Troublesome Professionals: On the speculative reality of theatrical labour

Abstract

This article explores what might be at stake when art and performance exposes the apparently peripheral structures of value and labour that support the art-event. For example, in the piece attributed to John Baldessari in the 11 Rooms exhibition at the 2011 Manchester International Festival (UK), the organizers attempted to stage a previously unrealized concept by Baldessari that centered around the display of a real human corpse. For various reasons, they were unable to do so and instead displayed printouts selected from a year of correspondence in which the bulk of activity was undertaken by relatively anonymous members of curatorial and technical staff. Or in Quarantine's theatre piece Entitled (2011), technicians carry out the actions they would normally undertake during the day before an audience arrives, but, now that an audience is present, they narrate their actions as they perform them. One way of understanding these gestures is as attempts to present labour as something ‘real’ that might interrupt the fakery of art: the real corpse, the real stagehands, etc. However, drawing on Alice Rayner's reading of Derrida and Marx and John Roberts' arguments about the logic of the readymade, I argue that the usefulness of the staging of labour in this way is not in the way that it presents some authentic action that overcomes theatre's artifice, but instead in the peculiar failure of theatrical actions to be fully present. Rather than the ‘reality’ of the labour interrupting the ‘representation’ of the theatre, we might regard this as theatre that shows us labour as it really is; it is just that when we see it for what it is, it isn't there.

Notes

¹ A more careful analysis than I am able to offer here would distinguish between the kinds and degrees of instability and agency that tend to get lumped together under the concept of ‘precarity’: The situation of the contracted cleaner is quite different from that of the freelance project manager, as is that of the globetrotting artist creating his/ her own brand identity. For more nuanced considerations, see, for example, Jackson (2012) and Freee Art Collective (2013).

² Indeed, something curious happens to the status of the ‘material’ of that labour. As I began research for this article, I (rather naively) asked a contact at MIF if I may have a copy of the project manager's emails for reference. I was told, regretfully, no, that these emails, presumably still existing in multiple digital copies on the computers of multiple recipients, now constitute the artwork! Although I was generously invited to review the physical copies of the emails, they obviously remain of value as intellectual property. 11 Rooms has continued to circulate as an expanding exhibition, as 12 Rooms (2012) for the Ruhr Trienalle, and as 13 Rooms (2013) for the upcoming Kaldor Public Art Projects in Sydney (although the Baldessari contribution is to be replaced with a different piece for the latter of these).