Full Description
This title was first published in 2000. Published in two volumes, "Work and the Image" addresses a critical theme in contemporary social and cultural debates whose place in visual representation has been neglected. Ranging from Greek pottery to contemporary performance, and exploring a breadth of geo-national perspectives including those of France, Britain, Hungary, Soviet Russia, the Ukraine, Siberia and Germany, the essays provide a challenging reconsideration of the image of work, the meaning of the work process, and the complex issues around artistic activity as itself a form of work even as it offers a representation of labour. With a shared focus on the 20th century, the era of modernity and its postmodern aftermath, the essays in this volume examine the diverse ways in which the social relations of work in industrial societies from both capitalist and socialist regimes were publicly and privately mediated by changing forms of visual representation. The authors discuss traditional analyses of the image of the worker in the light of contemporary critical theories that address the question of the subjectivity of the worker in relation to class, gender, nationhood and the concept of modernity.
Contents
Introduction: trauma and subjectivity in work and worklessness; 1: 'Living tableaux of misery and oppression': sweated labour on tour 1; 2: Facing horror: women's work, sculptural practice and the Great War; 3: Colour, light and labour: Futurism and the dissolution of work; 4: The missing mécanicienne : gender, production and order in Léger's machine aesthetic; 5: 'A progressive dematerialisation of labour power': 1 a problem for visual representation in Germany in the 1920s; 6: From cyborg to state worker: figures as/in technology; 7: Realism and ideology in André Fougeron's Le Pays des Mines 1; 8: Working images: the representations of documentary film; 9: The pathos of the political: documentary, subjectivity and a forgotten moment of feminist avant-garde poetics in four films from the 1970s; 10: Teletales from the crypt
