Exhibition and performative lectures curated by Olga Dekalo and Aily Nash with works by Harun Farocki, Lucy Raven and Andrew Norman Wilson
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FRIDAY JULY 12 – SUNDAY JULY 14 

Friday, July 12
6-8 pm Opening reception
8 pm Andrew Norman Wilson, Movement Materials and What We Can Do powerPoint performance

Saturday, July 13
1-10 pm Gallery hours
8 pm Lucy Raven Motion Capture illustrated lecture

Sunday, July 14
1-6 pm Gallery hours
2pm Dream Factory Screening curated by Aily Nash and Andrew Norman Wilson

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To Look is to Labor addresses the exhibition space of the Basilica Hudson, a 19th century former foundry and glue factory repurposed as an arts and performance space. The project considers the Basilica as a former site of industrial labor and asks: how does screening images of labor and production in a now defunct factory transform the (art)work in the space as well as our understanding of the sociopolitical mechanisms which have altered the use of the space itself?

The exhibition includes works by artists Harun Farocki, Lucy Raven and Andrew Norman Wilson who investigate the multivalent implications of what it means for images to work— demonstrated in depictions of laborers departing the workplace throughout the history of cinema, in representation of post-fordist conditions of image production, and in the exploration of images in relation to the spectator’s own production of meaning.

The project’s larger question is: How does observing these (art)works within Basilica’s context and history activate the spectator’s relationship to the boundaries between work and leisure? And what does it mean that the site of labor has been altered in such a way that people now enter the factory as a place to spend their free time? In the essay, “Is a Museum a Factory?” filmmaker and theorist Hito Steyerl explains, “The typical setup of the museum-as-factory looks like this. Before: an industrial workplace. Now: people spending their leisure time in front of TV monitors. Before: people working in these factories. Now: people working at home in front of computer monitors.” Now one enters a factory—often transformed into the space of the museum—during one’s leisure time to willingly submit to the regimented confines of cinematic time, to look at (art)work, and to take part in cultural production. Mining this critique,To Look is to Labor aims to emphasize an increased awareness of participation and a renewed sense of agency with which we come to experience the moving image.

HARON FAROCKI

Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades (2006)
video installation for 12 monitors, running time: various
Comprising a century of cinematic history, from La Sortie de l’usine Lumiere a Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory in Lyon) (1895) to Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000), Harun Farocki’s twelve monitor installation isolates the borderline moment between work and leisure—the transition from the confines of regimented production time to that of “free” time as depicted throughout the history of film.

In Comparison (2009)
16mm to video, 61 min
In Comparison follows various modes of brick produc- tion in Africa, India, and Europe. The filmmaker reveals a range of technical strategies of how bricks are laid, transported and fired,commentingon how these working processes organize our social structures.

Harun Farocki is an author, filmmaker, and curator. Since 1966 he has created over 100 productions for film and television. Since 1995 he has become increasingly involved in the exhibition context, produced video installations for a gallery setting, and had numerous group and solo exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide. Farocki has written for many publications, and from 1974 – 1984 he was the author and editor of the influential journal Filmkritik (Munich). He was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1993 – 1999, and is currently full professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Farocki lives and works in Berlin.

LUCY RAVEN
China Town (2009)
photographic animation, 51:30 min
China Town traces copper mining and production from an open pit mine in Nevada to a smelter in China, where the semi-processed ore is sent to be smelted and refined. Considering what it actually means to “be wired” and in turn, to be connected, in today’s global economic system, the video follows the detailed production process that transforms raw ore into copper wire—in this case, the literal digging of a hole to China—and the generation of waste and of power that grows in both countries as byproduct. -Lucy Raven

Motion Capture (2013)
illustrated lecture
For her new illustrated lecture, Raven tracks the biography and technological innovations of animator Max Fleischer alongside those of Oskar Fischinger, Walt Disney, and other early animators, to explore systems used for capturing naturalistic and mechanistic movement in animation from its beginnings through the present.

Lucy Raven’s animated films and performative lectures have recently been included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, New York, and have been the subject of her 2012 solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Her photographic animation, China Town (2009), has screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Bradford International Film Festival, UK and Overgaarden, Copenhagen. She was the co-founder and co-editor of an audio magazine The Relay Project and is a contributing editor to BOMB magazine. In 2010 Raven was the co-curator of Nachleben with Fionn Meade at the Goethe Institute, New York. She works and resides in Oakland, CA and New York.

ANDREW NORMAN WILSON
Movement Materials and What We Can Do (2012)
PowerPoint performance
In Movement Materials and What We Can Do, Andrew Norman Wilson employs corporate, academic and artistic lecture techniques to the intertwining concerns of his projects Workers Leaving the Googleplex and ScanOps, which are based on Google Books images in which software distortions, the scanning site and the hands of the book-scanning “ScanOps” employees are visible. Medium-specific considerations and various histories of film/video, photography and publishing media are addressed, emphasizing the materiality of both analog and digital media and the labor processes they entail.

Workers Leaving the Googleplex (2011)
HD, 11 min
Wilson’s installation, Workers Leaving the Googleplex, features illicit footage of marginalized class of Google Books “ScanOps” workers at Google’s international corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley. Situated within a motion picture history of Lumière Brothers’ Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895), and Farocki’s Workers Leaving the Factory (1995), the piece addresses the transformations and continuities in arrangements of labor, media and information.

In 2013 Andrew Norman Wilson participated in Palazzo Peckham at the 55th Venice Biennale, Art Basel with Art Metropole, Betonsalon in Paris, Steve Turner Contemporary in Los Angeles, and Carroll / Fletcher in London. He recently had a solo show at threewalls in Chicago entitled The Refrain: Medfield/Walpole, and is preparing solo shows for Club Midnight in Berlin and Important Projects in Oakland, California. He was an artist in residence at Impakt in Utrecht and at the Headlands Center. His work has been featured in Aperture, DIS Magazine, Tank Magazine, and Artforum. Wilson currently lives and works in New York.

DREAM FACTORY screening
curated by Aily Nash and Andrew Norman Wilson

Examining new forms of labor, consumption-as-production, and the aesthetics and visual language of capitalistic globalized “lifestyles,” the moving image and media work in this program recapitulate corporate imagery and language as both a critique and recognition of the omnipotence of these systems. Works by Michael Bell-Smith, Neil Beloufa, Harm van den Dorpel, Harun Farocki, Mark Leckey, Hito Steyerl, Pilvi Takala.

Olga Dekalo is a curator based in New York and is a graduate of CCS Bard.

Aily Nash is a curator and writer based in New York. She curates films at Basilica Hudson, and works for the Berlinale Film Festival.