Title: Dan Eisenberg on Labor, Economic Justice, and the Contradictions of Current Systems
Industry.jpg: Ellen Rothenberg, Industry, Not Servitude!. © 1997 Ellen Rothenberg. Collection, National Historical Park for Labor and Industrial History, Lowell, MA.
DanImage.jpg: Film still from Daniel Eisenberg’s current film in progress. Daniel Eisenberg, The Unstable Object (11). © 2017 Daniel Eisenberg.
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Dan Eisenberg (Professor in the Departments of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation and Visual and Critical Studies) is a filmmaker who works at the intersections of documentary and experimental media. His unique body of films have been internationally acclaimed for expanding the boundaries between traditions of the personal avant-garde film and historical documentary. Eisenberg has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Centre Geroges Pompidous, Paris among others and has been recognized internationally including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a grant from the Graham Foundation, Chicago. Here, he discusses his work current collaborative work as the inaugural Faculty Research Fellow at the Institute of Curatorial Research and Practice at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).
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Emily Breidenbach: You and Ellen Rothenberg (Adjunct Professor in Fiber and Material Studies) are the inaugural Faculty Research Fellows at the Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice at SAIC, a two-year position that began in last and culminates with a major project in SAIC’s Sullivan Galleries in Fall 2019. Can you give me an idea of the form your current work is taking at this point?
Dan Eisenberg: We are currently at the end of the first phase of our research for this fellowship project, having collected readings, theoretical texts, historical surveys, reviewing artists, media makers, and recent curatorial activity on the subject of labor and work... these have been surveyed to motivate the initial set of questions that will propel the next phase of the project. We are also partnering with re:work, the International Research Center for Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History at the Humboldt University in Berlin to make sure we aren’t overlooking important people or subject matter... they are our intellectual advisors for the project. At the same time, we have been meeting regularly with the curatorial team at the Sullivan Galleries.
EB: Wow, that’s a lot for a first phase. Which aspect are you most excited about? What are you looking forward to?
DE: We are now entering a phase that requires conversation with participants and the shaping of the process into public forms: a symposium, an accessible research archive, some experimental collaborations and structures... we are dreaming now of pathways forward, well in advance of final outcomes, which at this point remain intentionally undetermined and undeveloped, subject to the research process.
EB: Interesting. In what ways does your work ask questions about economic insecurity, unemployment, and labor?
DE: Extremely literally. We have developed three areas of inquiry, all with specific questions to be explored:
VISIBILITY + INVISIBILITY: THE REPRESENTATION OF WORK
Since almost all contemporary labor remains unseen behind walls and closed doors, it’s clear that one of the empowering features of Late Capitalism is a hiding away of labor so that goods, services, and every other purchased item appears as if magically produced and delivered from the heavens, away from human hands or the daily grind. Labor’s invisibility places it in a disadvantageous position to capital. How do we make labor visible so that it may acquire the sensual power to communicate its essential importance?
What are the esthetic forms and strategies that can be used to represent work, as it becomes increasingly abstract and remote?
How do we represent service labor, intangible labor, affective labor? How do we represent work in an age when it’s hard to represent?
How does this visibility restore power or newly empower labor and work?
How can a research project about work and labor equilibrate the relationship between labor and capital, return it to a position of parity and equality?
THE FUTURE OF WORK AND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT
What will work look like 10 years from now?
How can we imagine a world where the work/capital relation doesn’t drive the social contract?
How can decoupling of work from “surviving” produce a different society with different values? What does a post-work economy look like?
What other forms of compensation are possible, imaginable, and can we produce images for them?
Does the social contract recognize life outside the labor /capital equation?
MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES, NEW FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION ECONOMIC JUSTICE
Marginalized communities who have been excluded or sidelined from the formal economy have developed alternative systems of exchange. These communities have had to develop cooperative economies, barter systems and other expanded notions of work.
How does knowledge and experience, which exists outside the academy, get valorized and included? How does this knowledge get shared, and what does it offer us as we move into new paradigms of labor and work?
What do these communities have to teach us, what might they model for the future? And most importantly, how does economic justice figure into all of these questions?
EB: Why do you think you are drawn to exploring economic justice in your work today? Why is it crucial to you explore this topic now?
DE: Work constitutes along with gender, family, race and class, an essential social construct, and consequently, a social contract. Under Capitalism, earning a living is not a choice but a demand. And ever since Marx theorized labor-power and the commodification of labor, work has been differentiated and compensated according to the rule of law, economic rules of the market, and the social codes of gender, race, and class. Determined and defined by historical precedent, the dominating assumptions have been that the system is fair, equitable, color-blind, reasonable and rational. It is none of these. There remains little room for those who don’t succeed and these regimes have produced wildly unjust effects.
Why do the women who raise families, take care of the sick, teach children, and maintain the household earn little or no money, and given little respect for these essential tasks of human reproduction? Why, after many of these essential tasks have been commodified in the service economy, are they compensated so poorly, often below a living wage? How can we discuss and visualize social reproduction from these perspectives?
Even as we have seen the lifting of economic borders and boundaries, the effective use of capital to develop economies globally, and the rapacious expansion of capitalism to every corner of the globe, the unfinished project of the commodification of labor has still not reached inside our own homes. Those who remain at home, taking care of sick parents or young children, remain uncompensated.
Where do these divisions and discrepancies come from? How can we address these disparities of compensation?
What is this social construct we call WORK? What are its rules? Why have we become so dependent on work to ensure our basic existence? Are there other ways society can organize its basic functions other than around work? What would that society look like? What possible alternatives could be acceptable in our current democracy?
We are asking these questions in the wake of historic changes in the nature of work, in the midst of the vast deindustrialization of the Midwest, the increased precarity of maintaining long-term employment, the decades-long pressure on wages to remain low, the astronomical increase in debt, particularly student debt, the attrition in the effective power of labor unions, the rapid movement towards a service economy, the automation of industrial labor, extreme income inequality, and many other dramatic changes.
After the crisis of 2008, and the massive bailouts that were required to stabilize the flow of capital, the political establishment has not adequately dealt with these pressing questions or the populist political turn of workers in the Midwest in 2016.
These destabilizing forces raise essential questions about the viability of our current social constructs and the social contracts we maintain around work and labor.
EB: In the wake of the historic changes in the nature of work that you spoke about, what role do you see art playing in addressing these larger issues?
DE: Perhaps we’re thinking more about creative cultural intervention; the condition that artists, writers, media makers... citizens, can claim the right to speak about things that affect us all without the institutional authorization of ‘expertise’. We all believe in our right to speak, to be heard, to our multiple subjective positions, and the power of these positions. We also believe that we can sometimes be more attune to the exhaustion of forms, rhetoric, protected histories, and of course, political hierarchies than those that operate from within these authorized systems.
As artists, we take it as a given that it’s our responsibility to constantly reform our ways of thinking, feeling, sensing, and acting. It’s what we were trained to do, and what we train our students to do. It’s also our responsibility to do it ethically, collaboratively, inclusively, and with as much consciousness as we can.
Our moment requires the critical analysis we are undertaking, and self-reflection as well... examining the failure of the arguments, the abuse of meritocratic privilege, the ways in which our democracy is unequipped to deal with the effects of the neo-liberal project... particularly for those who’ve suffered the most and who’ve been mostly forgotten. Reflection has allowed us to see the exhaustion of our structures, frames of reference, all the old solutions and hierarchies. They just don’t work anymore.
As artists, writers, and media makers, the imperative to respond to what we perceive as a crisis is clear, but how? The populist response is to divide and exclude, with a desire to return to conditions that can no longer be recuperated or sustained. Artists must instead challenge, provoke, and propose. If the source of insecurity is a perceived revocation of most basic social contract, then we must begin by addressing what it means to be productive, to have a future, to be included, to feel secure. The challenge is to find artwork that sensually and intellectually expresses, depicts, or reveals the contradictions inherent in the current condition... that speaks directly to the problem, and may begin conversations that draw from diverse experiences. Who knows... we may even come up with some compelling propositions to at least some aspects of the current crisis.
In any case, there can be no change in advance of comprehension, empathy, and a sense of shared destiny. Through inclusion and an expanded sense of community, art and culture bridge those gaps of communication.
EB: I appreciate your sentiment that art can help bridge the gap here. Are there other artists, curators, or arts administrators working on the topic of labor that you regard?
DE: Of course... although to be fair, we are more keenly interested in what can be produced from the research... producing a set of conversations and thoughts that motivate new work that may answer some of the questions we’ve raised. There will be familiar names and faces to us all along the way, but we’re not yet near the point of finalizing participants.
EB: You and Ellen are partners and have a history of working together--what are the biggest challenges and the biggest advantages for you and Ellen when working together as the inaugural Faculty Research Fellows at the Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice at SAIC?
DE: Let me clarify something... it’s not just Ellen and myself that are fully engaged here. We are working with a committed team at the Sullivan Galleries that meet regularly: Mary Jane Jacob, Kate Zeller, Trevor Martin, Hannah Barco, Sarah Skaggs, Shannon Waldman, Tess Haratonik, and more occasionally, Steven Plaxco. We couldn’t move any of this forward without their support, expertise, commitment, and investment in the ideas of the project. We learn from each other, respect each other’s expertise and perspective, and we try to model all the ethical dimensions of the project. That in itself is productive and instructive. If there are challenges, we work through them, most often with some humor and self-awareness. The advantages with working with such an experienced team is that we can dream big, and then find out quickly where our limits are, but to be honest...we are still dreaming.
