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In 1973, Hollis Frampton sent a letter of protest to the curator of
MoMA who had asked him about the possibility of doing a retrospective of
his work, "for love and honor and no money."(1) The working conditions of
artists may not have changed much today, but perhaps there has been a shift
in the way the problem is approached. Theaster Gates's "My Labor Is
My Protest" at White Cube, Bermondsey, is less about protest as
strike, or critique via deconstruction, than the positive production of
social change through work: that is, labor as protest.
This
notion of labor as a form of protest is perhaps most evident in the
exhibition's reference to Johnson Publishing Company, Chicago, most
specifically in the works Johnson Editorial Library (2012) and On
Black Foundations (2012). JPC is the largest African-American-owned
publishing firm in the United States; they are the publishers of
Ebony and JET magazines (2) as well as the owners of
Fashion Fair Cosmetics, a cosmetic line created in 1973 and now the
largest Black-owned cosmetics company globally. (3) Founded by John H.
Johnson and Eunice W. Johnson in 1942, JPC combined humanitarian and
industrial affinities, utilizing entrepreneurial business as a means to
reinstate civic rights and promote social change. JPC's self-financed 1954
film, The Secret of Selling the Negro Market, selected here by Gates
as part of the exhibition's film program, promotes the economic power of
the African-American demographic. Against dismissing the sublation of civil
rights into consumer rights, "My Labor Is My Protest" proposes business as
a mode of collaborative critique. A political space where people make
things, invest narrative in those things, and sell those things.
This narrative investment is clear in the objects presented. Outside the
gallery My Labor is My Protest (2012), a 1969 yellow Hahn fire truck
marred by blotches of tar, stands on show. A further video of the tarring
of the truck can be seen inside the gallery. Fire trucks like this would
have been controversially used to disperse the race riots of the Civil
Rights movement. The use of tar has several connotations. Tar is a
preservative used to waterproof, it can be understood as a racist,
slanderous term, and it can also denote a sensitive or easily aggravated
situation. It is also a reference to Gates's father, whose work as a roofer
during the 1968 Chicago riots, constituted, for Gates, an alternative form
of protest, a critical productivity in the face of oppressive
disenfranchisement. It is an effort symbolized in Raising Goliath
(2012) which appears to suspend a huge 1967 red Ford fire truck against a
full back catalogue of JPC magazines and fire hoses in one of the gallery's
oversized interior spaces. Smaller painting and tapestry works, like the
tar-covered Roofing Exercise (2012) and the decommissioned, stitched
red, white, and blue fire hoses of Gees American (2012) seem to
gesture more specifically toward the transformation of obsolescence into
cultural equity. While at the same time, there appears to be mourning for
the loss of political agency in A Maimed King (2012), a single chair
facing a crumpled Martin Luther King image in a dusty public display case,
"I heart" drawn in the dust.
"My Labor Is My Protest" is
not just about the production of artworks though; it is far more centered
on how art production relates, via distribution and exchange, to the
creation of communities and markets. Gates fully invests in art's
transformative potential as fetish to generate revenue for his larger
social and cultural collaborative projects. The most well-known of these is
The Dorchester Project (2009) on Chicago's South Side, a group of
houses acquired by Gates and repurposed as, amongst other things, a library
of 4,000 volumes from the now-closed Prairie Avenue Art and Architecture
Bookstore, a 60,000-strong slide collection from the University of
Chicago's Art History Department, and a Soul Food Kitchen. That these
unwanted collections have been re-housed is perhaps less interesting than
the way in which they are used to create Minority Business Enterprises;
businesses which, like JPC, are over 51% owned by members of ethnic
minorities. These enterprises then run training schemes, utilizing the free
labor of graduates in need of vocational experience to train unskilled,
unemployed local residents. Such not-for-profit engagement with the
mechanics of policy attempts to use art object production as a means toward
the creation of an incentivized workforce, rather than the other way round.
The extent to which this labor can be understood as protest is, of course,
tempered by the workers themselves. Labor as protest is not about producing
artworks, or even building cultural centers, and it is not about the
appropriation of houses or land: labor as protest is about the
appropriation of agency itself. (4)
To think of the phrase "My
Labor Is My Protest" in terms of agency poses the radical possibility for
an art practice sustained through objects and not just because of them.
Gates originally trained as a potter, and it was the lack of studio
resources that led him to begin to consider issues of social policy, craft,
and space. If the transformative relationship from dirt to clay to art is
self-evident, then the issue is not the availability of dirt but the agency
required see it as other than this; in other words, the care that brings
clay and spirit together into life.
1. http://hollisframpton.org.uk/frampton9.pdf
2. http://www.johnsonpublishing.com/page.php?id=13
3. http://shop.fashionfair.com/v/pxd/aboutus.html
4. http://mica.vidcaster.com/bfMe/theaster-gates-february-8-2012/
Gil Leung is a writer and curator based in London.
She is Distribution Manager at LUX and editor of Versuch
journal. She writes for Afterall and other independent
publications.
 
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