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.

(Text for wooden beams)

we’re in a delicate phase right now
we’re a fragile state
no time to talk, sorry
well, you’re not really supposed to, really familiarise yourself with the tools

thanks
put away the tools
thank you
we’re not sure when we’ll be done
we’re there now, we’re here now though, thanks nearly there, thanks
we’re there already, thanks
how long will that take then
can you come in tomorrow
it’s all here, it just needs a tweak
we’d like you’re input by Tuesday
how do you want to do this
when can we leave
can objects retire
sorry we can’t wait any longer
its very noisy, all these machines everywhere, sorry you’ll get the hang of it
hang up
make it stop, thanks
just leave it with us, thanks
we’re taking shape, don’t watch
it’ll take shape by the end of the day
its loosing shape now, see
we’re waiting for the parts
brushing, rolling, spraying, brushing, rolling
we should have left hours ago
we should have left years ago
you should have left by now
harder, now softer, thanks
shake it, shake it harder
its, you know, just don’t
please, you know
we’re beginning to shake
just a bit of slack
a bit more
loosen your grip
we wish you’d loosen your grip
trembling, can’t help it
we can’t help it
suddenly we’ve not a word to say, that’s hard there’s nothing we can do about it
all these processes to get here
turn turn again, turn again
just think of it as a rehearsal, just relax
just let it, you know
loosen your grip, please
we’ve been here all day
we’ve been here all night long
day in, day out, rain and shine
we just can’t, sorry
that’s what’s left
that’s what’s left of it
we’re what remains of it
do it and pass it on
stand back, thanks
lay them down
you don’t have to hold, touch, anything
you don’t, you know
just be close, thanks
just be near, thanks
please don’t
we’ve been through this
sorry
sorry no breaks
learning new tricks is what we do
don’t mind us
no breaks thanks
just look, no hands
thanks, sorry
it’s constant
hum
we’re various tones
that’s it
that’s all
yes, thanks

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.

Wednesday, 8 February 2023

https://www.cimo.hr/en/events/exhibitions/exhibition,-ben-cain-and-tina-gverovic-the-collective-work-clothing-department-is-not-closed,-2022.html

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.

Wednesday, 11 September 2019

Post-Work Work-Wear No's 1-5. Made according to original patterns by long-established workwear company in Croatia

Sunday, 7 December 2014

https://soundcloud.com/ben-cain-11/02-long-liner-02

Tuesday, 4 September 2012

Tuesday, 21 December 2010

Sunday, 19 December 2010

Object Language (2010) - 3min clip from 12min loop

Sunday, 31 October 2010

Star Wars

2008

Digital animation transferred to 16mm.

5min loop.

A short scrolling text within a star-studded infinity ground introduces/describes a public space that is told to exist deep in extra-terrestrial space.

Space-Time on the Street

2007

Single channel for projection

(Made to accompany installation at Associates gallery in London)

5min loop with sound.

Spoken text written by Ben Cain, and spoken by Tina Gverovic.

A series of merging still images (taken from some 20 metres above the figure on street below) of a lone figure on the street wearing a simple mask, with spoken voice overlaid.

Saturday, 30 October 2010

A Figure Walks Out of a Picture

2009

Series of short videos made to accompany solo exhibition (installation) at Site gallery in Sheffield.

Including digital animation, video, scrolling text, and still images, sound, spoken voice, found sound.

A series of inter-related video works reconstruct memories of Sheffield, and project images of possible future characteristics of the city.

Glass Bell

2010

Single channel for projection.

Made to accompany an installation which features wooden display units, and a series of ink drawings.

30 sec loop with sound.

A glass bubble/vessel spins endlessly, producing reflections and light refractions which seem to alter on every rotation. The hypnotic effect is arrested by the intermittent sound of a glass bell being struck.

Print Material

2010

Single channel for projection.

Made to accompany installation (a series of screen prints and hand written texts on paper which are pinned to a concertina construction made of wood).

Circa 10min loop with sound.

A series of shots of various working-parts of industrial printing machines.

Making of the Means (Glass Dance)

2009

Single channel for projection.

Made to accompany a large installation at Wiels in Brussels.

Circa 10min loop with sound.

Documentary recording of the process of blowing the glass sculptures which were purpose-made for the exhibition Making of the Means at Wiels.

Making of the Means (Work Dance)

2009

Single channel for projection.

Made to accompany a large installation at Wiels in Brussels.

Circa 3min loop with sound.

A fluid series of extracts from a workshop with two dancers. The video shows the dancers recalling and reinterpreting the processes of physical labour that were involved in the blowing of the glass pieces made for exhibition, as well as responding to purpose-made objects which were arranged in a workshop-like setting.

Handwork / Woodwork

2009

2 x single channel for projection.

Circa 5min loop with sound.

Work in progress in the course of making work that focuses on actions rather than outcomes.

Handwork / Woodwork

2009

2 x single channel for projection.

Circa 5min loop with sound.

Work in progress in the course of making work that focuses on actions rather than outcomes.

Mannheim

2007

Single channel for projection

5 min loop with sound

Normally accompanied by a series of photographs of the modern day area which is depicted in the video.

Spoken text written by Ben Cain, and spoken by Natasa Ilic.

As we slowly zoom in to the centre of the still image, a voice recalls the events that might have taken place in the public open-air swimming baths which is depicted on screen.

Deep South

2008

Single channel for projection

5 min loop

Projected through a small hole in a wall onto another wall in a thin corridor within a purpose-built space.

Text written by Ben Cain.

A series of still photos of illustrations from an early 20^th Century travel guide/story describing a journey through the hills off the Croatian coast. Here the illustrations have been digitally altered, and the text that would normally accompany the images has been re-written.

Roller

2009

Single channel for projection.

Made to accompany installation at an alternative space (factory basement) in Brussels.

Circa 5min loop with sound.

A black circle is repeatedly rolled down the arc of a purpose-made ramp, abruptly hitting a concrete wall with a loud bang. The rolled disc hits an area of the wall where there is mounted another black disc, and therefore appears to be attempting to enter the black disc on the wall as if it were a hole.

Far Out, High Up, Way Off

2009

2 x single channel for projection.

Made to accompany a large installation within the group show ‘Associates in NY’.

Circa 10min loop.

Including digital animation, video, scrolling text, and still images.

A series of images, and masked figures continually introduce a place which never quite comes into focus.

A Figure Walks Out of a Picture

2009

Series of short videos made to accompany solo exhibition (installation) at Site gallery in Sheffield.

Including digital animation, video, scrolling text, and still images, sound, spoken voice, found sound.

A series of inter-related video works reconstruct memories of Sheffield, and project images of possible future characteristics of the city.

Ben Cain (b.1975 Leeds) lives and works in London and Zagreb. He is primarily involved in the production of video installations, sculpture, audio work, performances and printed matter, which deal with the convergence of theatre and documentary information, with a particular interest in facilitating and highlighting the viewers’ role in the emergence of subjects and objects. The work tends to be formed through interplay of saying and doing, production and description, action and imagination; where specific outcomes remain unstable and illusive. Recent work has increasingly focused on sight, speech and bodily movement in the process of developing work that oscillates between the visible and non-visible, the physical and the imagined.

Since 2002 Ben Cain has been making posters that either accompany gallery installations, or exist as stand-alone works that are displayed in public space as well as private and domestic settings. Positioned somewhere between the ‘agit’-style formal and highly functional public announcement, and a more intimate and sometimes poetic form of address, these posters often ask their audience to re-assess their perception and influence on the immediate surroundings. Addressing the reader as one who might belong to a potentially effective group, gently urging them to consider the implications of their status as a member of ‘the public’ is a theme that’s often present in the posters, but is also one which frequently emerges in other work.

Ben Cain has been exhibiting internationally for over ten years. In the last year he has exhibited in various places including the Slought Foundation, Philadelphia; Garanta Perform, Istanbul; Wiels, Brussels; the ICA, London; and Lenbachhaus in Munich.

Ben Cain

At the Edge of Work

At the Edge of Work

At the Edge of Work

At the Edge of Work

At the Edge of Work

At the Edge of Work

The New World of Work (Body)

The New World of Work (Feet)

The New World of Work

58th Salon (Feet and Body)

The New World of Work (Body)

The New World of Work (Feet)

@bencain.londonzagrebleeds

@bencain.londonzagrebleeds

Dubrovnik Biennial

Dubrovnik Biennial

Resistance / Persistence

Resistance Persistence

download publication/texts

Ben Cain and Tina Gverovic: The Collective-Work Clothing Department is Not Closed, 2022

Čačak Biennial

Čačak Biennial

The New World of Work (feet)

The New World of Work (extra limbs)

The New World of Work (body)

No Action only Talking (video - see link)

Last Line (with Tina Gverović)

Last Line (with Tina Gverović)

Manual Language

Manual Language

Manual Language (ARL Dubrovnik)

BLUES

Aaargh

Aaargh

alternatives

Not Asking a Question, Not Expecting an Answer

Not Asking a Question, Not Expecting an Answer

tests

tests

Handles, Arms, Tools

Handles, Arms, Tools

Self-Learning Automatons

Self-Learning Automatons

Status-Anxious Sticks

Floating Garden (public commission for University of Reading in collaboration with Tina Gverović)

Floating Garden (public commission for University of Reading in collaboration with Tina Gverović)

Floating Garden (public commission for University of Reading in collaboration with Tina Gverović)

Floating Garden (photo credit Adam Stead)

Training

Training - Small Semi-Skilled Tasks

Training - Small Semi-Skilled Tasks

Training - Small Semi-Skilled Tasks

Uses of Leisure

The Uses of Leisure

Object in the Square

Object in the Square

The End (palm tree)

Late Objects

@bencain.londonzagreb

Weight of Work

Post-Work Work-Wear No's 1-5 (54th Zagreb Salon)

Post-Work Work-Wear No's 1-5 (54th Zagreb Salon)

Post-Work Work-Wear No's 1-5

Post-Work Work-Wear No's 1-5

Post-Work/No-Work/Neo-Work

Post-Work/No-Work/Neo-Work

Post-Work/No-Work/Neo-Work

Post-Work/No-Work/Neo-Work (notes)

The Shape of You

The Shape of You - notes

The Shape of You

The Double-Sided Body Studio

The Double-Sided Body Studio (digital print on blueback, wooden structure/platforms, bread)

The Double-Sided Body Studio (digital print on blueback, wooden structure/platforms, bread)

install details - Kings College

exhibition at Kings College: Post Work Wear (Meri on Denim in Chromos No.2)

post-work-wear at Chromos no.4

post-work-wear at Chromos no.1

post-work-wear at Chronos no.3 (various)