18/2/2010
Allan Sekula
e-flux, New York
Allan Sekula's 1974 photo-text work, This Ain't China: A Photonovel, announces the artist's early attention to China as a foil for Western paradigms of production cultural and economic. The work combines a (meta)narrative with staged photographs, shot in the spirit of Jean-Luc Godard (in a Maoist phase and channeling Bertolt Brecht). Curated by Monika Szewczyk.
Curated by Monika Szewczyk
"the cook liked to believe that his story pivoted on a parable about the relative merits of fact and fiction in everyday class struggle".
from Allan Sekula's This Ain't China: A Photonovel (1974)
Allan Sekula's 1974 photo-text work, This Ain't China: A Photonovel, announces the artist's early attention to China as a foil for Western paradigms of production—cultural and economic. The work combines a (meta)narrative with staged photographs, shot in the spirit of Jean-Luc Godard (in a Maoist phase and channeling Bertolt Brecht). Sekula's plot concerns the employees of a greasy spoon restaurant in San Diego (artist included), all musing about working and living conditions, and plotting a strike—a microcosm implicated in a global imaginary, transformed by the presence of a different culture. This Ain't China was made at a time of great interest—especially amongst left-leaning Western artists and intellectuals—in the possibilities of Maoism. Yet the counter-example of China, and its negation, remain elusive. In the ambiguous way it is evoked, China could be both the country at the height of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and fine dinnerware (porcelain or "fine china").
Presenting the work in 2010 raises the question of how both these Chinas—as well as today's People's Republic, with its (ever enigmatic) embrace of capitalist manufacturing and consumption with a communist face—continue to configure imaginaries of alternative forms of production. Sekula's 1974 photonovel is paired with a new work: a backlit transparency made for the storefront window of the e-flux space on Essex Street in New York's Chinatown. The image was captured while the artist was doing research in one of China's "special economic zones" near the port city of Guangzhou for a forthcoming documentary on working conditions in and around the world's most active ports. It shows a young Chinese factory worker holding part of a kitchen appliance she is helping to manufacture, her eyes closed. The image may be seen as evidence of Sekula's shift from staged photography to a documentary approach, and opens a question concerning the artist's paths to realism. And yet the new image shares an element of refusal with the earlier photonovel.
A solo-show of two works, This Ain't China: A Photonovel (1974) and Eyes Closed Assembly Line (2010), thus enables the visitor to trace key trajectories for Allan Sekula's entire practice. The investigation of his special interest in China leads to other questions concerning the politics and aesthetics of working class refusal, what we might call an "attitude of ain't."
This Ain't China is open to the public from Tuesday through Saturday, 12–6 pm at 41 Essex Street, lower level.
Allan Sekula is an artist whose innovation of photographic practice and theory centers on the engagement of documentary and performative forms in a sustained critique of economic, social and cultural globalization. He has exhibited extensively in the context of large-scale international exhibitions, including documenta 11 and 12. In 2003, Performance Under Working Conditions, a major retrospective exhibition with a publication on his work was organized by the Generali Foundation in Vienna. Currently a selection of works spanning the artist's career, including early works and a new series, have been brought together in Polonia and Other Fables, which tours to The Renaissance Society in Chicago; Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw; Museum Ludwig in Budapest and Belfast Exposed.
Monika Szewczyk is a writer, editor and some-time curator based in Berlin and Rotterdam, where she is head of publications at Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art. Her collaboration with Allan Sekula, focusing on This Ain't China: A Photonovel, continues in the Summer of 2010 when the photonovel and a selection of new photographs will be featured in the group exhibition Nether Land (Act VIII of Witte de With's year-long multi-part program with the leitmotif of 'morality'), which will be presented in the context of the 2010 World Expo at the Dutch Culture Center in Shanghai.
A conversation between curator Monika Szewczyk and the artist will be held at The Cooper Union on February 22, 2010 at 6:30 pm with free admission.
Image: Allan Sekula, This Ain't China: A Photonovel (1974)
Courtesy of the artist and Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica
For further information please contact taraneh@e-flux.com.
Opening: Friday, February 19, 2010, 6-8pm
e-flux
41 Essex Street, New York City