Art in America
By: Rachel Wetzler, Associate Editor

The Realist movement begins in earnest with an image of work.

Contemporary artists have adopted strikingly different approaches to contend with the instability of twenty-first-century economic life. Some have responded through a kind of abstraction of work itself, focusing instead on its evolving infrastructure: Liam Gillick’s generically modernist plexiglass-and-aluminum structures that allude to the utopian aesthetics of de Stijl, the Bauhaus, and Constructivism as they trickle down into the bland placelessness of the service economy cubicle; Yuri Pattison’s networked environments, like “user, space” at Chisenhale Gallery in 2016, a mock coworking space replete with slick minimalist office furniture, air-filtering plants, and computer-controlled smart lighting; Simon Denny’s installations that mimic displays at tech industry conferences and trade shows.

Another response has been to reflexively engage with the precariousness of “artist” as a profession. In the practices that art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson describes as “occupational realism,” artists unable to make a living in the field with which they professionally identify have recast the day jobs they take on out of necessity as artwork, emblematized by a project like Ben Kinmont’s Sometimes a nicer sculpture is being able to provide a living for your family (1998–ongoing), in which Kinmont’s actual, income-generating bookselling business doubles as a long-term endurance performance. For Bryan-Wilson, such works are “realist” in multiple senses: on the one hand, paid labor is really performed, not merely mimed or acted out; at the same time, these performances articulate the multiple, shifting identities and self-identifications characteristic of precarious workers in general.

Over the past several years, however, an increasingly prominent group of artists, including Aliza Nisenbaum, Jordan Casteel, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Kevin Jerome Everson, have taken up the aesthetic conventions and formal traditions of realism, returning, in various ways, to the quintessentially realist form of the worker portrait. Though they engage knowingly, and in many cases overtly, with the realisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these portraits are far more ambivalent about the portrayal of labor than their predecessors, as if registering the shifting ground of work today.

[…] photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier’s series “The Last Cruze” focuses on deindustrialization and its aftershocks, illustrating what happens when the bottom finally falls out in a factory town—in this case, Lordstown, Ohio, whose economy had long revolved around a General Motors plant that most recently produced the compact Chevy Cruze. In November 2018, Dave Green, the president of Local 1112 of the United Auto Workers was informed by GM management that the Cruze line was being discontinued and the plant would be “unallocated,” a bureaucratic workaround that allowed GM to effectively close the factory without violating its union contract: the plant would not technically shut down, it just wouldn’t have anything to make, and thus no need for any workers. After the announcement went public that Lordstown and four other GM plants would be unallocated, the company’s stock price immediately shot up; meanwhile, the employees were faced with the wrenching choice of accepting offers of relocation to other GM plants, often hundreds of miles away from their homes, or staying put and hoping for the best, giving up their pensions and benefits.

Frazier documented the weeks leading up to the final Chevy Cruze rolling off the line in March 2019 and regularly returned to Lordstown for several months after, taking portraits of the workers and their families. The photographs are paired with text panels drawn from interviews she conducted with the sitters, in which they discuss their histories with the company, their anger—or resignation—in response to the closure of the factory, their anxieties about leaving friends and family behind. Though a selection of the photographs and interviews was originally published in the New York Times Magazine in 2018, Frazier takes care to distinguish what she is doing from photojournalism, with the position of detached objectivity that designation implies: “The Last Cruze” is an expression of solidarity from someone who has seen firsthand the social and economic wreckage a factory closure leaves behind. Frazier was born and raised in the former steel town of Braddock, Pennsylvania; her first major series, The Notion of Family (2001–14), extrapolated from autobiography, using her own family as embodiments of disinvestment in the Rust Belt and its consequent postindustrial deterioration.

[…]

Read more…

Courtesy of: ARTnews.com

TED Radio Hour
By NPR/TED Staff

We need water to live. But with rising seas and so many lacking clean water — water is in crisis and so are we. In this TED Radio Hour, speakers explore ideas around restoring our relationship with water.

Part 2 of the TED Radio Hour episode Our Relationship With Water

Flint, Michigan is the site of one of the worst ongoing water crises in recent U.S. history. Artist LaToya Ruby Frazier has spent years capturing the stories of life living with toxic water.

WALLING: This is LaToya Ruby Frazier.

FRAZIER: When we all wake up in the morning, the first thing you’re going to do is get in the shower, right? The second thing you’re going to do is brush your teeth. Well, imagine what that feels like when you can’t do that.

ZOMORODI: LaToya is a visual artist and a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Much of her work focuses on the lives of working-class families in the Rust Belt.

FRAZIER: When I first arrived in Flint the summer of 2016, there were well over 29,000 homes that were impacted. And I think that’s what struck me the most – which is where Shea Cobb and her mother, Ms. Renee, and her daughter, Zion, who were 8 years old at the time, they were living in the midst of this.

ZOMORODI: Shea is also an artist and a school bus driver. And LaToya spent several years with Shea, her mother, Renee, and her daughter, Zion, documenting their lives in Flint.

FRAZIER: Yeah. I remember the first time I met Shea. It was quite beautiful. We met at a diner, her favorite diner, called Captain Coty’s, where she liked to go get buttermilk pancakes at the end of her school bus route in the mornings. And upon meeting each other, sitting down in the booth just looking at each other, it felt like a double portrait in a way. You know, she’s in her early 30s and a really diligent, hard-working artists. And so I felt that it was my responsibility to document and cover what it’s been like, you know, raising her daughter during this ongoing water crisis.

ZOMORODI: For people who maybe don’t quite understand exactly what Shea’s day-to-day life was like without having easy access to water – because it’s not like you could just boil the water in Flint, right?

FRAZIER: Well, the water quality was so bad that she couldn’t inhabit her family home at 303 Mary Street. When I arrived, she was living in another apartment with her mother. And, you know, the water contamination was so severe that she couldn’t brush her teeth. You know, you take a shower and brush your teeth. Well, with contaminated water, you can’t do either of those two things.

SHEA COBB: We get a bottle of water. And we waterfall it. You brush your teeth. You spit it out. You waterfall your bottle. And you brush some more. We don’t ingest the water on any level.

FRAZIER: You know, one of the standout images in the photo essay is seeing Shea pouring water from a plastic water bottle into Zion’s mouth to gargle with it. And I shoot it with a fast shutter speed so that it freezes the water drop just before it touches Zion’s tongue. And you see the toothbrush at the bottom right-hand part of the frame – so brushing her teeth with bottled water, having to bathe with bottled water, having to cook or not cook at all.

COBB: Since the water situation, I’m discouraged to cook in my house and use my kitchen. We’ll go out to eat. And we’ll eat on the outskirts of the city.

FRAZIER: We would go to a restaurant called Badawest to eat dinner there. And even there, you know, they were serving glasses of water. And, you know, Shea would never drink it. And she would forbid Zion to drink it.

COBB: The Flint River is toxic, has been toxic for years. Fecal matter in the Flint River, toxic chemicals and waste dumped in the Flint River. We know not to drink out the Flint River. We won’t swim in it. We don’t mess with it. We don’t even like the smell of it. When it get hot outside, downtown Flint, you can smell the Flint River. It stinks. Why would we drink it?

FRAZIER: It is 2020. This started six years ago. Flint might not be headline news any longer. But the water crisis is still going on. We can’t forget about the men, the women and children and the families in Flint. […]

Listen here…

Following the Flint Is Family project, Frazier partnered with AWG Contracting and Moses West to bring an atmospheric water generator to Flint so that residents could produce their own supply of clean water. It is in its second year of use.

Courtesy of: NPR / TED Radio Hour

Artforum
By: Zack Hatfield

Frazier has always addressed the untenability of how things are with an art that pushes beyond the purview of representation, one that prioritizes the assembly of communities and archives over commodities.

PEOPLE IN MOTION. This was General Motors’ slogan when Sherria and Jason Duncan were hired at the company’s factory on the edge of Lordstown, Ohio, around the turn of the millennium. Sherria’s mother, Waldine Arrington, retired from the assembly plant in 2004 and now helps care for her granddaughter Olivia. A recent photograph finds the four of them at a bare kitchen table, frozen: Sherria and Waldine sit side by side, while Jason, hands clasped, hunches across from Olivia. In profile, the child meets her father’s tired gaze; the two women look directly at the viewer. The sight lines form a crossroads.

These lives all revolve around the factory, or did. The news arrived from GM on the Monday after Thanksgiving 2018: Due to the sinking demand for compact cars, the plant would stop manufacturing the Chevrolet Cruze, its sole product. Lordstown Assembly, the backbone of the region since 1966, was being idled. The corporation soon began sending forced-transfer letters to all of its unionized employees, an ultimatum notorious for breaking households apart: Keep your job and pension by resettling to another factory, perhaps thousands of miles away, or lose everything.

LaToya Ruby Frazier has always trained her camera on families dealing with fallout. Her black-and-white portraiture, incisive without ever seeking to betray what her subjects have not chosen to show, is about the relentless but often abstract forces of neoliberalism and how they make and unmake working-class homes, starting with her own. The artist’s earliest series, begun in 2001 when she was a teenager, chronicles the postindustrial declension and pollution-borne maladies of her native steel town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, mostly through images of her grandmother Ruby; her mother, Cynthia; and herself. These culminated in the 2014 photobook The Notion of Family, an unsparing document of looking and loving amid economic and bodily decline. Since then, Frazier has continued to picture small-town sagas with a multigenerational scope, subtle ingenuity, and global import, whether covering the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, or shooting in the depressed coal-mining area of Borinage, Belgium. While ostensibly grounded in the now-unfashionable American traditions of Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange, her photographs reject the flattening lens of iconicity, centering individuals’ own words in accompanying texts. Frazier often works on assignment for magazines and newspapers, her photos strategically combating the stereotypes and omissions characteristic of the mainstream media’s representation of the working class. The most persistent and insidious omission—the absence of people of color in portrayals of American blue-collar life—is challenged in Frazier’s art, where the intersections of class with race and other facets of identity are dramatized alongside the structural inequalities within racial capitalism.

This latest counternarrative, “The Last Cruze,” is devoted to Lordstown Assembly and its union, Local 1112 of the United Auto Workers. Conceived for the Renaissance Society in Chicago in 2019 and subsequently exhibited at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, the series pairs more than sixty portraits of Lordstown workers and retirees with typed oral histories that collectively form an archive of the culture of the plant and the events that unfolded there. Partnered with the New York Times Magazine, Frazier began visiting Lordstown a month before the last Cruze rolled off the assembly line in early March 2019. But unlike the national press, which largely construed the idling of the plant as a flash point for Trump’s broken campaign promise to blue-collar constituents, she was there for the aftermath, her narrative fracturing the mythology of a white working class. She built rapport with union members across lines of gender, sexuality, and race as they continued to clock in, and then, after the last Cruze was finished, she stayed while her newly unemployed subjects wrestled with the question of whether to uproot themselves or wait to see if the UAW’s impending contract negotiations with Detroit’s Big Three automakers would result in Lordstown’s getting a new vehicle to manufacture. In recent years, GM has shifted its production abroad, where some employees earn as little as a couple of dollars an hour.

Read more…

Courtesy of: Artforum