Sweatshop

Installation.

TV screen, video ca. 12 minutes, wallpaper photo, t-shirts.

year: 2012

Underage sweatshop workers making t-shirts, India.

This is not an attempt at questioning a possibility of change or at dragging art into a political or socio- political or ethico-aesthetic discourse; nor is it an effort to start a dialogue or a discussion of its actual pros and cons. Such an attempt would bring no results whatsoever in battle against the phenomenon presented here, nor would it constitute any meaningful example.

In the act of hiring underage sweatshop workers to produce t-shirts, theory gets united with practice by a different set of rules. It can be assumed that whoever is condemned to working in an illegal t-shirt-producing sweatshop has brought this on himself.

Rules of conduct in a sweatshop are arbitrary, but through slave labor the oppressive power gets activated, and it supports the status quo while officially trying to eradicate it by earning profits from such exploitation.

The victim activates the power that becomes her oppressor. “In order for a change to occur, everything has to stay the same.”

In this case, the oppressor – people in power – is capable of making their false resemblance effective, while the art involved with discussing this phenomenon remains ineffective, false and entrenched in its own reality.

Despite the strict and sworn secrecy surrounding this business, there is nothing secret or private about it: everything is official and transpires in the open.

Everything that transpires outside the law becomes marked by a sense of adventure and independence which allegedly makes people free – and this misguided sense of freedom allows them to forever dwell on the shallows of their own hypocrisy. The question remains, whether they can ever be capable of reaching for what is real, independent and truly free.


“At this point art entered into infinite reproduction, with everything that doubles itself, even the banal reality of the everyday, falling by the same token under the sign of art and becoming aesthetic. The same goes for production, which we might say has today entered into aesthetic: reduplication, the phase where, expelling all content and all finality, it becomes somehow abstract and non-figurative . In this way it expresses the pure form of production, taking upon itself, as art does, the value of the finality without end. An ‘and industry may then exchange their signs: art can become a reproduction machine (Andy Warhol) without ceasing to be art, since the machine is now nothing but a sign. Production can also lose all its social finality as its means of verification, and finally glorify [itself].” Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death


It may be proposed that these t-shirts are sold as art objects in order to generate a tangible dimension and real help, and this way to achieve socio-political and aesthetic goals of art… This, however, is not my intention. T-shirts are being sold separately, as art objects produced illegally by minors. Each t-shirts comes with a serial number and a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

The slogans printed on t-shirts work as campaign logos.


T-shirt 1

ONLY GAMES CHANGE THE WORLD
THE PERFORATE THE GREATEST DEFEAT INTO SUCCESS
Creating one’s own thing, pass one’s experience, one’s point of view
METAPHYSICAL BEAUTY OF CRISES
EX TERESA

An artist,not as narrator or history documentalist, but
as producer, a causative factor: an artist is around when
things only start shaping up, when decision are just being
made, and acts equally with other factors - agents of change.

RE-NEGOTIATION OF SOCIAL AGREEMENT
TO SATISFY THE NEEDS OF MODERN MASSES
Liberal attitude is directly related to moral attitude.


T-shirt 2

There are no failures in political art, just imperfections
Suggestions of alternative social and political solutions
have to start appearing, whatever they are to be.
A COMMON REPETITIVE ROUTINES IS NEEDED

It’s important for every “branch” to have its own objectives and strategies.

MASS CULTURE NEEDS CONTINUATION
Expanding consciousness and achieving social changes using artistic means.
IGNORANCE IS INSIGNIFICANT IN PRACTICAL USE
The strategy of implementing art into the social fabric.


T-shirt 3

DECISION OF ONE PARTICIPANT DOES NOT HAVE ANY MEANING
Radicalism in realm of art may not always be
translatable into cultural standards.
FOR PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS IGNORANCE IS INSIGNIFICANT

You can make social changes using art.

AN EXPERT OF WHAT APPEALS TO AN ORDINARY MORTAL
How to explain a situation or a problem to a dead hare
PROMOTION MAKES UP FOR SHORTCOMINGS
I would like the ideal worlds that are born in the artist’s
imagination to be able to come into existence in reality,
even if they were to be imperfect.


T-shirt 4

Acting in art is a map of escape
IS ECONOMY AND ART ASSOCIATED WITH HUMAN IMAGINATION?
Our individual pleasure raise the level of society.
THE END OF REBELLION OF THE MASSES
PROHIBITION IS A GAME OF REPEATED ENTERTAINMENT

If you create art with a political effect in the social space,
you neither contemplate nor celebrate your failures: on the contrary,
you have to handle the dysfunctions.

THERE ARE NO FAILURES IN POLITICAL ART, JUST IMPERFECTIONS
REVOLUTION NEEDS CONSUMERS

Sweatshop - trailer
Sweatshop - how it works