Anonymous Steel Worker
Shown at: Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh (2007-08) | National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi (2014)
Enamel screen print on stainless steel
96 inches x 58.5 inches
In 2012-13, in Pittsburgh, foraging through an eccentric collection of objects to do with the history of the steel industry in this rust belt town, we found an awkward but affectionate sculpture of a ‘dog’ that a steel worker had made with odds and ends of machine parts while working in the factory. There were bits of cork (to make the head and the body), used pipe cleaners for the wire, fragments of wood and the assorted metal debris (nuts and bolts) gleaned from the factory floor.
The dog, an informal object made in the early twentieth century, has a time-traveling resemblance, in its silhouette, to the ‘robot-dog’ objects that began coming on to the market as ‘play-companions’ for children and the elderly, equipped with limited amounts of artificial intelligence that made them both obedient and cute, together or alternately, whenever necessary.
The worker’s ‘dog’ that we found also seemed to us to be both sentinel and transgressor of different orders of time. It was a reminder of an odd and passionate refusal to submit to the factory’s occupation of the worker’s bodily time. At the same time, it was a sentinel, a guard (guard-dog) of a worker’s memory of stealing time from work and turning it into an occasion for play.
The worker’s dog, the distillation of the spirit of an ‘anonymous steel worker’ has had different exhibition lives. It is printed as a crimson screen-printed emblazonment on paper. This is the way it was first exhibited in a Raqs show titled ‘Time Book’ at an art venue called ‘The Mattress Factory’ in Pittsburgh (2007). Here, it found itself within an assemblage of other objects and video signals that offered reflection on the historical legacy of the steel industry.
Later, in the Raqs exhibition ‘Untimely Calendar’ at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi (2014-2015), the image of the dog, stayed as a print on a steel-sheet, suspended over an installation that invoked a citrus orchard inside a factory, surrounded and annotated by an array of the editions of actual prints of the front page of a workers’ newspaper (‘Faridabad Majdoor Samachar’ / ‘Faridabad Workers’ News’) across three decades.
A spectre of the ‘Robot-Dog’ also spirited itself in the form of a spoken word monologue into our performance-installation ‘The Last International’ (at the Performa Festival, New York, 2013) as a time-travelling envoy and interlocutor from the future. It is as if with each instantiation, from exhibition to exhibition to performance, the worker’s steel dog has taken on different lives, telling different but inter-lined stories about time and labour.
Working with traces like this ‘workers’ dog’ helps us realize that objects such as these appear as object-sediments in a metaphorical geological stratigraphic profile. They settle, lurking into the seams of events and processes, disrupting temporal sequences. They make time feel volatile, and possibly, occasionally, volcanic.
The Robot-Dog Reads 1993 to 2014
264 framed copies of ‘Faridabad Mazdoor Samachar’ (1993-2014)
With screen print on acrylic (‘Robot Redux’/‘Anonymous Steel Worker’)
For this work, Anonymous Steel Worker has been reformulated and overlaid on editions of the newspaper, ‘Faridabad Mazdoor Samachar’, from 1993 to 2014.
