A Day’s Work
SKK, Soest, Germany
Curated by Susan Morris in association with Bartha Contemporary
27th January – 13th April 2019
Francis Alÿs, Jill Baroff, KP Brehmer, Rudolf de Crignis, Hanne Darboven, Jeremy Deller, Inge Dick, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Spencer Finch, Mathew Hale, James Howell, On Kawara, Joey Kötting, Nick Koppenhagen, Mike Meiré, Helen Mirra, Susan Morris, Rakish Light (Brian O’Connell & Deirdre O’Dwyer), Pete Smith, Ignacio Uriarte, Stanley Whitney
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Installation View, A Day’s Work, SKK, Soest, Germany.
LEFT: On Kawara, July 9, 1981, Acrylic on canvas, 46 x 61 cm, 1981.
RIGHT: Susan Morris, SunDial:NightWatch_Activity and Light 2010-2012 (Herringbone Weave), Jacquard tapestry: silk and cotton yarn, 130 x 312 cm, 2017.
PRESS RELEASE
Stiftung Konzeptuelle Kunst, Soest, is delighted to present A Day’s Work, selected by British artist Susan Morris. This exhibition brings together a group of 21 international artists who address issues around temporality, subjectivity, labour and art.
Some of the artists in the exhibition are concerned with the rationalization of time and natural phenomena; others investigate the alienating effects of new technologies on workers’ lives while others still engage in a more private, personal struggle with the capricious nature of the materials they have chosen to work with.
Often these overlap, such as in the work of KP Brehmer which, as Margaret Iversen argues in her catalogue essay Diagramming the Day, takes the form of a struggle between the effort to systematically record things, such as the changing colour of the sky over 24 hours, and the unruly nature of the watery paints he uses for the task, that leak out of the very system he has created to contain them. Similarly, Mike Meiré’s crushed newspaper reconfigures the grid-like ‘journal’ as chaotic splotch.
In Renaissance frescos, the giornatae refers to the area an artist could paint in a single day. A measurement of human labour is thus embedded in artwork dating from the 14th and 15th century, its calculation based on how much physical energy a painter may have set against the material properties of the paint itself, such as the time it took to dry.
In everyday usage, the phrase ‘a day’s work’ might be an expression of satisfaction, signalling the end of a task. However, it could also be the amount of paid labour you need in order to survive.
Artists such as Francis Alÿs, Jeremy Deller, Mathew Hale and Philip-Lorca diCorcia address ways in which the variable value of labour is determined. Their work aims at exposing exploitative practices where the body of the worker is traded and/or rated for productivity and ‘like-ability’. Here a technologically permeated subject is set against that component of selfhood which can’t be measured: the ungovernable and unquantifiable moments of introspection or pleasure.
Nick Koppenhagen’s Witterungsreporte diagrams (2013-ongoing) record every day of every year according to a set of colour coded definitions. Susan Morris’s Jacquard tapestries also record her own day to day activity, alongside ambient light conditions, over extremely long time periods. Both practices address pictorial abstraction on the one hand while on the other diagram the body and soul within a system that attempts to leave nothing out.
Echoing the original definition of the giornata, On Kawara and Stanley Whitney’s paintings, Rakish Light’s photographic prints, Joey Kötting’s video work and Pete Smith’s poetry engage with the physical properties of materials set against the limits of what might be possible to get done before the day’s end.
For Jill Baroff, the day is measured not by a clock or by the limits of human capability but by the intervals and cycles in the natural world, with works dictated, for example, by the rise and fall of sea levels, the tide times, or the amount of daylight in each passing day. The data from which her ink on paper drawings are sourced, however, comes from the internet. Works by Inge Dick and Spencer Finch similarly engage with the way technology mediates the way we encounter natural phenomena.
Counting provides the parameters of Ignacio Uriarte’s audio piece and Hanne Darboven’s drawings while, for Helen Mirra, the count of her footsteps operates as a frame for the meditative rhythm which is at the heart of her field recordings, where objects encountered during a day’s walk are printed in ink on linen. James Howell and Rudolf de Crignis return to the question of paint, to its materiality, as explored in the almost invisible labour of layering colour as well as in the interrogation of the compositional field itself – the problem of how it may be divided up or arranged. Running counter to ideas of maximising productivity, their paintings take their own ‘slow’ time while nevertheless registering the passing of the day.
The question of what constitutes a day’s work changes alongside industrial and technical developments. Artists can comment on these things but they themselves are constrained by the limits of the materials they use and the time they have to do something with them. Considered within the context of contemporary conditions of work therefore, A Day’s Work examines the activity of artists in relation to this mutable unit of measurement – a subject that Micheal Newman explores in his catalogue essay A Day’s Writing.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue. Launched on 3rd March 2019 at SKK, Soest, with an introduction by Susan Morris, it will contain essays by art historians Margaret Iversen (University of Essex) and Michael Newman (Goldsmiths College, University of London).
A Day’s Work Equation, Susan Morris and George Marshall, 2019
Catalogue Introduction (text format only)
On the evening of Saturday, 27 October 2018, I went to bed around my usual time but woke the following morning an hour earlier – at least according to the clock, which had shifted back from British Summer Time to Greenwich Mean Time. I could stay an extra hour in bed, which might be wise, given that for the next few weeks my fellow citizens and I were about to enter the dangerous period after the clocks change when we are more likely to feel depressed, have a traffic accident or make mistakes at work. The clocks always go back (or, six months later, “spring forward”) in the wee, small hours of a Saturday night/Sunday morning – the logic being, I suppose, to give us a day to recover from this manipulation of time before work begins again on Monday morning. Yet for an artist, who works in her own time, surely the hour of the day and the day of the week are irrelevant? I work when I want to, or when I can. Nevertheless the rhythms of my working life are in lockstep with those orchestrated by the society I inhabit. If I need materials or technical expertise, for instance, I must respect the fact that the art supply shop or printer’s opening hours correspond to those defined by law as a ‘working day’ – generally nine to five, Monday to Friday. I have to get up. However, as I know from my recently completed series of Jacquard tapestries, woven directly from digital recordings of my sleep/wake patterns, I often fail to do so. It was my weaver who first noticed the trail in the data of tiny points of colour signalling ‘activity’, for about a minute every morning, isolated in the blackness indicating sleep. Time and again, my alarm clock had gone off and I had hit it to stop its ringing, before resuming my slumber.
Failure to work, or at least to synchronise our activities with those of the wider world we live in, forms one of the themes of this exhibition, A Day’s Work. The body has an uneasy relation to the artificial systems of clock and calendrical time that structure our days. The idea that one can fail to keep time, to be on time, implies that there is an ownership of time, that our hours might be the property of someone else. As our lives and our bodies become ever more permeated by technologies that seek to profit from our time, including that spent on leisure activities or even during sleep, the time we can call our time, free time, is diminishing.1 Ironically, perhaps, these technologies can take away our time in other ways, too, by robbing us of the hours in which we need to work in order to make a living.
There is another, related theme that also runs through the show. The exhibition developed primarily out of my interest in the giornata, an Italian Renaissance term that refers to the amount of painting in a fresco that an artist could complete in a single day. Thus a measurement of human labour is embedded in artwork dating from the fourteenth century, its calculation based on how much physical energy a painter may have set against the material properties of the paint itself, such as the time it takes to dry. Obviously, the question of what constitutes a day’s work changes alongside industrial and technical developments. Artists can comment on these things, but they themselves are constrained by the limits of the materials they use and the time they have to do something with them. Considered within the context of contemporaneous working practices, this exhibition examines the activity of artists in relation to this mutable unit of measurement, which contracts or expands according to the input of a wide range of variables. This is something I attempt to convey in my Day’s Work Equation, written in collaboration with mathematician George Marshall, used on the cover of this catalogue. The unquantifiable nature of this quantity of time is also explored in Michael Newman’s catalogue essay ‘A Day Too Late’.
The Jacquard loom was the first invention to mechanise labour, thus bringing into the workplace machines that could work faster and for longer than any human individual. As a consequence, labourers were organised to become more machine-like. For instance, the work required of them might now be divided into small parts, with each piece of an entire task performed separately by workers on an assembly line. The ‘automatisation’ of the worker gave birth to time and motion studies such as those conducted at the end of the nineteenth century by Frederick W. Taylor, and therefore also marked the beginning of worker surveillance, currently maintained through technical devices such as the Motorola WT4000. This ‘wearable terminal’ tracks the speed and efficiency of a worker – forced to wear it in places such as Amazon distribution centres – and delivers a warning message if s/he is falling behind schedule. It’s an example of how surveillance technology, in the effort to automate us all, is becoming ever more invisible and increasingly embedded in the body.2
The Motorola tracking device was included in an installation by British artist Jeremy Deller shown at the 2015 Venice Biennale along with a banner emblazoned with the words “Hello, today you have day off.”. Both pieces are exhibited in A Day’s Work. The (grammatically incorrect) wording of the banner is the text message sent to workers on zero-hours contracts to inform them that their labour is not required on the day in question. As the artist has suggested, it’s actually insulting to tell someone that they’re not working that day and to call it a ‘day off’.3 The banner is one of a series Deller modelled on the slogans of marching workers – affiliated to local, now often obsolete industries such as mining – who carried them as affirmation of community cohesion in the protest actions and strikes that eventually won the limitation of the ‘working day’ to eight hours.
Many of the works in this exhibition comment upon the contemporary conditions of work and the position of the worker. Los Angeles-based artist Mathew Hale’s large collage Page 92 of MIRIAM DIVORCEE, 2008, for example, includes pages from the entire section on ‘The Limits of the Working Day’ from Karl Marx’s Capital (1867). Considered in terms of hours spent and expenditure required, a day’s work, Marx suggested, ‘is not a fixed but a fluent quantity’ involving a complicated series of exchanges.4 As if to reinforce this point, Hale’s collage is dominated by words taken from a poster celebrating Olafur Eliasson’s 2008 exhibition Take Your Time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The altered text reads ‘TAKE OUR TIME’, with the Y obscured by a page of text from the Black & White Love Atlas (1991). That book’s pornographic images depicting prostitution and sex tourism are used throughout Hale’s collage. The same (black) woman appears twice: once in a scene where she is clearly servicing the client’s (or viewer’s) fantasy, and again across the pages of a third book, on the changing styles of home décor, where the woman – apparently caught in sexual ecstasy – floats within the space of a living room. Thus, in a moment of reprieve, her depiction shifts from exploitation to private bliss.5 The exchange of sexual labour for money is suggested once more by the presence in Hale’s collage of a folded piece of publicity material for Pierre Klossowski’s La Monnaie vivante, (1970; translated recently as Living Currency), which infamously argues that capitalism originates in the perverse desires lurking deep within each individual and that these desires actively pursue their own commodification.6 Thus, industrial or postindustrial economies are based not on the distribution of goods, but on the circulation of erotic desires and fantasies, where bodies are primarily objects of voluptuous consumption and libidinal exchange. 7
The piece in the exhibition by Belgian-born, Mexico-based artist Francis Alÿs is a photographic study for a video work. The image shows the famous Zócalo Square in Mexico City; at its centre is an enormous flagpole that casts a prominent shadow. As the earth revolves around the sun, so the shadow moves around the square like a giant sundial, dragging the people sheltered within it in its wake. Rather than moving into the covered arcades around the square, these individuals, who are waiting to be employed, choose to make themselves as visible as possible. They are keeping time – not clock time but the time before clocks, the time of day dictated by the sun, which moves slowly around the square. For some it gets too late: no work comes. As the shadow dissolves into darkness, however, and the ensemble dissipates, so another kind of work begins; night work, under cover of the darkened sky. Here a time for pleasure opens up, perhaps, for acts performed in violation of the laws laid down by day. Alÿs’s piece is related to his earlier video work Turista, 1994, also made in Zócalo square, in which the artist takes his place amongst a different group of waiting workers, who stand along the square’s railings holding handmade signs advertising their skills.
The subjects in the American artist Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s photographic series Hustlers are waiting too, and while they don’t advertise their trade as overtly as the workers of the Zócalo, they are also offering themselves up for paid work. Each subject’s service rate is included in his portrait’s title, along with his name, hometown and age. So it is that Brent Booth (Brent Booth, 21 years old, Des Moines, Iowa, $30) sits in a neon-lit parking lot slowly finishing a carton of Pepsi, waiting for the next punter to offer dollars for the use of his body; and Roy (Roy, ‘in his 20s’, Los Angeles, California, $50) lies on a bed in an anonymous motel room, waiting, as the Lou Reed song puts it, for the man. 8
Demonstrating an affinity with diCorcia’s prints, three of Mathew Hale’s tiny, yellow ‘price tag’ works, part of his ongoing One Silver Dollar Paintings, flutter in the air at various key points in the exhibition. Each consists of a miniature abstract painting on one side with a ‘price’ in dollars on the opposite. The latter figures are actually the dates of Hale’s visits to Marilyn Monroe’s grave in Los Angeles – if he went on the 26th of the month, the tag reads $26. (I am reminded that in German Tag means ‘day’.) The double-sided tags are each suspended from a 3D cast of a branch from the rose bush opposite Monroe’s grave (which Hale somehow managed to snip off without being seen).
The artists Brian O’Connell and Deirdre O’Dwyer work full days as the collaborative project Rakish Light. Clocking production according to the changing presence of the sun over its 24-hour cycle, they used a simple box camera fitted with two separate lenses to make the photographs for The Double OO Guide to Sobriety, on twelve road trips taken in the often parching conditions of the American West. For each image, they positioned the camera in the direction of the chosen view, then exposed an 11 x 14 inch negative for ‘several seconds’ – an intuitive calculation based on the natural light at that point in the day. After sundown, they set up a makeshift darkroom in their motel room: installed blackout curtains; mixed photo chemicals; rinsed the negatives in the bathtub before hanging them to dry on closet hangers.
Everything had to be tied up by day’s end so that they could move on to the next vista – following the model (accelerated somewhat) of Ansel Adams, their esteemed American predecessor, famous too for his work ethic. Completion of a day’s employment depended on the day’s light, with activity carrying on into the night, when the couple’s intimate quarters were cast in the ‘safe’ red light of the photographic darkroom. The resulting images evidence a loop of activity that is not entirely neat, or closed. Tellingly, O’Connell and O’Dwyer chose to shoot, as one of twelve documented sites, the Vagabond Inn. There is something about their enterprise that is connected to searching for something lost, or to salvaging old ideas, working as they do with provisional apparatuses and using (almost) obsolete technology. Nevertheless, the images that emerge from this process seem very much of the present tense. Rakish Light gathers or snatches ephemeral moments in time, making images that are vaporous, or cloudy. Even those shots that capture desert or mountain scenes have a mist-like, watery feel about them, stained as they are with traces from the developing bath – in contrast to occasional sunbursts along at the images’ borders, betraying light leaks.
British but Los Angeles-based artist Joey Kötting drove to work for five years, to a job he didn’t much like, mainly because of the long, time-consuming, commute – 134 miles each way. Leaving Los Angeles, he took the US Route 99 North, each day passing an oil pump. On his way back, on the I-405 South, he encountered a large neon cross – ‘hovering’, as he describes it, ‘over the west side of the highway’. He began to photograph these landmarks using his iPhone. Sometimes the oil pump was working, at others it was still. The cross was sometimes illuminated, at others dark. Over the years, the artist states, they ‘became my focus and muse’. An archive of images built up that Kötting has made into a film, giving each sequentially ordered photograph a duration of under a second. Thus the cross and pump flicker back and forth amongst the peripheral detritus – the taillights of a truck, speed restriction signs, a snatch of scenery – also caught by the camera. Taking these photographs every day allowed Kötting to claw something back from the drive, which was unpaid time extracted from the day, and which cut into his salary. A day’s work is often extended into travel time, but because such time is spent not working either, it is a kind of dead time. However, as well as representing what are arguably two of America’s most potent symbols – oil and religion – the collected images of the film PumpCross, 2009–14, stand for something that has been retrieved from this otherwise wasted time. From brief, repeated, daily gestures that eased the ‘grind’ of the journey, Kötting made a work; one that speaks of time spent in limbo, suspended between one space and another, a kind of timeless noplace. Indeed, driving or any type of commute can create a space where you are on hold, much like the individuals waiting in Zócola square. You perform work that is not work, but that is necessary to the work, to get the work.
There is a group of artists exhibited in A Day’s Work who are interested in working against the clock using materials that are not always easy to predict or control. Most of these artists use paint, and maintain a daily practice of painting. Starting on 4 January 1966, the Japanese-American artist On Kawara set out to make a painting every day. He didn’t always succeed, and discarded any painting not finished by midnight on the day in question, but nevertheless continued working on the series until his death in 2014. Although these works vary in colour and size, each painting includes only the date it was painted formatted in the language and numerical convention of the place in which it was made. Kawara also made a box for each completed painting, which he lined with a page from a newspaper published that day and also local; as he made paintings in 130 different countries, this ‘extra element’ of the work silently accumulated and collectively represents both a sample of time and a cross-section of human experience. The newspaper that goes with the painting in A Day’s Work, for instance, records a long-forgotten heatwave in New York City, when, on ‘July 9th 1981’, a child leapt joyfully into a fountain, no doubt to try and cool down.
Newspapers provide both material and form for the work included in the exhibition by German artist Mike Meiré. AMOK, 2010, consists of selected sheets from a newspaper that have been folded and arranged into a crystalline shape. This action ruptures the paper’s underlying grid-like structure, reconfiguring it into something more chaotic, which the content also reflects. The viewer sees photographs of a demonstration against climate change, a graph showing falling shares, and soldiers taking to the street to subdue a protesting crowd. The pictures record the chaos of the work’s title, but in the way that they play off one another, they also form a composition, a new form that in some way counters the chaos, especially as – because of the way newspapers put everything ‘good’ or ‘bad’ together, side by side – there are banal images along with the dramatic ones: a picture of a vase of flowers, perhaps from an advert, and the colour red, from the background of an image unseen. These punctuate the overall image formed from the process of folding, and bring it into focus. In addition, the separate sheets of newspapers are stuck together with a basic masking tape that forms a series of diagonal lines, which also become part of the overall composition. Meiré wanted to introduce yet another element of texture and mark making into the piece, again involving the accidental. So, echoing Duchamp’s gesture when he conceived his 1918 work Unhappy Readymade, Meiré hung the work outside on a roof terrace, opening it up to the wet, windy weather outside.9 AMOK bears the marks of this exposure: the ink is faded, the surface battered and discoloured, evidencing the elements of a day that otherwise do not find their way into newsprint.
For the Swiss artist Rudolf de Crignis, a day’s work usually takes longer than 24 hours. Crignis builds up the surface of his largely monochrome canvases with layer upon layer of paint, alternating horizontal brushstrokes with vertical. Each layer of colour, often starting with ultramarine blue, is painted over with another that acts upon it – orange, silver, radiant lemon yellow, gold, for instance. Time passes. Then, one day, the work is done; the painting is finished. That day is integrated into the title of the painting, which therefore marks time. In this way, Painting #96-33 is the 33rd painting in 1996. The date becomes a declaration, both of its end point and its position in the overall sequence. But how did the artist get there? Something resolves, becomes still, but only momentarily, and only on the day that he knows the work is over. This is because what occurs in the painting is made present only to each particular viewer at the particular time of his or her encounter with it. A colour shimmers, hovers before the eyes; a colour that cannot quite be defined and that might be completely different the next day, not only if the light has changed, but if something shifts, as it always does, in the mood of the viewer – which must have also included the artist himself.
American artist James Howell’s work also requires the participation of the viewer to bring the work to fruition, with the subtle action of light upon the painting’s surface changing like the weather. Each of Howell’s works also embeds the date of completion into its title. However, another set of numbers is always recorded, too – in the case of 48.17, 06 Feb 2004, there is ‘48.17’. This does not relate to something like the painting’s dimension, but is the code essential to a calculation that has produced the work. Howell is very interested in paint, while applying a rigorous system to its use. He works entirely in grey – although not quite. His canvases are built up out of measured amounts of black, white and often umber paint. Each colour is mixed according to a system that is mapped out in diagrammatic drawings (the ‘Lines’ and ‘Numbers’ also included in the exhibition). ‘48.17’, for example, denotes the percentage of white used in the painting: from the top edge of the canvas, the grey field progresses downwards towards a darker intensity, according to a gradation determined by a particular chosen point on a parabolic curve.
Sometimes the themes in this exhibition overlap, as demonstrated in the practice of the German artist KP Brehmer, whose work takes the form of a struggle between the effort to systematically record things and the unruly nature of the materials he uses for the task, which leak out of the very system he created to contain them. There is often a hopelessness about the ‘chores’ he sets for himself, such as recording the changing colour of the sky over 24 hours. Working against the clock, no sooner has he identified the particular colour than it changes. Brehmer also works against the gridded paper on which he maps his information. So what is he actually recording? It seems that the mistakes, the drips and blunders (going over a line, for example, painting or even pasting extra bits of paper over mistakes) seem to be there on behalf of the error-prone human who slips in and out of artificial systems such as calendrical time – systems imposed on individuals who can’t keep up, who drop behind or wander off. In Brehmer’s work a mechanised and technologically permeated subject is positioned against that component of selfhood which can’t be measured, the ungovernable and unquantifiable moments of introspection or pleasure explored in work such as the Soul and Feelings of a Worker series; or the impulsive and irresponsible – possibly impatient – subject recorded in Traffic Accidents by Hours of the Day, 12.4.77 in Berlin (who may in fact be suffering from a semiannual time change).
Leaking and dripping, an entanglement of paint (ie materials) with the grid, is also very present in American artist Stanley Whitney’s Stay Song 3, painted over the course of one day in 2017. As Margaret Iversen remarks in her essay ‘Diagramming the Day’, artists may use the grid simply to point to the form’s limitations when it comes to conveying what falls outside of it – the more ‘sensory dimensions of our experience’. Developing this theme, Iversen analyses the work of the artists in this exhibition who concern themselves with the rationalization of time in relation to natural phenomena. For Jill Baroff, the day is measured not by a clock or by the limits of human capability, but by the intervals and cycles of the natural world, with works dictated by the rise and fall of sea levels, the tide times, or the amount of daylight in each passing day. The data from which her ink on paper drawings are sourced, however, comes from the internet. Works by Inge Dick and Spencer Finch similarly engage with the ways technology mediates our encounters with natural phenomena. As Iversen suggests, ‘Finch’s remarks on the history of efforts to categorize different types of cloud are illuminating. … He finds the attempt both “appealing and pathetic”, since clouds [like the colour of the sky for Brehmer, or that of water for Finch himself] are basically impossible to name or categorize.’ 10
German artist Nick Koppenhagen records, in brief written notations, various day-to-day observations and then colour codes them according to a system of his own devising. On paper, the accumulated marks, made daily, contribute to a practice of drawing where diary and diagram are intertwined. Like many of the artists in this exhibition, Koppenhagen follows a set of self-imposed rules, but he displays a growing ambivalence to them. Overwhelmed by other work in 2018, for example, he started to lose enthusiasm for the time-consuming task he had set himself, so that the piece made at the start of the Witterungsreporte series, in 2013, contrasts sharply with the one made last year. Exhibited here, both these works record, in a circle divided into 365 slices, the varied modes of his everyday being. But whereas the piece made over the course of 2013 is throbbing with the many different hues that categorise each shift and nuance of mood, just two streaks of colour radiate out from the otherwise grey ‘wheel’ produced in 2018. One records the first green shoots of spring, the other remarks on the falling leaves. It’s already autumn.
Here we have a kind of refusal to work, but not – as might be the aim of the members of a striking union – in order to improve working conditions or demand better wages, but simply because, in the words of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the artist would ‘prefer not to’. Bartleby the Scrivener, published in 1853, tells the story of a man who continues to show up for work, but who does less and less when there, refusing the demands of his increasingly perplexed boss by simply stating ‘I would prefer not to’. Subtitled A Story of Wall Street, this story – a commentary on a kind of fatigue in regard to capital – is appropriate to think about in relation to Koppenhagen, who, in his attempt to perhaps parody or subvert the organisational systems of our daily lives, ended up drained by them.
In his essay on measurement, included in this publication, Michael Newman writes about the Bartleby character in relation to an aimlessness that is ‘neither work nor non work’; a (lack of) activity that occupies the fine line between ‘depression and a protest against the economisation of everything, including the most intimate life’. Rachel Haidu, in her book The Absence of Work (2010), links madness, which may also be bound up with refusal, to a play with language that is not nonsense but which instead presents itself as ‘noncommunication’. Mad speech, for example, which as Haidu argues in fact ‘approximates the “blank” affect of much modernist literature and art’, doesn’t yield easily to interpretation and instead contains something that cannot be assimilated, an element of incomprehensibility, of noncommunication. Noncommunicative language has a potency because it cannot be instrumentalised but, Haidu suggests, it is nevertheless generative, for it can ‘stand in for work’. 11
An examination of the phenomenon of time and the entanglement of art with day-to-day life, both in relation to current events and to one’s own lifetime (ie how long your life might be), can be seen in the work of German artist Hanne Darboven, where writing and drawing perhaps collide. Indeed, Darboven has described her work with numbers – drawn from calculations almost always relating to the calendar – as writing without describing. Works such as the one included in A Day’s Work, Ein Jahrhundert-ABC, 2004 (after the original drawing from 1970/71), are generated out of the application of mathematical calculations in a strategy therefore not dissimilar to Howell’s. Suffused with musicality, and often reminiscent of Jacquard weaving cards, her work resonates with many other pieces in the exhibition, but I would like to make a connection between Darboven’s ‘writing’ practice and the American artist Helen Mirra’s ‘drawings’. This may seem a little unusual, for Darboven’s practice feels decidedly desk-bound, while Mirra’s work occurs during the time and space of walking, where the count of her footsteps operates as a frame for the meditative rhythm at the heart of what she refers to as ‘field recordings’. Here objects encountered during a day’s walk are printed in ink on linen. However, both Darboven’s and Mirra’s practices are meditative, and both rely on the application of a system, process or set of rules. Both artists employ, or draw upon, solitude. But they differ in their relation to chance. Or do they? While Mirra cannot know ahead of time what object she will pick up, Darboven seems to cut out chance, working within the parameters of a closed mathematical system. But little clots of ink from the pen she uses, alongside the unruly marginalia that snake around the edges of a work, take on a life of their own – unpredicted. Furthermore, Darboven slips between writing and drawing, and Mirra’s ‘drawing’ work emerges as a form of writing. Her work is reminiscent of what Roland Barthes was trying to achieve in experimenting with a new form of writing practice that involved the recording of ‘incidents’ (connected for him with the photographic ‘encounter’). These might take the form, Barthes suggests, of ‘mini-texts, one-liners, haiku, notations, puns, everything that falls, like a leaf’. 12
Mirra herself has described her practice as ‘tending to poems, mostly not in words’.13 Fragmentary but not without structure, her works are built from sequences of imprinted objects, such as the series of twigs in the piece included in A Day’s Work, pieced together like a collage – preserving gaps, leaving things open-ended. Indeed, a collage can often be regarded as a kind of poem. For Anglo-Argentine artist Pete Smith, the cut-up technique provided means to produce a whole series of poems. In this way Smith is writing, like Mirra and Darboven, except that he is using fragments of things encountered in the pages of National Geographic magazine. Smith doesn’t use images but words, or the little phrases that catch him. He cuts them out, and then, in a process of unworking or reworking (disassembling and reassembling), he builds new sentences that nevertheless remain sliced through with silences, or with something trying to force its way into language, like a stutter, but that cannot quite get there; that remains outside and refuses to conform to the way we expect language to be (simple, transparent, a vehicle of meaning). Yellow Poem No. 3, 2010, exhibited in A Day’s Work, ends with a phrase that has been on the tip of my tongue ever since I started working on this exhibition: “all in the day’s work”. This could imply any amount of time or effort, but certainly is only ever uttered at the end of a job, when things come together, or in the case of Smith’s poems, don’t. Because there is something about the way the words have been reassembled that also loses something. Something goes missing; something that, as the poem suggests, is connected to “What you don’t see / almost hidden in shadow”. Perhaps these are mad texts; a mad writing that refuses or withholds communication. Yet it is still work – or ‘a fold in the spoken language that is an absence of work’ – that, like a cast shadow, falls in the place of the missing – because impossible – work. 14
Alongside my visual work, I also have a practice of writing. I should explain, too, that the data from which my tapestries are derived was recorded on an Actiwatch, a medical/scientific device used by Chronobiologists to track disturbances in sleep. I started using this device in 2005 – long before the ubiquity of FitBits etc. Aligning my practice with the Surrealists’, my intention was to make works derived from automatic or involuntary gestures. The present ubiquity of these recording devices gives my work a different but not unexpected context. With that in mind, I will end with the writer W. G. Sebald’s notion that writers and weavers have much in common. Not only are they plagued with worry that they may have gotten hold of the wrong thread, but they easily become trapped within the devices they have invented for their craft, which become, Sebald suggests, like instruments of torture.15 We could extend this analogy between the loom and the writing desk to include the many devices we have invented to make us work harder, faster or more efficiently, thus binding ourselves to train timetables, spreadsheets, computer screens, email, social media, Skype calls and Facetime – available 24/7. In fact, the old English word for work, travail, which we still use, is etymologically linked to trepaliare, the Latin word for torture.
What could be more potentially tortured than the final piece I’m going to mention, German artist Ignacio Uriarte’s audio work, Counting (for) Eight Hours, 2014? And yet, though it must have been torture to perform – what if the speaker stumbled, spoke the wrong number, would he start again? – this work is highly meditative to listen to, like relaxing to the sound of a ticking clock. A man spends eight hours doing nothing but counting (in German), with one second allotted to each syllable. In the course of eight hours he reaches the number 3599. As well as referencing the span of time accounted for by a typical working day, Uriarte’s work reflects the connection between time as an abstract category and language as a way of structuring and defining it. The works selected for A Day’s Work take many different kinds of time. Many are in fact ongoing, or are the result of a daily routine repeated over months, even years, but most either incorporate or resist the demands of clock or calendrical time. They create something like their own time, with the struggle to work, or the struggle against working, set against the limitations imposed by a single day.
© Susan Morris, February 2019
1 Jonathan Crary has commented on how sleep now means neither on nor off but indicates a permanent state of readiness for work / deployment. See Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013), 13
2 The goal, as Shosana Zuboff’s argues in her new book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, is to automate us all. See https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-sur-veillance-capitalism-google-facebook
3 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jul/01/art-venice-biennale-jeremy-deller-zero-hours-contracts
4 Karl Marx, Capital (London: Penguin,1990), 341 (The text in Hale’s collage is from a different edition)
5 The artist quotes the title of Primo Levi’s book Moments of Reprieve (1981)
6 https://frieze.com/article/illicit-trade
7 https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/living-currency-9781472511430/
8 The first two lines of Lou Reed’s song are: I’m waiting for the man/ Twenty-six dollars in my hand.
9 Unhappy Readymade was conceived by Duchamp in a letter to his sister, as a wedding present. It consisted of a geometry book, which Duchamp’s sister Suzanne and her husband Jean Crotti were instructed to hang by strings from the balcony of their apartment in Paris, thus exposing it to the elements.
10 Page 67 in this publication.
11 Rachel Haidu, The Absence of Work (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2010), xvi. I have condensed Haidu’s argument, which draws on Michel Foucault’s 1964 essay ‘La Folie, l’absence de l’œuvre’ (Madness, or the Absence of Work).
12 Roland Barthes, RB/RB (London: Papermac, 1995), 150. My emphasis.
13 http://hmirra.net/biography/
14 Rachel Haidu, The Absence of Work (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2010), xvi
15 W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (London: The Harvill Press,1999), 282-3
All websites accessed on 03.02.2019