Runway x FELTspace: BODY WORK

The seventh Runway Journal x All Conference Conversation comes from FELTspace, situated on the unceded lands of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, Tarntanyangga.

FELTspace invited artist and writer Joseph Breikers to respond to their current exhibition BODY WORK curated by Alice Castello (FELTspace, 4 - 20 November 2021). BODY WORK is centered around modalities of labour situated on and within our bodies; exploring how bodies are employed as sites of labour or implicated by acts of labour. The artists participating are Kate Bohunnis, Maya-Victoria Pask aka Queenie Bon Bon, Henry Wolff and Stephanie Doddridge.

LABOURING FORMS

Progeny of extraction and lack
and anthropogenic fires.

The dialogic fires
The laughing fires
The fires that toil

Forge / forging

As the guilt-ridden cross-pein hammer 
struck the anvil, new articulations formed. 
Elbows and knees built to work [1]. Terrified 
by this new economic servitude, the blacksmith 
dropped the hammer. It came to rest in the fine, 
warm dust with its cruciform inverted. 

The first sign of revolt.

Despite the warnings of this sweaty melodrama, 
we put our bodies to work. And advanced a system 
of value based on our ability to operate as an organic machine. 

Becoming an alienated, human-made, renewable resource. 

Steel 
and earth.

After seven-hundred years of building 
Our hands were troubled.

The guiltless, inverted cruciform returned
(in dreams, and subway scrawlings)

Hardened bodies with itchy fingers
We craved a new relationship with the brick

This brick, this two-faced Janus, who built many doorways
We sought beginnings and endings; upheavals; 
with its destructive arc.

Earthen womb
Earthen grave

The white cube is no ordinary space. It is a space that tends to alienate in a similar way that a shopping mall, or factory does [2]. And like these spaces, the white cube is also — despite its significance and irrespective of attendance — bedevilled by that same strange emptiness. 

The white cube alienates the product (the artwork) from its attendant labour. It is a machine whose main function is to defend, like a walled city, a program that posits art as the product of vocation, or occupation [3], and not the product of work. This has the potential to do two very different things. One, it can devalue the work as it becomes increasingly difficult to tie it to an economic system that thrives on clear relationships between labour, product, and value. Or two, the work can become an insurmountable gift that — because its value is hard to determine — is impossible to repay. 

In ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, Georges Bataille sketches his treatise on political economy which, he argues, is one of excess, not lack. In Bataille’s solar economy there is overabundance, not scarcity; the sun gives far too much — namely, life. In his essay, Bataille explores the notion of potlatch as a way of expending this excess. For Bataille, potlatch is an exchange that:

So, if we think of art as a ‘gift of riches, given openly’ [5], then it is easy to see how it could fit into the system of potlatch. In this version of the game, the artist begins potlatch by giving an artwork to the viewer. In turn, the viewer must ‘respond later with a more valuable gift’ [6]. But the white cube is such that the recipient cannot ‘return with interest’ [7] the gift that was given. Thus, the viewer becomes the humiliated recipient, destined to lose this game of potlatch. 

It may seem a cruel fate, but I doubt this loss is ever felt in a truly humiliating way. If it is ever felt it often gives way to a sense of wonderment and awe, or to an acrimonious belief that their infantile progeny is equally capable.

Each room in every building houses an everyday object that vibrates: a ringing phone, an electric toothbrush, a washing machine. At the hands of the listless and bored, these objects can transform into a font of pleasure and discovery, and sometimes — mid-plague — rediscovery. No one Thing in the world is only good at one thing. Finding an objects’ unintended purpose can be a way of re-establishing agency. It has the potential to drag you out of a fugue state, and plant you firmly back in your body. Back into pleasure and that special kind of voluptuous boredom.

….

A voice, reminiscent of witching-hour TVSN, extols the virtues of several everyday household objects and their unintended use-value. Everything is transformed. A body becomes a cloud with the aid of cotton balls, a sleeping bag becomes a silky chrysalis, and high heels are role-played into an inexhaustible and ecstatic beast crushing the agelasts. 

A joyous, polyphonic score accompanies this activity. Some might consider it to be a diversion, or secondary to forms of activity and labour that have a clear relationship with the economy. And it is precisely because this particular expenditure of energy has a very peculiar relationship with the economy, some might question its value. However, especially given the sturm und drang [8] of recent times, a gift of pleasure-advice is invaluable. And it is hilarious.

….

‘This definitely-one-hundred-percent-genuine-Chanel-probably-silk-or-polyester scarf […]’ [9]

What’s in a name? Everything. And at the same time, not much. Names are somewhat arbitrary to begin with, and there seems to be a bit of ‘whim’ involved in settling on a proper noun. “I think ’Gabrielle’ is kind of nice… -ish…?,” once said an exceptionally blasé Albert Chanel. 

…. 

Ultimately, there is value in everything, so:

And this could be said of artists and sex-workers alike.

Baked earth in the shape of a casket

A dwelling and a shop front / false front
A church

Then towers, and ramparts to define a closed system

However, on each and every cornerstone, the stamp of the blacksmith’s inverted cruciform 
slowly sends out destructive fissures.