SAM DURANT
ART PAPERS July/ August 2010
PAULA COOPER GALLERY, NEW YORK, March 13-April 17 2010
REVIEWED BY MIMI LUSE
In contemporary American popular culture, work is often represented as an innocuous form of incarceration. Television cubicle-sitcoms like The Office give us the comedy of extreme banality in confined conditions. How easily we forget our indebtedness to a much more radical history for the grey creature comforts of the modern workspace. For modular furnishings and humane amenities like the eight-hour workday, we can respectively thank utopian furniture designers and a series of anarchist-led labor strikes in the late nineteenth century. Taking advantage of our collective memory loss, Dead Labor Day is Sam Durant's historical corrective (Paula Cooper Gallery; March 13-April 17, 2010)
"Capital is dead labour," as Marx's gothic metaphor holds, "which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour." For the exhibition’s eponymous work, Dead Labor Day, Durant built a life-sized gallows whose scaffold platform can be accessed by a set of metal stairs. Gallery-goers who climb it will find a water cooler, with paper cup-dispenser, installed on the platform. The concept is a visual pun: distracted by complimentary Dixie cups, the modern worker finds herself an unwitting hangman of the life-sucking forces of capital. But it is also a superimposition of two discrete historical models of discipline: the theater of punishment and the humane, slow-burning incarceration of the modern working environment. Models upon models.
In the front room, Gallows Composite C (Billy Bailey Gallows, Haymarket Gallows, Rarney Bethea Gallows, Saddam Hussein Gallows), 2010, lies on a mirrored pedestal. Just as modernism provided better living through furniture, the model here is a process of refining capital punishment through the rule of averages. The lightbox Break Room with lnternational Mass Meeting, 2010, shows an upside-down spread of an ideal, sleekly modern, open-concept office break room layered over an archival poster commemorating the four Haymarket martyrs who were hanged in Chicago in 1887. Durant also introduces archival materials at the gallery's front desk – documentation of Grover Cleveland's decision to move Labor Day to the month of September in order to disassociate the holiday from its radical May- Day/ Haymarket origins, for one, and sheathes of economic data; two curve graphs overlaid to show, gracefully, the correlation between economic inequality and a decline in union membership. Offering these materials, Durant demonstrates the increasingly elegant ways in which history ironizes itself; while it might profess a true reflection, it instead turns things topsy-turvy.
Durant's earlier work likewise served to demonstrate this principle. Reflected Upside-down and Backwards, 1999, created a corrupted mirror-image by placing two model- sized versions of Robert Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed, 1970 (now mostly destroyed), on top of one another. One was charred – as the structure was in 1975 – and the other was pristine enough to file under the text-book header "sculpture in the expanded field." Meeting Smithson's self- supplied definition of a "new monument" as that which “places both past and future into an objective present," Durant’s composite played with the dualities of perceived history and the archives of art history. These works are a painful remedial that force us to accept coexisting versions of history, and burn neural pathways in the process. In his writings on the "archival impulse," Hal Foster describes Durant's work as a counter- memory for our cultural Alzheimer's: "why else connect so feverishly if things did not appear so frightfully disconnected in the first place?"
-Mimi Luse
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