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| Mark Curran: Gowning Room 1, Building 7, 11.02 a.m., Monday, November 11th 2003 colour photograph; courtesy Belfast Exposed |
How could the thirst for genuine community ever be quenched in a world where the typical ‘human’ relationships are buying and selling, order-giving and order-taking? How could our lust for sensual intercourse ever overcome our mutual isolation through technologies which demand that we travel at faster and faster speeds to destinations all equally devoid of real life? How could our desires for multi-dimensional and directly immediate personal communication ever be fulfilled by instruments of separation and deceit like the mass media and the proliferating networks of electronic information processing?1
If the cultural artefact has coherent meaning it is a commentary on its own nature, its own materiality, how its matter looks or sounds or arranges space. The ideological flights of fancy and ersatz dichotomies it engenders must emanate from this and must collapse into this.
Mark Curran has produced and collated some artefacts and presented them under the name The breathing factory at Belfast Exposed Gallery. This includes some unframed photographs, a video projection, a DVD playing on a laptop that sits on a shelf, a notebook on a table illuminated by a low-hanging lightbulb, some concertina- folded A4 pamphlets on a table with similar lighting and a small framed photograph upon which there is a yellow sticky-fixer note reading “Hi Oonagh. I don’t want Mark to use this picture. The rest are fine. The Ed.” In addition, the ambient sound of a factory, rackety and generic, permeates the entire gallery space from overhead speakers. It is an intelligent and methodical show, coherently arranged and with strongly defined subtexts.
The visual material depicts workers, machinery and architecture at Hewlett-Packard’s high-tech factory in Leixlip, County Kildare. The location of the factory in the twenty-six-county Irish state is in one sense incidental, as it could be almost anywhere on the globe, and indeed will be when it proves cost effective (during a gallery talk the artist described how all the equipment could be dismantled and relocated to another country or continent in a period of days). Conversely, the transcribed interviews with HP workers provided in the pamphlets, and the publication essays by Seán Ó Riain and Martin McCabe, make clear that this is an investigation into the particular social and economic circumstances that support the factory’s existence in Ireland. The considerable pathos in this dichotomy emerges when one gazes at the images of actual workers at the plant.
The very coherence of the exhibition demands that an extra care be taken when reading it. Culture is always metaphoric, and metaphor is a conundrum in which an original or ‘referred to’ form, state or arrangement is analogised or represented, thus generating a principle or meaning that holds true not just specifically but generally. The politics of the ‘referred to’ situation here is so alarming (the precariousness of the economic bubble in a global economy), and the history of industrialism weighs so heavily that it might eclipse more immediate and pertinent facets of the work.
The irony of offering an implicit critique of industry from inside the framework of industry and while utilising the methods, logic and strategies of industry, such as the inherent value of production, the process of replication and the commodification of meaning, is driven home by the fact that the building in which the exhibition is situated was previously a shirt factory. The work’s interrogation of the disparity between the reality of manufacturing and the marketing of the corporate agenda is strikingly relevant to its location, given the relationship between property development and culture as civic branding in the so-called Cathedral Quarter of central Belfast. That the walls of the gallery are reminiscent of corporate display boards is an unfortunately explicit reminder of this reality.
Most intriguing about the work is its visual ambiguity in relation to utopian and dystopian readings of technology. The equanimity of the gaze of the worker-subjects depicted in the photographs elicits a sense of this ambiguity. This equanimity is thoroughly typical of contemporary photography and (perhaps disingenuously) designates a phenomenological approach as a means to offset the more unstable, clunky and disputable symbolic currencies that are raised. For the viewer, meeting with one’s own equanimity the dead gaze of a removed subject, the hint of alienation is evoked (albeit vaguely, due to the insipid nature of the encounter).
The visual equivalence of machinery and a rack of white suits with the image of the worker initially emphasises the alienating reduction of the human to functional unit of economic production. This seems superficial though in light of the visual composure of the images and particularly their overall sense of luminosity. In addition to the subtext of alienation is the exoticness of the high-tech aesthetic that is carried by both luminosity and equanimity. Despite themselves, the images seem like they could transplant to a corporate catalogue or annual report. Significantly, the DVD loop plays on a G4 laptop, that definitive object of desire also notable for its luminosity
There is something of the leisure franchise to this world, in the depiction of spaces both exotic and manageably human-scaled. The workers are provided with costumes, operate futuristiclooking machines and sit at their computer consoles just as they do in their leisure time. The depiction of workers in this context seems not just a fait accompli, but perhaps even the best of all possible worlds. After all, what would the workers depicted be doing with their time if not gainfully directed by such ventures as HP, Intel, Siemens, etc? The fact that the workforce includes many temporary contract workers, with no long-term job security, exacerbates the suspicion that the structure of work increasingly resembles leisure and vice versa, evidenced by such requirements as skills transferability, flexible working hours, careerism, lifelong learning and the commodification of time. If the industrial revolution introduced an execrable work-life dictated by the clock, this post-industrial vista rather spookily suggests what life would be like inside the clock itself.
The title of the exhibition is perhaps its most revealing signifier. A grand metaphor devised by VW chairman Peter Hartz, it indicates the function of the corporation as a testing ground and conduit for new arrangements of social life. The corporate vision, as it presides in the strategist’s diagram or metaphor, and as it unfolds in the labour of the worker, provides not just product, but purpose.
The information stylists of the culture industries provide not just critique of corporate processes, but glamour, or perhaps glamour in the appearance of critique.
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| Mark Curran: Bank 1, Building 1 12.47 p.m, Thursday, November 6th, 2003 (Leixlip, Ireland) colour photograph; coourtesy Belfast Exposed |
1 Lev Chernyi, from introduction to John Zerzan, Future primitive and other essays, Autonomedia, Brooklyn, 1994, p.91 Lev Chernyi, from introduction to John Zerzan, Future primitive and other essays, Autonomedia, Brooklyn, 1994, p.9
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