Story and Photos by Ann Treacy
The Soap Factory has gone back to its manufacturing roots to host Three Factory Pieces, the latest installment of Piotr Szyhalski’s ongoing art epic, Labor Camp. Polish-born Szyhalski teaches at MCAD; his art has been shown all over the world. He said that “Labor Camp celebrates beauty and dignity of labor: We Work All The Time”. It is a natural fit for a gallery that once was a working factory.
The show celebrates industry – but the industry of people not of management or owners as is indicated by the bold banners in the first room of the gallery that read like protest posters. “They live and profit. You die in Debt.” It sets a political tone that’s strong but skewed because the industry is the making of the banner. But then the art isn’t the banner so much as the making of the banner; it’s a fine but important distinction.
There are half a dozen actors performing the scenario of the banner-making. They move like cogs in a wheel. Szyhalski said that “Labor Camp encourages all forms of individualism.” There are (at least!) three segments to the show as the name implies; some segments require actors to perform menial chores – creating banners, sitting and waiting, rolling, remaining motionless. Of that action, only banner-making results in a product and again that product resembles a protest poster against the purpose of the factory. It honors the adage of work for work’s sake.
In the next scenario, two actors rest on chairs. Two are on the floor with faces covered. They aren’t motionless, but they are very slow. At intervals, the seated actors go to one on the floor; they perform a ceremony where a seated actor replaces the one on the floor and the remaining two return to their seats. At the next interval, the seated performers go to the other one on the floor and perform a similar ritual. It’s an astute representation of the most menial labor. You never get to remain in one position long enough to rest. Just at the point where you might relax, an action is required for the ritual. But there is a beauty in the movements as well as the repetition. Complementing this rotation, throughout the three-room gallery, are large videos of actors rolling. The action isn’t quite in synch with the live rotation – although there’s a strong urge at least in my mind to make a connection. It may or may not exist.
The last room is a grotesquely beautiful collection of child-sized coffins set on a thin layer of sand that covers the room. In the sand are etched letters in calligraphy. In the coffins are old shovels. Szyhalski said, “Labor Camp promotes immateriality: It exists at no particular location and has no fixed physical form.” It’s an interesting juxtaposition of the permanence of death, the immaterial nature of physical life and impermanence of everything built on sand. It is visually stunning.
The auditory experience of the show is old school factory, clanging and clacking of metals with a background of ambient drone controlled by an artist set up with synthesizers. There were symbols wired around the building that would chime periodically in tune with the other clatter but more nuanced with the softness.
There is one last segment to the show – chairs tied together like a monkey’s knot hung under the floor boards. Patrons can see and touch a table that covers a hole in which goes a rope that holds the hanging chairs. You can also see live video of the chairs shot from below the floorboards. The structure is too heavy and too large to pull up through the floor boards, but it’s visually compelling. There’s something about it that makes you want to try to lift it even though you know you can’t. It’s Sisyphean task – much like all of the tasks performed in the exhibit. Visually very interesting, the beauty of the work draws us in.
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