| art.description.project | “With the end of the period represented in The Wolfsonian’s collection (1885–1945), the image of the worker fell out of favor as a subject for the arts. It made me think about how we do not know the faces of the people who create the things that surround us. We know other faces—politicians, celebrities, criminals—but not the worker, the one who makes and transforms.”
Conversation with Esther Shalev-Gerz, in Describing Labor publication, 2012
Describing Labor draws on artist Esther Shalev-Gerz’s research into depictions of work and working figures from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. Once a heroic image of class consciousness and national character—pictured widely in the period of the Soviet Revolution, the Great Depression, and the two World Wars—the worker has since receded from the forefront of the visual field. Through new works of video, audio, and photography, this project gives image to the often-unseen figure of the worker whose labor fabricates the physical world. Rather than glorify historic representations and rather than fetishize the figure of the worker, the project carries its visitor into a living image—the moment of constructing a particular sense of creation and of our own place within it.
Describing Labor comprises large format color photographs; a two-channel HD video installation; a selection of historic artworks; and an audio installation of recorded “voices” derived from the artworks and their era. The exhibition took form through a participatory process. Shalev-Gerz invited twenty-four people who have a mastery of the language around art—those who use the word as a tool when engaging with art—each to choose an historic artwork wherein workers appear and to describe it while being filmed. Through these faces and voices of the present day, the project engages with such dualities as the materiality of objects and the obstinacy of the image; the mediated gaze and the thing itself; historical moments and the current moment of recognition. The prevailing sense of reality is thereby de-composed into its rudimentary parts, set into new arrangements by each and every effort at describing the world a bit further.
Visitors to the exhibition are invited to enter into this unfolding dialogue with mute images and their possible speech—with silent figures that might speak of their world and to our own provided we work to speak through them. Such is the sum and substance of description—of the effort to articulate persons, peoples, places, or moments that always elude articulation, not so as to demonstrate the limits of speech, but that a community might form around and through the act of seeing, saying, and listening.
Esther Shalev-Gerz is internationally recognized for an artistic practice that investigates the construction of knowledge, histories, and cultural identities. Her works frequently are developed in dialogue with the inhabitants of specific places or the witnesses to particular events, inviting people to become participants in discourses that address issues of representation, citizenship, and personal and collective memory.
Based in Paris, she is a professor in Fine Art at the Valand Academy at Göteborg University, Sweden, where she currently is leading an international research project on Trust and the Unfolding Dialogue, funded by the Swedish Research Council. Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions include: The Belkin Art Gallery, UBC, Vancouver (2013); Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts / Lausanne (2012); Kamloops Art Gallery, Kamloops (2012); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2010) www.shalev-gerz.net | |
| art.description.summary | Conceived during her two-week residency at The
Wolfsonian, Describing Labor draws on artist Esther
Shalev-Gerz’s research into depictions of work and
working figures from the late nineteenth through the
mid-twentieth century. Through new works of video,
audio, and photography, this project gives image to
the often unseen figure of the worker whose labor
fabricates the physical world. Rather than glorify historic
representations, the exhibition carries its visitor into a
living image—the moment of constructing a particular
sense of creation and of our own place within it. | |
