Viviana Zargón and the Reinvention of Work

1.The Origin of the Void

What is the palpable form taken by a void? What is its history? The presence of the void made itself felt in Argentina during the ‘90s. Terms such as joblessness, unemployment, abandoned warehouse, gutted business, vacant lot and ghost town became frequent in everyday language. It was one way—by naming what was lacking, the negative—of processing the profound calamity society was living through. What is certain is that an unprecedented change was taking place, one that involved the repercussions of globalization and its effects on a local scale, which would take years to be thoroughly comprehended. Films, novels and works of art would be the first to propose perceptible forms for the void. These were no longer words naming what lacked, but explorations of that void, incursions into the chasm that opened up between a past believed to have been stable and a future set in terra incognita. While this process was underway during the late ‘90s, collective imagination was already being notably shaken up. For this reason, in order to comprehend this change—often referred to as neo-liberal politics—films, novels and works of art must be examined before looking for answers in the fields of sociology or economy. Viviana Zargón's works constitute singular figures that shed light on the mutations that took place in labor and the gutting of industrial production that took place during those years of upheaval.

In 2011, Viviana Zargón presented a series of variations on an image of the Palais des Machines, constructed in Paris on the occasion of the 1889 Exposition Universelle (World’s Fair). Today, the building no longer exists; the artist was obliged to work on the basis of photographic testimony. The Palais was one of the Expo’s principal attractions (which included the inauguration of the Eiffel Tower), and it consisted of a large iron and glass structure whose aim was to show the progress of art and industry worldwide. Cuban writer José Martí did not attend the Fair, but compiled information from news articles to create a reconstruction of it, writing a chronicle as if he had actually been there:

We go to the Fair, we join in this visit where all the human races meet. We go to see trees from everywhere on earth in one same garden. On the shores of the Seine, we go to see the history of all houses, from the troglodyte’s cave in a rock crevice to palaces of granite and onyx.¹

The modern era was the balcony from which mankind's admirable history could be observed, embodied in the form of progress. In another equally enthusiastic passage, he describes the Palais des Machines, mistakenly but symptomatically denominating it the "Gallery of Labor":

The life of mankind is there, since his first appearance on Earth fighting against bear and caribou, using skins to keep from freezing, curled up in his cave. That is how peoples are born to this very day.²

This enthusiasm for modernity encircles man's entire history, and it is though primitive tribes elaborated their first flint weapons for the sole purpose of perhaps one day exhibiting them at the World's Fair, offering them up to the gaze of the bourgeoisie visiting Paris. The Palais was a monument to modernity's enthusiasm, situated in the 19th Century's capital city.

Zargón’s variations are diverse: their point of departure is a grey-toned image of the building removed from its context, appearing to float in the middle of nowhere. It is fragmented and deployed on canvases, paper and an artist’s book. As the very name of the building indicates, it is a world with poles in tension: it is a palace (pertaining to the destitute realm of nobility) and a machine (modern man’s new God). What Zargón does, then, is to push this tension even further. The aporias of her art unfold between the hand-crafted and the mechanical, between labor and void: photography and painting, grays and color, realism and fragmentation, nostalgia and the present. She returns to the origins of modernity in this work, back to an iron structure of what was thought to be solid—practically eternal—but no longer exists (the building was taken down in 1910). At the World’s Fair, art and technology came together as allies—as Walter Benjamin analyzes—in spite of the traditional opposition between the Polytechnic School and the School of Fine Arts, and despite some artists’ complaints along different lines, ranging from its outer covering (art that covers technology like the lamp carried by a Greek goddess) to its spectacular nature. ³ Many years later, at a time when technology has been granted a place of privilege in art, Zargón returns to this alliance and this tension: she takes the technology of the photograph as the basis of this work, but recovers art’s manual gesture, as if a resource traditionally associated with aesthetics were needed for the reconstruction of a technological artifact. Aesthetics plays an essential role in shaping the figure of the void, labor and the modern past in her work: it is a way of making palpable a dimension that is on the verge of disappearing into thin air or already nostalgia. What is lost is not abandoned, but given a way (and the strength) to return by way of aesthetic imagination.

Zargón's vision strips technology nude, no longer as the promise of the future, but as fossil remains, extracted by the artist from modern imagination’s geological strata. Her choice of a work that no longer exists is no coincidence; demolished in 1910, the example that it once was of construction engineering and iron’s future finally came to nothing. But what operations might be carried out on the naked building, with no interior and no walls? Very simply, two: isolation and folding. Situating it in an undetermined environment reinforces both the origin of its construction and its monumentality. Folding it fragments and decomposes it: the action separates us from this world and obliges us to an aesthetic gaze, one that should know how to appreciate spatial variations and manual skill. Craft enables an approach to this industrial contraption: the closer it comes to the photo, the more evident its artisanal temperament becomes. Between human and nostalgia for the human, between labor and nostalgia for labor, Zargón opts for a slice taken from an intermediate moment (before the ruin, but already fallen out of use) that points to labor's new phase, which can no longer be separated from an aesthetic dimension. She removes it from usefulness and automatism in order to recover the inventive impulse: putting an object into the world speaks to our senses.

2.The Labor Community

Reality deals a powerful blow to the factory landscape, and it retires from our imagery. In Latin America, the tradition of representing the industrial panorama dates back to the early 20^th Century, and though it may have been a testimony of exploitation, it was also a hymn to progress and a reconfiguration of humanity, as shown by authors ranging from Alfredo Guttero to Quinquela Martín, from Tarsila de Amaral—in the faces of his Operários —to Diego Rivera in his murals. There is no ambivalence here, only a dialectic point of view: in the philosophy of Marx, work was alienating but also the only practice that allowed a perspective of the world with a view to its transformation. In large part, representations of it rested upon this dignification of labor (a recurring theme in Latin America’s modernity).

In the Flandria series, Zargón addresses the very heart of Argentinean labor just as it would like to be imagined. It is almost natural that the past be observed with fondness and nostalgia at moments of decadence and ruin: Flandria offers us a history that makes this gesture believable and motivated. The town of José María Jáuregui is also known as Villa Flandria: the cotton textile mill that Jules Steverlynck (1895-1975) created gave the town both unity and identity. A Belgian Catholic businessman, Steverlynck not only started up the factory, but also constructed a social fabric including culture and sports that went past the salary-based relationship to become a community connection. He founded the Club Social y Deportivo Flandria (Flandria Social and Sports Club), El Telar magazine, whose motto was "God, fatherland, home, peace and work", the San José Obrero maternity clinic and other institutions that turned the town into a living organism the heart of which was the factory. In 2001, Sebastián Schinel, Fernando Molnar and Nicolás Battle made a documentary titled Rerum Novarum, about the musical band of the same name (inspired by papal encyclicals) that was made up of workers, with instruments purchased by Don Julio, as Steverlynck was called by the townspeople. The company not only occupied working hours, but also gave meaning to free time.

The documentary evokes the ’50s and ‘60s with nostalgia by way of institutional films, juxtaposed with current images of the textile factory in ruins. The film also shows how the factory brought about the foundation of hospitals, schools, clubs and even a cinema. The brief biographies are personal and emotive, leaving sociological and political aspects aside. The contrast between celluloid film—from the era of solid cinema—and video—liquid cinema, to use Zygmunt Bauman's formula—marks the rupture that took place during the ‘90s. Flandria textiles entered into crisis in the late ‘80s and finally closed its doors in 1995. ⁴

The opposition established between film and video—which refers to the materials used to construct imagination and lived experience—is echoed between steel and canvas in Zargón's work, between the whole and fragments, between photography and painting. The operation is more complex, however, in the sense that there are no ruins: it is not an evocation, but the force of something that returns, something that is suppressed but still survives. In her work it is as if whatever still remained to be retrieved after the conceptual and expressionist "factories" from recent decades had come and gone is recovered. Instead of following the path of the remains, as many artists have done, she goes back to her paintbrushes. In other words, she approaches the remains (with an intensive use of photography), but only in order to make the separation that much more radical. The paintings look like photos, but only in order to say that they are paintings. In the Políptico de Flandria (Flandria Polyptych) there is no sign of Don Julio’s humanism or the happy—supposedly happy—community while the factory remained in operation. The operation is two-fold: on the one hand, she creates a "photographic" figuration of the factory space in order to then fragment it. On the other, she empties it in order to recover manual labor, which now corresponds to art. The community narrative of labor that used to give the town meaning and a sense of the future is gone. What is it, then, that comes to take its place?

3.From Steel to Beliefs

Viviana Zargón's exploration should be understood in the context of post-Fordism and the crisis of factory labor. In the same way that the French Revolution did not mean the end of the monarchy, post-Fordian debates by no means presuppose the end of factories, but a different configuration of labor instead. The question here, then, is a series of tendencies that are superimposed one over the other to give the present its particular tone. Where Fordism granted identity, a future and a lifelong sense of belonging, today's era is marked by labor's precariousness, circumstantial belonging and unforeseeable futures. Where Fordism emphasized large factories (mammoth contraptions that still dominate the northern industrial belt that stretches from Buenos Aires to Santa Fe), new units of production tend to be smaller, more disperse and mutable (while in the large factories that do remain, human presence is being replaced by increasingly automated processes). The most important point may well be, however, that while the production of physical objects used to constitute the most important process of generating income and wealth, today it is the area of symbolic production (publicity, information technology, services, finance and intellectual labor) that dominates visual space and defines the course of the economy. As Paolo Virno states in his book Gramática de la multitude (Para un análisis de las formas de vida contemporáneas) (The Grammar of the Multitude (Toward an Analysis of Contemporary Ways of Life)), during the post-Ford period “abstract knowledge—in the first place scientific knowledge, but not that alone—prepares to become no less than the principal force of production, relegating segmented, repetitive labor to a residual status”. ⁵ Virno calls this instance general intellect, transformed during the post-Ford era to become the largest labor force.

In Beccar, Viviana Zargón takes photographs of an abandoned factory ⁶ on the verge of being turned into a supermarket: it marks a change from production to consumption, from manufacturing to displaying products. In 2002, Enrique Bellande presented the documentary Ciudad de María, filmed between 1997 and 2001 in San Nicolás in the province of Santa Fe, where Somisa, Argentina’s most important steel plant used to be. The film shows the changes that have taken place in the city since the moment that the Virgin appeared before Gladys Motta on September 25, 1983. Little by little, religious fervor centered on the Virgin began to grow, until finally converting San Nicolás into a site of religious devotion in the mid-‘90s. Traditionally known as “steel city” on account of Somisa (upon which the economy of its inhabitants depended), San Nicolás begins to be called “city of María”, and winds up receiving a million and a half people every year in pilgrimage. The steel plant’s closing in 1991 and the brutal firing of its over seven thousand workers constitute a crucial turning point in the city’s history. ⁷

Aside from the interest spurred by the figure of Gladys, Bellande focuses primarily on the economic transformations that generate the phenomenon: San Nicolás goes from being a manufacturing city to a site of religious pilgrimage. In a nostalgic tone, the filmmaker recovers a Somisa company ad by the from the ‘70s that ends with the slogan “Everything is steel”. The advertising spot filmed on celluloid contrasts with the video format in which the documentary is produced, linking it with the modern city, workers and steel, while television appears to be more closely associated with the post-modern city, the faithful and superstition.

In the post-modern world, labor is "stripped of its eschatological paraphernalia and separated from its metaphysical roots" according to Zygmunt Bauman, "labor has lost the centrality that had been assigned to it in the galaxy of dominant values during the era of solid modernity and heavy capitalism".⁸ Few cities in Argentina had their fate as closely tied to the heavy capitalism that steel symbolizes as San Nicolás. In precarious times, however, it found another raw material that was almost as profitable as steel: faith. Are we witness, then, to a loop in which capital no longer profanes the sacred—according Marx's famous hypothesis in his Communist Manifesto —but the sacred instead becomes capital’s ally? A million and a half people making a pilgrimage are also a million and a half consumers who make devotion their true labor.

The Serie Motul (Motul Series) from 2010 can be related to the transformations seen in Ciudad de María. Motul is a brand of industrial oils that assure the fluid functioning of machines in the same way that paint enables an artist’s imagination to function. In this case, it is the Bash factory, a safe manufacturing company located in the Belgrano neighborhood [in Buenos Aires]. The Bash factory building, closed during the ‘90s, was acquired by the Amijai community in 2001 with the objective of constructing a temple there. Zargón’s interest focused on just one phase of the process: after the factory had ceased to function and before it was converted into something else (in this case, a synagogue). ⁹ The process was not very different from that described in Ciudad de María, but this was not a case of narrating it (with the temporality and nostalgia that would entail), but of detaining it in a single image. But why visualize that moment in particular?

There are several works that deal with the Bash factory: the photographs taken of this industrial building are utilized in two different polyptychs. In Cuadrados de Motul (Motul Squares), three paintings alternate with two similarly square steel plates. In the Serie de Motul, five vertical canvases each have a steel plate alongside, all mounted separately on the wall with intervals in between. Fragmentary photographic images are used in these paintings. As opposed to the deployment of the Palais des Machines piece, here it is impossible to visual compile a homogenous or continuous space out of the panels (not even by "filling" in the empty space that separates each of the five groups). There is a rigorous play between grays and dim lighting, we can recognize the same object in different positions in some panels and perspective is maintained, but without managing to bring the images together in accordance with a single disappearing point. It is as if the space were being perceived by way of combining fractured bits of memory and broken promises. The sensory perception of those viewing the work must go to work in these empty spaces.

The aesthetic separation from reality in what memory or the retina retains is demonstrated through the use of color and in the challenge presented by the range of grays. Zargón's works operate along this scale, carefully employing light and some strong or delicate strokes of color that declare "this is a painting". Above and beyond these strokes, however, the key is in the use of gray (the world of factories is not necessarily gray although it tends to be associated with this color, even more so when the human figure is removed). Gray is by no means an easy color. Gilles Deleuze quotes Delacriox, who said that "gray is color's enemy, it is painting's enemy", but also Cezanne, who stated that “one is only a painter once he or she has painted a gray”.¹⁰ Deleuze sustains that there is a gray of failure (the muddy tone that is the mix of all colors) and a different gray "which is that of an ascending color", the luminous, active gray of Kandinsky. We could say that Zargón is not interested in the aesthetic gray proposed by Cezanne, but takes Delacroix’s phrase literally: she makes her gray an enemy of painting and color. And if this gray is not muddy, if it is not passive, it is because it is a gray that takes us outside painting: from canvas to metal, from acrylic to steel, from the studio to the factory. The attraction to this gray is so strong that it presents itself—beyond the canvases—in steel plates as a confluence between art and the realm of manufacturing. Placed in continuation to the paintings, the plates also create a kind of parallel or background reflection of this factory imagery. The gray that arises out of sheer strength from the brushstrokes is the most difficult one of all (that of the ashes of labor), creating a strange light that seems to emanate from nowhere.

The clamity of the ‘90s was embodied in language, narration and allegory in literature as well. Boca de lobo (Jaws of the Wolf, 2000) by Sergio Chejfec, and El trabajo (The Job, 2007), by Anibal Jarkowski, are just two works that narrate the new landscape of labor and industry that emerged during that decade. In reference to Chejfec’s novel, Alejandra Laera speaks of "writing's empty time" and an "auratization of the factory world". ¹¹ The ruins of the ‘90s do not call for tears, then, but rather a reconfiguration of our imagination. In Boca de lobo there is a slowing of time that focuses on debris, and it is by recognizing their power that a future is finally achieved, in the character of a woman who winds up pregnant. In a somewhat similar gesture, Zargón's gaze comes to rest on unused oil, whether in a container full of rubble or in an empty interior, in order to produce an altered sense of time and space. Her work should be seen in the context of other works from the late ‘90s and the outset of the new century that recognize intelligence and effort in factory work that ought not to be squandered because it may turn out to be a key to our rescue in new situations yet to arise. The usefulness of the useless or art as a "utensil" are two possible ways of imagining this link.

4.Workers and Art

Making objects and placing them in the world is a task that falls to workers. In the modern era, this relationship is not a direct one: either the objects are produced according to distant orders coming from someone with greater power, or they lack any creative earmarks because of their automation, or finally, they are trapped by the market before reaching the world, which distorts them by applying prices. This linear relationship would seem to have evaporated in an era when objects are not necessarily material in nature any longer, but circulate by way of constellations (above all what I have in mind are the digital realm and the importance of information).

In a world of uselessness (and where uselessness can be very profitable), an aporia is generated: does an aesthetic gaze redeem these things? Do aesthetics then remain as labor's leftovers? Have objects been returned to the world?

I would like to liberate these objects from the titles that Viviana Zargón has given them. From Duchamp onward, titles have undoubtedly become just as important as any other element in a work (which is not the case for Renaissance or 19th Century art). Here the titles enter into friction with the works and sometimes even against them, giving them paradoxical, ambiguous or ironic meanings. What is the meaning of the titles from the Objetos inútiles (Useless Objects) series? "Inútil Mondrian", "Inútil Boltanski", "Inútil Duchamp", "Inútil Bourgeois"… Is this an appropriation of the art world’s view of the world of labor? Is it about granting objects with the meaning and prestige that they lack? Or is she pointing out a rescue operation?

These questions can all be answered in the affirmative, but what interests me more than that is considering the visual commitment that these objects entail. This is not conceptualism's gray matter (in the gesture of the titles), but the pink matter that was also present in Duchamp, alias Rrose Sélavy, ¹² as George Didi-Huberman has demonstrated. I would like to carry forward the circuit of appropriations so masterfully initiated by Viviana Zargón, which leads me to ask myself why these objects are so fascinating.

In the radiator factory where Viviana created these objects' portraits, workers used their ingenuity to resolve the concrete problems involved in constructing their products: how to transport them, how to hold them up, how to pile them up, how to organize them. The word ingenuity is pertinent, because in contains as much engineering as it does invention. These objects were sustained in the world to the extent that they were able to fulfill the purpose for which they had been made. Each of them embodies a real act of love, and Viviana's gesture is to portray them in all of their uniqueness and splendor. In Objetos inútiles they no longer have a context, nor do they need a world, because they are that very world: they can create a force in the world of general intellect. Here we have a secret story of labor, a celebration of bricolage, passions encountered and soldered fast. It is true that human labor is not represented in Vivana’s other works (although the manual touch of the artist's hand is recovered), nor is there nostalgia that reactivates. There is space. It is a space that breathes and sustains itself above and beyond context and historical timeframe. These useless objects are there to show us that the construction of an object sent out into the world is enough in and of itself, aside from any eventual function. The artist’s gesture may also serve as a link between the world already lost and the one we have to live in. An object does not occupy a particular space, but generates a void, and that void is what Viviana Zargón creates in her works so that we might learn how to inhabit the new times we live in.