Vacuum Noise
Trafó Galeria Budapest, 6 February – 29 March 2009

Vacuum Noise plunges in with the alluring question ‘has the working class gone to heaven?’, soliciting the response of leading contemporary artists to the legacy of twenty years of global capitalism in the East and South. The exhibition, curated by Nikolett Erőss, seeks to examine the renewed visibility of the industrial worker as victim of the intensive global capitalist strategy of seeking out cheap labour anywhere in the world and the human cost of rolling factory closures. The ever-flexible Trafó Galeria space was decked out in subdued industrial grey for the occasion, with low walls used to produce cubicles that are reminiscent of the monotonous sub-divisions of factory space. The installation creates a serious and challenging setting to absorb six works that broach the massive subject of the real lives and fictional representation of workers.

A pivotal work in the show is Harun Farocki’s collection of film clips of Workers Leaving the Factory (1995), culled from news reels, documentaries and feature film and presented together with a deadpan female voice-over, whose informative comments include the observation that there are many more representations of prisons than factories in Hollywood films. The film dwells on the factory gates as both a physical barrier and an intermediate space, and recalls the cinematic tropes of oppressed workers, individuals dissolved in the mass, and the redeeming figure of the heroic striker, with the latter more a feature of Soviet films than Hollywood. In fact what emerges from the artist’s cinematic selection, starting with the Lumiere brothers’ famous 45 second clip of workers leaving a Lyon factory from 1895, is the degree to which the figure of the industrial worker has been visually constructed and delimited by the physical boundaries of the factory. The film shows how little filmic treatment there has been of life on the factory floor, or the actual processes and conditions of production, which remains unseen on the other side of the wall, while the overriding images express the desire for escape from the hardships of industrial life.
  
Chen Chieh-jen’s Factory (2003) focuses on changes in the global economy and their effect on traditional factory occupations, such as the fate of women textile workers in Taiwan whose jobs were lost when companies relocated because of cheaper labour costs on the Chinese mainland. The artist brought the women back to the deserted factory to repeat their meticulous routines on discarded sewing machines, suggesting a double-edged nostalgia for factory work, which despite its soul-destroying monotony still has the potential to create a sense of solidarity and shared experience that can be enjoyed only in retrospect. The poetic beauty of this film without dialogue treads a thin line between the desire not to impose the burden of conveying social criticism on the subaltern subject and the clear risk of aestheticising the women’s toil and loss.

By taking a wide geographical reach, Vacuum Noise makes the important point that similar processes of alienation and adaption are taking place across the globe simultaneously. Egyptian artist Doa Aly focuses in her film Chinese Sweet, Chinese Pretty (2006) on the precarious existence of Chinese travelling saleswomen living in Cairo. The artist provides insight into the virtually invisible community of Chinese female immigrants who work in the Egyptian capital on tourist visas, selling cheap Chinese-made goods door to door. She shows their existence in a parallel world alongside the Egyptians, with which they keep communication to a minimum. The artist succeeds in drawing our attention to the emergence of a space for cultural exchange beyond the purely functional, which opens up in the interstices of their daily economic transactions with the citizens of Cairo and the act of bargaining. Along with issues of displacement, belonging and memory, the work highlights the precarious existence of fragile individuals propelled into unfamiliar situations by the juggernaut of globalisation.

Artur Zmijewski showed three parts (Danuta, Patricia and Salvatore 2006/7) of a nine film series that functions as an exercise in quasi-scientific social observation and involves following individuals in various countries for 24 hours through their ordinary working lives. The resulting material was then edited by the artist into 10-15 minute sequences that concentrate on banal and repetitive activities, such as getting up, working, domestic chores, eating and sleeping, as if to suggest the artist’s defiant wish to create something meaningful out of the monotonous and the mundane. There are references here to the professionalised and pseudo-objective gaze of the sociologist, a provocative exploration of the contradictions of exploitative community art projects (characteristically the artist pays for access to the private time of his subjects, removing any illusions of free cooperation) and a deeper commentary on the unbridgeable gulf between the artist-as-observer and the lives of the ‘real people’ he represents.

Isa Rosenberger’s ultimately problematic film A Monument for the Women’s Centre (2006) focuses on the lives of women who are former employees of a defunct DDR chemical factory, and their attempt to combat the media image of East German women as victims of the transition by creating a contemporary monument. Speaking with the objectifying voice of the specialist, the artist poses a series of discomforting questions to the women, such as ‘Why are you a double loser?’ The central figure in the film is an absent socialist realist memorial to the woman worker which was erected in the hey-day of the factory, but removed in the post-communist era. Rosenberger’s project aims not to revive the ideology of what was ultimately a monument to industrial efficiency, but to celebrate the creativity of work in and of itself, as an individual gesture rather than as social purpose.

The one newly commissioned work in the show, and the only non-video piece, is from Hungarian artist István Csákány, who gives us a sculptural rendition of the Worker of Tomorrow (2009). According to this vision, the absence of the worker in visual culture is conveyed by an empty chair, coat, trousers and boots, all executed in brute concrete. The artist shows sensitivity to the difficulty of representing the worker in the double sense of his or her invisibility in contemporary culture and the problematic inheritance of socialist realist public sculpture in Eastern Europe. If the ‘worker of tomorrow’ is no longer on the pedestal, then we can only hope that he has been elevated to a better place, where he won’t have to work so hard.

There is a sense in which the dramatic events in the global economy have overtaken the concerns of Vacuum Noise, which focuses mainly on the steady advance of globalisation and its effects on the conditions of labour, and does not directly address the crisis of confidence in the whole paradigm of liberal capitalism contained within the ominous term ‘credit crunch’ and the tantalising possibility that what was previously assumed to be an inevitable process has now halted or even shifted into reverse. The strength of the exhibition lies in its exploration of the shadowy figure of the industrial worker in the public and artistic consciousness of contemporary Eastern Europe, which although primarily an archetype belonging to the past, still continues to exert a fascination from the margins of the memory of socialist public culture. The opportunity presented by Vacuum Noise is to find a way to release the emancipatory potential of the figure of the worker in today’s context, which survives in the glint of the eye of Farocki’s heroic dockyard striker, the defiant pride of the living model for the female worker standing again on Rosenberger’s empty plinth, and the resilience of the Chinese migrants as they negotiate the chaotic scenes of an adopted culture.
 
      Maja and Reuben Fowkes