Be a Happy Worker: Work-to-Rule! – Galerija Miroslav Kraljević (GMK)

Curators: Ivana Bago & Antonia Majača

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The exhibition Be a Happy Worker: Work-to-Rule! forms a first visible part of a long term research on the isses of labor being developed in the framwork of the project Land OF Human Rights. It considers different perspectives and concepts of work and labour, the ‘slowing down’ of work, touching upon the quality of work and life in the former and present working conditions, the global division of labour and creative reflections on industrial and postindustrial labour. On the other hand, the exhibition touches upon the nostalgia for the time of belief in industrial modernization, in the light of destinies of workers after the transformations and dissolving of the factories in East Europe.

Work-to-rule is usually described as an industrial action in which employees do no more than the minimum required by the rules of a workplace and, while still following safety and other regulations, cause a deliberate slowdown in the production process as a form of protest. This procedure, known also as ‘white strike’, simply slows down the production and is less disruptive than a strike and less susceptible to disciplinary action as the elementary rules are being obeyed. Along with alluding to the need to question the possibility of general slowdown or production of ‘surplus labour’, the exhibition title derives also from the possible misreading of the phrase today, in the matrix of advanced neo-liberal capitalism. From this perspective, the title could be read in the instructive mode as ‘work to dominate’ or ‘work to succeed’ and so refer to the models of subjectivity and flexibility characteristic for late capitalism. In other words, Work-to-Rule here stands for minimizing the surplus engagement, performing of minimal number of required tasks as a functional way of displaying power in the position defined by the fordist models of production but at the same time the opposite – the effect of corporative meritocracy in which hard work leads to profit, increase of power and advancement in corporative hierarchy.
Simultaneously, the paradox inherent in the title can be used as a point of origin for thinking about the dichotomy of two different modes of production: fordist, based on ‘necessity’ and production quotas and post-fordist industrial model of production which was born in the late 1970’s where the work is also not divided among single workers, as in fordism, but among teams of production carrying the responsibility for quality and its betterment and where, instead of hierarchy, interaction, responsibility and creativity are emphasized putting an extreme pressure on the individuals subjectivity and forcing constant flexibility. As Maurizio Lazzarato has pointed out, ‘What modern management techniques are looking for is for “the worker’s soul to become part of the factory.” The worker’s personality and subjectivity have to be made susceptible to organization and command. It is around immateriality that the quality and quantity of labor are organized.’ Today, when the product of immaterial labor is, above all, the ‘message’, is there a way to avoid the exhausting logic in which we are at the same time subjects of production but also of consummation, in conditions in which production involving creative potentials of an individual always demands also a subjective involvement of the consumer? In which ways can the direct link between money and work be disjointed in order to avoid new forms of slavery and how can we live new forms of subjectivity with dignity?

Furthermore, the exhibition presents works of artists from the wider region that deal with political and social aspects of recent transformations in the time of wild capitalism in Eastern Europe, the glorification of the West as a heaven of entrepreneurial possibilities but also the still relevant issues of gender division of labour, the ‘invisibilty’ of women’s labour and the ever more complex relation between labour and leisure. Mapping different perspectives and art strategies and the heterogeneous ways they have dealt with this complex subject from the perspective of ‘New Europe’, Be a Happy Worker:Work-To-Rule! reflects the history of work, the aspects of transformation of past working conditions and a wide range of issues regarding the immaterial labour that concerns us all today.

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The Social Engine – Exploring Flexibility is a new collaborative project by Miklós Erhardt and the group Reinigungsgesellschaft. It uses methodologies from the fields of sociology and work psychology, integrated into the art practice and involves partners from the fields of economy and social sciences to explore the influence of flexible concepts of work on the structure of society in Germany and Hungary. It promotes a cognitive concept of art as a tool, whereby the main goal is to gain knowledge through questioning, and putting new perspectives on, the most pressing issues linking economy and society. The project explores the concept of flexible work and life, investigating the special role of the new concepts and practices of labour introduced by the global economy in transforming existing social networks and identities.

A description of the new headquarters of a Czechoslovak business bank found in one Czech architectural magazine was the starting point of Zbynk Baladrán’s research resulting the new video The Theory of Work. The artist researches the idea, put forward in the magazine article, of architecture as instrument of reform and progress of the institution. Is it possible to build a house as an instrument of reform of the institution?

With the public intervention Women at Work, Sanja Iveković points to the still problematic gender division of labour and the way it manifests itself in public space. The discriminating mechanism according to which the figure of a male worker on the official ‘road works’ traffic sign automatically represents both the universal worker and the very concept of work, is here deconstructed by means of a simple intervention in which the male figure is replaced by that of a female. In this way, the warning about the ‘road works ahead’ is literally and symbolically renamed into a warning about ‘women at work’, i.e. the social mechanisms according to which women’s work is still valued as secondary. Its meaning is still based on the concept of ‘typically female’ occupations, including a ‘typically female’ contribution to the community, that isn’t consituted through public and political way of acting but through caring for the family and, in a more general sense, merely providing support for the public and political, i.e. male sphere. Additionally playing with the gendered meaning of the public and private spaces, the artist inserts the sign into the parks and green areas of the city of Zagreb, rare points in the city in which women’s work is publicly visible and present. Ironically, this physical work (by predominantly female workers in horticulture) is again based on concepts of ‘caring’ and ‘maintenance’ of the public surfaces as well as tht ‘representativeness’ of public space, and not the active production of its meaning. The visible women’s work of ‘nurturing’ the public space thus alludes to the invisible women’s work of ‘nurturing’ home and the family. The visible or less visible ‘public’ work is followed by the invisible work of a housewife still shared by most women, regardless of their social status, which is additionally emphasized by the plaque below the sign, providing information on the unpayed and invisible women’s work.

In the frame of the year-long project 366 liberation rituals, initiated through the project Land of Human Rights, Igor Grubić performs and documents a street action in which he, in a very direct and provocative manner, points to the criminal processes of privatization and the corrupt political elite.

In the video Prayer of PW20/LW, Pavel Mrkus plays with the aesthetization of industrial labour and technological processes. The video animates the mechanized movements of two robots used in the automobile industry in Japan, transforming their work into a choreographed dance, while also evoking religious rituals via the accompanying music: the sound of Buddhist sutra chanting recorded at Nishi Hongwanji, the central temple of the Buddhist sect Shin in Kyoto.

Société Réaliste, an art cooperative created by Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste Naudy, has developed several research and economical structures in fields such as territorial ergonomy, experimental economy, political design and counter-strategy. The project EU Green Card Lottery includes a website that mimics a very specific type of “parasite” website, which exploits aspiring migrant workers hoping to apply for the American Green Card Lottery system. These sites encourage migrant candidates to apply to the U.S. State Department Lottery through them and pay for this service, which is actually free. The project refers to the wider problematics of the migration business’ machinery. Usually displayed in various contexts, the physical installation is a meticulously crafted and totally fictional EU Green Card Lottery Registration Office, reflecting, in a subversive way, the exploitation of the non-European workers seeking jobs in (Western) European countries.

Tanja Dabo’s work Contact Point: Searching is the result of the artist meeting her best friend again, who had, in the meantime, began with a new, immigrant life in Amsterdam. In an intimate gesture of identification with the work and life of her friend and her colleagues, in September 2001 Tanja Dabo performed three actions of polishing the floors of three private apartments that had previously been cleaned by the three young women I.S.P., D.D. and A.G.K. All three immigrants are from Eastern Europe, living and working as illegal immigrants in Amsterdam, earning money from cleaning apartments of well-to-do and ‘legal’ citizens. The statements given by the three women are stories about their experience of leaving their countries, in search for a better life, realization of their goals, as well as stories about their current lives in the Netherlands.

In the project Your Way to the Top, Helmut and Johanna Kandl used and intervened on a collection of glass negatives from the Lower Austrian Landesmuseum, which were used as teaching aids containing a wide-ranging selection of over 400 coloured photos depicting various work situations and means of production. The suggestive romanticism of the selected motifs from the archive cover the inter-war years. Workers at a blast furnace, in leather processing, in dairies, mills and mines—beside these, the pictures tell the story of the deceptive idyll of women, children and housework, etc. This is contrasted with quotations from the world of business, often trivial quotations of the men in power and the no less cynical statements by the advertising gurus, which openly reveal their strategies. The shifts between word and image, between signs and signified, set up a complex hall of mirrors of past, present, aesthetic systems, social questions and the many misunderstandings between them.

Miners’ memories, the new project by Kristina Leko, deals with the topic of miners’ heritage and contemporary history at the specific locality of Labin and Raša. It has been realized with collaboration with workers at the coalmine, ex-miners and their family members. The history of this mining region is marked by economic migration, related to the dinamics of opening and exploiting the mining tunnels. The administrative and political changes during the 19th and 20th centuries were followed by immigrations from various parts of the Austro-Hungarian Kingdom, Italy and Yugoslavia, marking also the economic boosts and bouts of mining industry. The end of the eighties mark the beginning of the decrease of mining industry, with the last tunnel closed in 1999 and marking the end of the mining era in Labin. The project aims at creating an archive of miners’ memories and transforming them into a valueable and meaningful segment of cultural heritage.