Ben Cain: 2010

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.

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.