"LABOR: what is the meaning of my no?" 2011, Installation, Textile Arts Center hand-embroidery on unbleached muslin 10 pieces Read a review of the show here.    "LABOR: what is the meaning of my no?" prepared for artists' talks, July 25, 2011, The Textile Arts Center Brooklyn 1. The title of this work comes from a book I wrote called LABOR: a fiction, combined with a line from Goran Sonnevi’s poetry—“what is the meaning of my no?” contemplates refusal: In Sonnevi’s case, in this line, he refuses to accept his home country of Sweden’s alleged innocence in world affairs. Sonnevi is arguing for an interconnectedness across borders, ideologies. I am attracted to this idea of the world. In my case, I refuse to see my work in the classroom as an “adjunct” to the educational enterprise. I refuse to regard art work and art education as unimportant, even if its instrumentality is illusive. 2. This project is about display—and a refusal to be quiet
about something that I know is a socio-economic trend. So while I have
intensely personal feelings about my labor, I also know it is a shared
experience. For example, this quote from the LCD Soundsystem song “New York I love you, but you’re bringing me down.” “There's a ton of the twist/But we're fresh out of shout” 3. But I am interested in a labor archive that is not didactic, that has room for doubt, personal experience, partiality, perhaps even hiding, or a soft shout. 4. Working with the grid of LABOR I have come to see that I relate to the wall as an educator. My worklife began in the field of adult literacy, where we had the challenge of creating new texts: adult literacy students often can’t read the newspaper, but children’s books are also not appropriate for them. So we would pick a topic and discuss—and as we discussed, I would transcribe onto big sheets of newsprint taped to the wall—tracing everyone’s thinking by using writing, mapping out the discussion. Most of the time our discussions and this transcribing did not lead to a conclusion, but to a list of phrases and words for review, questions to read back, text that students would then use to build their own future writings.
| "A Becoming Archive" 2011, Installation, Textile Arts Center hand-embroidery; photographs & original writings on old book pages View an online version of this work on Elective Affinities here.    5. Twenty years later, I am drawn back to the wall, to the color of unbleached muslin—much like newsprint. But unlike the classroom, unlike what I write on the blackboard, whiteboard, or on newsprint, these current works represent what I do not say to students: a discussion that is, possibly, a subtext or perhaps my labor situation is completely spectral to the students with whom I work. I believe in keeping my struggle separate from their learning. It is almost taboo to speak about the classroom, especially in the classroom: hence my self-censoring while my archive of labor grows. I carry the institution’s policies and email dispatches with me into the classroom; I carry my financial stress; I carry a contract, infringed; I never speak about this directly. 6. What do you see, viewer, when you look at LABOR? If none of the narrative I just read is obvious when you look, I want at least the shapes to indicate intensity, the beauty of partiality, fringes, interruption, the beauty of the line, words, hand-make marks, a world of work. Question: How is the system of your own labor in flux, what are its desirous futures? 7. Why stitching? Why not just take pages from my journal, as I did in order to make this work, and blow them up and make paper works for the wall? In answer, words that come to mind are “incorporation” "ingestion" and "somatic." Stitching is evidence of a body, slowly, a person, sitting and making words. This change of pace and intention felt right to me: a balance between jotting and plotting—or maybe I want to exploit the tension of those two impulses: to jot down, to compose. Not to reside on the surface, but to absorb words into the fabric of possibility: context and text, background and mark becoming, materially, one. |
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