158 | 2022

DUNCAN FORBES

Immaterial Tramp

In their film Postmodern Times (2017), Michael Mandiberg recreates Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) shot by shot using freelancers employed via the digital labor platform Fiverr. Filmed in more than twenty-five countries and involving 182 actors, the result is a discordant and strangely compelling transformation of the original. The Tramp and his numerous global impersonators waddle in and out of the frame, bringing today’s digital factory into critical dialogue with the most famous satirical rendition of its Fordist predecessor. In doing so, Mandiberg poses questions—realized also in other artworks—about artistic labor, the work of appropriation, and the micropolitics of contemporary art making.

If Mandiberg’s aim is to deepen our understanding of labor in art, then it is necessary to be precise about the politics of production, post-production, permissions, crediting, and distribution. Indeed, the conditions governing these areas are central to the work. Using software, Mandiberg broke down Modern Times into 581 clips, writing descriptions for each clip (they subsequently became a screenplay). The artist then posted requests on Fiverr, asking its freelancers initially to submit one clip. If successful, they were then offered ten or so other clips interspersed throughout the film. The quality of the image or acting was not an issue—the only requirement was that the shot be filmed horizontally. Actors were paid between $5 and $40 a clip, depending on the complexity of the mise-en-scène, duration of the shot, and number of performers involved. The clips were then edited precisely to reconstruct the film, interspersed with scenes from the original to help anchor the narrative and embed the juxtaposition between the Fordist factory and the digital one. Postmodern Times is the same length and with fundamentally the same structure as its predecessor. The actors are fully credited, under Mandiberg’s direction, at the beginning of the film. . . .

The film’s labor relations, the economies of its making and screening, are significantly the meaning of Postmodern Times. But they also resonate with wider debates currently circulating around the status of artistic labor, most notably associated with the writing of Dave Beech.1

1 Dave Beech, Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (Boston: Brill, 2015).

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 158/2022, pp. 9–18.

MARINA VISHMIDT

Security Theater: On Pilvi Takala’s Close Watch

At first glance, Pilvi Takala’s most recent project, currently on show in the Finnish Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, marks a turning of the tables. While the artist has often done projects in the past that find her testing the boundaries of acceptable behavior in public/private spaces such as Disneyland or shopping malls, in Close Watch (2022) she is one of the keepers of “public order.” But what constitutes such an order, and whom do its boundaries include? These are some of the initial questions raised by the project, and, as we’ll see, their ramifications stretch beyond the context in which they’re posed.

The distinctiveness of Takala’s trajectory as an artist might be deemed the way that she “externalizes” institutional critique. Which is to say, art is not the target but the resource base for infiltrating professional scenes such as marketing or gaming, or social codes such as carrying money in an opaque container in public or not touching strangers in coworking spaces. The fact that it is a resource base rather than an alibi is key, as her status as an artist is never revealed or thematized in these uncanny conducts. For Close Watch, as in previous projects, she operates on a “need to know” basis in which managerial higher-ups get informed about the infiltration but colleagues do not, in order for the ruse to be effective. A significant difference here, however, is that not only did the colleagues google her a couple of weeks before the projected end date of her deployment, but there was no invitation or commission from the side of the company. Nor was there really a ruse, even. Close Watch was self-initiated, and all the requisite training (which does not appear to have been extensive) was completed in order to work as a security guard in one of Finland’s largest shopping malls. Of equal significance perhaps is that the relationships formed at work were extended by months of conversations and filmed Forum Theatre workshops that involved Takala and her former colleagues, some of which are represented in the piece at the Biennale and in the accompanying publication. In this sense, the piece offers a determined socialization of the bemused reflexivity that other works of Takala’s were concerned with prompting in the viewer, and only secondarily in the other inhabitants of the coded spaces in which she was moving.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 158/2022, pp. 19–28.

ANTHONY CARFELLO

On the Job with Kathi Hofer

In recent years, “The Future of Work” has become an inescapable titling cliché throughout publishing. Unlike the foregone conclusions that follow such headings, the Berlin-based, Austrian artist Kathi Hofer offers nuanced questioning of the concepts of work, labor, and branding across shifting perspectives and sites. From photography to found objects to performative interactions, Hofer’s practice recalls the approach of the US chronicler Studs Terkel in his interview collection Working (1974), where “people talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do,” as indicated in the book’s subtitle. Except Hofer’s inquiries are updated to acknowledge the remote work, “anti-work,” precarity, and what the anthropologist David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs,” which have developed in the years since Working. Hofer asks what people do/did and how they feel/felt, but also why they do/did it, for whom, and what they would rather be/have been doing instead. She describes her activity as translation, which necessarily follows something being put forth first to then be considered from a future position.

Hofer’s HOFER (2016) revisits a discontinued brand years after its heyday. With the cataloging mindset of an archaeological dig, she excavated her grandparents’ business in St. Johann im Pongau, Austria, which specialized from 1947 to 2003 in weaving and selling the Walkjanker—a traditional Alpine coat made through a laborious process of knitting and then boiling wool fabric to bring the threading closer to weatherproof. A biography of the deceased corporate identity was formed through its physical and promotional vestiges for her contribution to a two-person exhibition at mumok in Vienna (Hawser/Hofer, March 4 to May 22, 2016). The artist hung an array of Hofer waistcoats and jackets both on the wall and from a clothing rack, the latter hung low underneath a found sweatshirt cheerily reading “Best Company.” Linen-covered panels were mounted in arrangements recalling minimalist paintings, with wool swatches and ties by the fashion designer and Hofer-brand enthusiast Kenzō Takada attached to the two largest.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 158/2022, pp. 29–38.

JENS ASTHOFF

The Nature of Humans

A slice of brown bread is transformed into an image: a supine oval shape, pallid, large-pored, edged in crust, like a kind of frame. It’s photographed from above, as if it were lying on a plate before the viewer. But there’s no plate, there’s only the bread: cut out of its background, removed from any tangible surrounding space, visibly enlarged. It’s a simple concentration on an individual object. The picture has a companion piece: the same slice of brown bread, this time buttered, photographed full-frame in a manner similar to the first image. In shades of light gray, the motif sequence speaks of the ground and of applying material to it, and it’s treated in such a flat, pictorial way that it almost reads as a paraphrase of monochromatic painting and the canvas: the rough pictorial ground, the all-over, the dynamic gesture—it’s all there. The photographic treatment lends the object an iconic aspect, in spite of the blunt and sober way it’s depicted. But beyond this, the photo sequence also speaks of something else entirely: it can be seen as a vignette of everyday life. A basic foodstuff is presented in the most minimalist way possible: our daily bread, nutrition in the infinitive, as a paragon before and after preparation.
It’s this kind of precision of ambiguity that characterizes Laura Bielau’s photography: for the most part, the viewer can identify the precise thematic content, but it’s not always immediately clear what the work is actually about.¹ The openness, the semantic interconnec­tedness between motifs, some of which are general, some highly spe­cific, give rise to artistic meaning. Context provides the crucial dynamic; in Bielau’s work, images are never presented alone. She develops her subjects in series in a process that often takes years, approaching her themes through various avenues of research and allowing them to evolve into visual motifs. Her photographs are made during sojourns at research institutes and workplaces, from Internet searches and everyday life—but also from situations that she sets up in the studio. The production takes place in an ongoing process of selection and rearrangement: Bielau composes her series and condenses the image sequences. In the end, apart from exhibitions, these culminate in photo books in which the images are arranged in a prescribed syntax² and point in various directions for purposes of contextualization, probing the realms of sequence and similarity.

1 “Actually, the attraction is that there are such different motifs.” Laura Bielau in conversation with the author on April 29, 2022 in her Berlin studio. All the following quotes by Bielau were taken from this conversation.
2 Bielau speaks of “a kind of grammar in photography” that’s about “legibility, similar to the way in which books are read.” You have to “get involved with the images and look closely . . ., actually, with all the pictures I take.”

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 158/2022, pp. 39–48.

OLAMIJU FAJEMISIN

The Reciprocal Function of Time

There are many artists who make films, though not all of them would label themselves as “filmmakers,” let alone qualify for the title, but the British-Ghanaian artist and filmmaker Larry Achiampong is one such exception. His recent moving-image works deliver stories laden with postcolonial critique, developed partially in response to the troubling British political climate of recent years, and otherwise as memoirs, or relics. Speaking to me over Zoom from his new studio down the River Thames in Essex, having recently moved out of London with his young family, Achiampong, who also works extensively across sculpture, installation, photography, and performance, among other mediums, explained the logic behind the worlds he captures in his short films, and in his recent feature-length debut, in a series of anecdotes, going between personal memories and the stories behind his favorite video games.¹

The series Relic Traveller (2017–ongoing) is perhaps the best introduction to Achiampong’s work. Across several phases, different sound and moving image works, performances, flags, and sculptures map out a fabric of interwoven Pan-Africanist tales. This epic intermedial cloth traverses various significant locations, speculating on a nearish future in which the infrastructures of the “Global West” have failed; meanwhile, “the African Union” has been established as a new world power. Compounding narratives of social angst, white nationalism, postcolonialism, displacement, and migration suggest an idea of retelling or remembrance, though we soon learn that the function of time is reciprocal in the artist’s work. While there are fleeting glances at what one might simply label as Afrofuturism—the eponymous protagonist, a member of the “Relic Travellers’ Alliance,” is equipped with space exploration technology and ordered to journey outside of the African Union to retrieve information scattered in the wake of political collapse—this is not a utopian vision. In spite of its mythic, almost revisional setup, each facet of this work aches with the tension of postcolonialism.

1 All quotes attributed to the artist are taken from a conversation between him and the author on April 20, 2022.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 158/2022, pp. 49–58.