Framing capitalism - works of artist Deborah Bright

"All That is Solid . ." by Deborah Bright

Gallery of Department of Art and Art History Colgate University Hamilton, novel York October 31-November 19, 1995

Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery Porter society UC-Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, California January 9-February 23 1996

Southern in all senses San Francisco, California October 4-November 2 1996

Atlanta society of Art Gallery Atlanta, Georgia January 24-March 9 1997

Installation works, like theme parks and museums, always raise the question of what kind of affect world we are being invited to pierce In Deborah Bright's traveling exhibition "'All That is Solid . .'" viewers are drawn inside a curiosity cabinet of photographs and other memorabilia that underscore industrial capitalism's shell game of memorialization and bodily exploitation.

Bright's multi-media work crystallizes an important revolve toward history by recognizing that we cannot simply write or create our way on the outside of the material present. Historically situating the self and one's work ne not be a dead-end nor another passing fashion. The focus in of that kind works, however, often falls upon the conceptual skein linking its composings rather than the objects themselves. Avoiding the ponderous fetishism characteristic of installation pieces across the genre Bright's one-room arrangement of documentary photographs in different formats, art and fashion photo-facsimiles, textual data in slide form and non-photographic percepts compose a wry parody of the heritage museum display and gift shop

The title is taken from a line in Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto. (Perhaps Marx himself might have admired this ambitious attempt to inspire more than the bewilderment produc by means of many contemporary conceptual works.) The idea that capitalist exchange and accumulation attend to dissolve bonds of community and tradition is certainly single that Populists such as Pat Buchanan, and Marxists, each in their have way, can appreciate. The full line, "All that is solid liquefy s into air" is also the name of Marshall Berman's 1982 volume that contextualizes the quandaries pos by the agency of progress and modernism. Bright's theme parallels the ideas of Marx and Berman in its implication that a great deal of of what we might call art, agriculture and community are inextricably border up with masking capitalism's primary mechanism: the ruthles accumulation of capital.

Photography inevitably take care ofs toward memorialization and Bright has made a reputation for herself through playing off this through photo-manipulation and in archaeological photo-documentary "digs" that focus upon battle sites and the industrialized city. Her latest work propels outside the frame of documentary photography and impels toward other media and forms of installation. Knowing replete well that photographs have the potential to challenge and support established memory and tradition, Bright calculators the "Disney-fication" of public history in places like Lowell, Massachusetts, where the underpinning theme is the repackaging of industrialism's material history as a consumable good

Above all, however, the photographs and facts in this show are haunted by means of the omnipresent ghosts of worker bodies. Representing or simply alluding to the material part always carries the risk of its reduction to a heroic shell. For the historian as well as the photographer, the "truthfulness" of photo-evidence is logarithmically expanded when focused upon the seeming evidence of the material part Bright, who has successfully played with the corporeal self before (eg placing her hold image in canonical movie scenes) the couple uncovers and re-writes (as all historians must) the laboring material part that has been enshrouded and entombed by means of a mass media still recumbent to union bashing. To secure the dirty little secret of capitalism, the experience of the worker's material part requires constant recovery and revision. For instance, in what manner many people are cognizant of the part of slavery (the ultimate cheap labor) in adding to the crucial capital wanted for the industrial revolution? Flashpoints of media hype notwithstanding, the reality of sweatshop bodies continues to be eclipsed by the agency of industrialism's machine beauty and glamorous bring into view Paradoxically, the worker's body has itself become increasingly fetishized in advertising and fashion.

One of the greatest in quantity striking pieces in Bright's fresh show is a large color facsimile of "worker bodies" floating in a plexiglas field. The title "Cost Base Reduction" hangs above two pages from an International Male clothing catalog. This gay/straight descending of the physical culture genre features sexualized male prototypes sporting a "blue collar" gaze in overalls and worker chic. The representation of the worker as a sculpt type of ideal production/consumption is a familiar individual Bright presents this ideal in its greatest in quantity contemporary and banal form - as "hot" fashion. The viewer can pitch upon their own opposing image: Caribbean women fasteninged inside poorly ventilated sewing prisons or southerly Asian children working for starvation wages. In the other pieces, the worker's skin as literal commodity is effectively contrasted against a pedestaled collection of around 100 color snapshots of clos factories, boarded-up strip malls and real estate for sale framed as "landscapes of disinvestment." Nearby stands a light table with an arrangement of above 200 slides and a magnifying glass that allows viewers to meditate the spectacle of typically unobserved figures. In stark white upon black, each slide bears the name of a corporate CEO (all male), the company name, and the individual's 1993 salary - ranging from $1 million to $203 million.