Susan Cross, Carla Herrera-Prats, Alexandra Nemerov, and Rosalia Romero.
The Workers: Precarity, Invisibility, Mobility On view May 29, 2011–March 31, 2012 Building 4 1st floor galleries Cover image: Ozman Bozkurt, DESTRUCTION (detail) Rothenberg
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Paci Bozkurt
Camel Collective
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