Inkwell and Dates: Labor in Exhibitions “Objects of Pride and Shame” and “Gastev. How to Work”

Abstract

This article investigates labor through the interpretation of modern artistic practices. Two exhibitions have been chosen as examples. The first one is the exhibition of Vladimir Arkhipov's collection of folk things; the second one is “Gastev. How to Work'' dedicated to Alexey Gastev. The exhibitions were held at the PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art in 2021. The author conducts a comparative cross-temporal study of the results of labor and the labor process focusing on the phenomenon of a folk thing investigated by artist Vladimir Arkhipov for more than two decades and idealistic reference ideas of scientifically regulated labor norms and standards developed by Alexei Gastev and the Central Institute of Labor in the 1920s. The comparative study will rely on the paradigms of re-thinking the labor in the mid-20th and early 21st centuries by scientists such as A. Honneth, Z. Bauman, M. Heidegger, G. Standing, and H. Arendt and the contemporary philosophical research on the issue of ontologies, namely the flat ones, undertaken by B. Latour and T. Morton. The methods designed during the evolution of the theoretical representation and understanding of labor in the second half of the 19th century and at the end of the 20th century allow for tracing and exploring the path from the forced labor to the free one focusing on artistic practices. This comparison will refer to the analysis of labor as a process. Contemporary approaches in the field of ontology, namely the flat ontology, have been used as a methodology for analyzing the transformation of perceiving the labor outcomes. Both the labor process and its results have been analyzed along the trajectory of the subject-object relations. The paper proposes a definition of the perception and product of labor under the modern socio-economic and sociopolitical conditions through the prism of artistic ideas.