Work, Work, Work

If recent editorials are to be believed, society now values public displays of productivity as much as conspicuous wealth. To be busy is to be important. The inverse of this fetishization of labor among the elites is the brutal reality faced by the remaining 99%⎯where employment is increasingly precarious, transient, disempowering, and under attack from robotic innovation. “Work, Work, Work” featured global art drawn from the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art collection, and considered how labor informs our social, political, and technological lives, as well as the production and reception of art. The curator, Ellie Buttrose, continued to demonstrate her skill at engendering insightful, cross-cultural dialogue through unlikely combinations. 

In the first space, exhibits reflected on cumulative power through groupings of people and objects. For About 1,000 copies of The New York Daily News on the day that became the Stonewall Riot copied by hand from microfilm records (1997), Mathew Jones replicated the newspaper from June 27, 1969, in its entirety, arranging the bundled copies on a low plinth. As the title notes, the date’s significance lies in its insignificance as the day prior to the first brick being thrown at New York City’s Stonewall Inn—now considered as having kickstarted the modern LGBTQIA+ rights movement. Other pieces displayed in this room include Zhang Huan’s To add one meter to an anonymous mountain (1995)⎯a six-minute video of performers stacking their naked bodies on top of a peak⎯and Work team contest (2009), a vast Social Realist mosaic from North Korea’s Mansudae Art Studio, one of the country’s changjaksa (official artist studios). The latter commends the efficiency of steel foundry workers who had surpassed their productivity targets, their faces beaming amid a celebratory brass band. The meeting of these pieces generated an exhilarating tension, bending the meaning of working together across each action: Jones’s isolated toil in ode to historic, collective action; the minute yet somehow monumental gesture of Zhang’s performers; the mosaic’s politicized depiction of labor, produced in an actual factory of state propaganda. The role of the worker flips subtly across each. 

It seems obvious to state that contemporary artistic labor is multifaceted; the strength of “Work, Work, Work” lay in its invitation to examine these variances across cultures. Simultaneously, it encouraged important reflection on the threatened value of labor—artistic or otherwise—at present, as well as the incisive, unquantifiable contributions of art.