All posts by Annie

Work

Production Rings

A series of four videos, all depicting a different scene – a clearing, a pine forest, a pond and a meadow. Shot with a DSLR on a tripod, they resemble photographs, as the only action occurring is the occasional, but regular, entrance of a smoke ring, released from behind the video camera, appearing as a rhythmical timecode. The regularity of the release of smoke is suggestive of industry, as the steam from an engine or the fumes from a power plant. The release of steam from engines is in a sense their product, it is the result of their work. The rings, which may at first appear as perfect circles, soon degrade when they are hit by the elements. The artist’s work is done off camera and like the work of a scientist, the same task is carried out again and again. But like so many failed experiments, no apparent result is achieved.

 

Work

Navigating the Pond

The artist went to the physical effort of transporting a two-metre diameter hoop down into a pond, where it made a very subtle intervention, blending in with the surroundings. She then rowed the video camera from one end of the pond towards the hoop, trying to keep the center of the hoop in the center of the frame. As the video unfolds, the hoop gradually emerges from its surroundings, as the video camera gets closer and eventually glides into the hoop. The task is successful but this success serves no purpose.

 

Writing

Aversion Management

Essay for Aversion Management, Rogue Project Space, September 2013

Aversion Management looks at productivity from the side of the manager. The work of artists is more often than not self-directed unpaid work. The pressure to produce is, for most artists, strong but there is often no external source of this impulse. As Adorno says, the artist “embodies the social forces of production without necessarily being bound by the censorship dictated by the relations of production” 1. For Aversion Management we want to bind the artists to the relations of production and see how they perform. We are exposing ‘work’ – both the work of artists, and the work involved in running a space.

Artists have to fit art-making around the demands and deadlines of other aspects of their lives. Will artists be more productive by subjecting art to the same strict structure and deadlines as other aspects of life? As OTCOP 2 say in ‘A Living Body Performing its own Autopsy…’, “Individually, we can be better or worse at managing time, prioritising processes and planning production. These are key capacities required to make any post-Fordist collaboration function efficiently and without apparent conflicts”3. The work of an artist is not just the production of artwork, but all of the meetings,  networking, emails, applications and marketing that goes along with it. The exhibition aims to highlight this work by making it the object of critique – an artist is paid in relation to their work efficiency, not on how established they are, or how large the work is. The exhibition is a classic ‘project exhibition’, a term coined by Marion von Osten  4, in that the ‘what’ becomes secondary to the ‘how’, as opposed to a thematically curated exhibition. As Liam Gillick says: “Art production and work methods are not temporally linked or balanced because the idea of managing time is not a key component of making art, nor is it a personal or objective profit motive for artists. Unless they decide that such behavior is actually part of the work itself” 5. The ‘what’ in this case is the control of the artists’ working methods.

Quite surprisingly we found this method very successful. Just by making artists aware that they were being scrutinised seemed enough to spur them on to become high-achievers. They went above and beyond to produce labour intensive, ambitious artworks. Under normal circumstances this is all that is asked of artists, and would be more than enough to secure them a full artists fee. But despite all of this extra labour, they still managed to slip up on their basic targets – Thomas Yeoman’s artist bio is now three weeks overdue, and Adam Renshaw’s tarmac is still wet (being dyslectic is no excuse!). As charming and hard-working as they are, we have no choice but to reduce their fee accordingly.

1 Adorno, T. (2004) Aesthetic Theory, London: Continuum, p. 55

2 OTCOP is a research group, OTCOP stands for On The Conditions of Production.

3 OTCOP, “A Living Body Performing its own Autopsy…” in Engqvist, J. et al (eds.) (2012) Work Work Work: a Reader on Art and Labour, Berlin: Sternberg Press, p. 223

4 von Osten, M. (2010) “Another Criterion… or, What Is the Attitude of a Work in the Relations of Production of Its Time”, Afterall issue 25, Autumn/WInter, pp. 20 – 22

5 Gillick, L. “The Good of Work”, in e-flux journal (2011) Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art, Berlin: Sternberg Press, p. 71

Work

Concept Models

The sculpture series Concept Models explores the gap between intention and realisation. The sculptures are representations of different scientific models, which are in themselves representations of scientific laws. Scientific models take different forms. For instance, a Galilean idealisation is a model that involves deliberate distortions, usually representing an ideal situation, e.g. one with no friction, or isolated systems. These models are a representation of a situation that can only exist in the abstract, not in reality. There are also analogical models; models where something is described as being ‘like’ something else. For example, the theory of general relativity is often explained using the rubber-sheet model; the curvature of gravity is ‘like’ the curvature of a rubber sheet when a weight is placed on it. The very act of using an analogical model involves inherent failure.

Concept Models aestheticises the work of scientists, and in particular the intellectual work of having to explain and simplify complicated or abstract concepts. This marks an important distinction between the work of artists and scientists. When the scientist devises a model, they need to take into account the falsity involved in simplifying or analogising, and try to keep this to a minimum. An artist is not tied to the truth but instead makes decisions based on the aesthetic. In Concept Models this aestheticising is present through the residue of the artist’s work. The artist is the placer of a marble, or the turner of a screw. The science is compromised yet again by the artist, who takes the basics of an explanation of a principle and does what is needed to make it ‘work’. All photographs by Olivier Richomme.

Work

Work Velocity

The video piece Work Velocity depicts a steam engine governor, the part of the engine that regulates the speed. When the engine picks up speed, the heavy balls of the governor are forced outward, which slows the engine down, and in turn causing the balls to drop back down. The video is edited to show the the endless repetition of the balls of the governor slowly moving out, then back in again. This function, which once had profound importance, now serves as a demonstration. In the early mills, every machine would have been connected to one source of power through a series of connecting drive shafting and belt systems, the rate of production of every part of the manufacturing process was dependent on the speed of the engine. But the steam engine depicted in the video is now in a museum – the ‘work’ has become a commodity. The engine’s speeds controls no work, except possibly the artist’s, who tries to make it perform, making it slow down then speed up in order to get the shot, the ‘work’.