Group Exhibition

“A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”

The very act of producing has become within itself burdened with questions in our time, like producing certain work that is within the realm of production itself. It is a double-processed labor, where the first activity of work occurs in determining the agenda for work in order to find appropriate categories for it. For example, I know that I need to do certain tasks today—which in turn will translate to ‘work.’ And as a more specific example, let’s say—I have run out of clean plates to eat from, therefore, I should wash the dishes, therefore, do work, therefore: produce clean plates. I will be using the broader term of production here which includes transformations— from a soiled plate and into a clean, sparkling plate, where I can place food and enjoy it without ingesting unwanted particles or taste. I have worked and have produced change within that work.

In the same respect if I wanted to draw—I am not producing a new entity. I have, in essence, just contributed to the transformation of paper where certain graphite minerals are now placed on some parts of its surface. Indeed, I have produced an image, but it is not essentially a new object. Now given these two activities, the double-processes of production come in when we try to produce, mentally, a categorization. Although they are both work—washing dishes and drawing an image are concepts that we seldom associate with each other as ‘part of the same work.’ We call the former a chore, while the latter, depending on the mood and agenda, is called making art. But they are both work. Since when did we become so separated from our own faculties as individuals as to require categorizations and assignations before the actual act? We have become scheming beings.

We have subscribed to multiple end-results, therefore multiple personalities. Is this not disruptive? Or maybe counter-productive? We have become embodiments of the factories and industrialization’s avatars for the concept it has invented which is the division of labor. This is what hinders productions—the segregation of actual labor from the body coursed through an imagined, conceptual categorization and method. And I don’t mean just the production of certain specialized constructs like art, but also of necessitated labor like our notions of ‘chore.’ But if we want to set art as a kind of creative production, then one might say that this thinking limits it. The very instant that I have decided to attach the concept ‘creative’ to ‘work’ (if we follow this logic) already limits it. The very fact that this piece I am writing (to which, if I apply a conventional categorization—is part of an exhibition’s text) will not be considered as an appropriate ‘essay’ is a solid proof why work or production, which is tied to cultural, political, and social determinants, are very, very, very slow…to evolve. That is why you should not only discontinue regarding this piece of writing as essay, but in one, swift, reflexive response, should just be considered as nothing but work.

//CLJ

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