The 3^rd Industrial Art Biennial (IAB),[1] with more than forty artworks created by Croatian and foreign artists, was supposed to occupy galleries and public spaces in Istria, Raša, Labin, Pula, Rijeka, and Opatija, titled after the well-known Velvet Underground’s song “Ride into the Sun”: “Looking for another place / Someone else to be / Looking for another chance / To ride into the sun….” And while it is still uncertain what will happen to the Biennial as a whole, the Rijeka episode, which should have taken place at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, is now just an imaginary exhibition. One among many art projects abandoned in the ongoing recession, amidst the layoffs and terminations of service contracts. Culture is bound to go down, as the title of the Rijeka episode of IAB We’re Off seems to suggest. From the standpoint of artists as the main victims of precarious work, the MMSU episode wanted to thematize the crisis aspects of labor system, only to also be washed away by the same crisis. With a combination of older works and works commissioned for this event, it was meant to serve as an alternative guide through the unknown roads of working practices: in what ways does work hurt us? And, likewise, how can we enjoy the work?

This exhibition, which encompassed the works of seventeen artists, wanted to explore the in-between zone of work and refusal to work. More precisely, in an attempt to contradict the contemporary pressures of hyperproduction, it sought to present different visions of work and pastime, both of which favor different forms of inaction. These works therefore symbolize an act of rebellion against the crazy demands of the competitive work culture: they seem to negate the artistic work that focuses on aestheticized artefacts and a constant accumulation of art products, but they also reverse the work-related processes. Created from the 1970s onwards, they focus on the topics of rest and inactivity. The goal is to counterbalance the present working rhythms, which, tailored to the needs of the market and hyperproduction, inevitably lead to the demise of the entire system. However, the ongoing race between work and free time is not going to end any time soon. The stakes will only be higher, which means that both the concepts will soon become rare privileges. As artistic attempts of escape from the harsh working conditions seem to suggest here, the struggle continues.


Work as a Form of Reward?

“Of course, there is a humanitarian side of the shorter day and the shorter week, but dwelling on that subject is likely to get one in trouble, for then leisure may be put before work rather than after work – where it belongs.” (Henry Ford)^[2]

Whether we still have the eight-hour workday or we are now working flextime, without a clear beginning or end to our working days, work has a central spot in our everyday lives, and this is what the 3^rd Industrial Art Biennale wanted to explore. The locations where the Biennale was supposed to take place have also influenced the selection of this topic—the Biennale mostly occupies former industrial sites, such as the Rikard Benčić factory, where the MMSU has recently moved in. However, instead of lamenting the destiny of closed factories, we wanted to present these sleeping giants as the places where our predecessors fought for better working conditions, conditions traditionally known as “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.” “The struggle for the eight-hour workday took some time. It started with the demands for cutting the working day from 14, 16 and 18 hours to 10 hours for women and children, but afterwards, slowly and gradually, people began voicing their requests for a normal 8-hour working day. Of course, years had to pass before the demands were finally accepted. In some countries, the eight-hour law was not passed until the 20^th century.”^[3] Nowadays, however, amidst the economic collapse, it seems that the main issue in the history of labor, the question of working hours, is turning into a struggle for preservation of the eight-hour workday, even though it should have been reduced as an effect of the intense technological progress.

The 1970s and 1980s gave rise to amateur films that mocked the idealized image of progress. These films were usually made by photography and film clubs formed at the time in Yugoslavia by worker organizations. They depicted the monotony of work, but they also criticized the prescribed ways of spending free time. The works of Croatian and foreign artists, Petar Trinajstić, Nikola Velčić, Antoni Kreis, Danusz Skubel, and Zdislaw Zincznik, instead of offering the propaganda-based pictures of a working man’s elation, describe the unofficial strategies of coping with a working day, such as moments of leisure that seem to defy the official politics. The work of Bojan Mucko, made in collaboration with pensioners Ajka Koščina and Boris Turčić, is along similar lines. The conversations about fulfillment and exhaustion, about comfortable and uncomfortable tasks, result in a hip-hop song. The participant’s voices, accompanied with sounds produced with different items, recreate the memory of work, with its sorrows and joys that make it man’s biggest obsession and central paradox: we cannot live without it, yet it makes us sick. If we take a look at the span of human life, we can see that we devote all our time to work, from the cradle to the grave—we learn our first words, educate ourselves, look for a job, fulfill the job-related tasks, acquire new qualifications, all the way to retirement. And then, even in retirement, at least in the home environment, we continue to be active. It seems that the endless list of phrases and sayings about work could be expanded with a few more, like work is endurance, and free time is a perk. Or, the one who controls work is also the one who controls free time. The Rijeka episode of the Biennale wanted to explore, among other things, the ways of gaining more control over one’s own work time and free time.

In the economy of spectacle, free time has already been commodified, partly erased by ever more popular flexible working hours and partly “consumed” in consumer activities. Seldom does it include relaxation and contemplation. In the hyper-accelerated society, there is not much room for inner reflection and inertia because, among other things, we are constantly in the “ON” mode, connected to a computer, mobile phone, or some other gadget. In this context, the work of Dragana Sapanjoš is particularly interesting as it thematizes the attempt of escape from this state of being constantly networked.^[4] The work is envisaged as a ride in rented automobiles. Visitors are invited to sit in the back and go for a ride, but they are not allowed to use mobile phones or talk to the driver. The ride is accompanied by music that, with its progressive increase in intensity which is then followed by a decrescendo, mimics life itself. However, the music also mimics the ride, as the route slowly moves away from the city bustle, meanders through the peaceful periphery, to finally return to the beginning. What seems as a spectacular procession of dark automobiles soon reveals itself as a subtle satire on human habits. Each passenger is immersed in their own time capsule, for a full 45 minutes, which is an optimal duration before we start losing concentration. Even with the sounds of music in the background, it turns out that doing nothing, and being with one’s own emotions, is not that easy.^[5] Perhaps we need to work more on our free time? Can music and humming help us in that? In the past, folk poetry often accompanied everyday activities, capturing the people’s wisdom. It helped people get through the day more easily, but it also mocked human need to be work-efficient, like in a poem from an old calendar: “On Sunday I drink wine, on Monday I don’t work. On Tuesday I like to lie down, on Wednesday I get up again, on Thursday I recuperate, on Friday I think a bit, on Saturday I ask myself: ‘What am I to do?’”^[6]

From the Rhythm of Cogwheels to the Speed of Algorithms

“A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. […] This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny.” (Paul Lafargue)^[7]

The works of Pilvi Takala and Antal Lakner explore the modern obsession with action and speculate on different ways of spending free time. Both artists present us with funny violations of working norms and parodies of the body’s “purposeful” movements. Pilvi Takala’s intervention examines social rules at a workplace. Instead of the expected work efficiency, it describes the practices of doing nothing and relaxing at work, which the artist uses to mock the ever-present systems of monitoring people’s work. In order to realize her work, The Trainee, Takala took up a job at a private firm where only a few people knew the true reason of her employment. Once there, she behaved untypically for a workplace—she spent time in contemplation, refused to use computers, took frequent rides in the elevator… Soon, she provoked different reactions in her coworkers, some of whom were confused, and some were paranoid. Everyone started avoiding her and talking behind her back, even though such behaviors, too, should be categorized as unacceptable. In any case, The Trainee avoids any moralizing and uses humor to encourage us to ask ourselves: How satisfied are we with our work? Are we willing to express our frustrations in front of our colleagues? Is there an approved form of leisure, and what kind of mental relaxation is the most acceptable?

Antal Lakner examines the pains of work and the exhaustion of our bodies, from which we recover in different ways—for instance, by taking an afternoon nap, escaping into nature, or spending time in the gym—which have been described both by holy books and popular self-help manuals. Lakner’s INERS series encompasses interactive works that recall workout and anti-stress equipment, which the visitors can try out in the exhibition space. Some of the works function as offline tools that relax your painful muscles, strained from the overuse of computer technology, while other works transform the tiresome stages of work into entertaining and purposeless physical effort. So, what exactly are we doing when we are trying out these surrogates? Are we returning to manual activities, which are increasingly forgotten amidst technological progress and automatization?^[8] Or are we working on our own selves, optimizing our bodies to make them more sustainable and efficient? Many philosophers, sociologists, and artists have dealt with the contradictory idea of rest as the prerequisite for better work readiness. Lakner also reflects on it, and he does it in a humorous way. INERS converts the gallery space into a “fitness club,” but not without an ironic commentary on the inevitable transformation of labor system where it is hard to draw a line between work time and free time, and differentiate automatized gestures from spontaneous activities and true relaxation. And while we are sweating away on Lakner’s gear, we cannot but wonder: do we relax even when we work and, vice versa, can we work and relax at the same time?

Silvio Lorusso’s work also thematizes the troubles of modern society, where people are constantly “ON.” Presented in the form of the question, Shouldn’t You Be Working?, it occupies places where you least expect it, such as the MMSU façade. The line is taken from “StayFocusd”, an extension for Google Chrome that pops up on your screen when you spend too much time browsing the web, helping you stay focused on your work. And just like the pop-up that appears on your screen, warning you that the time for surfing social media has run out, Lorusso’s intervention surprises us by being placed in public space. What would you do when you spot it—laugh it off or be triggered back into productive mode?^[9] Particularly in the context of museum workers, who are often believed to do nothing, Lorusso’s question offers us an opportunity to make jokes at our own expense and to laugh at our own image. It also makes us think more about the disparagement of culture, the sector that cannot keep up with economically measurable activities anyway. This inability of culture to measure up is often used in populistic speeches to provoke antagonism towards it, thus distracting people from serious economic problems and inequality between workers and political elites.

“To sit on one’s hands” is a well-known expression that may be correlated to the one used by Lorusso in his work. In the cynical twist of late capitalism, this funny phrase has become the stigma of those who have free time against their own will, i.e., people who can’t find work. In other words, it has been turned into an alibi for labeling jobless people as lazy and socially undesirable. “The division of people into those who work and those who don’t work—the diligent and the do-nothings, the hardworking and the layabouts, the eager-beavers and the sinecurists—is not new; yet, over the past years it has become the main ideological matrix that permeates people’s opinions. The category of idlers and bums have been joined by armies of the unemployed (whom the employed label as useless and incompetent), the misérables, the indignados and various groups of nationally, geographically and ethnically tagged people […] Refuges and migrants sit on their hands, too. They have nothing better to do than knocking at the doors of rich countries, which are supposed to give them life of leisure at taxpayer expense […].”^[10]

Time as Artistic Material: The Aesthetics of Silence and Absence

“One day you might just explode. Thousands of tiny particles in the air. […] Embark on a fresh new start. Never look back.“ (Ioana Nemeș)[11]

Time for work and time for break, and the thin line between them, especially in artistic professions, were the motifs of several works planned for this exhibition. They address time as an invisible but constant life phenomenon. “The different ways in which we use the word should be enough to show that we don't have a precise definition for it. The most elusive of the seven fundamental physical quantities in the International System of Units, we don't really know 'what' we think time is. […] Will it only ever move forward? Toward what? Could it slow down? […] Would we notice? Why does it fly for those having fun but drag on and on for the bored […]?”^[12] The logic of the clock and its punctuality that keeps surging forward is contrasted with a personal experience of time, sometimes meditative, sometimes wearisome and depressing. These intimate and metaphysical aspects of time are what Ioana Nemeș explores in her work Monthly Evaluations. The artist, who died suddenly at a young age, started her career in art in her twenties, after leaving professional sports. In her work, she often investigated the logic of competing and the fear of failure and stress that come with it. The moments of creation of a work of art, crises and anxieties that are usually hidden from spectators’ eyes are now revealed, becoming part of her enigmatic daily notes such as Dreams Do Dream Us, Don't They? We see Ioana’s changeable metaphysical states “catalogued” according to different parameters of physical and emotional energy, intellect, financial aspects, and happiness, with positive and negative signs and specific colors. In her obsessive attempt of self-evaluation, the artist ironizes managerial standards that tend to be used even for evaluations of subjective experience, such as our feeling for time or our creative outputs.

The characteristic of Tehching Hsieh’s work is the affirmation of artistic practice based on self-renunciation and negation of one’s own productivity. Best known for his marathon performances, Hsieh presents himself with a documentation of works performed between 1978 and 1999. In his one-year-long performances, Hsieh questions the limits of psychophysical endurance. He completely interweaves the sphere of art and life, making the usual division between work time and free time more complex. All of this comes under the motto Life is a life sentence; life is passing time; life is freethinking. The first four performances feature restrictive actions in private, intimate, and public spaces. Whether he locks himself in a cage without any contact with the outer world (Cage Piece), subjects his biological rhythm to the length of one hour with a clock that marks the expiry of the set time (Time Clock Piece), spends a whole year outdoors with scant supplies and no shelter (Outdoor Piece), or ties himself with a rope to Linda Montano, his partner, in a confined space with no physical contact (Rope Piece), Hsieh’s performances play with the idea of the creator, the self-confident homo faber, suggesting absurdity and renunciation as integral parts of life, and possibly, a form of freedom.  The last two works, of meagre aesthetics as well, reflect the artist’s intention to become invisible. These are No Art Piece (1985 –1986), where Hsieh decides to quit doing art, and Thirteen Year Plan (1986 – 1999), with which he terminates public display of his works.

Hsieh is one of those ultimate authors who have decided to discontinue exhibiting art and withdraw from the public eye entirely or for some time, like Marcel Duchamp, Ivo Gattin, Gustav Metzger, and Ida Biard. The unusual case of Bas Jan Ader is along similar lines. In Search of the Miraculous (1975) presents Ader’s attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a small sailboat, which ended in his disappearance on the open sea. It had been devised as a trilogy, whose central part directly deals with the artist’s last voyage. It was filmed at the start of Ader’s crossing and shows the farewell performance with the artist and the choir dressed in black singing sea shanties. The circumstances of Ader’s disappearance led to various theories. Some romanticized the artist as an uncompromising hero, while others saw In Search of the Miraculous as a tragic accident. There were also speculations that the work was meant to be the last farewell to the world, a part of a planned suicide. In any case, this grandiosely envisaged endeavor seems like an act of utter renunciation more than anything else, and it is precisely because of its utmost extremity that it has become anthological.

Progress Frenzy and Termination of Action—What Kind of Work Can We Celebrate?

“Work-centred visions of social progress continue to be promoted, even though there are not enough paid jobs to go around, and people's lives become dominated by the struggle to find and keep work.” (David Frayne)[13]

The marathon-like pace of progress described in the saying bigger, stronger, faster, which demands constant effectiveness and competition, without reflecting on its negative sides, is what several works here have in common. Instead of speed, a seemingly positive prefix for progress, some art pieces propose its counterpart—slowness. They show how with a minimum of energy we can achieve an effect of high intensity while at the same time turn the original state of lethargy and resignation into a form of silent protest. A fitting example of this is the night intervention of Goran Petercol, planned on the Korzo, the main city promenade. This minimalist action is based on the medium of light being a precondition of any visibility. It plays with the meaning of illumination in its narrow and broad sense: to shed light on something, to illumine from all sides so that everything is well-lit, that is, to explain or elucidate a certain issue. However, Petercol goes on to research the excess of light, the intensified light effect, pointing to the absence of content and lack of transparency in what is being illuminated in this way. The street action is planned to take place in front of the Mali Salon, the MMSU exhibition venue for seventy years, and one of the rare cultural facilities in the city center that was converted into a TV studio in 2019, for the purpose of covering programs of the European Capital of Culture—Rijeka 2020. The Mali Salon, with its glass façade facing the street does not show much activity anyway. Apart from the filming equipment and the set, there is nothing substantial going on inside. What kind of work is truly visible on Korzo Street, and which of these activities only simulate employment?

Non-invasive interventions in the present state of affairs are characteristic of another artist who is known as “one of those who produce ideas, instead of consuming work materials.”^[14] Postconceptualist Mladen Stilinović often examined the work-nonwork conflict, as well as the stereotypical visions of artists as constantly active creators. Subtraction of Zeros is based on a transformation of action into nonaction. In this work, the author does not seem to create anything. More precisely, he creates zeros and then subtracts them, until he reaches a zero-like state on an empty canvas. The artist’s mathematical operations with zeros indicate doubt in the unconditional progress based on commercial profit that slowly but surely pushes us to the edge of sustainability. They deal with nonproductive values, which is accentuated with emptiness and monochromacy of the “paintings.” Like in his parodies of ideological phrases, laziness and inactivity are defined as important factors of creativity. However, moments of anxiety and dullness and are also present here, as vital elements of creativity and suppressed forms of communication. In Stilinović’s own words, “Laziness is the absence of movement and thought, dumb time—total amnesia. It is also indifference, staring at nothing, non-activity, impotence. It is mere stupidity, a time of pain, futile concentration. Those virtues of laziness are important factors in art. Knowing about laziness is not enough. It must be practiced and perfected.”[15]

The idealized images of labor and the society of prosperity, with endless production that makes moments of rest and recuperation impossible, are also thematized by Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla. In Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano, No.1., the artists perform, upside down and backwards, a part of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony known today as the official anthem of the European Union. The musician plays the piano while standing in a hole carved in the instrument’s center, leaning out over the keyboard. Walking while playing, he moves the instrument, which is mounted on wheels, slowly across the floor. Because of the hole in the piano, part of the keyboard is not working, so the visitors hear a structurally incomplete version. The reversed melody emphasizes the contradictions of the legendary composition that has become as a symbol of humanist values and national pride in ideologically disparate contexts, from the Chinese Cultural Revolution to the Third Reich.[16] Its preapocalyptic sound anticipates the need for creating a renewable world, also addressing the idea of progress that proves to be an unstable fiction, subjected to variable sociopolitical circumstances.

The works of Alicja Rogalska and art collective Apparatus 22 explore the ways of creating more benevolent conditions of labor. The installation by Apparatus 22, Art is Work, is a work-in-progress. One part of the work consists of workers’ overalls, which recall Rikard Benčić’s past, when the building was a factory. Contradictory statements written on the overalls, about the career and position of artists, such as “I've got an artist fee in this exhibition” or “I didn't get paid for my work in this exhibition, do you really think artists feed on glory?” spark discussions on the precarious work of artists as well as the evaluation of such work, which often excludes fees. The second part of the work consists of videos that show conversations with artists from different parts of the world. The artists respond to questions “Why do you think art is work?” or “Why is contemporary art vital for society?” By participating in these conversations, the artists are virally spreading the discussion on the precarity of artists’ work. Instead of insisting on individualism, Art is Work promotes ideas of teamwork, based on the principles of free exchange and creation with available means.

While Art is Work primarily deals with the role of artists in society, the video of Alicja Rogalska, which was supposed to be filmed at MMSU-u, is preoccupied with the health of cultural workers and the possibility of their “healing” with nonconventional methods. Rogalska even intended to invite a local medium to assist her in her assessment of physical and mental state of “culture. This is an interesting move, because both professions are in a vulnerable situation in terms of status—they are seen as irrelevant in comparison to “meaningful” professions. Moreover, in times of recession, the cultural sector is the first to undergo cuts, like its “health” isn’t bad enough as it is. Alicja’s collaboration with the medium, which was meant to take place in the form of treatment and conversation with MMSU employees, relies on alternative visions of healthy life, including bioenergetics and nonverbal communication. By doing so, Alicja shakes our confidence in the “normalcy” of labor conditions. And while we rationally fulfill our daily tasks, the question is: How rational is the labor system itself? Why don’t we adopt “irrational” methods in its transformation then?

The Return to “Normalcy”

“I would also suggest that we use the annual leave twice a year, for six months. You never know, this could be a way to achieve the annual target. Because for now, the annual target is classified in our company books as ‘wishful thinking’.” (Zezavko Kinezić)[17]

The idea of work as a source of meaning is as complicated as the idea of free time. The crisis of one is related to the crisis of the other; depending on circumstances, they can be both a reward and a curse. In this imaginary exhibition, work occupies us on a conceptual level, as an unrestricted, creative time that is not subjected to profit earning. Rather, we see it as the time for contemplation, relaxation, and the creation of alternative scenarios, which also includes moments of doubt, discomfort, pain… And we are using it to counterbalance the competitiveness that marginalizes inactivity and defines moments of rest as something undesirable. The current slowdown or cessation in production and consumption makes us suspicious of economic growth as the only driver of prosperity, but it also calls work as the primary source of self-identification into question.

We’re Off is envisioned as an experimental lab that investigates the above-described topics. In contrast to the traditional definitions of work as an undoubtedly purposeful activity, it depicts human activity as an interplay of free choice and resignation with the pressures of competitiveness, as a fulfillment and denial of roles that are given to us. Combining cultural, anthropological, and artistic perspectives, it advocates an arbitrary approach to social rules about work. Unlike the (self-)exhausting work practices and burnout that have been affecting the modern world, it promotes different modes of inactivity—not as a form of shirking from duties, but as a rebellion against the idealization of work. In its examination of work ethics and propositions of different models, it relies on the practices of non-work, leisure, recuperation, meditation… We’re Off encourages us to imagine an equal distribution of work time and free time and to laugh at the ideology of progress. It inspires us to resist the need to be constantly productive. There is a Slavic folk poem that says: “If you are as busy as a bee, as perseverant as an ant, as strong as a bear; if you carry loads like an ox, and in the evening you feel like a beaten dog, you must go to the vet immediately, because you might have already turned into a jackass.”

I would like to thank all the artists and lenders of the works planned for this exhibition, the designers of the visuals that accompany this text, Marino Krstačić Furić & Ana Tomić, and the translator Lidija Toman.

Ksenija Orelj (Rijeka, 1979) studied art history and German language and literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb and took a master’s degree in curatorial cultures at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts in 2013. In 2011, she took part in the Intensive Curatorial Course, ICI, NY and in 2018 she was a curator-in residency at the Museumsquartier in Vienna, Q21. Orelj is a member of Croatian Section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). She is currently working as a senior curator at the Rijeka Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art / MMSU (mmsu.hr).