Workers leaving the factory... and entering the museum
(Sharon Lockhart, Lunch Break Installation)
It is quite curious that the first films ever made by Louis Lumière show workers leaving the factory. At the beginning of cinema, workers leave the industrial workplace. The invention of cinema thus symbolically marks the start of the exodus of workers from industrial modes of production. But even if they leave the factory building, it doesn’t mean that they have left labor behind. Rather, they take it along with them and disperse it into every sector of life.
A brilliant installation by Harun Farocki makes clear where the workers leaving the factory are headed. Farocki collected and installed different cinematic versions of Workers Leaving the Factory, from the original silent version(s) by Lumière to contemporary surveillance footage.11 Workers are streaming out of factories on several monitors simultaneously: from different eras and in different cinematic styles. But where are these workers streaming to? Into the art space, where the work is installed.
Not only is Farocki’s Workers Leaving the Factory, on the level of content, a wonderful archaeology of the (non)representation of labor; on the level of form it points to the spilling over of the factory into the art space. Workers who left the factory have ended up inside another one: the museum.
It might even be the same factory. Because the former Lumière factory, whose gates are portrayed in the original Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory is today just that: a museum of cinema. In 1995, the ruin of the former factory was declared a historical monument and developed into a site of culture. The Lumière factory, which used to produce photographic film, is today a cinema with a reception space to be rented by companies: “a location loaded with history and emotion for your brunches, cocktails and dinners.”14 The workers who left the factory in 1895 have today been recaptured on the screen of the cinema within the same space. They only left the factory to reemerge as a spectacle inside it.
As workers exit the factory, the space they enter is one of cinema and cultural industry, producing emotion and attention. How do its spectators look inside this new factory?
It is obvious that the space of the factory is traditionally more or less invisible in public. Its visibility is policed, and surveillance produces a one-way gaze. Paradoxically, a museum is not so different. In a lucid 1972 interview Godard pointed out that, because filming is prohibited in factories, museums, and airports, effectively 80 percent of productive activity in France is rendered invisible: “The exploiter doesn’t show the exploitation to the exploited.” This still applies today, if for different reasons. Museums prohibit filming or charge exor- bitant shooting fees.19 Just as the work performed in the factory cannot be shown outside it, most of the works on display in a museum cannot be shown outside its walls. A paradoxical situation arises: a museum predicated on producing and marketing visibility can itself not be shown—the labor performed there is just as publicly invisible as that of any sausage factory.
Without notice, the question of political cinema has been inverted. What began as a discus- sion of political cinema in the museum has turned into a question of cinematic politics in a factory. Traditionally, political cinema was meant to educate—it was an instrumental effort at “representation” in order to achieve its effects in “reality.” It was measured in terms of efficiency, of revolutionary revelation, of gains in consciousness, or as potential triggers of action.
Today, cinematic politics are post-representational. They do not educate the crowd, but produce it. They articulate the crowd in space and in time. They submerge it in partial invisibility and then orchestrate their dispersion, movement, and reconfiguration. They organize the crowd without preaching to it. They replace the gaze of the bourgeois sovereign spectator of the white cube with the incomplete, obscured, fractured, and overwhelmed vision of the spectator-as-laborer.
What else is desperately missing from the museum-as-factory? An exit. If the factory is everywhere, then there is no longer a gate by which to leave it—there is no way to escape relentless productivity. Political cinema could then become the screen through which people could leave the museum-as-social-factory. But on which screen could this exit take place? On the one that is currently missing, of course.
From Hito Steyerl's "Is the Museum a Factory?" The Wretched of the Screen. Sternberg press, 2013.
http://indexofpotential.net/uploads/46385/Steyerl,%20Hito%20-%20The%20Wretched%20of%20the%20Screen.pdf