Industry in art: Cao Fei at the 2008 Carnegie

Previously: Impressionism, Sheeler, Epstein.

Throughout the week I’ve shared examples of artists whose work reflected the way people in their time thought about industry. Today industry is dying in the U.S., and I can’t think of an American artist who spends much time on the subject. As a result of globalization, industry has moved to Asia, especially to China. Artists have too.

The best example of an artist’s interest in Chinese industry is surely Canadian Ed Burtynsky’s photographs of Chinese factories and the surrounding industry ‘towns.’ Burtynsky, who is obsessed with photographing the biggest examples of ‘X,’ is especially interested in the previously unimaginable scale of Chinese factories. A recent documentary about him, Manufactured Landscapes, emphasized this with a remarkably long opening shot that traversed the length of an entire factory floor. (See the trailer here. The Burtynsky below is
2004’s Manufacturing #7, Textile Mill, Xiaoxing, Zhejiang, China.)

Chinese artist Cao Fei is also interested in China’s industrialization. Her interest is in the people who fill Chinese factories, the assembly lines of young people who do careful, dexterous manual labor on the cheap. In Whose Utopia (still above, 2006-07), on view now at the Carnegie International, Cao focuses on the people in China’s massive factories, suggesting how an active fantasy life can try to make up for the repetitive drudgery of menial work. Cao shows us a line worker dressed up as a ballerina, another dancing, and so on, all posed in their work environment, complete with the painful artificial lighting therein.

I don’t think it’s the best work in the Carnegie. Whose Utopia never really gets beyond the surface of the issue it tries to aestheticize. I found myself grimacing rather than understanding or feeling. The installation doesn’t help: Whose Utopia is awkwardly placed at the foot of a stairway and the sound is difficult to hear. But it is the first work of art I’ve seen about workers in China’s factories. It’s a start. Artists have been fascinated by industry for 140 years, so I’d bet we’ll see more.

Previous Carnegie International posts: The bleakness of the 2008 CI. Vija Celmins and Mark Bradford. Richard Hughes.