Some Questions After Brecht 2017
Knorr, Karen (2017) Some Questions After Brecht 2017. [Digital art, Photography]
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Some Questions (after Brecht) in the year 2017 was supported by a commission awarded to selected photographers by La Samaritaine in Paris, France. Photographers were chosen by Christian Caujolle, an independent French curator and writer based between Cambodia and France. I was given an open brief "carte blanche" to make work on location on the building site of La Samaritaine.
This new work photographed during summer 2017 continues and returns to the development and research embodied in my conceptual documentary practice over the last 40 years. Documentary is understood as an expanded field that addresses evidence and site critically by using a strategy of poetics with the combination of image and text. The photographs taken with a large format digital back and transformed into solarised work theatres on building site.
La Samaritaine is a 19th century department store with a famous Art Nouveau facade overlooking Rue de La Monnaie near Pont Neuf in Paris, France. Emile Zola describes in the opening chapter of Au Bonheur des Dames, the seduction and fascination of the department store window and the stacking goods high which addressed women as consumers of luxury goods: the department store becomes type of "ladies paradise".
"At the back a large sash of Bruges lace,of considerable value, was spread out like an altar-veil,with its two white wings extended; there were flounces of Alençon point, grouped in garlands; then from the top tothe bottom fluttered, like a fall of snow, a cloud of lace of every description—Malines, Honiton, Valenciennes,Brussels, and Venetian-point. On each side the heavy columns were draped with cloth, making their background appear still more distant. And the dresseswere in this sort of chapel raised to the worship of woman's beauty and grace.” - The Ladies Paradise , Emile Zola.
I photographed the Samaritaine building site now under construction, the old store being transformed into smaller retail shops and luxury flats by the Japanese Agency Saana. The building is financed by the LMVH group that now owns La Samaritaine and Gucci as one of its luxury "houses". I decided to juxtapose the images with text from Brecht's famous poem: Questions from a Worker Who Reads (1935), each stanza accompanying an image of the builders work sites. Each stanza becomes a caption of the image.
The photographs record and document a labour in progress, yet the construction workers have exited and the building is being built as if by magic. The actual physical labour is here embedded in a process of reification so well described by Guy Debord in the Society of the Spectacle: "The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images". The workers here are unacknowledged invisible producers. By using Brecht's poem I challenge the heroes of history reminding us that certain things continue under our current market economy which acknowledges the powerful but disparages workers.
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