Autopsy of the Boilersuit
11 May
Pedro Borges
Setting the Table
This is an experimental writing piece where I will attempt to touch on the main concerns of my recent practice through critical reflection on the decision-making it involves. I believe this to be experimental because I will write in an attitude which gives agency to the images and objects I come across, instead of a rational progression of thoughts, I’m without regard for making sense where there is none. The writing may be about the way it is written in.
In the making of my work towards the Degree Show, I found myself laying a boiler suit on a table and being with it. I started to film it, to act with it, to measure and compare it, and let it act on me as well.
An image arose, that of the working-class man, a past aesthetic now nostalgic in movies, foreign tongues arguing, changes in money and food, abandoned fields, long hours, cars and mechanically twitching hands. Another image, similar nonetheless, also started to wonder. The image of my family, of their mannerisms, ambitions, politics, humour and lunchtime stories. A pattern of survival through expectations, faith in science, servitude and disillusion.
There I was, somewhere in that mess. I stood looking at the boilersuit from the outside and the shadow it cast in the studio. One step at a time I approached:
This is an experimental writing piece where I will attempt to touch on the main concerns of my recent practice through critical reflection on the decision-making it involves. I believe this to be experimental because I will write in an attitude which gives agency to the images and objects I come across, instead of a rational progression of thoughts, I’m without regard for making sense where there is none. The writing may be about the way it is written in.
In the making of my work towards the Degree Show, I found myself laying a boiler suit on a table and being with it. I started to film it, to act with it, to measure and compare it, and let it act on me as well.
An image arose, that of the working-class man, a past aesthetic now nostalgic in movies, foreign tongues arguing, changes in money and food, abandoned fields, long hours, cars and mechanically twitching hands. Another image, similar nonetheless, also started to wonder. The image of my family, of their mannerisms, ambitions, politics, humour and lunchtime stories. A pattern of survival through expectations, faith in science, servitude and disillusion.
There I was, somewhere in that mess. I stood looking at the boilersuit from the outside and the shadow it cast in the studio. One step at a time I approached:
One leg in first,
“Am I even part of this?”
Another leg follows,
“Perhaps this is a mistake”
Looking around for the armhole,
“Should I ask my father about this?”
Zipping up the suit.
“My hair is all sorts of wrong for this”.
This is a documentation of my thoughts, where I will try to make sense of some things and refuse to make sense of others.
left (Manager Inspecting a Swedish Factory, from A Seventh Man by John Berger) right (Winston Churchill in a “siren suit”)
I found this history to encapsulate a large spectrum of people. From women fighting for equality dressed in industrial attire to futurists proclaiming a macho aesthetic. In looking for photos that pertained to me, the two pictures above interested me. On the left is a picture of managers inspecting a factory in Sweden, looking at the worker (Berger & Mohr: 2010: 110-111). On the right, Churchill is dressed in a siren suit. The difference between them accommodates doubts about my own involvement in this history. I’ve lived an ambiguous reality of coming from a family of working-class people but having the education and means not afforded to my grandparents. I feel, as I go on through life, that I am both looking at the worker and the worker being looked at. In Churchill’s picture, I find a source of hesitation; a fear of pretending to be something I am not.
«Figuring (the meaning of a word) is a way of thinking or cogitating or meditating or hanging out with ideas. (...) Figures help us avoid the deadly fantasy of ‘the one true meaning’. They are simultaneously visual and narrative as well as mathematical. They are very sensual.». (Haraway & Kenney: 2015: 257).
This figure that I was pursuing - the multiple model of the suit where myself, Churchill and the Swedish factory worker existed at once, had to remain unresolved, much like the plurality of images it was made of. Any decision I could make to be definite about that figure would make it literal, disenchanted, fixed in a vacuum. Realising this helps me to refrain from thinking of the image in pure rationale, otherwise, there would be no opportunity for stupidity, hesitation and doubt, which are my actual connections to the model of the suit.
«‘One never appreciates quite the degree for need of stupidity in the studio,’ said William Kentridge. ‘I am a great believer that stupidity gives the work its impulse, the benefit of the doubt.’». (Kentridge: 2018)
Dressing the Dead
«Figuring (the meaning of a word) is a way of thinking or cogitating or meditating or hanging out with ideas. (...) Figures help us avoid the deadly fantasy of ‘the one true meaning’. They are simultaneously visual and narrative as well as mathematical. They are very sensual.». (Haraway & Kenney: 2015: 257).
This figure that I was pursuing - the multiple model of the suit where myself, Churchill and the Swedish factory worker existed at once, had to remain unresolved, much like the plurality of images it was made of. Any decision I could make to be definite about that figure would make it literal, disenchanted, fixed in a vacuum. Realising this helps me to refrain from thinking of the image in pure rationale, otherwise, there would be no opportunity for stupidity, hesitation and doubt, which are my actual connections to the model of the suit.
«‘One never appreciates quite the degree for need of stupidity in the studio,’ said William Kentridge. ‘I am a great believer that stupidity gives the work its impulse, the benefit of the doubt.’». (Kentridge: 2018)
Dressing the Dead
I lay the suit flat on the table, trying to photograph it. The lights I set around it have some painterly qualities, but the whole thing looks a bit awkward. It looks like an autopsy is about to take place, but the room is small and there is nothing on the wall. I wander around it thinking of what to do.
Should I add something to the image?
Another object?
Should I be in it?
Is it too plain?
Or is it overcrowded?
What does this mean?
Does this doubt have a meaning?
Do I know what I am doing?
What am I doing?
Even though I have identified myself with some ideas and figures, I still have no scale, light, composition or narrative that embraces the qualities of a subjunctive investigation of the boilersuit.
Looking through images to help me, I land on The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632). The figures interest me. I print them and they stay on the wall of the studio for a few days.
Much like the factory worker and the manager in the previous pictures, there is a dichotomy between student and professor. There are also gestures, like the book at the back, shown to us by the student. There is peaking in with curiosity and indifference from students to the professor and cadaver who is being shown.
In a first reply to the painting, I organise my studio around and try to remake the composition.
It was at this point I started thinking about filming myself around the suit, in different poses, inspecting the suit. William Kentridge’s films often involve him having a double of himself, such as in Interview for Studio School (2010) where he interviews himself in his studio. In this video, he seems to have this duality, where one of his versions makes something and the other corrects it, or how he interrupts himself when speaking or comments on his own answers (to his own questions). This nonsensical attitude becomes what the work is about, while he still manages to express his doubts about a matter through the contradicting opinions he gives both as an interviewer and the one being interviewed.
I decided to play it out, borrowing from Rembrandt’s gestures. One part of me making, the other watching. Two different commitments to the task at hand and two different levels of hesitation and confidence. The light is clinical, but the space isn’t.
Having found my way through the images I pursue, shooting them over and over, collecting accidents to integrate along the way, I started to have something happening. I decided the film would be about an autopsy of the suit.
The procedure is taking place over the suit, its aim isn’t clear, but it's going somewhere, right?
Top Down
The procedure is taking place over the suit, its aim isn’t clear, but it's going somewhere, right?
Top Down
In previous work with collages, I collected a number of scientific illustrations of fruits for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Pomological Watercolor Collection. The showing of an object on its side, and then its cross-section, the inspection of the lemon in a vacuum against two orthogonal planes is an example of cartesian thinking about reality. The lemon becomes its own platonic double and is then safely stored and catalogued as if to ensure that agriculture means don’t forget their ends.
Timothy Morton describes how the “agrilogistics” of Mesopotamians, 12.000 years ago, was the beginning of the way of thinking that was involved in colonialism, industrial revolution and has now led us to ecological disaster (Morton: 2018). This way of thinking is what allows us to categorise objects around us as either belonging to the agrilogistic project - anything that can be domesticated and consumable to the Mesopotamian - or needing exclusion (Morton: 2018: 93). The lemon illustrated is ready to eat, reduced to its function in a utilitarian world.
In the video I started to play with the idea of a “double view”, to have different planes for filming something from its front and from its top. Adopting this view of objects lets them appear familiar to the audience, for if the suit exists in the front-facing plane and the top-down plane, then it must really be there, without missing information. It looms that the conclusion must be somewhere close, following the paradigm of thought of a promised result in agriculture, that the thing will become consumable soon enough. This expectation becomes a centre of play for me, and I refuse to give the answer straight on. Not just because I don’t want to, but also because I don’t know.
Timothy Morton describes how the “agrilogistics” of Mesopotamians, 12.000 years ago, was the beginning of the way of thinking that was involved in colonialism, industrial revolution and has now led us to ecological disaster (Morton: 2018). This way of thinking is what allows us to categorise objects around us as either belonging to the agrilogistic project - anything that can be domesticated and consumable to the Mesopotamian - or needing exclusion (Morton: 2018: 93). The lemon illustrated is ready to eat, reduced to its function in a utilitarian world.
In the video I started to play with the idea of a “double view”, to have different planes for filming something from its front and from its top. Adopting this view of objects lets them appear familiar to the audience, for if the suit exists in the front-facing plane and the top-down plane, then it must really be there, without missing information. It looms that the conclusion must be somewhere close, following the paradigm of thought of a promised result in agriculture, that the thing will become consumable soon enough. This expectation becomes a centre of play for me, and I refuse to give the answer straight on. Not just because I don’t want to, but also because I don’t know.
This top-down view is also a way for me to show my distance from the suit, of not actually being a worker in a factory. I’m looking down, drawing the map, composing the image, performing the autopsy or even just looking at it being done in front of me, looking and showing, just like in The Anatomy Lesson.
The process of organising a composition in this top-down view was very akin to that of making a large collage. In fact, bringing the suit to be hung on the wall (through the projection of the video) there seems to appear an allusion to a readymade. Suddenly I had that connection between my doubles around the boilersuit and the aesthetics of collage.
Something needs mentioning: I was not literally performing an autopsy. Better put, I wasn’t performing a “scientific” autopsy on a “dead” suit. I am not interested in a literal scientific boring functionality result out of this film, something like - The suit is blueness and blueness is working class. I want to play, and “play always involves the invitation that asks “are we a ‘we’?” (Donna Haraway: 2015: 255-261). I want to entangle the suit in other things, so that it becomes apparent how many other things the suit is besides itself.
I am far too inept to say what the suit is, so I decided to delegate that to the studio, the math blocks, and a bug viewer. I only need to be successful in breaking the perceived difference between these things and the suit, in the spirit of showing their “similar differences” and “different similarities” (Bohm: 1996: 8)
The Studio
The process of organising a composition in this top-down view was very akin to that of making a large collage. In fact, bringing the suit to be hung on the wall (through the projection of the video) there seems to appear an allusion to a readymade. Suddenly I had that connection between my doubles around the boilersuit and the aesthetics of collage.
Something needs mentioning: I was not literally performing an autopsy. Better put, I wasn’t performing a “scientific” autopsy on a “dead” suit. I am not interested in a literal scientific boring functionality result out of this film, something like - The suit is blueness and blueness is working class. I want to play, and “play always involves the invitation that asks “are we a ‘we’?” (Donna Haraway: 2015: 255-261). I want to entangle the suit in other things, so that it becomes apparent how many other things the suit is besides itself.
I am far too inept to say what the suit is, so I decided to delegate that to the studio, the math blocks, and a bug viewer. I only need to be successful in breaking the perceived difference between these things and the suit, in the spirit of showing their “similar differences” and “different similarities” (Bohm: 1996: 8)
The Studio
There is something else I want to mention in Kentridge’s work, the way he uses the studio as a placeholder for his attitude (when defending stupidity, nonsense, wrongness and hesitation, the studio seems to always be the place where it happens). Although one can only dream of having a studio with the size and life of his, my tiny cluttered studio had a growing need to perform.
Of course, part of this concern about the boiler suit is also about my image dressed in it, in front of the camera. Not as a vain thing, but as something which is important. Bruce Nauman’s recordings of him in the studio show him in a big space and without worry. Mondrian’s studio was as precise as his work. Giacometti’s studio walls had the same grit as his sculptures. I’m a tall man in a small room making a sizeless video, hair too long to work in a factory, dressed in a boilersuit and with formal shoes on.
The room isn’t big. There is a table, that is actually a door pretending to be a table. The door to the room has so far shown no sign of being a table in disguise. Stacks of images lay around, printed photos scanned from books at the library, taken from magazines or found somewhere I can’t remember. A boat. There is a teapot I interviewed once, although it seemed to grow tired of me. Bananas. A worn-out violin, played by the years that have passed much more effectively than I ever did. Drawings of the studio before this one and projects abandoned twice compose the walls. The face of a stranger. The rest is drawers, scalpels and cutting mats.
I often clean my studio before beginning something, and it always ends in a different assemblage of layers on layers of images. It often feeds the work, there is always an image that suddenly sticks out from the mess and works its way into a collage, drawing or painting. I have started to think of it as an agency the studio has over me when I work. The image long ago found, printed and stored in a pile didn’t just stop existing, it became rubble for a time, but rubble that is still there. Jane Bennett calls this “Thing-Power: the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.” (Bennett: 2010: 6).
In this way, I gathered these objects and built a pile that tries to make it so things come in and out of perception, a disguised mix of a landfill and a flea market takes over the table, where what is rubble keeps changing.
As I have said before, I do not know what the boilersuit is. It may be the teapot and the blue they both share, it may be the book and its suggestive cover, it may be the picture of a raging spaceship deafened in black and white, it may be the schematic picture of rats wrestling step by step, it may be what was cool in the ‘50s, it may be the paper that is just out of frame,(...).
Playing with Measures
Of course, part of this concern about the boiler suit is also about my image dressed in it, in front of the camera. Not as a vain thing, but as something which is important. Bruce Nauman’s recordings of him in the studio show him in a big space and without worry. Mondrian’s studio was as precise as his work. Giacometti’s studio walls had the same grit as his sculptures. I’m a tall man in a small room making a sizeless video, hair too long to work in a factory, dressed in a boilersuit and with formal shoes on.
The room isn’t big. There is a table, that is actually a door pretending to be a table. The door to the room has so far shown no sign of being a table in disguise. Stacks of images lay around, printed photos scanned from books at the library, taken from magazines or found somewhere I can’t remember. A boat. There is a teapot I interviewed once, although it seemed to grow tired of me. Bananas. A worn-out violin, played by the years that have passed much more effectively than I ever did. Drawings of the studio before this one and projects abandoned twice compose the walls. The face of a stranger. The rest is drawers, scalpels and cutting mats.
I often clean my studio before beginning something, and it always ends in a different assemblage of layers on layers of images. It often feeds the work, there is always an image that suddenly sticks out from the mess and works its way into a collage, drawing or painting. I have started to think of it as an agency the studio has over me when I work. The image long ago found, printed and stored in a pile didn’t just stop existing, it became rubble for a time, but rubble that is still there. Jane Bennett calls this “Thing-Power: the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.” (Bennett: 2010: 6).
In this way, I gathered these objects and built a pile that tries to make it so things come in and out of perception, a disguised mix of a landfill and a flea market takes over the table, where what is rubble keeps changing.
As I have said before, I do not know what the boilersuit is. It may be the teapot and the blue they both share, it may be the book and its suggestive cover, it may be the picture of a raging spaceship deafened in black and white, it may be the schematic picture of rats wrestling step by step, it may be what was cool in the ‘50s, it may be the paper that is just out of frame,(...).
Playing with Measures
Above is a photograph of some maths blocks. Similar to any early illustration one finds in their first maths books or an abacus. They are sold as educational toys for children. I am still unsure of why I bought them.
They introduce us to an abstract space; the blocks lay together in a box (to which they will ritually return after playing) and relate only to each other and the system of base 10 counting.
If one was concerned about pure mathematics, then these blocks are rather too few, their colour is distracting and they are too ruffly cut to measure their number in real centimetres - defined as a hundredth of a meter, which in turn is defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. Imagine teaching that to a child.
In a way, this material inaccuracy of the blocks is what allows the child to play with them, they still hold something akin to experience through their roughness and colour. Although the concept of the centimetre as a unit remains very distant, when playing with the colourful wooden bits the child will eventually lay them flat against something, something that isn’t light in a vacuum. In my case, this was the blue boilersuit I had bought to protect my clothes when I painted.
After playing with these blocks for a few days, stacking, building, and playing with patterns I eventually found a place for them against the boiler suit.
When against a suit they seemed to gain new meaning, their measure, whatever it was in centimetres, was now the depth of a pocket or the length of the collar. This brought a different imagination to them. I was not only measuring fabric on the suit - for the suit is not like the light in the vacuum, a space of human ideas and control to the nth degree - I was measuring the suit as a place.
Place is built of entanglements, things have some path to each other, no matter if they are human or dead matter. Things cannot be thrown “away” (Bennett: 2010: 6). As Timothy Morton reminds us: because there is no away. (Morton: 2018)
I was then, measuring the dressing up before work, the adjustment of the suit to fit the neck, the pack of cigarettes or the pencil that goes in the pocket, the formality of dirty work, the lint and fuzz caused by repeated movements, the touch of cheap fabric and a section of an assembly line some time ago.
Of course, some of these things are not as pronounced as others, but they are there even if faintly and strangely. That is what engages my imagination. I had to feel the wooden block outside the vacuum, enchant them and make them stick out (Morton: 2018) while remaining full of doubts about whether they hold true in any way.
The Bug Viewer
When against a suit they seemed to gain new meaning, their measure, whatever it was in centimetres, was now the depth of a pocket or the length of the collar. This brought a different imagination to them. I was not only measuring fabric on the suit - for the suit is not like the light in the vacuum, a space of human ideas and control to the nth degree - I was measuring the suit as a place.
Place is built of entanglements, things have some path to each other, no matter if they are human or dead matter. Things cannot be thrown “away” (Bennett: 2010: 6). As Timothy Morton reminds us: because there is no away. (Morton: 2018)
I was then, measuring the dressing up before work, the adjustment of the suit to fit the neck, the pack of cigarettes or the pencil that goes in the pocket, the formality of dirty work, the lint and fuzz caused by repeated movements, the touch of cheap fabric and a section of an assembly line some time ago.
Of course, some of these things are not as pronounced as others, but they are there even if faintly and strangely. That is what engages my imagination. I had to feel the wooden block outside the vacuum, enchant them and make them stick out (Morton: 2018) while remaining full of doubts about whether they hold true in any way.
The Bug Viewer
The bug viewer is like a handheld vacuum chamber you can take with you wherever you go. Drop something in it. Immediately it will beg the question - how big does it get? You look, and it's all distorted, but the grid gives you a sense of comfort and pretends to help you situate yourself in the mess.
In my video, I try to use the bug viewer as an instrument of misdirection, much like the top-down view taken from the illustration of the lemon. I film myself holding the viewer and taking a peek. The camera follows me, through the universe of the top-down view and through the grid things pass by - collages, pictures, people, animals, strings, (...) - and the grid eventually leaves you. How did we get from the bug viewer inspecting the boilersuit, to the golden ratio of the atomic bomb? Because the grid pretended to help you maintain belief until then. You are now with few resources for making sense of what you are seeing, even though it is shown in a top-down plane.
The grid becomes the cartesian space, the argument that tries to find a real coherent truth about the things it comes across. It inevitably fails.
In my video, I try to use the bug viewer as an instrument of misdirection, much like the top-down view taken from the illustration of the lemon. I film myself holding the viewer and taking a peek. The camera follows me, through the universe of the top-down view and through the grid things pass by - collages, pictures, people, animals, strings, (...) - and the grid eventually leaves you. How did we get from the bug viewer inspecting the boilersuit, to the golden ratio of the atomic bomb? Because the grid pretended to help you maintain belief until then. You are now with few resources for making sense of what you are seeing, even though it is shown in a top-down plane.
The grid becomes the cartesian space, the argument that tries to find a real coherent truth about the things it comes across. It inevitably fails.
Just like the bug viewer leaves you stranded in the film, I’m afraid I’ll leave the reader stranded here. My work is also concerned with colour and specific aesthetics of collage that play with scale and humour when dealing with narratives of systems of the western world. That has not been the central focus of this work, even though I suspect its attitude is the same. It probably will be an important part of this work. I just haven’t made it yet. So this is it. I hope that being stranded wasn’t all bad.
Bibliography
Bibliography
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- Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant matter. Durham: Duke University Press.
- Berger, J., Mohr, J. and Sven Blomberg (2010). A seventh man : a book of images and words about the experience of migrant workers in Europe. London ; New York: Verso.
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- www.youtube.com. (n.d.). Bruce Nauman-Stampin in the studio 1968. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRF5FukKiCo [Accessed 11 May 2022].
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- Haraway, D. & Kenney, M. (2015) 'Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhocene', in Davis, H. & Turpin, E. (2015) Art in the Anthropocene. London: Open Humanities Press, p.255.
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- Morton, T. (2018). DARK ECOLOGY : for a logic of future coexistence. Columbia University Press.
- Morton, T. (2015) 'We have never been displaced', in Eliasson, O. Reality machines. Stockholm, p.113.