Dignity and Futility: Art and Labour in a Post-Industrial World

On May Day in 2018, artist Ceri Hann sat on a small stool in a large domed room at the Mission to Seafarers, a community building on the docks of Melbourne that provides support to visiting ship-workers, and methodically stamped the words ‘OF WORK OF ART’ onto hundreds of circular metal washers. The small objects were then gifted to visitors and passers-by as a means to start a conversation about the relationship between work, labour, and artistic practice. The circular nature of the metal disc meant that the phrase could be interpreted in many different ways: ‘OF WORK, OF ART’, in one reading, or ‘WORK OF ART’ in another, or perhaps even ‘ART OF WORK’. This unclear or open readability of the words was emphasised in the way that the artist stamped the words backwards, so they could only be ‘read’ clearly when reflected in a mirror or other reflective surface. After several hours, Hann packed up his gear, and nothing remained of the performative work other than the circulating objects, which, like material currency these days, are of questionable value. The performance brought together physical work and industrial production in a public display of human labour, although without any obvious economic purpose or gain. These were not objects that could be easily sold or traded, nor were they being produced as part of an industrial process that would generate any other tangible products or outcomes. The backward printing of the text made the objects even harder to consume or read as ‘branding’ for the artist or the performance. The performance epitomised the futility of work and labour as we move from an industrial to a post-industrial society, where human labour is increasingly understood as inefficient, flawed, and unproductive compared to the work of machines and computers (as simplistic as this may seem). The artist’s performance also captured the futility of work and labour for many artists who live below the poverty line. Taking Hann’s performative work OF WORK OF ART as a starting provocation, this article explores the work of several contemporary Australian artists whose different approaches to labour address the simultaneous dignity and futility of waged labour in a post-industrial society. In his book Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (2015), American futurist Martin Ford presents a vision of a world where work is on the brink of becoming immaterial, a