Ben Cain

At the Edge of Work

The exhibition space will act as a pseudo factory involving various types of production. The individual works and the environment itself all present forms of adaptation, digestion, and coping with a life-work situation in which ‘work’ is somehow everywhere and nowhere, omnipresent, and invisible. People talk about the ‘heart being taken out’ of things, out of work, meaning that there’s a lack of feeling or humanity. Perhaps there’s a vacuum in the gap between industry and post-industry, an enormous open empty space, a ruin, a sudden shift that left a huge amount of people feeling entirely lost, disenfranchised. However, that generation is fading, and new generations might find it hard to recognise any sort of ‘heart’ in spaces of industry. Some of the sculptural works explicitly look at the deconstruction of a clear or perhaps romantic notion of the ‘worker’, some present ‘work’ with a veneer of ‘leisure’, others set up situations where labour of some sort is latent or immanent. Most of the spaces and sculptures here assume the audience to be some sort of potentially active worker within a working environment. This exhibition is far from a comprehensive study of industrial and post-industrial work patterns and environments, but it does intend to raise questions about conditions of work that are ‘human’ (or humane), and desirable, and therefore there’s an invitation to think how and if we might work differently. The exhibition confesses to a confusion about which periods and forms of work are damaging or liberating in terms of the potential of individuals and communities to impact positively on one-another and their environment, i.e., to realise agency, social consciousness and fulfilment. Should we expect any of these things from our engagement with ‘work’? It's clear that work or labour is increasingly omnipresent in all our lives (automation hasn’t given us a post-work leisure utopia, and most of the ‘leisure’ activities we are pursuing are the work of ‘working-out’, bench-pressing, replacing for example die-casting), and so it feels necessary to continually ask how we used to work, how we work now, and how we want to work – these are some of the questions this exhibition wants to struggle with. The contemporary worker’s body is dispersed in actual space, virtual space, and in time, working on demand, over-time and with no set hours. Perhaps in the case of ‘industrial labour’, although often displaced, and travelling across borders to find work, the body is static. All the body’s moves happen in one small area, and in tight bond with its’s machine. But what about office-work, desk-based work prevalent since the mid 19thC, McDonald’s – is that industrial labour, service industry, or both and more? A clear idea of what work is, what it looks like and where it takes place has been dismantled and with it a coherent sense of self? But we ought to be very careful about a promoting a notion of the heroic dignified worker – it’s clearly the product of myth, nostalgia, and romance? There’s no denying that the material and spatial, sculptural in fact, characteristics of industrial labour are deeply impressive, attractive, phenomenal, even awesome, and these factors make it easy for that period of work to be aestheticized, smothered in nostalgia, exoticized and consequently monetarized through for example the hip re-branding of workwear by everyone from top-end fashion houses, to domestic-scale ‘artisan’ production houses, down to mundane hyper-conservative high-street stores such as Gap. The majestic sunlight on monumental structures and beautiful erstwhile ruddy-cheeked faces in the images of Tošo Dabac and Walker Evans is deeply captivating and persuades us of the dignity of that work -and not unreasonably- the euphoria of socialism and the familial support and comfort of work-place community. Everywhere we are surrounded by the contemporary lack of this type of work? This work, and that world, is omni-present in the landscape of many European countries, in cultural industries inhabiting ex-factory space ruins, and in the ‘chore jackets’ on everyone’s backs that are now cultural icons. The ruins of work are acutely visible. Faced with the constant presence of the signs of what work apparently once was before some workers became walking commodities and PR assistants to themselves, it’s hard not to think about the role of ‘work’ in our lives and our society, and with all this in mind, it’s hard for me not to make work about work.

Čačak Biennial

Work and Workers Dismantled and Reconstituted Ideas about what work is and what workers do were perhaps relatively stable for a long time, particularly in areas of labour where classic workwear uniforms were common, i.e. the concrete and steel, sweat and oil underbelly forming the economic, social and material backdrop of a society associated with the progressive type of architecture that houses this installation. Simple but carefully considered blue 3-pocket buttoned coats supposedly protected the wearer, and in the best scenario these overalls might also have offered dignity and shared identity. Above all though workwear was and is about time. From the point of putting the coat on in the morning to the point of taking it off in the afternoon the wearer was invariably ‘working’. This putting-on and taking-off might symbolise the divide between work on the one hand, and leisure or not-working on the other. Work has long since dispersed, reformed, diffused, seeped in and spread out, generally filling in the gaps of non-work. What do we wear now in the new indeterminate time-space of work? In ethnographic museums around the world, and of course in Čačak as well, we can see small armies of ancient bodies poised on top of thin metal rods which are sunk into weighted bases. This method of display is also employed in this installation, although in this case, beneath a fairytale-scale canopy of Ficus Elastica Decora viewers walk amongst life-sized figures. The fragments of blue fabric and ceramic displayed on the concrete and steel mannequins might be remnants from another time, possibly recalling nostalgic notions of labour and associated solidarity, but equally they might be records of contemporary experiences of work – distressed, dis-assembled, dismantled, and marked by chameleon and multi-faceted identities.

Training - Small Semi-Skilled Tasks

Having been made in order to fit into a small suitcase that is then carried from London to Stockholm where the objects are then laid out in the form of a street stall, it’s hard for me not to think of the travelling salesman, perhaps even Arthur Miller’s Death of the Salesman (in part about the links between changing production methods and identity), and ideas about how material is managed and exchanged between people, about how material itself might mediate. The objects shown include products of creative labour and industrial labour, and products that seem to evidence no labour or physical work at all, miraculous objects. Some of the objects on display are actually discarded try-outs taken from wood and steel workshops. These discarded parts have been carefully selected, sand-blasted or polished, and then powder-coated or painted. The method of arrangement (inc. table supplied by Patrick Lacey and David Price) involves a type of framing that draws attention to the attempts made in the pursuit of getting something right, learning something, figuring out how to work with tools, materials, and colours. The work is comprised of exercises or sets of found and purpose-made objects – tests, models from an actual workplace and from a workspace in my head. Collectively they present a model of a studio or a nomadic workshop, one which is concerned with labour that isn’t very productive.

Absent-Minded Exercise

In the course of absentmindedly running a finger along a surface, and in so doing measuring heat or sensing texture, one might be thought to be ‘being affected by’ environment, space, material; and at the same time and with the same finger one might inadvertently clean the same surface while also leaving a trace of oil from your skin thereby impacting upon, or affecting, that same environment. Is this some form of micro-relationship? How might this moment of simultaneously affecting and being affected by -both equally active states- be recorded and amplified? Minute but nevertheless tangible and vital forms of affect may be unsolicited, involuntary – perhaps this is a form of disinterested or passive affect?

In fields of art making where ‘participatory practice’ implies the audience’s ‘active’ role in producing, for example the production of a subject (the audience themselves?), there’s an increasingly pressing need to qualify the nature of that productivity. This need arises out of a more general demand for our (i.e. a viewer, client, consumer, user, operator, producer, or all of these at once) productive engagement with an infinite variety of fields where people come into contact with other matter, data, people, objects, and subjects. So one question might be about the nature of the active and/or productive relationship between people and things, people and people, and people and materials. Do those relationship generate capital or exchangeable data, and can that data be monetarized? And anyway who’s doing the acting? When does that relationship generate a space of self- or community-realisation, which in turn might have a capacity to liberate or make powerful, or promise ‘mutual-support’ as an outcome, for example? When people are consumers are encouraged to recognise themselves as consumers who should present themselves as products, who really benefits from all that productivity?

With the omnipresence of ‘activity’ and ‘interactivity’, and the time for work-time both expanding and becoming denser, passivity becomes more attractive. The attraction lies in its potential to offer rest, down-time, but also a space for undetermined speculation, a space for potential itself. ‘Active engagement’ used to imply political assertion, partaking in the production of society, investment in change, perhaps even caring for things, people and ideas regardless of whether or not they impact directly upon ones own life. How do we consolidate those positive associations with ‘action’ on the one hand with a desire for passivity on the other? However activity and passivity aren’t mutually exclusive terms, just like subject/object and author/audience. It might well be that in some cases being passive, refusing to act, constitutes, conversely, a form of activity, and vice versa. When tireless activity, self-exploitative working patterns, and the constant assertion of our own subject-hood might seem to define our contemporary landscape, then recognising passivity as vital, generating spaces for passivity, and choosing when or how to adopt a passive position might be increasingly necessary. The question of who can actually afford to practice passivity might then follow, but that stands alongside the question of who can’t.

‘In the era of biopower, what bodies are meant to produce is essentially their own economically productive lives – integrally self-converting into human capital. Life itself has become integrally capital-intensive’ (Massumi, Politics of Affect). The effects of excessively competitive and self-exploitative patterns of work arguably take root in the body. Immaterial or cognitive labour materializes, if anywhere, in or on the body, e.g. skin, eyes, limbs, joints, nerves, hair. Functioning as something of an antidote to a backdrop of ever-present activity or productivity, in the book Technologies of the Self Foucault talks about learning how to effectively take care of oneself, and in discussing this form of care, he quotes Marcus Aurelius, ‘I did little work, and that to no purpose’. So small-scale, seemingly purposeless work, or perhaps work that is done when we’re not at work or not really working at all is upheld as being valuable, and seems to be equivalent to a kind of ‘taking care’. Perhaps this ‘little work of no purpose’ can also be associated with a form of passivity?

There are three areas that I’m linking here - the active and passive nature of ‘affect’, signs of contemporary work on the body, and a notion of caring for oneself and others. I want to consider the ways in which these areas might be co-dependent.

Object Excercises - closed session with students of the CASS School of Art

a live object. an object that simultaneously changes form. an object that is at once flat, and then not. an object that breathes and thinks. an object which wonders why. an object which is its own audience and maker. an object that masquerades. an object that’s unruly. an object that can’t sit still. an object that’s full of bodies. an object that’s a monument, one which can be folded up and packed away. an object that’s covers up. an object that moves and shakes. an object that’s submissive. an object that’s empty. an object that leaves early. an object that stays all night. an object that carries on regardless. an object that doesn’t listen. an object that does.