CANDICE BREITZ - LABOUR

LABOUR
CANDICE BREITZ
Feb 29—Apr 30
Opening Friday, Feb 28, 6—10pm

This is what makes art worth loving: Art renders the impossible possible; it makes the inconceivable tangible. In doing so, it can entertain and amaze and appal us simultaneously. In short, it can dazzle and overwhelm us; it can leave us transformed. Candice Breitz’s work is of this kind. This is art that you are unlikely to forget. Her most recent piece, Labour, is an outstanding case in point, amalgamating the most intimate and the most beautiful—(as well as the most horrifying)—aspects of our social life on Earth. Breitz draws the most intense of human experiences into close proximity, using the despots and demons of our times as her conceptual conduit.

A brief description is in order. Four sets of grey curtains delineate a series of narrow booths attached to the gallery’s walls, each just large enough to accommodate a single visitor, who is set in direct encounter with a monitor upon drawing the curtains of each booth aside. Within these intimate settings, we are confronted with scenarios that we are rarely (if ever) able to observe in real life, a series of women in the act of giving birth. Filmed from above, the unchoreographed footage is explicit, capturing the sheer physical presence of each woman in labour. We witness the powerful contractions, the breaking of water, the emergence of the baby’s head, followed by its shoulders; and, finally, the diminutive blood-smeared body as it becomes wholly visible. We are privy to the skilled routines of midwives, to the cutting of umbilical cords, to the magical moment of primary contact between mother and child, to the tenderness of the first touch in the wake of strenuous physical exertion.

What we actually see, however, is something entirely other than what is described above. For, Breitz in fact chooses to stream the featured births in reverse. In experiencing each, we are thus in fact present to gestures that now read as final loving caresses, staged seconds before each tiny human being is re-connected to the umbilical cord, only to then disappear—more or less abruptly—as each baby is sucked ineluctably back into the womb. The maternal belly bulges with pregnancy in the final moments of each video. The child is gone. Cut to black. White letters whisk across the screen, accompanied by the sound of an unborn—(or, to be more accurate, retracted)—heartbeat: M-I-K, we read at the end of one video. In another booth, the letters spell out N-I-T-U-P. In yet another, they read P-M-U-R-T. The text is easy enough to decode: These are names drawn from the swelling ranks of the early twenty-first century’s most notorious tyrants; the foremost dictators, populists and fascists of our times—Kim, Putin, Trump, Bolsonaro. A single name appears at the end of each video, spelt in reverse. If rumours leaked from the artist’s studio can be relied upon, the work of Labour is far from complete: Modi, Erdoğan, Duterte, Orbán and Assad are yet to be undone. There is no end in sight.

A poster-sized manifesto—claiming to be a ‘Matricial Decree’—is another crucial element of the installation, inviting us to make sense of what we see. Written in the name of an entity that signs off as ‘Your Matriarchat,’ the text is stylistically reminiscent of past political manifestoes, but also of the genre of historic pamphlets and government ordinances, here transposed into a futurist register that is evocative of speculative science fiction. The decree speaks the language of an unfamiliar authority, one that remains unfamiliar to us only because we are yet to be conversant with it. The document channels the voices of a global consortium, a maternal collective that has—throughout the annals of history—been willing to benevolently dedicate itself to the labour of giving and nurturing life, a consortium without which the human race could not be perpetuated.

The Matriarchat—we learn from the decree—continues to assume utmost responsibility for this giving of life. It is also, however, willing to extinguish life where necessary, albeit only in extraordinarily rare cases. This is a matricial authority that is unwilling to tolerate individuals who are “dysfunctional beyond repair,” nor will it turn a blind eye to forms of behaviour that threaten the interests and/or the very existence of a stable human society, regardless of whether the perceived threat emanates out of sexism, racism or patriarchal violence. “Under the most extreme of circumstances,” The Matriarchat is prepared to impose the most extreme of sanctions, in other words, the retraction of individuals whose aggression has done wilful damage to the wellbeing of society at large. With this fictional construct, Breitz complements what is arguably the greatest human power—the power that attaches to bringing a new life into the world—with a power that can effectively undo the labour of reproduction. She frames this power of reversal as an emergency measure, one that effectively extends the scope of maternal labour (the nurturing and protection of the brood), all the while endowing such labour with political authority.

We humans are in danger, quite obviously. or, at least, many of us are. It is by no means clear how we might succeed in derailing the autocrats who rule and ruin more and more of our planet. Desperate times call for desperate measures, Breitz seems to suggest. She proposes a drastic remedy (one that might be viewed as either utopian or dystopian), a set of operations that might rid us of the menacing patriarchal figures who preside over us, a form of punishment that is to be meted out to those who have displayed an absolute lack of humanity, to those who wish to erode democratic checks and balances, to those who wish to assert their authority to the ends of impeding social justice; in short, to those who have imposed egregious harm.

Labour is not an incitement to murder. Breitz does not literally choose a path of terror, nor does she simplistically condone the extinction of life. Neither does she urge us to feel rage and hatred. On the contrary. Rather, she sketches an imaginary and almost inconceivable fictional counter-model via which to lend expression to her critique of this moment in history, one in which notions of equality, fairness and solidarity have come under serious attack. It is as accurate to say that women have historically been responsible for the labour of reproduction (a reality that may slowly be starting to shift), as it is necessary to reflect on Breitz’s tongue-in-cheek proposition, one that is harrowing and awe-inspiring in equal measures. Breitz suggests that the possibility of extraction, of calling out, of reversing a violent social agent, need not necessarily be underwritten by remorse. Within the fictional space of her proposal, the reversal of certain individuals is motivated by the same sense of social responsibility that is implicit in the act of giving birth.

The rituals that Labour invites us to contemplate are not rituals of murder or elimination. Nor, for that matter, can we easily describe the rituals on view as acts of abortion (a choice for which women, even now, are relentlessly condemned, punished and even executed, their bodies remaining brutally subject to the moral imperatives of this or that regime). No, what we are watching might better be described as a taking back, a retraction, a withdrawal executed in altruistic service to the broader collective. Consummated with precisely the affection and tenderness that is typically expressed by parents as a new life comes into being, Labour reverses the trajectory that we might expect, under the caring ministrations of a series of midwives and birth professionals. The ‘Elite Reversal Agents’ who selflessly perform these retractions are citizens who have stepped forward out of a commitment to preserving and defending the dignities and freedoms that make life worth living. Their subscription to progressive ideals underwrites their willingness to perform the sublime and challenging labour of reversal. For, though this fictional matriarchal society is one that values tolerance and love, it can no longer blindly extend such tolerance to the authoritarian subset that seeks to undermine and destroy its values.

Having thought and felt our way into Labour, we do not remove this toxic minority from the world simply for being toxic. Together, we hold the small blood-stained heads. Together, we caress the delicate lips as they draw their last breath. Together, we re-connect these miniscule bodies to the umbilical cords that promise life-giving sustenance. Yet, ultimately, it is mothers who—once again—put forward their bodies as a vehicle via which to definitively withdraw what the greater community can no longer endure or survive.

It is this gesture that makes Labour memorable: Breitz maps out a decidedly futurist feminist stance, one that counters patriarchal violence with obstinate bodily resistance. In paying homage to the reproductive labour that has conventionally been performed by women, she cracks open a threatening ethical debate that has implications far beyond what we can currently imagine. The Matriarchat that has symbolically authored the gesture put forth in Breitz’s piece may well be fictional for the time being. The demands that this authority so stringently articulates, nevertheless have an undeniably political resonance, unleashing a series of implications that remain difficult to entirely grasp from within patriarchy. This is a future that is perhaps still to come. At this point in time, however, we remain dependent on women to will us into being.

Text: Alexander Koch Translation: Gerrit Jackson Editing: KOW