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The Work of Art

Guy Robertson – 2011

Finding Tom Lovelace digging deep holes in a
piece of nondescript marshland (Site 407),
carrying an 8 by 5 metre timber partition up a
Cambridgshire hillside (Object Anonymous),
or transporting a concrete encrusted bollard
back to his studio (Yellow Rupture) one would
be impressed, if bemused, by the extraordinary
lengths he goes to in order to achieve his
photographs. The sweat that goes into the
construction of each image, or series of images,
is contrasted however by their tone on completion:
marked, but unpeopled, a still mist hangs over
the marshland in Site 407; an elegiac memorial,
perhaps to the work of the artist. In Object
Anonymous there is again this silence: for what,
exactly, has this scene been set? The carefully
arranged construction in Yellow Rupture,
neutralised in white space, becomes singular
and strange.
 
It is because of this tempering and channelling
of the initial work done, then, that each of
the final pictures arrive loaded with dramatic
potential. Indeed there is theatre here: the
curtain is down on act one and we are in the
interval pondering. There is a great sense of
potential and, like Brechtian tableaux (but made
with objects not people), the scene is poised
with meaning.
 
And what meanings are these? I will pick out just
one line of thinking from images which encourage
multiple interpretations. In Preparation for the
Real (2010) depicts the legs of a figure, perhaps
the artist himself, atop a pile of breeze blocks
stacked in a gallery setting. Playing on artistic
tradition Lovelace's plinth and sculpture
juxtaposes material construction with the role of
the artist. The teasing absence of the subject,
a theme prevalent throughout the work in this
exhibition, leads us to question the artist's
role as orchestrator. Lovelace, literally standing
on building blocks, suggests that the privilege
of the artist is that his practice penetrates all
levels of production. Whilst many of us work as
connectors or managers in a sprawling network of
immaterial transactions, the artist can move
through all the parts of labour involved in his
work, from its conceptual management to the
material construction. There is a humanising
coordination here, between concept and material,
which remains true of all the works on display.
 
Lovelace makes an oblique reference to labour
constructs in the title of his series 'Object
Anonymous', also the title of this exhibition,
which alludes to Walker Evans's series 'Labor
Anonymous'. In 1946 Evans set up his camera in
front of a blank grey wall in Detroit, Michigan,
and photographed unwitting labourers as they
made their way to work. The result is a 
fascinating group of portraits questioning the
role of the individual in a mechanised and
homogensing industrial society. Whilst Evans
documents the disjointedness of individual
autonomy and social heteronomy (the subjugation
of the individual in an industrialised society)
in 20th Century labour patterns, Lovelace updates
this milieu for our own times by emphasising the
interweaving of the two: teaming conceptual
acuity with craftsmanship and melding them with 
artistic expression. The result is a valorisation
of artistic labour.

The text accompanying Evans' photographs when
they were first published in Fortune magazine in
1946 describes the portraits as depicting "the
most resourceful and versatile body of labor in
the world", ensurers of victory at war and pillars
of the American nation. This romantic display of
modernist belief in the individual worker has now
been realised beyond the 1940s imagination - in
the 1960s there were worldwide uprisings by
students and workers alike demanding greater
autonomy in the workplace. They won their battles,
but the desire for greater self-determination
and freedom was soon subsumed as globalised 
economies turned it to their advantage by
valorising the immaterial labourer: epitomised
by the freelancer who, whilst also managing his
own time, manages streams of information, across
borders and with little geographic consideration.
The result is the proliferation of immaterial
labourers, increasingly disassociated from
production. Lovelace’s series Object Anonymous,
which replaces the labourer in Evans' photographs
with the landscape, challenges this loss of
contact with place whilst suggesting new lines
for engaging craft and concept.
 
   
Produced on the occasion of Object Anonymous.
An exhibition at Son Gallery, 2011.

Guy Robertson is Director of Son Gallery, London.

David Evans – 2011
Guy Robertson – 2011
Kyla McDonald - 2011
Claudia Corrieri - 2010
Richard West on Unit 2 - 2008