University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Business casual: performing labor in the work of Harun Farocki, Pilvi Takala, and Melanie Gilligan

(USC Thesis Other)

Business casual: performing labor in the work of Harun Farocki, Pilvi Takala, and Melanie Gilligan

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

Business Casual: Performing Labor in the Work of
Harun Farocki, Pilvi Takala, and Melanie Gilligan

by

Simone Krug

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS

August 2017

Copyright 2017 Simone Krug
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to single out my primary reader Noura Wedell, whose insight was
instrumental in all stages of this thesis and whose mentorship during my time at USC
extended far beyond the scope of this project. I owe much to her wisdom and
encouragement and she is an asset to this graduate program. I also want to thank my
thesis committee members Karen Moss and John Tain for their support and patience
during the development of this project.

A sincere thanks to Andy Campbell and Amelia Jones, whose excitement about my
ideas propelled me forward.

I am grateful for the support of my colleagues in the MA program, namely Hannah
Grossman, whose willingness to listen, debate, and challenge me throughout my studies
has been indispensible.

Lastly, I am thankful for the support of my family Ken Krug, Andrea Scharf, and Josh
Krug and my friends in Los Angeles and New York.

iii

DEDICATION

To my grandmother, Lore Krug.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………v

List of Figures…...…………………………………………………………………vi-viii

Introduction…...…………………………………………………………………………1

Chapter I: Selling Your Performance
Harun Farocki, The Interview (1997)…………………………………………………..11

Chapter II: “Some Sort of Mental Problem”
Pilvi Takala, The Trainee (2008)………………………………………………………51

Chapter III: “A More Fulfilling Position Elsewhere”
Melanie Gilligan, Crisis in the Credit System (2008)………………………………….81

Conclusion: The Interview, The Job, The Termination………………………………106

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….109

v
ABSTRACT

This essay examines three disparate film-based artworks that render the realm of
work—and the precarious role of the immaterial worker—visible, claiming the
predefined behaviors, habits, and rote choreographies the subjects perform at the office
as fictions. Harun Farocki’s documentary The Interview (1997), Pilvi Takala’s video
and installation work The Trainee (2008), and Melanie Gilligan’s 4-part mini-series
Crisis in the Credit System (2008) show how we define, shape, and position the
laboring self in society by obscuring the distinctions between what is real and what is
performed, role-played, and acted.
Farocki, Takala, and Gilligan’s video works lay bare the changing structures of
postindustrial capitalism that lead to shifts in the culture, structure, and organization of
work. The artists expose the rigidity of these structures, critiquing and resisting the
systems that seem so ingrained and unchangeable in society. Although not directly
interventionist, these works mark subversive modes of resistance to labor as it has been
organized in neoliberal capitalism. This thesis borrows from histories and critiques of
neoliberalism found in foundational texts by political theorists, sociologists, and
economists David Harvey, Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, Fredric Jameson, and
Maurizio Lazzarato, which provide a basic cartography from which to map the
conditions in which these videos, and the situations they portray, are created and
staged.

vi
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1………………………………………………………………………………...26

Figure 2.………………………………………………………………………………..27

Figure 3.………………………………………………………………………………..28

Figure 4.………………………………………………………………………………..29

Figure 5.………………………………………………………………………………..30

Figure 6.………………………………………………………………………………..31

Figure 7.………………………………………………………………………………..32

Figure 8.………………………………………………………………………………..33

Figure 9.………………………………………………………………………………..34

Figure 10.……………………………………………………………………………....35

Figure 11.……………………………………………………………………………....36

Figure 12…………………………………………………………………………….....37

Figure 13…………………………………………………………………………….....38

Figure 14……………………………………………………………………………….39

Figure 15…………………………………………………………………………….....40

Figure 16…………………………………………………………………………..…...41

Figure 17…………………………………………………………………………….....42

Figure 18……………………………………………………………………………….43

Figure 19…………………………………………………………………………….....44

Figure 20…………………………………………………………………………….....45

Figure 21……………………………………………………………………………….46

Figure 22……………………………………………………………………………….47

vii
Figure 23……………………………………………………………………………….48

Figure 24……………………………………………………………………………….49

Figure 25……………………………………………………………………………….50

Figure 26……………………………………………………………………………….67

Figure 27……………………………………………………………………………….68

Figure 28……………………………………………………………………………….69

Figure 29……………………………………………………………………………….70

Figure 30……………………………………………………………………………….71

Figure 31……………………………………………………………………………….72

Figure 32……………………………………………………………………………….73

Figure 33……………………………………………………………………………….74

Figure 34……………………………………………………………………………….75

Figure 35……………………………………………………………………………….76

Figure 36……………………………………………………………………………….77

Figure 37……………………………………………………………………………….78

Figure 38……………………………………………………………………………….79

Figure 39……………………………………………………………………………….80

Figure 40……………………………………………………………………………….80

Figure 41……………………………………………………………………………….95

Figure 42……………………………………………………………………………….95

Figure 43……………………………………………………………………………….96

Figure 44……………………………………………………………………………….96

Figure 45……………………………………………………………………………….97

viii
Figure 46. ……………………………………………………………………………...97

Figure 47…………………………………………………………………………….....98

Figure 48……………………………………………………………………………….99

Figure 49……………………………………………………………………………….99

Figure 50……………………………………………………………………………...100

Figure 51……………………………………………………………………………...100

Figure 52……………………………………………………………………………...100

Figure 53………………………………………………………………………….…..101

Figure 54………………………………………………………………………….…..101

Figure 55………………………………………………………………………….…..102

Figure 56………………………………………………………………………….…..102

Figure 57…………………………………………………………………………...…103

Figure 58…………………………………………………………………………...…103

Figure 59……………………………………………………………………………...104

Figure 60……………………………………………………………………………...104

Figure 61……………………………………………………………………………...105

1
INTRODUCTION

It is worth noting that in this kind of working existence it becomes increasingly difficult to
distinguish leisure time from work time. In a sense, life becomes inseparable from work.
1

––Maurizio Lazzarato. Immaterial Labour

I check my work email from my bed. This tendency is ingrained in my morning
routine. Deftly punching out replies from underneath the covers, I rarely clock in. How,
after all, might I aggregate durations so infinitesimal yet recurrent on an invoice? The
impetus for this thesis stems from my own inability to distinguish between the site of
rest, or, more aptly—leisure—and the space of labor. Italian social theorist Paolo Virno
classifies the tendency to conflate these opposing phenomena in contemporary culture,
noting, “labour and non-labour develop an identical form of productivity, based on the
exercise of generic human facilities: language, memory, sociability, ethical and
aesthetic inclinations, the capacity for abstraction and learning.”
2
This capitalist
paradigm permeates both my mornings and a greater reality about new modes of labor.
In an essay delineating recent intersections of performance and work, art historian Julia
Bryan-Wilson brings Virno’s ideas about time and remuneration closer to home,
noting, “as any freelancer knows, if you are never officially on the clock, then you
never feel totally off the clock, either.”
3
What circumstances in the economic system
lead to this blurring between working and not working?
This essay will examine three disparate film-based artworks that render the

1
Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labour.” Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, eds. Michael
Hardt and Paulo Virno. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 147.
2
Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Trans.
Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson. (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 103.
3
Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Occupational Realism.” TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 56, Number 4,
(Winter 2012) (T216): 40.
2
realm of work—and the precarious role of the immaterial worker—visible, claiming the
predefined behaviors, habits, and rote choreographies the subjects perform at the office
as fictions. Harun Farocki’s documentary The Interview (1997), Pilvi Takala’s video
and installation work The Trainee (2008), and Melanie Gilligan’s 4-part mini-series
Crisis in the Credit System (2008) show how we define, shape, and position the
laboring self in society by obscuring the distinctions between what is real and what is
performed, role-played, and acted.
German filmmaker Harun Farocki investigated the structures of late capitalist
society in Germany, returning often to the site of work and the ways workers must
function in order to obtain or maintain a job. The Interview (1997) records the training
processes for job applications in Berlin in 1996, less than a decade after the 1989 fall of
the Berlin Wall. In the interview training sessions, students learn and analyze modes of
presenting—and ultimately marketing—themselves, studying and critiquing recorded
footage of their behavior, speech, and movement. As in his many other film essay
works such as How to Live in the Federal German Republic (1990) or Indoctrination
(1987), which document various training sessions in a socio-politically shifting
Germany, Farocki lingers on the way his subjects act, or role play, envisioning realistic
scenarios that might take place as they endeavor to get jobs. His film asserts that in the
interview, the worker, rather than simply selling his or her labor time, is expected to
mold his or her behavior and internal landscape to the requirements of labor. As George
Tsogas describes, “the commodity form in cognitive capitalism becomes biopolitical.”
4

In this sense, the commodity comes to encompass the very forms of subjectivity as the

4
George Tsogas, “The Commodity Form in Cognitive Capitalism.” Culture and Organization. Volume
18 Number 5. (December 1, 2012): 377.

3
interviewee learns to sell their attention time, interests, and emotions. In these
interviews, the subject must learn to practice straight posture, reserved eagerness, a neat
appearance, etc. as presenting oneself becomes a mode of selling oneself.
Finnish artist Pilvi Takala’s The Trainee (2008) reflects on the internalization of
office and worker behavior a decade later; however, rather than conforming to
normative office environment manners, she subverts them. Assuming a pseudonym and
alternate identity, Takala stages and records a performance where she plays a low-level
marketing employee at the international accounting firm Deloitte in Helsinki. Her
behavior, from staring off into space at her desk or riding the elevator all day, shocks
her officemates, who cope with her unconventional conduct and resistance to working
by reporting her to upper management. In her film, Takala juxtaposes secretly recorded
footage of her interactions with colleagues with screenshots of email correspondence
amongst the staff about her inactivity. While Takala’s colleagues are unaware of her
position as an artist performing as an employee, the Deloitte upper management
nevertheless sanction this performance-qua-traineeship. As a privately owned
multibillion dollar global accounting firm that specializes in audit, tax, consulting, and
financial advisory services, the company capitalizes on her unconventional conduct,
profiting from her creativity and cultural capital as an artist in the name of their own
corporate interest
Conceived in the same year, Canadian artist Melanie Gilligan’s four-part
fictional drama Crisis in the Credit System (2008) likewise examines the role of the
worker in an increasingly wealth obsessed and financialized milieu on the brink of a
credit crisis. Organized like an episodic TV show, the piece portrays a cast of major
4
investment bank employees on an outdoor work retreat as they play an ice-breaker
game of improvising strategies of handling the evolving financial climate. The bank
employees are handed scraps of paper that cast them as private equity heads,
economists, and other characters from the financial stage. Gilligan thrusts her
characters into the murky layers of the financial realm as they move between the
outdoor work retreat to hedge fund offices and trading floors in dreamlike sequences,
and from positions as low-level bank employees to high-level economists or wealthy
hedge fund managers. Despite the fantastical and complex solutions and scenarios they
envision and enact, ironically, at the end of the series, the entire team is nevertheless let
go because, as their group leader claims, they are in difficult financial times.
Farocki, Takala, and Gilligan’s video works lay bare the changing structures of
postindustrial capitalism that lead to shifts in the culture, structure, and organization of
work. The artists intend to expose the rigidity of these structures, critiquing and
resisting the systems that seem so ingrained and unchangeable in society. Although not
directly interventionist, these works mark subversive modes of resistance to labor as it
has been organized in neoliberal capitalism.
5
In this thesis, I will borrow from histories
and critiques of neoliberalism found in foundational texts by political theorists,
sociologists, and economists David Harvey, Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, Fredric
Jameson, and Maurizio Lazzarato. These will provide a basic cartography from which
to map the conditions in which these videos, and the situations they portray, are created
and staged. While the works I will discuss date from the mid-1990s and late-2000s, and
therefore articulate a spirit of labor that is specific to their particular time and

5
Discourse surrounding these terms and themes have been defined and reframed countless times since
the 1970s.
5
geography, a brief discussion of the socio-economic contexts that predate these works
will situate the structures of labor that inform my argument in later chapters.
The late 1960s and early 1970s ushered in an era of drastic global social,
cultural, and economic revisions following the implementation of neoliberal
economics, an “institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights,
free markets, and free trade,” as sociologist David Harvey writes.
6
Neoliberal
economics emerged in response to the deterioration of the prosperous “golden age” of
economics that lasted from the post-war period until the 1970s. The economic
structuring of the “golden age” can be traced as a response to the economic downturn
of the Great Depression. In the United States, the “golden age” was an era of rapid
economic growth, with minimal foreign trade competition and a regulated market.
Further, the rise in union participation secured labor rights for workers. Increased
governmental involvement on social fronts created the welfare state, a system of
economic security whose continued impact includes social security.
The waning of the “golden age” and the rise of neoliberalism can be traced to
diverse sources, namely the contrast between rising wages and declining productivity
and profitability in the 1970s.
7
As capital accumulation and prosperity stagnated,
unemployment rose, and the government sought institutional policy that altered, as
Harvey notes, “divisions of labour, social relations, welfare provisions, technological
mixes, ways of life and thought, reproductive activities, attachments to the land and
habits of the heart.”
8
Significant markers of the shift include Richard Nixon’s

6
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.
7
Alejandro Reuss, “That ‘70s Crisis.” Dollars & Sense Real World Economics. Accessed February 19,
2017. http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/1109reuss.html
8
Harvey, 3.
6
deregulation of the American dollar in 1971, the Arab Oil Embargo in 1973 and the
ensuing inflation, and Jimmy Carter’s Airline Deregulation Act in 1978, which opened
up free markets, ushering in mass corporate globalization. In the wake of this seismic
economic change, the capitalist class obtained even greater access to power. The
massive infrastructural economic and political changes of neoliberal policy had global
effects that reverberate today.
The rise of neoliberalism coincides with a shift in the ethos, or ideological
reconstruction, of the capitalist system and thus a re-structuring of labor in the 1970s-
1990s. In The New Spirit of Capitalism, sociologists Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello
describe the evolutionary nature of the capitalist system, which inherently presupposes,
and even requires, critique. They assert that “criticism is a catalyst for changes in the
spirit of capitalism. It is impossible for capitalism to avoid being at least somewhat
oriented towards the attainment of the common good, as it is this striving which
motivates people to become committed to its process.”
9
By incorporating critique,
capitalism evolves and restructures itself. This ethos enables periods of restructuring
between what the authors call the first, second, and third (or new) spirits of capitalism.
These transitions are defined by a progression from agrarian and mercantile labor
models to industrialized labor models, managerial organization, and labor struggles, to
a more connected, project-based model of working reliant on increased “network” and
“social connexion.”
The new spirit of capitalism incorporates what Boltanski and Chiapello call the
“artistic critique” of capitalism, which

9
Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, “The New Spirit of Capitalism,” Paper to be presented to the
Conference of Europeanists Chicago. (March 14-16, 2002): 2. Accessed February 16, 2017.
http://www.darkmatterarchives.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/boltanskiSPIRITofCapitalism.pdf.
7
“foregrounds the loss of meaning and, in particular, the loss of the sense
of what is beautiful and valuable, which derives from standardization and
generalized commodification, affecting not only everyday objects but also
artworks (the cultural mercantilism of the bourgeoisie) and human beings.
It stresses the objective impulse of capitalism and bourgeois society to
regiment and dominate human beings, and subject them to work that it
prescribes for the purpose of profit, while hypocritically invoking
morality. To this it counterposes the freedom of artists, their rejection of
any contamination of aesthetics by ethics, their refusal of any form of
subjection in time and space and, in its extreme forms, of any kind of
work.”
10

Assuming the spirit of artistic freedom, the new spirit of capitalism fuses economics
with culture, invoking a need for gratifying work, flexible hours, and work driven by
desire. In this capitalist system, workers seek not simply paychecks, but meaning.
While the new cultural context driven by the third spirit supposedly allows for
greater flexibility and creativity on part of the worker, it nevertheless blurs the
definition between work and non-work and between the individual identity of the
worker and the company at large. Boltanski and Chiapello note, “In a connexionist
world, the distinction between private life and professional life tends to diminish under
the impact of dual confusion: on the one hand, between the qualities of the person and
the properties of their labour-power (inseparably combined in the notion of skill); and
on the other, between personal ownership and, above all else, self-ownership and social
property, lodged in the organization.”
11
The dismantling of hierarchy between boss and
worker might seem like a democratization of power, but nevertheless it shifts weight,
responsibility, and ultimately more work onto the worker. In this communal,
communicative capitalist system, work might become less alienating, but still retains,
and even expands, its exploitative qualities.

10
Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Gregory Elliot (London and
New York: Verso, 2005), 38.
11
Ibid., 155.
8
Somewhat similarly to Boltanski and Chiapello’s claim about culture’s lack of
autonomy in economics, Fredric Jameson explains this for postmodernity, in the sense
that art, music, architecture and more abstract modes of cultural production are
subsumed by late capitalist logic. While cultural production under modernism retained
a sense of autonomy, the thrust of late capitalism, dissolves—or, as Fredric Jameson
notes, “explodes” this logic under postmodernism.
12
He explains, “What has happened
is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production
generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-
seeming goods (from clothing to aeroplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now
assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation
and experimentation.”
13
The postindustrial capitalist drive for increased production and
accumulation infiltrates modes of artmaking of which Andy Warhol’s Factory, and its
mass-produced silkscreen printing, is an apt example. Postmodernism blurs the
distinction between the high culture and mass-factory produced object. The economic
reordering of postmodernity creates a postindustrial culture where everything assumes a
use value and a price.
The emergence of postindustrial capitalism and post-Fordism alter the
organization of production at this time. These shifts are characterized by increased
reliance on technology, the appearance and expanded role of multinational capital in
the economy, and the expansion of the service sector. This moment can also be
exemplified by a radical transmutation in the structure and management of work in the

12
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. (London and New York:
Verso, 1991), 56.
13
Ibid., 4.
9
1970s which sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato terms “immaterial labor.” Culling from the
informational and cultural influences on the economy, “immaterial labor” identifies
“changes taking place in workers’ labor processes in big companies in the
industrial and tertiary sectors, where the skills involved in direct labor are
increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal
and vertical communication). On the other hand, as regards the activity that
produces the “cultural content” of the commodity, immaterial labor involves a
series of activities that are not normally recognized as “work” - in other words,
the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic
standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public
opinion.”
14

This new mode of labor exemplifies the artistic critique that led to the new spirit of
capitalism described by Boltanski and Chiapello. The values, formation, and
conceptualizations of this new mode labor are illustrative of the zeitgeist.
While the role of the individual subject in the workplace expands greatly under
this new system, the subjects lose their own autonomy to it. Lazzarato writes, “The
concept of immaterial labor presupposes and results in an enlargement of productive
cooperation that even includes the production and reproduction of communication and
hence of its most important contents: subjectivity.”
15
While Michel Foucault’s model of
the production of subjectivity implicated what he called the modernist disciplinary
apparatuses of the factory, the school, and the prison, Lazzarato describes a new form
of subjectivity produced by incessant demands on attention imposed by service work,
and the importance of emails, screen culture, the internet, user generated social media,
etc. “Immaterial labor” reconstructs the question of the formation of subjectivity, such
that the subject herself devotes more time and energy to working. In this regard, work
becomes a mode of structuring the self, and with that, life.

14
Lazzarato, 142.
15
Ibid., 149.
10
While the video works I will examine date from two distinct historical moments
in an increasing global geopolitical arena, Germany in the late 1990s and the more
contemporary London and Helsinki at the height of the stock market crisis in the late
2000s, they nevertheless converge in their critique of the economic restructuring and
the role of the worker in late capitalist society. These works respond differently,
formally and structurally, to the condition of neoliberalism, exposing the conditions of
labor that shape them. They present different forms of admixture of art, life, and
economic structures: one is a “film essay” documentary on the interview process to get
a job, the other is a performance documentary of a fictional job but in a real setting, and
the third is a parody of a TV show that addresses neoliberalism by presenting its
critique. These case studies do not provide an encompassing history, however, situated
together, they provide a model for thinking about and through the complexity and
obstinacy of capitalism. By placing these enacted scenarios of works together, I intend
to shed light on their intersections and show anew the complexities of their situations.

11
CHAPTER I: SELLING YOUR PERFORMANCE
HARUN FAROCKI, THE INTERVIEW (1997)

What would it mean to treat the real as an effect to be produced, rather than a fact to
be understood?
16
––T.J. Demos. Moving Images of Globalization

In Harun Farocki’s 1990 film How to Live in the German Federal Republic
(Leben-BRD, 1990), the filmmaker documented instructional classes that ranged from
how new parents might wash a baby, to how a rookie police officer might placate a
drunk criminal, to how a stripper might remove her undergarments, to countless other
quotidian tasks and duties that required training, juxtaposing these scenes in order to
expose the rigidity of social structures in West German society (Figures 1-3). The title
of Farocki’s work mimicked the text in an instructional pamphlet or user manual, an
explanatory script that one might follow in order to learn, in this instance, “how” to live
life in the Federal German Republic. On this culture of ordering individuals and their
actions to fit systems of productivity and efficiency, Farocki noted in a 2001 interview
in Camura Obscura, “Commodity economy claims to have for every need, for every
lack, a thing in store that can take care of the lack.”
17
The culture of instruction
presented in these scenes did not constrain human interactions, rather, they presented a
mode of abstracting, controlling, and capitalizing these modes of communication and
interaction. The way the stripper shimmied off her slip might mean the difference
between a satisfied customer leaving a pile of Deutsche Marks and no tip at all (Figure
4).

16
T.J. Demos, “Moving Images of Globalization Source.” Grey Room. The MIT Press. Number 37 (Fall
2009): 17.
17
Harun Farocki and Randall Halle, “History Is Not a Matter of Generations: Interview with Harun
Farocki.” Trans. Sabine Czylwik. Camera Obscura. Duke University Press. Volume 16, Number 1
(2001): 57.
12
Filmed at the beginning of the end of the Cold War over the course of 1989, the
western capitalist society of the German Federal Republic (FRG) that Farocki depicted
had recently unified with the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the post-communist
faction of the east.
18
In this regard, the film gave an image of a society on the brink of
change even as it served as a document or preservation of that culture. Noteworthy to
Farocki was the role of the individual subject before the ensuing great political shifts.
Citing this atmosphere of discipline and guidance in the creation of the bourgeois sector
of society, which had shifted away from the working class context of the GDR, he
noted, “The whole issue is of course related to the expansion of the middle class.
People working in a factory were supposed to bend and be as much of a nobody as
possible; now everyone is expected to take the initiative and to have a self out of which
the action proceeds.”
19
The bourgeois mode of life required or necessitated these
instructional models wherein the very structures of life could be studied, enacted, and
reenacted. As workers shifted from working class to middle class, they engaged as
“entrepreneurs of the self”
20
as described by Foucault, responsible for learning,
growing, and being mobile and innovative.
21

Over the course of his lifetime, Farocki witnessed and documented the changing
social structures of Germany in filmic “essays” that combined gestural, cinematic, and

18
The economic and monetary union between the two Germanys occurred on July 1, 1990. Christopher
S. Swader. The Capitalist Personality: Face-to-Face Sociality and Economic Change in the Post-
Communist World. (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 88.
19
Ibid., 58-59.
20
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79. Trans. G.
Burchell. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
21
To this end, Foucault also notes, “What is the function of this generalization of the ‘enterprise’
form?... [I]t involves extending the economic model of supply and demand and of investment-costs-
profit so as to make it a model of social relations and of existence itself, a form of relation- ship of the
individual to himself, time, those around him, the group, and the family.” Ibid., 242.
13
documentary styles. Born in the Czech Republic in 1944 to an Indian father and
German mother, Farocki came of age at a time of political upheaval and social change.
He grew up in India, Indonesia, and Hamburg and was a member of the first Berlin
Film Academy (Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie) class in the 1960s. In addition to
making films, he wrote for and edited the magazine Filmkritik (Munich) from 1974-
1984, and published writing throughout his career. He taught classes in Germany and at
the University of California, Berkeley, between 1993-1999 and at the Academy of Art,
Vienna between 2006-2011. Berlin appealed to him because it had evaded the postwar
economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) of the 1950s that had reshaped the rest of West
Germany and he spent much of his adult life there until his death in 2014.
22

Sociopolitical, historic, and economic change in Germany deeply informed
Farocki’s work, and the binary between a socialist and capitalist ethos is present in
many of his works that address labor, war, surveillance, and discipline. The end of the
Communist experiment in the Soviet Bloc, marked by the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall
and subsequent German reunification, led to a more overt embrace of neoliberal models
on part of the ex-Soviet republics. Describing this economic transformation, sociologist
Christopher S. Swader notes, “The Eastern German communist state had shielded East
Germans from the uncertainties of modern society, so that unification meant the
incorporation of a great deal of modern risk, in the guise of unemployment, for
example. This riskiness is one their Western counterparts had already experienced for a
much longer period and is a great departure from the ‘employment society’ of the

22
Nora M. Alter, “Two or Three Things I Know about Harun Farocki.” October 151. (Winter 2015):
151.
14
former GDR.”
23
In reunified Germany, the heavily interventionist welfare state model
of the east became a non-interventionist state in which individuals were required to
provide for themselves what the state once provided. Neoliberalism implies laissez-
faire economic policies that are in opposition to the state-directed policies of East
Germany, thus the need to train people to insert themselves into this new form of
governance in the recently reunified state. With reunification, the global unemployment
crisis of the 1970s that Reaganism and Thatcherism claimed to address likewise
impacted these formerly socialist countries.
24
Shifts to post-industrial production were
accompanied by shifts in cultural politics, such as newfound celebration of technology
and information and even the privatization of European television, which are themes
that appear in Farocki’s 1997 film The Interview.
25

The Interview presents observational footage of job interview training sessions
for youth and the long term unemployed, recorded both by Farocki and the training
center staff for educational (but also surveillant) purposes in the classroom (Figures 5-
7). Editing together scenes of these role-play sessions and the classroom conversations
that ensue, he revealed the structures of labor and values of Berlin society in this day.
Fitting into these structures required training (its own mode of labor) and competency.
Farocki’s characters practiced “perfecting” themselves as they studied and dissected
their speech, bodily movements, emotions, social relations, and relations to objects
(Figures 8-9). These attitudes are paralleled in Lazzarato’s description of “immaterial
labor.” He writes, “What modern management techniques are looking for is for ‘the

23
Swader, 90.
24
David Harvey notes, “The crisis of capital accumulation in the 1970s affected everyone through the
combination of rising unemployment and accelerating inflation.” Harvey, 14.

15
worker’s soul to become part of the factory.’ The worker’s personality and subjectivity
have to be made susceptible to organization and command. It is around immateriality
that the quality and quantity of labor are organized. This transformation of working-
class labor into a labor of control, of handling information, into a decision-making
capacity that involves the investment of subjectivity...”
26
By learning the modes—and
reciting the scripts—the interviewee demonstrated her willingness to both invest her
personality in and give up her own autonomy in order to enter this system. These
training sessions were not paid. They did not teach the interviewee how to do the jobs
for which they would eventually interview. Rather, they taught subjects how to improve
themselves, how to act, behave, and communicate in order to get hired. Even in these
staged interviews, the characters were already asked to be creative, to invest more of
their personal into their positions, even to put more of their “soul” into their interview,
if not the jobs for which they vied.
Under the socialist GDR, workers did not have to compete to find work. Rather,
workers fulfilled tasks and would be employed. Swader notes that there was “low
pressure to work harder, and a lack of workplace insecurity.”
27
The Interview
documented the ways that workers with experience in a socialist country tried to learn
the modes of getting a job in a capitalist society. The introduction of capitalism created
a more competitive and precarious environment for workers.
28
This point was directly
addressed in a scene from the end of the film in which a male interviewer coached a

26
Lazzarato, 143.
27
Swader, 87.
28
With competition, however, came higher wages. Despite this high job security, Fred L. Casmir writes
that “their incomes were often far behind those of West Germans in similar situations.” Fred L. Casmir.
“’Wir sine ein Volk”: Illusions and Reality of Germany Unification.” Communication in Eastern
Europe: the Role of History, Culture and Media in Contemporary Politics. ed. Fred. L. Casmir (Mahwah,
New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: 1995), 49.
16
woman on how to emphasize a skill she did not possess in order to land a job and how
to negotiate for a salary based on sales rather than a fixed income. He warned, “I don't
think I’ve made myself clear. No housewife gets even a penny for her hard work. If I
were you, I wouldn’t approach a real situation like this, because commitment isn’t
compensated and certainly not what you're ‘morally’ entitled to. No, in capitalism - it
its pure form here - only profits count.” This exchange, directly invoking capitalism,
emphasized its influence on the way work and life are structured. The woman could not
get hired based on enthusiasm alone.
As the political borders in Germany shifted, so too did the organization of work.
Farocki described this phenomenon with a “story of women who once had a secure
position in the GDR (which) repeatedly came up. They had had technical qualifications.
With the end of the industry in the territory of the GDR, their knowledge was suddenly
worthless. The same happened in the West, but much more slowly and over a stretch of
decades. In the former GDR social abilities were in demand--even the femininity of
women.”
29
Emphasizing this change from socialist republic to democracy, Farocki
exposed post socialist society’s slow adjustment to competitive capitalist society.
Obsolete knowledge and lack of competitive skills led many to job interview training
centers like the one that Farocki depicted. As these individuals practiced their lines for
anticipated interviews at this center, they became unknowing actors in Farocki’s film
and, with the perspective of time, real documents of the structural unemployment that
accompanied the reunification struggle.
30

29
Farocki and Halle, 62.
30
It was widely assumed that the reunification of East and West Germany would be a smooth transition
process, especially in contrast to other Eastern European countries. However, a swift transformation of
the GDR was not a reality. Dorothy J. Rosenberg, “Stepsisters: On the Difficulties of German-German
17
The filmmaker was thematically interested in capitalism as a structure, and The
Interview stands as one example of many strategic examinations of its underpinnings.
Social scientist Jörg Becker claims that Farocki examined “aggregate states of
capitalism.” In doing so, "The author addresses the objects of his investigations with a
sense of loss that speaks from historical events and the conditions they have
occasioned.”
31
The Interview did not harken back to a time under socialism; rather, it
divulged the heaviness of its transition. This discomfort was apparent in a mock
interview with an older man who explained to his interviewer that he trained as a
mechanic and had a degree from the technical university (Figures 10-12). “I can
contribute a lot in the area of trade,” he said, as the interviewer interrupted him—it
turned out this was an interview for a telemarketing position, and his experience as an
electrical technician was irrelevant. His skills were clearly obsolete. Ironically, the
interviewer corrected him on how to communicate and how to listen: “Excuse me, but
when have a telephone conversation, first say what you want to say, why you want to
say it, and then say it.” As both poor communicator and listener, telemarketing was
clearly a poor fit. Lazzarato writes of this phenomenon, “As it is no longer possible to
confine subjectivity merely to tasks of execution, it becomes necessary for the subject’s
competence in the areas of management, communication, and creativity to be made
compatible with the conditions of ‘production for production’s sake.’”
32
In this
postindustrial society, one markets one’ personality rather than their technical skill.

Feminist Cooperation.” Communication in Eastern Europe: the Role of History, Culture and Media in
Contemporary Politics. ed. Fred. L. Casmir (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates:
1995), 83.
31
Jörg Becker, “Images and Thoughts, People and Things, Materials and Methods.” Ed. Thomas
Elsaesser. Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004),
60.
32
Lazzarato, 134.
18
Similar awkward moments manifested when a man applying for a position as a
biotechnical assistant repeatedly emphasized his creativity (Figure 13), or when a
woman applying for a position in advertising said she could do invoices and was very
inventive (leading one to believe that she might apply her inventiveness to a technical
task) (Figure 14), or when an interviewee instructed a student applying for a position at
a bank to be more charming (Figure 15).
In the training sessions depicted in The Interview, when students watched
played-back videotape of their mock interviews, the trainers encouraged them to listen
and learn from one another. The communal classes emphasized a sense of camaraderie,
wherein one was not simply critiqued, but contributed to the discussion and learned
from others’ blunders or successes. Ironically, while some teachers instructed students
to gesticulate, others were told to keep their hands down or out of the way (Figures 16-
18). In one scenario, a young woman was reprimanded for resting her hands on her
mock interviewer’s desk while in another class setting, a man was told that resting his
hands on the interviewer’s desk exuded “equality”. Farocki presented these
contradictory scenes in succession, underscoring the arbitrariness of these lessons.
Ordering his film thus, he demonstrated how this society conformed to fit these
inconsistent paradigms. Film scholar Christa Blümlinger notes that these instances
“show how a society of service industries, management, and training departments busy
devising one-size-fits-all behavioural templates that guarantee the stability of the
system.(…) Farocki captures what is really at stake in a contemporary society that is
undergoing a transformation into a post-industrial system in which the factory
19
symbolically gives way to the business enterprise”
33
The rules for this performing,
acting, and choreography were all made up. Farocki lingered on the footage from
classroom sessions that reveal further incongruences between what was discussed and
what actually transpired on the tape.
Farocki’s cinematic style integrated close observation with a sense of distance.
In his own footage from the sessions, a viewer might feel as though they were in the
room, another participant observing a training session. The cameras and technologic
equipment appeared frequently in the foreground of his shots, almost like characters or
subjects unto themselves (Figures 19-20). Farocki deliberately included the technologic
objects of production in his frames. This inclusion of the equipment lent a sense of
informality to his scenes, but also of voyeurism. Viewers were reminded of the
machines of observation. The filmed footage was a mode of self-surveillance—an all-
seeing gaze for self criticism and perfection. The technology thus invoked the notion of
ordering or control.
His editing style, by contrast, assumed a form of non-linear, flowing
assemblage. Incorporating black and white scenes and stills from the recorded sessions
the students scrutinized on television screens, he created an effect of mise-en-abyme;
viewers watch the training subjects watch themselves or their fellow trainees (Figure
21). The layers of what was real and what was acted were blended together, as the
television screen footage depicted acted sessions, while the characters watching the
footage acted naturally and as themselves. But the acting and role-playing was also
real—these characters played themselves, albeit in improvisational scenarios.

33
Christa Blümlinger, “Harun Farocki: Critical Strategies.” Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-
Lines. Ed. Thomas Elsaesser. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 317.
20
Blümlinger observes, “The displacement that has occurred here in this distance from
real life is represented by the television monitor, which repeats and re-presents the
‘role-playing’ of the ‘model actors’ and their trainers. The displacement between reality
and its simulation affects the repetition, a key element in Farocki’s montage and in the
viewer’s memory.”
34
Juxtaposing the filmed footage of interviewees as they were
forced to watch their performances, Farocki demonstrated that these people were taught
to follow a script on how to behave, both by instructors and by their classmates. In one
scene that depicted students watching recordings of salary negotiation practice, we hear
the sound of clapping from the TV screen where the students study their actions. In this
instance, the show has been successful, the sale (of the interviewee) successful. If the
interview has indeed become a show, the different layers of reality are certainly hard to
parse.
Neil Young electric guitar riffs accompanied the scenes of the filmed footage,
whereas sound from the scenes Farocki shot himself recorded the simultaneous
dialogue that took place in the room. This guitar effect lends a sense of mystery or
drama to these scenes, as though something is about to happen. These archival shots are
often slowed down, reversed, or reframed so as to focus on particular body parts or
body language. He repeatedly zoomed in on facial expressions and hand gestures—
smirks, smiles, fidgeting (Figures 22-24). These scenes can also be characterized by a
deliberateness, or slowness. Lingering on particular images, moments, or movements
was a method of rumination.
As artistic strategy, Farocki set two different modes of documentary (real filmed

34
Ibid., 318.
21
footage and his own footage), in dialogue, using experimental editing to lay bare the
way in which these stories and norms are fabricated. T.J. Demos writes about the
documentary form: “Far from being opposed to fiction, documentary is actually one
mode of it, joining both in continuity and conflict, the “real” (the indexical, contingent
elements of recorded footage) and the “fabulated” (the constructed, the edited, the
narrative) in cinema.”
35
As an “essay film” Farocki presented evidence and examples of
the real, in this instance, the real social need to teach German citizens how to interview
and how to present themselves. However, he never revealed the precise identity of
these characters, who remained anonymous throughout. Their backgrounds, and the
politics of their unemployment or motivation to attend the interview training sessions
are never overtly addressed. Also in the vein of an essay, the filmmaker inscribed his
own judgment, which manifests in his resistance to chronological organization. The
succession of images became fragments or pieces from an archive of observed habits,
rather than a coherent narrative. Documentary film is, ultimately, an art form, and while
it may hold a mirror up to society at a novel angle, it nevertheless reproduces only a
reflection, blending, or conflating of the real and the fictive.
Farocki’s strategy of depicting the subjective teased out the political as one
understands the oppressiveness of the norms these prospective applicants endured. The
students were taught to memorize rote rituals, and to repeat and memorize lines from a
script. In one instance, a student on the mock interview stage was told his posture was
wrong (Figure 25). The instructor asked, “So how could you sit? You can remember
that and practice it.” By instructing this student to practice sitting, a natural position of

35
Demos, 17.
22
the body, she proposed a mode of controlling his movement and his states of rest. Was
sitting an exercise that one could learn? Moreover, was better posture in fact the right
way to get a job? Hal Foster makes a noteworthy point about How to Live in the FRG
that is relevant to The Interview, noting, “as a documentary of dramatizations, How to
Live also anticipates our own age of post-Warholian reality TV, in which real life often
appears real only if performed and “living” sometimes seems synonymous with “acting
out.”
36
The lives, and practices that Farocki depicted were real and fictional. The
artist’s observations in The Interview collapsed living with acting, formally,
structurally, and theatrically.
37

The Interview as an object likewise assumed multiple roles: first, as a
documentary television episode commissioned in February 1997 by the French and
German public programming channel Arte as part of its documentary series Facing Life
(Welt im Blick / La vie en face) in February 1997, and later as an art film screened in
museum exhibitions. The Facing Life series format featured non-sequential hour-long
episodes intended to portray “real life” in Europe. Filmmaker Thierry Garrel described
the show in 1997, noting, “It is aware of our world, and society. For the past few years,
as it preoccupied itself with increasingly spectacular forms of entertainment, television
has struggled to acknowledge a real society. I think it’s very important to confront
citizens with situations of crisis, to discover with a bit of depth the questions that
condition life, work, unemployment, and political life, and to avoid doing it through

36
Hal Foster, “Vision Quest: the Cinema of Harun Farocki.” Artforum. Volume 43 Number 3.
(November 2004): 156.
37
This also fits into recent theoretical writing about “liveness” in the post digital age—both as a
technical term in computer science and in larger culture and ideas of performativity as described in Philip
Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. (New York and London: Routledge, 2008).
23
TV, news, and investigative journalism.”
38
The program Facing Life aimed to depict
the realities of contemporary life, and The Interview as a 58-minute television episode
certainly documented aspects of the conditions that structured how to get a job in this
particular context. Broadcast internationally, German citizens flipping channels might
see themselves reflected in the narratives of these hopeful interviewees as they
struggled to learn the scripts and structures of unified Germany. Television viewers in
other countries might learn more about German conditions.
Museum and gallery audiences, in contrast, invariably regard this film
differently, especially with the critical distance of time. Film historian Nora M. Alter
makes an incisive point about the changing cultural role of Farocki’s films,
“The collapse of public funding for experimental filmmaking and its
distribution coincided with the shift from analogue to digital image
technology, as well as with the development of new projection equipment
that facilitated the integration of large-screen film and video projects into
art spaces. The latter phenomenon made available important new funding
sources for the fabrication, exhibition, and distribution of moving-image
productions. The pattern is quite clear: Instead of negotiating with
television networks, experimental filmmakers increasingly began to look
to galleries, museums, and large art-exhibition foundations such as the
Venice Biennale or Documenta for production support.”
39

Since its television debut, The Interview has been screened at museum exhibitions in
Western Europe such as Governmentality Art in Conflict with the International Hyper-
Bourgeoisie and the National Petty Bourgeoisie in 2000 in Hannover (which between
2003-2005 traveled to MACBA Barcelona, Miami Art Central, Witte de Witte

38
Thierry Garrel and Oliver Hahn. Arte – Der Europäische Kulturkal: Eine Fernsehsprache in Vielen
Sprachen. (Verlag Reinhard Fischer, 1997), 409-410. Translation from French my own.

39
Alter, 155.
24
Rotterdam, and Secession Vienna
40
), Mimétisme at Extra City – Center for
Contemporary Art in 2000 in Antwerp, and Das Un-Zuhause der Bilder Steirischer
Herbst in 2010 in Graz.
41

The circumstances of where and how The Interview was shown and how it was
received informs the criticality of the film, demonstrating that its role within society is
not fixed. With the lack of funding for filmic production, films such as The Interview
moved from public television to less public art spaces.
42
This history of the screening of
the film reflects shifts in society and how art is indebted to the larger social mode of
production, which includes funding structures, technologic advancement, etc.
Jameson’s description of culture as subsumed by the logic of late-capitalism in
postmodernism comes to the fore in this instance. While the site for criticality has
become more reduced, that is, sequestered to the gallery, accessed by a diminished,
self-selecting art audience, the work is no less critical today.
43
The film’s original role,
as a publically screened television episode documenting a moment in cultural and
political history as it examined the restructuring of work, becomes part of its cultural
relevance. In both contexts, though in different ways, Farocki’s film examines the
reified structures of German society that defined work, pointing to bigger questions

40
This was a separate but related project called “The Government” that also showed at Kunstraum,
University of Lüneburg in Lüneburg, Germany.
41
A longer list of venues for this film are available on the artist’s website. Accessed March 5, 2017.
http://www.harunfarocki.de/films/1990s/1997/the-interview.html
42
It should also be noted that this coincides with the creation of an art market in East Germany,
especially the New Leipzig School of painting that arose beginning in late 1990s, in addition to the
explosion of a unified Berlin as global center for contemporary art. Further, this shift in technology and
sites of presentation coincided with the “editioning” of artists’ video and films—often very small, limited
editions that inflated prices of works to control inventory and distribution and to sell them to wealthy,
blue-chip collectors and museums.
43
As I write this chapter, The Interview is currently available in an unofficial capacity on YouTube.
However, as many of Farocki’s other films are not available in their entirety online and as accessibility is
limited to the public.
25
about subjectivity and production today.

26
Figure 1

Harun Farocki, Leben – BRD (How to Live in the FRG), 1990. Still from video
(originally 16mm), 83 mins.

27
Figure 2

Harun Farocki, Leben – BRD (How to Live in the FRG), 1990. Still from video
(originally 16mm), 83 mins.

28
Figure 3

Harun Farocki, Leben – BRD (How to Live in the FRG), 1990. Still from video
(originally 16mm), 83 mins.

29
Figure 4

Harun Farocki, Leben – BRD (How to Live in the FRG), 1990. Still from video
(originally 16mm), 83 mins.

30
Figure 5

Harun Farocki, Die Bewerbung (The Interview), 1997. Still from video-BetaSp, 58 min.
Commissioned for the Arte TV series Welt im Blick / La Vie en Face (Facing Life).

31
Figure 6

Harun Farocki, Die Bewerbung (The Interview), 1997. Still from video-BetaSp, 58 min.
Commissioned for the Arte TV series Welt im Blick / La Vie en Face (Facing Life).

32
Figure 7

Harun Farocki, Die Bewerbung (The Interview), 1997. Still from video-BetaSp, 58 min.
Commissioned for the Arte TV series Welt im Blick / La Vie en Face (Facing Life).

33
Figure 8

Harun Farocki, Die Bewerbung (The Interview), 1997. Still from video-BetaSp, 58 min.
Commissioned for the Arte TV series Welt im Blick / La Vie en Face (Facing Life).

34
Figure 9

Harun Farocki, Die Bewerbung (The Interview), 1997. Still from video-BetaSp, 58 min.
Commissioned for the Arte TV series Welt im Blick / La Vie en Face (Facing Life).

35
Figure 10

Harun Farocki, Die Bewerbung (The Interview), 1997. Still from video-BetaSp, 58 min.
Commissioned for the Arte TV series Welt im Blick / La Vie en Face (Facing Life).

36
Figure 11

Harun Farocki, Die Bewerbung (The Interview), 1997. Still from video-BetaSp, 58 min.
Commissioned for the Arte TV series Welt im Blick / La Vie en Face (Facing Life).

37
Figure 12

Harun Farocki, Die Bewerbung (The Interview), 1997. Still from video-BetaSp, 58 min.
Commissioned for the Arte TV series Welt im Blick / La Vie en Face (Facing Life).

38
Figure 13

Harun Farocki, Die Bewerbung (The Interview), 1997. Still from video-BetaSp, 58 min.
Commissioned for the Arte TV series Welt im Blick / La Vie en Face (Facing Life).

39
Figure 14

Harun Farocki, Die Bewerbung (The Interview), 1997. Still from video-BetaSp, 58 min.
Commissioned for the Arte TV series Welt im Blick / La Vie en Face (Facing Life).

40
Figure 15

Harun Farocki, Die Bewerbung (The Interview), 1997. Still from video-BetaSp, 58 min.
Commissioned for the Arte TV series Welt im Blick / La Vie en Face (Facing Life).

41
Figure 16

Harun Farocki, Die Bewerbung (The Interview), 1997. Still from video-BetaSp, 58 min.
Commissioned for the Arte TV series Welt im Blick / La Vie en Face (Facing Life).

42
Figure 17

Harun Farocki, Die Bewerbung (The Interview), 1997. Still from video-BetaSp, 58 min.
Commissioned for the Arte TV series Welt im Blick / La Vie en Face (Facing Life).

43
Figure 18

Harun Farocki, Die Bewerbung (The Interview), 1997. Still from video-BetaSp, 58 min.
Commissioned for the Arte TV series Welt im Blick / La Vie en Face (Facing Life).

44
Figure 19

Harun Farocki, Die Bewerbung (The Interview), 1997. Still from video-BetaSp, 58 min.
Commissioned for the Arte TV series Welt im Blick / La Vie en Face (Facing Life).

45
Figure 20

Harun Farocki, Die Bewerbung (The Interview), 1997. Still from video-BetaSp, 58 min.
Commissioned for the Arte TV series Welt im Blick / La Vie en Face (Facing Life).

46
Figure 21

Harun Farocki, Die Bewerbung (The Interview), 1997. Still from video-BetaSp, 58 min.
Commissioned for the Arte TV series Welt im Blick / La Vie en Face (Facing Life).

47
Figure 22

Harun Farocki, Die Bewerbung (The Interview), 1997. Still from video-BetaSp, 58 min.
Commissioned for the Arte TV series Welt im Blick / La Vie en Face (Facing Life).

48
Figure 23

Harun Farocki, Die Bewerbung (The Interview), 1997. Still from video-BetaSp, 58 min.
Commissioned for the Arte TV series Welt im Blick / La Vie en Face (Facing Life).

49
Figure 24

Harun Farocki, Die Bewerbung (The Interview), 1997. Still from video-BetaSp, 58 min.
Commissioned for the Arte TV series Welt im Blick / La Vie en Face (Facing Life).

50
Figure 25

Harun Farocki, Die Bewerbung (The Interview), 1997. Still from video-BetaSp, 58 min.
Commissioned for the Arte TV series Welt im Blick / La Vie en Face (Facing Life).

51
CHAPTER II
“SOME SORT OF MENTAL PROBLEM”
PILVI TAKALA, THE TRAINEE (2008)

Whereas Harun Farocki filmed real people acting out personal moments from
their lives that they knew were being recorded, Pilvi Takala implicates herself into the
space of life and acts and records herself with people who are unaware of their
complicity in her performance and video work. Looking at a more contemporary
structure of work in 2008, she integrates herself into the “real” space of the Helsinki
branch of the Deloitte Consulting company, while remaining in the fiction of her
performance artwork. Her 14-minute video The Trainee, created in collaboration with
the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art and the Deloitte’s financial marketing
division, opens in a mundane office setting where the artist enacts the role of Johanna
Takala, Marketing Trainee (Figures 26-38). Recorded from a hidden camera, the
video’s image is fuzzy around the edges. Employees in business casual sit at desks in
an open office plan divided by filing cabinets and cubicles. Johanna, decked in a
company ID badge, joins their ranks. However, instead of “working” at her computer or
appearing busy, she stares blankly into space, disrupting normative office behavior.
Takala records the interactions with her colleagues that result, and contrasts this
footage from her performance with email and voicemail exchanges from her concerned
coworkers reporting her odd behavior to her superiors. The artist uses acting to
demonstrate how one is supposed to act, creating an artwork that records and meditates
on the distress that ensues when one worker undermines these unwritten rules. In
subverting its standard performance, she reveals the fixity of the structures of labor in
late capitalist 2000s society.
52
The video is presented in three sections, with clearly labeled white titles on
black background that mimic the look of a PowerPoint or other typical office
presentation. In the first section, February 25 (a day at Consulting), Takala introduces
herself to her new colleagues as the trainee from marketing. Occasionally, the footage
speeds up, signifying the passage of time but also amplifying the hum of copy
machines, keyboards, and other office machinery. While her colleagues appear
occupied, Takala stares into space. Her inactivity is apparent and a colleague asks if she
is waiting for something. She replies, “No, I'm doing a bit of thinking about what I
should do. I'm just doing some brain work.” Hours pass and another colleague asks her
to tell him what exactly she’s been thinking about. She responds, “Well I kind of... you
know when you're always staring at the monitor, so it’s good to sometimes try to do the
work just in your head … I mean, nothing seems to work out without a computer
nowadays and from time to time I try to manage everything without the machine.”
Unsure of how to respond to Takala’s comment, her colleague asks her about her
studies and she tells him about her thesis, which addresses global marketing brands like
Deloitte. Another colleague comes out and notes, “Oh! You don’t even have a
computer,” as though a computer is indispensable in order to work. Johanna reassures
her, however, that she has been doing brain work.
In the next section, Feb. 26 (a day at Tax & Legal), Takala elicits a more
emotional and concerned response. It shows a split screen shot of the artist staring into
space near a bookcase in an office library. Beside her image, Takala inserts text from
an email exchange from a concerned coworker to her supposed superior onto the
screen. The email text reads, “I just wanted to ask, did you lose a trainee and is it ok,
53
that she is doing brain work all day?” At first Johanna’s only movement is her breath.
She stretches her arms, scratches her face. She seems calm, meditative. Another
complaint email appears on the split screen: “She sat in front of an empty desk
from10:30 am on, went for lunch in between and continued sitting until 15:30. Several
Tax-people went up to this person who they didn't know to ask her who she was and
what she was waiting for/doing. The answer was that she is doing brain work and/or is
thinking about her own things. People at Tax not only thought this is weird and funny,
but also scary to some extent. What on earth is this and why has nobody missed the
trainee all day?” A response email appears, reassuring the Tax & Legal department that
Johanna has been writing her thesis on the brand and has just a few more days. Vetted
by the Marketing department, they assure the other departments that they have checked
in on her productivity and progress.
In the final section, February 28 (a day in the elevator), Takala stands in the
elevator, again staring off into space, with no floor destination in mind. This confuses
the other riders, who ask what floor she’s going to, but she explains that she is just
traveling, “train style.” Workers come in and out, smiling knowingly at each other,
exchanging nervous glances in her presence. Their looks confirm that they find her
action, or inaction, to be irrational. By the end of the day, the elevator riders know who
she is and what she is doing in there. The office has noticed. One man asks, “Are you
really sure this is a good way to think?” She responds, “Yeah Yeah. Sure. You just
have to wait at least an hour for this to start working.” The scene ends with voicemail
recording and email complaints. The voicemail recording beeps, and a concerned voice
states: “There’s that kind of problems (sic) involved here that I don’t want to go into
54
the same elevator with her. So, she’s riding with the elevator back and forth. So try to
get her out. Ok, Bye!” Her bosses are summoned to remove her. The email notes that
her action has become a distraction and has affected the productivity of her coworkers:
“People spend useless amounts of time speculating this issue. Couldn’t we now get her
out of here? Obviously she has some sort of mental problem.” Unable to place the
impetus for her inactivity, she makes her colleagues nervous. Clearly unfit for this type
of labor, these messages are pleas for her superiors to get her out.
The work takes form as both a video that can be accessed in full on the artist’s
website or as an installation whose primary audience are viewers in a museum context
(Figs.). While the performance in real-time was both distracting and alienating for her
“coworkers,” in its installation format in a gallery it is incisive and critical. For Takala,
born in Helsinki in 1981, the institution of labor and late capitalist office behavior
merits review. In the installation, Takala includes the accouterments of her role—her
ID card, office furniture, a PowerPoint slide with images of her at the copy machine or
staring off into space as her Deloitte coworkers stare at her in disbelief. These objects
function as props, and here, the museum context becomes their stage (Figures 39-40).
At the same time, these props, many of which are likely mass-produced at IKEA,
become artworks. Even her ID card sits underneath a glass vitrine, a precious vestige
whose framing underneath the glass suggests its importance.
44
Julia Bryan-Wilson
notes, “Within capitalism, art has long figured as a special type of production. It is also
understood to catalyze a special type of sensory orientation; doing something ‘as art’ is

44
Chris Burden can be credited for first displaying his performance objects as relics on velvet in vitrines.
55
meant to increase attention or awareness on the part of the doer.”
45
Ironically, Takala’s
piece does not begin as “art,” but as a secretive performance. Only in hiding its status
as artwork can Takala create this piece.
The role of critique takes on many layers here, as she questions her colleague’s
commitment to work and mode of defining work or non-work. Behaving unlike them,
she holds up a mirror that reflects an image of the extreme form of cognitive
capitalism
46
: brain work, the work of social relations, reading, emailing, etc. Her
mimetic gesture is at once mocking, violent, and emancipative, but above all represents
an experiment that disrupts their expectations, thus providing her colleagues an image
of freedom from the established structures of labor. As an experiment to see her
colleagues’ reactions, she uses their discomfort and uneasiness to make her work. In
her experiment, their performances make them her unwitting participants.
The open office plan and foosball table are signifiers of a late 2000s office that
prides itself on the idea of freedom and flexibility. Moreover, the laptops that workers
carry around with them, in the elevator and around the office, imply that there is a spirit
of movement, that employees can carry this work with them into another room (or even
bring it home!). The new spirit of capitalism described by Boltanski and Chiapello is
defined by this notion of flexibility, teamwork, and multitasking. Of this new
organization of the workplace, they note, “the hierarchical principle is demolished and
organizations become flexible, innovative, and highly proficient. Compared with
integrated hierarchical organizations, organization in networks, which allows firms to

45
Bryan-Wilson, 43.
46
This idea comes from Yann Moulier Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism. Trans. Ed Emery. (Cambridge,
UK: Polity Press, 2011).

56
be rid of a costly hierarchy…”
47
Takala’s Deloitte office subscribes to these ideals;
workers sit side by side and interact with one another at open tables. Of this system,
Boltanski and Chiapello also note “Teams are a locus of self-organization and self
monitoring.”
48
While they sit at an open table, Takala’s colleagues are afforded a better
view of their surroundings, and as a result make a job out of monitoring her. Despite
this notion of office freedom, her behavior is nevertheless micro-managed.
While the notion of “openness” and “project-based” tasks supposedly lend
freedom to the worker, scholar Brian Holmes describes these phenomena as modes of
worker exploitation. He notes, “The imaginary of rebellion and liberation, the quest for
individual authenticity, the ideal of self-management, the anti-hierarchical social form
of the network/rhizome, all have been appropriated as rhetorical and organisational
devices that respond to broad aspirations of emancipation, but deliberately channel
those aspirations so as to reinstate exploitation and alienation under another guise.”
49

Takala abuses the “freedoms” Deloitte affords her. If she has been assigned a project or
task, she uses her freedom to roam into the elevator or to look off into space. Takala’s
actions are thus instances of genuine rebellion against a system that prides itself on
being inclusive, open, and laidback.
Takala’s rebellion, however, does not go unnoticed. While she is supposedly (at
least according to her colleagues) tasked with an assignment, she proves untrustworthy
in her deliberate inactivity. Boltanski and Chiapello note, “With the decline of close
monitoring by superiors, we witness the rapid development literature (as in

47
Boltanski and Chiapello, 75.
48
Ibid.
49
Brian Holmes, “Artistic Autonomy and the Communication Society.” Third Text. (August 6, 2006):
552.
57
microeconomics) of the theme of trust. Trust is what unites the members of a team,
affirm with its leader, the coach with the person he supports, or the partners in an
alliance. Trust is a sign that the situation is under control, since people only place it in
someone they know will not abuse it, who is predictable… Trust is in fact the other
term for self-control…”
50
Takala, however, proves unreliable from the very first day
she records. She is at work but she does not do traditional work. She has presumably
been assigned a task, but in the absence of her marketing superiors, team members from
other departments intervene because they think she is shirking her responsibilities and
is thus untrustworthy.
Takala’s position as a youthful trainee and student likewise place her in an
unstable position. The realm of immaterial labor allows for a variety of types of labor,
from freelancers, to unpaid bloggers, to contractors, etc. The 1099-set functions in a
precarious space, working part time or from project to project. Lazzarato writes, “One
could say that in the highly skilled, qualified worker, the “communicational model” is
already given, already constituted, and that its potentialities are already defined. In the
young worker, however, the “precarious” worker, and the unemployed youth, we are
dealing with a pure virtuality, a capacity that is as yet undetermined but that already
shares all the characteristics of postindustrial productive subjectivity.”
51
Thinking
without a computer, or invoking pure creativity without any visible effect, Takala
performs labor as “pure virtuality.” Because they cannot see her working, her
colleagues become concerned she has not learned the system, and are determined to
teach, correct, and even report her. The artist’s role as a trainee, and thus as a temporary

50
Boltanski and Chiapello, 83.
51
Lazzarato, 145.
58
worker, is significant as it determines the way her colleagues engage with her. She is
supposedly only at Deloitte for a few months, so the relationships she has forged with
her coworkers are not that strong. Moreover, her newness and naiveté allow her space
to make mistakes, but further contribute to her position as a precarious worker. She has
come to Deloitte to experience working and to learn about the firm. Her thesis, after all,
centers around its marketing practices. But her thesis, and her simultaneous role as a
student, likewise justifies her presence at the company. Her occupation, then, is both
that of a Deloitte trainee, but also that of a student (who has excelled enough in her
studies to be writing a thesis, though many in the office might not think her capable).
Further, as a trainee, she is at the bottom of the system, her colleagues likely assume
that she is supposed to do perform rote or mindless tasks and ultimately might have
little room to think creatively or to use her brain at all.
By claiming to do brain work, however, Takala directly confronts the landscape
of immaterial work. Brainwork functions as the ultimate immaterial labor as it leaves
no trace; as a “pure virtuality” it is completely in her mind or imagination. While her
colleagues might regard her “brain work” as not working, expressed in awkward
laughter or out of her earshot, she is in fact producing an artwork and is thus engaged in
work. Moreover, her role in creating the artwork is that of director (albeit with plenty of
improvisation), actor, and even editor when the performative part of the experiment is
complete. Ultimately, in creating an artwork, she is, in fact, being productive, and thus
she is working, though not in the prescribed manner of the Deloitte office. Ironically, as
she acts in her performance experiment, she inculcates her colleagues into her work,
even as they reject and question her mode of non-work, which is, as we know, her
59
mode of working(/creating an artwork). Further, the very presence of her body—her
embodied and performative thinking process in unusual places like the elevator––is
also troubling and disruptive to normative office behavior.
Takala’s refusal to work is not connected to the well-known history of the labor
struggle of the past few decades, whose roots stem from the spirit of disaffected leftist
intellectuals in France and Italy in the 1970s. In Italy, a spirit of growing unrest on part
of self-organized workers movements, coupled with the militarization of these
movements led to a movement called Autonomia in 1977, where the refusal to work
became a revolutionary strategy. In Takala’s description of her work, she states, “What
provokes people in non-doing alongside strangeness is the element of resistance. The
non-doing person isn’t committed to any activity, so they have the potential for
anything. It is non-doing that lacks a place in the general order of things, and thus it is a
threat to order. It is easy to root out any on-going anti-order activity, but the potential
for anything is a continual stimulus without a solution.”
52
Takala’s refusal to work is a
refusal to fit within a system that even incorporates logical modes of resistance such as
strike or protest.
53
These instances mark political actions that serve an end. While a
strike might remove workers from the work context, there is nevertheless a deliberate
reason for their absence, be it more humane conditions or increased wages. In Takala’s
case, she rebuffs the system as a whole, puzzling her coworkers. Why isn’t she
working? The lack of reasoning behind her inactivity is troubling. However, as she

52
This information is taken from the artist’s website. Accessed March 6, 2017.
http://pilvitakala.com/the-trainee/
53
It is important to note the recent history of art strikes here, such as the Art Workers’ Coalition (1969-
70), Gustav Metzger’s Years without Art (1977-80), Stuart Homes’ Art Strike (1990-93), and more
recent iterations that have emerged in the 2000s such as those by W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the
Greater Economy).
60
never receives a specific task on screen, she is never being deliberately unproductive.
In fact, her sole task (which, as artist, she assigns to herself) is to perform as Johanna.
Unaware of the true nature of her role, her colleagues assume that she is leaving emails
unread, ignoring instructions, and thus letting down her team with egregious
incompetence.
Takala’s experiment in inactivity causes her colleagues to evaluate her
performance more closely and to question her sanity. Bryan-Wilson delves into these
themes, asking “What does it mean to be at work but not occupied — that is, not fully
devoting one’s attentions to the task at hand? Is this partial focus assumed to be the
condition of most contemporary work? How might art also speak to this space of
mental elsewhereness? The idea that ‘art is a calling,’ demanding full presence,
increasingly does not hold up, as plenty of art is out-sourced to others, is made during
states of boredom, or even explicitly thematizes distraction, and much ‘work’ is
performed with vigilant, intense, or reverent focus.”
54
Takala explores what happens
when we resist this preconceived, definable type of work. For much of the day, when
questioned by her colleagues, Takala claims that she is doing “brain work,” which
translates as arcane jargon because it does not fit their preconceived definition of what
work is or what it is not.
55
The issue at hand is the ambiguity of that concept. Is it
gibberish that she makes up so they leave her alone? What is also significant about her
work, or lack of work, is that it disrupts the way others are working. Her colleagues
cannot get their work done because Takala has become a distraction. Thus her lack of

54
Bryan-Wilson, 43.
55
One might read this as a bit surprising because of the fact that so many in the contemporary workforce
are referred to as “knowledge workers.” This points back to the fact that it is her unrelenting and
presumably unproductive corporeal presence that makes them think she must be crazy.
61
work, or her resistance toward this type of working causes others not to work, too.
Granted, they eventually get back to their jobs and Takala returns to her job as an artist,
performing similar experiments on the culture and disciplinary structures of social
contexts as diverse as Disneyland in Paris (The Real Snow White, 2009), a youth center
in London (The Committee, 2013), a private boarding school in the United States
(Drive With Care, 2013), etc.
While Takala calls her work at the marketing firm “narrative fiction” because
she alters the chronology and makes minimal edits, the true fiction lies in her position
as Johanna Takala. The fake trainee’s name is noteworthy in that she uses a pseudonym
(as a first name) but also retains her real last name. She has not hired an actor to enact
this performance; Johanna is, after all, Pilvi, but Pilvi has also constructed Johanna.
56

The artist collapses the real and the fictional, obscuring the differences between her
performed and real identities at Deloitte. On the performative nature of labor, Michael
Hardt writes, “we should not say that artistic production has become central to the
economy, but rather that some of the qualities of artistic production (its performative
nature, for example) are becoming hegemonic and transforming other labor

56
In various performance works of its kind, artists outsource labor and pay other people to perform.
Claire Bishop writes about this phenomenon, “The perverse pleasures underlying these artistic gestures
offer an alternative form of knowledge about capitalism’s commodification of the individual, especially
when both participants and viewers appear to enjoy the transgression of subordination to a work of art. If
one is not to fall into the trap of merely condemning these works as reiterations of capitalist exploitation,
it becomes essential to view art not as part of a seamless continuum with contemporary labor but as
offering a specific space of experience where those norms are suspended and put in service of pleasure in
perverse way …” Takala’s decision to act as the trainee herself, rather than hire an actor to do so, takes
on political significance in that she rejects a system where another individual becomes her employee, or
in this case, avatar. Her work is decidedly about her own subjectivity and behavior within the corporate
office context. Claire Bishop, “Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity.” October 140. (Spring
2012): 111.
62
processes.”
57
While Boltanski and Chiapello diagnose the artistic critique of capitalism
as integral to its third spirit, Hardt expands upon this notion, noting the performative
qualities of work today. The language of work evaluation today borrows this
terminology, in that a “performance review” becomes a mode of analyzing the behavior
of a worker in contemporary management culture. Work is, then, inherently
performative. A poor performance, as demonstrated by Takala, might result in a
warning or dismissal. While Johanna Takala performs poorly as Marketing Trainee,
Pilvi Takala nevertheless directs and acts effectively in an artistic performance that
evaluates the performative nature of the corporate office.
The communicative capacity of technology also performs a major role in
Takala’s video, functioning as an anonymous soapbox in which character “X,”
presumably a distant colleague, sends emails to character “Y,” presumably Johanna’s
marketing department superior. The Deloitte employees never overtly complain about
Johanna’s behavior or reprimand her directly. Rather, they use email and voicemail as
platforms to communicate about the anxiety she causes. Lazzarato writes about the
importance of communication in the new capitalist order, “The management mandate to
“become subjects of communication” threatens to be even more totalitarian than the
earlier rigid division between mental and manual labor (ideas and execution), because
capitalism seeks to involve even the worker’s personality and subjectivity within the
production of value.”
58
While Johanna Takala is the subject of communication, she is
never included in the email or voicemail exchange—she is the object rather than the
subject of this communication. In a sense, she performs the pure work of

57
Michael Hardt, “Immaterial Labor and Artistic Production.” Rethinking Marxism. Volume 17 Number
2. (April 2005): 176.
58
Lazzarato, 145.
63
communication without hierarchies. The office workers respond by communicating
with their supervisors, reverting to the hierarchies in place. They follow the established
logic of the office, so her “freedom” or “art” makes them work even more, and
according to the internalized necessity to produce. Her experiment sheds light on how
her colleagues react to freedom: an unnamed few rattle on her, while most others laugh
awkwardly in her presence, discussing her behavior out of earshot. Of course, her
colleagues are not free, so her experiment has “constraints.”
Lazzarato and Boltanski and Chiapello define this new era of capitalism as one
marked by “connexionist” activity and reliance upon the “network.” “Network”
capitalism can be characterized by the reign of the financial system, the
interconnectedness of the internet and social media users, etc. Italian theorist Tiziana
Terranova writes, “Capital wants to retain control over the unfolding of these
virtualities and the processes of valorization. The relative abundance of
cultural/technical/affective production on the Net, then, does not exist as a free-floating
postindustrial utopia but in full, mutually constituting interaction with late capitalism,
especially in its manifestation as global-venture capital.”
59
In this performance, emails
become a mode of surveillance and control, wherein anonymous employees report
Johanna Takala’s resistance to the capitalist system by way of brain work and absently
riding the company elevator.
It is also significant to consider that while staring into a computer screen marks
a condoned office behavior, staring into space, in contrast, is unacceptable. A
computer, then, might serve as a prop that gives off the impression of working or being

59
Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.” Social Text 63. Volume
18, Number 2. (Summer 2000): 43.
64
productive. Terranova describes the importance of internet access in this context, “Far
from being an “unreal,” empty space, the Internet is animated by cultural and technical
labor through and through, a continuous production of value that is completely
immanent to the flows of the network society at large.”
60
Johanna Takala’s lack of a
laptop suggests her lack of access to email and thus connection to her colleagues,
information, and the world at large. This deliberate refusal of informational access, in
favor of meditative brain work, causes confusion. While Johanna rejects this
technology and the access it provides, Pilvi herself still uses a mode of technology, a
(hidden) video camera, in order to make this work. In addition to using video
technology to record this performance, she connects her viewers to this video by
making it available in full on the internet.
61

In this work, the commodity that Takala foregrounds is herself—her time, her
energy, her knowledge. Subjectivity and labor produce the commodity. At the same
time, the commodity that is produced is an artwork that can be displayed in a museum,
and one significant factor of the experiment is that it ultimately lends cultural capital to
the commercial marketing institution. Scholar Isabelle Graw describes the shifting
values in the contemporary moment in art, “What were once specific demands that
artists in particular had to meet have come to delineate a universal social ideal. The
artist becomes the guiding model as the ideology of creativity reigns supreme across all
branches of the economy. Everyone wants to be creative today…”
62
Corporate
management capitalizes on the characteristics of the artist and the idea of creativity and

60
Ibid., 34.
61
While links to The Trainee are available on Takala’s website, other video works are only available in
excerpted form.
62
Isabelle Graw, “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’.” October 130. (Fall 2009): 120.
65
free-spiritedness. Deloitte transforms Takala’s intervention into a workshop/lesson for
its employees that encourage her “coworkers” to rethink their practices at work, and to
engage more fully. The Deloitte Managing Partner Teppo Rantanen noted, “Now we
have a unique opportunity to challenge ourselves and become part of an artwork.”
Rantanen continues, “This reflects our open-minded and innovative practices and our
ability to throw ourselves into new situations.
63
Deloitte Helsinki’s involvement with
art goes beyond the banal practice of hanging Abstract Expressionist works in the
company lobby. The Managing Partner of a global financial marketing firm’s embrace
of a work of critical performance work demonstrates the extent to which Boltanski and
Chiapello’s claim that late capitalist thinking has seeped into cultural production under
postmodernism.
While the current relationship between Deloitte and the artist herself might be
symptomatic of the corporate world’s inclusion in (or financial sponsorship of) culture,
the narrative arc of the performance work nevertheless relies on the authentic
discomfort Johanna Takala reveals when she refuses to conform to the standards of
office behavior. The artist speaks about using the sociological practice of the
“‘breaching experiment’, where you break a social rule to see how important it is.”
64

Here, she inserts “art” into a corporate context to see how people react. In her
performed experiment, she mimes the most extreme instance of work, its pure form in a
sense, creative life, that is, “art.”

63
Juuso Ville Tervo, “Corrosive Subjectifications: Theorizing Radical Politics of Art Education in the
Intersection of Jacques Rancière and Giorgio Agamben.” (PhD diss., The Ohio State University, 2014),
199.
64
Catherine Spencer and Pilvi Takala, “Interview: Open Access Pilvi Takala Interviewed by Catherine
Spencer.” Art Monthly 397. (June 2016): 397.
66
As its sponsors, the people at the top are free to embrace it, but the people at the
bottom, other supposedly low or mid-level employees, are not afforded that perspective
until her performance is complete and presented in edited video form. Furthermore, her
experiment relies on her recordings of her colleagues’ ignorance of her behavior as
performance or as “art.” While Takala’s colleagues might believe in the freedom that
Boltanski and Chiapello’s notion of artistic critique supposedly lends to the system of
capitalism, Takala’s work reveals the very rigidity of that system. By performing as an
employee and by creating an artwork funded by the corporate marketing company, the
artist joins forces with capitalism in order to present its critique.

67
Figure 26

Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Still from video. 14 min.

68
Figure 27

Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Still from video. 14 min.

69
Figure 28

Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Still from video. 14 min.

70
Figure 29

Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Still from video. 14 min.

71
Figure 30

Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Still from video.14 min.

72
Figure 31

Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Still from video. 14 min.

73
Figure 32

Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Still from video. 14 min.

74
Figure 33

Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Still from video. 14 min.

75
Figure 34

Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Still from video. 14 min.

76
Figure 35

Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Still from video. 14 min.

77
Figure 36

Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Still from video. 14 min.

78
Figure 37

Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Still from video. 14 min.

79

Figure 38

Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Still from video. 14 min.

80
Figures 39-40

Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Mixed media installation that includes PowerPoint
presentation, video, framed letter, key card, office furniture, computer, monitor.

81
CHAPTER 3
“A MORE FULFILLING POSITION ELSEWHERE”
MELANIE GILLIGAN, CRISIS IN THE CREDIT SYSTEM (2008)

While Harun Farocki filmed the fictions that manifest in real life and Pilvi
Takala performed in and documented interactions with real life, Melanie Gilligan
scripts a fictional episodic TV-show rooted in the intersections, and blurring, of the real
and the fantastical on the stage of the capitalist system. Her 2008 four-part docu-fiction
Crisis in the Credit System is distinctly different from the Farocki and Takala pieces, in
that it is both more traditional in its deployment of fictional filmmaking and in its
exploration of its subjects as psychologies. Gilligan’s series marks a prescient diagnosis
of the concurrent financial crisis shortly before the crash and an incisive and explicit
reflection of the capitalist ordering of society. In the work, Gilligan hires actors to
perform as investment bank employees on an outdoor work retreat where they are
tasked with understanding and, as their bank team leader instructs, “think(ing up)
optimal adaptive strategies” for the current financial crisis in a series of hypothetical
improvisation games (Figures 41-43). The characters that Gilligan envisions take on
multiple jobs and identities, first as bank employees and then as major players in the
global economic arena they improvise. Gilligan uses the anxiety and imaginations of
this diverse group to critique the political economy on the brink of collapse. She reveals
that the layers of performing within the financial realm are manifold, and, like the
market itself, volatile. Further, the speculation that is inherent to the systems of the
market are here applied to these bank employees, who reveal the complex and abstract
structures of the late 2000s economy and the fraught position of contemporary labor
within it when the employees are collectively fired in the final scene.
82
The series weaves in and out of an idyllic park space and into generic-looking
finance offices set in Mayfair, London’s financial district, though its corporate aesthetic
resembles Wall St. or countless other urban financial centers (Figure 44). While the
bank workers anxiously endeavor throughout the series to envision and animate the
roles they have been assigned, which range from hedge fund manager, to derivative
portfolio analyst, to financial journalist, Gilligan’s primary marker between “real” and
“role-played” is the change in setting from the outdoor work retreat to the indoor
finance office. The artist uses close up shots to toggle the workers between the outdoor
park and the indoor office. Zooming in on a newspaper tucked under his arm (Figures
45-46), Ian, who enacts the first role-play scene as a private equity head, moves from
the park to the elevator of his cleverly named private equity firm, Evergain Private
Equity. He appears in costume at the firm, donning a sharp suit and neatly combed hair.
In the office elevator with a colleague, he recounts a fable about Lady Luck, a
renowned 1920s prostitute popular with the Wall St. investor set whose syphilis led to a
frenzy of selling and supposedly, according to Ian’s imagined tale, caused the Great
Depression. Invoking the Great Depression, contagious disease, chaotic selling frenzy,
and the inherent unpredictability of the market early in the first episode, he
foreshadows both the future of the market and the tension and nervousness that
characterizes the series’ later dialogue and sentiment. This affect informs both the
group’s brainstorming games in the park and the market betting games they envision as
financial big shots in offices and conference rooms.
The brainstorming and role-playing activities function as an access point for the
bank to enter their employees’ imaginations in order to get to the root of the financial
83
crunch. In this environment, the bank employees dream up scenarios as they inhabit
and animate assigned roles. The bank manager, whose calm and confidence serves as a
foil to the perceptible apprehension the employees project, advises them to “Picture
everything that’s happened with the credit crisis so far as one big brain, and you’re the
thought processes, accessing this past and making connections.” Tasked with
envisioning fantastical modes of coping with the ensuing crisis, acting, or role-playing,
becomes the bank employee’s mode of working. Brainstorming, after all, signifies the
literal use of cognitive capital, a form of labor based on knowledge and creativity. In
addition to their familiarity with the current financial climate, the game will employ its
participants’ tact and creativity. The group leader also introduces an artist, supposedly
there to help the group visualize their ideas, though her presence seems merely
symbolic of the “creativity” or “creative capital” that drives the innovation behind
venture capitalism, especially as she does not reappear in the fictional sequences they
envision. In his text on cognitive capitalism, Moulier Boutang writes, “The values of
creativity only become capable of being exploited by an intelligent capitalism to the
extent that they were promoted as a value, first experimentally and then as a norm of
living.”
65
Acting is a mode of creative expression, and while the workers believe that
these tasks are helping the bank to comprehend the credit crisis, this activity is in fact a
mode of exploiting the workers for their knowledge, especially after the bank lets them
go in the final scene.
Though not overtly aware of the trauma to come in the final scene, the bank
employees are nevertheless possessed by an interiority of worry and dread. This is

65
Moulier Boutang, 88.
84
exemplified in a role-play scene where Souad the financial journalist enacts the role of
psychiatrist to Mark the hedge fund manager (Figure 47). As he describes his fears, she
asks him, “What’re you scared of? Isn’t transparency good?” In this failing financial
system, however, he, like any banker on the real economic stage, is not simply riddled
with apprehension, but is clearly a victim run down by the prospect and the reality of
crisis that has come to define his work and livelihood. Moulier Boutang diagnoses the
type of malady that has infected Mark, writing “This, of course, does not mean that
brain work lacks a physical or a bodily dimension, which can be very intense and can
result in work related maladies (stress, nervous exhaustion).”
66
Here, work sends him to
the doctor for treatment, and even in the psychiatrist’s chair, that is, away from the site
of the office, work consumes his thoughts, conversation, and time.
Assuming multiple, fluid personae, the characters demonstrate that, like the
anxiety-inducing newspaper headlines they read daily, nothing in the financial realm,
especially jobs, are fixed. Gilligan describes the dismantling of subjectivity in this
environment: “By pointing to the shallowness of the ideological underpinnings of a
system that works by maintaining its power to construct and destroy the self of the
individual professional (investment banker, hedge fund manager, journalist, etc.), the
“system” or the Spirit turns out to be constructed according to mythological patterns,
waiting to be theorized by way of some paranoiac dialectic.”
67
Even as it creates them,
capitalism deconstructs and destroys these varied identities. These workers try to adapt
to the financial system by playing various roles and dreaming up new solutions to its
crises, but to no avail. The financial system first drains and exhausts them, and in the

66
Ibid., 204.
67
Melanie Gilligan and Tom Holert, “Subjects of Finance Melanie Gilligan Interviewed by Tom
Holert.” Grey Room 46. (Winter 2012): 90.
85
end of the series, destroys their principal mode of identification, that is, their
occupation.
Mirroring reality, the characters Gilligan portrays reflect a globalized elite work
force, as a character with a traditionally Pakistani name like Sartaj or a traditionally
Arabic name like Souad join ranks with Ian, Penelope, and Mark on the company
retreat. The credits reveal that many of Gilligan’s actors use their real first names in the
series. This artistic strategy adds a layer of truth to the fictional role-played scenarios
she depicts. While Gilligan attempts to critique the terms of reality and fakeness and
the generalized abstraction created by financialized capitalism, the device of using her
actor’s real names lend the work a sense of political relevance.
It is also significant to note that the Crisis in the Credit System website debuted
within weeks of Lehman Brothers’ collapse, though conceived long before it. The
series was and still is deliberately accessible online on a specialized website funded by
the London arts organization Artangel and on this public platform, Gilligan’s work is
more democratically distributed than her other film and screen installation works.
68

Gilligan intended this work to reach beyond the hermeticism of the art world, noting, “I
tried to insert information about the work in newspapers and news websites, which are
the conventional means by which one learns about an event like the financial crisis.”
69

As such, the artwork-qua-TV series became a source of real-time information in 2008
about the credit crisis, functioning much like a source of news, in addition to a source

68
Certain other video series by Gilligan that pose similar critiques of capitalism, such as Self-Capital
(2009) and Popular Unrest (2010) are also accessible online on specialized websites. Nevertheless,
neither work has presented a prescient diagnosis of the financial collapse. Accessed March 25, 2017.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ATnDUzYilg and http://popularunrest.org/.
69
Thom Donovon and Melanie Gilligan, “5 Questions for Contemporary Practice.” Art21 Magazine.
(May 22, 2012). Accessed Februrary 26, 2017. http://magazine.art21.org/2012/05/22/5-questions-for-
contemporary-practice-melanie-gilligan/#.WYS1yneGORs.
86
of entertainment in its capacity as web-based television series (Figures 48-50). News
outlets such as ANP Per Support, Europa Press Espana, International Entertainment
News, Canada NewsWire and various other non-arts publications featured stories on
Gilligan’s series, emphasizing its role as the first artwork to address the machinations
of the concurrent financial crisis.
Referencing global mainstream issues, it presents them anew in dramatized
form. From art to news to television, the work straddles multiple genres. While the
series’ accessibility on the web does not exactly equal television distribution, its
distribution and accessibility was nevertheless much wider than that of a video or more
conventional artwork shown in a museum or gallery. As art, it both incorporates certain
features of the format of a conventional TV drama or sitcom, while simultaneously
presenting a parody of this mainstream entertainment outlet. While television
represents the tastes of popular culture, Gilligan uses its structures for artmaking,
conflating the realms of high and low art. In doing so, she implies that the value of
cultural phenomena is not fixed.
The work both subscribes to and resists television’s medium-specific strategies
and techniques. Her opening credits, a typical feature of a television show, function as a
way to insert the signifiers of the financial world into the series, presenting a contextual
mood board (Figures 51-52). Gilligan also uses the typical television technique of an
opening song, which, in her show, incants, “Crisis in the Credit System” as the title’s
letters shoot upward as if on a graph symbolizing profit or growth in collaged
newspaper, presumably from financial journals (Figure 53). While the introduction
mimics the format of opening credits, it also resembles an artwork, collaging images of
87
the financial moment. Ticker tape and its illuminated reports of stock and market price
movement flashes, followed by patterns of floating and exploding dollar bills. A Wall
St. street sign transposed over a newspaper headline reads, “A year that shook faith in
Finance.” A group of white men shouting on the stock exchange floor appears, then a
screen with stock market gains and losses, which leads to coins, a credit card exploded
into fragments, graphs with descending slopes, and finally currency symbols such as a
dollar sign, euro symbol, yen symbol, etc. The successive images of the paraphernalia
and symbols of exchange demonstrate that the work is invested in the notion of money
and its relation to the images of spectacle.
Television, with its proliferating images and all hour accessibility, epitomizes
Guy Debord’s concept of spectacle. Though perhaps better known for his writing on the
subject, his film Society of the Spectacle (1973), critiques a similar proliferation of
images in media, utilizing still images and footage from current events and popular
culture. While television broadcasts a variety of channels and stories, such as news,
documentary, and sports, Gilligan’s decision to create a spoof of a fictional TV show
demonstrates her interest in subverting the typical placement of politically and
economically informed (albeit ironic) art.
Beyond her interest in the aesthetic intersection of television and art, the artist’s
use of newspapers and their headlines is significant in that it inserts a sense of the real
into a show that is clearly fictional. The frantic newspaper and financial journal
headlines, that appear are records of the news in the financial system as it crumbled in
real time. As newspapers appear repeatedly in the work, these objects moreover
reference the displacement of various media: print media by television and by
88
extension, the move into high-definition, broadcast quality video and internet sites
distributed equally by private individuals and corporations. In Gilligan’s work,
newspapers function not simply as props, but as plot drivers, both of her fictional TV
series, but also the economic stage at large. The artist has noted that the work was
inspired by Soviet theatre troupe Blue Blouse who called their plays “living
newspaper.”
70
Ironically, however, as tangible objects in 2008, the newspaper connotes
an increasingly obsolete object. Obsolescence becomes a theme in this show, as the
bank employees likewise become redundant by the series’ end.
Overtly examining the economy as it enters a credit crisis, through the news and
though fiction, Gilligan exposes the fallibility of neoliberal policies. The heavily
financialized economy that Gilligan depicts reflects the spirit of greed and culture of
gleeful accumulation that took for granted the theory that the “banks were too big to
fail.” Gilligan notes, “The assumed invulnerability was supposedly achieved through
finance’s ability to anticipate, outmaneuver, and ultimately capture future outcomes
through a variety of financial instruments.”
71
The effects this belief system had on how
banks were being run, however, led directly to their failure. This moment, characterized
by increased subprime mortgage lending, rising interest rates, and the subsequent US
housing bubble burst were the first ripple in a wave that toppled bank investments,
leading to widespread bankruptcy and federal bailouts.
72
The economic crisis that

70
Ibid.
71
Holert and Gilligan, 86.
72
“The Origins of the Financial Crisis Crash Course.” The Economist. (September 7, 2013). Accessed
March 9, 2017. https://www.economist.com/news/schoolsbrief/21584534-effects-financial-crisis-are-
still-being-felt-five-years-article.
89
ensued was the biggest since World War II.
73
Though governmental coping methods
varied by country, the moment was marked by reduced public spending on welfare
programs and increased taxation.
74
Furthermore, the crisis affected the structures of
labor as unemployment rates rose and working conditions become increasingly
insecure.
75
These themes resonant throughout Gilligan’s series.
The very language used in describing capitalism’s “spirit” of capitalism
suggests its innate mythical quality. At the expertly titled fictional hedge fund office of
Delphi Capital Management, Gilligan portrays an investment manager who reads the
market as if he is an oracle, or mystical stock market prophet, absorbing information,
mumbling figures and currencies as he fumbles with graphs on his computer, and,
much like an oracle, making predictions based on chance and the irrationality of the
market (Figure 54). The artist’s repeated used of these themes in the series, from the
oracle as a featured character to the legend of Lady Luck, derive from the “mystical
overtones in the way many people in finance spoke of the behaviour of financial
markets”” in her research for the series.
76
Disillusioned bankers convinced of the banks
infallibility falsely believed they could anticipate the future outcomes of dangerous
trades. However, this very attitude led to global economic collapse.
Characters repeatedly return to themes of luck, superstition, and risk, playing
the market in ways both straightforward and absurd as they try to weather the crisis.
Everything, even abstract concepts, become sites of potential profit. As Boltanski and
Chiapello note, “The detachment of capital from material forms of wealth gives it a

73
Malina Voicu, Ingvill C. Mochmann, and Herman Dülmer, eds., “Values and Attitudes in Times of
Crisis.” Values, Economic Crisis and Democracy. (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 4.
74
Ibid.
75
Ibid., 7.
76
Holert and Gilligan, 86.
90
genuinely abstract character, which helps make accumulation an interminable
process.”
77
Gilligan hones in on the absurdity of this concept throughout the series.
This comes to a head in a scene where hedge fund managers Penelope and Sartaj
brainstorm tactics of profiting from staple food shortages (Figure 55). Thinking aloud,
Penelope mumbles, “shortage, poverty, hunger… (realization) Weight loss! Short large
clothing manufacturers and go long on companies making smaller sizes. Short Weight
Watchers, the major gyms, and scale manufacturers.” In this scenario, Sartaj notes that
when staple foods are expensive, they become luxuries, so that “Fat becomes the new
thin and fashionable again.” Gilligan notes in an essay, “In an economic crisis like the
one currently unfolding, people become acutely aware of how these exchange
fluctuations control the most basic conditions of their physical existence.”
78
The
traders, disillusioned by potential profit margins, fail to differentiate between an
existential humanitarian emergency such as a food shortage and the diet fad practices of
the global elite. This reveals not only absurdity, but also a critique of the utterly cynical
nature of business that insidiously privileges corporate profit over human health and
well-being. The body, on both ends of this spectrum, is a site for potential profit, ethics
notwithstanding. Hoping to gain from a food shortage, their behavior mimics the profit
driven guiding principle of a capitalist economy that chooses profit over decency.
Ironically, in a later scene, the hedge fund managers wait impatiently at a restaurant for
their meal (Figure 56). When told that food shortages are causing the delay, they are
surprised to learn that the kitchen does not have food stored away. Here, the financials
have even bet against their own hunger. These scenarios demonstrate the real and vast

77
Boltanski and Chiapello, 5.
78
Melanie Gilligan, “Affect & Exchange.” Intangible Economies, ed. Antonia Hirsch (Vancouver: Fillip
Editions, 2012), 27.
91
effects that market exchanges, or abstractions, have on people’s lives.
In another scene, concepts as diverse as the Republican Party and Angelina
Jolie are likewise abstracted by the capitalist system. Here, Souad the financial
journalist plays a game called “long short” in an interview with Ian, the private equity
head. In the game, Souad throws out words and Ian must decide whether to go short, or
bet against, or to go long, and bet for them. Souad asks, “Angelina Jolie?” Ian smiles,
“short on substance, long on form.” Souad continues, “the Republican party?” Ian
replies, “short, short term, then long, long term.” Of course in referencing Angelina
Jolie in this context, Souad uses her name, rather than her personhood. Her name
connotes its celebrity status and perhaps ideal of beauty, and thus its empty value can
be traded on. Debord describes this realm of consumptive simulation that comes to
define images and representations. Of this, he famously notes, “All that once was
directly lived has become mere representation.”
79
In its capacity as a representation, it
assumes a different meaning.
In this game, the US dollar, US real estate, oil and other germane topics are
discussed in financial and potential profit terms. Ironically, though the characters
appear on a split screen and seem to face one another in conversation, the journalist is
in fact outdoors in the park (wearing the clothes she wore to the park for the role play
activity), while the private equity head speaks to her from an indoor office space
(Figures 57-58). The text on the screen shows his title, and mimics the look of a TV
news program while Souad simply appears with a microphone prop in hand. Played out
from two different places, one outside and one inside (and thus far away), Gilligan

79
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994),
3.
92
emphasizes that these financials cannot actually hear one another. They are, in this
sense, blabbering to themselves.
The format of the retreat removes these employees from their cubicles and
desks and seems to function as an activity that will build camaraderie, trust, and
community within the bank team. The formation of a community thus becomes the
mode of work. Giles Deleuze describes the shift from the culture of the factory to the
culture of the corporation. He notes, “in a society of control, the corporation has
replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was
already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to
impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate
through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions.”
80
While the bank
employees might be outside of the office playing a game, they are nevertheless still
working. In fact, in this mode of work, positioned as a game, they sacrifice an immense
amount of time, energy, and knowledge and appear physically drained from the
determined efforts they have applied to their roleplaying.
The absurdity of the constructed game in this work represents a kind of “black
humor” that has rather sad, real world implications. Under the ruse of a “fun” game
conflated with labor, the subsequent firing of the participants directly reflects the real
world scenarios in which the bank and financial institution executives were let off the
hook. The distinction between the winners and the losers in the financial game is
visible in how the retreat leader speaks and even exudes confident mastery. She
announces, “We all know it’s a very difficult time in finance and you’re all clearly very

80
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59. (Winter 1992): 4-5.
93
committed to helping us see our way through the bad—as well as the good—and that’s
really appreciated. That’s why we’ve taken the time to carefully prepare these
compensation packages…Sorry guys, but I think you’ll find everything you need in
there to find yourself a more fulfilling position elsewhere.” (Figure 59). These
characters have worked hard to describe coping mechanisms for the crisis, and seem
proud of their achievement, but they still lose. While they have been working to act out
narratives about the financial system and the ensuing crisis, the bank manager sees this
work as a game, or as an outdoor exercise in fun. In this regard, the collusion between
work and fun allows the bank manager to let them go without any hint of regret or
ethical quandary. This acting, however, has been a great challenge of brain power and
creativity, yet it is clear in the end that these employees have been made puppets of the
system.
In this final scene, Gilligan’s stage directions read, “The five executives stand
there for a moment, dumb with shock. They have been entirely cleaned out of ideas.
They collapse like dolls, emptied of stuffing.”
81
The looks of disbelief and confusion
are a direct response to both their hard work and the way the bank has extracted, and
thus exploited, their talent and knowledge (Figure 60-61). Within the system, they have
been rendered not simply empty, but disposable. Lazzarato identifies a phenomenon
that resonates in this final scene, writing, “The cycle of production comes into
operation only when it is required by the capitalist; once the job has been done, the
cycle dissolves back into the networks and flows that make possible the reproduction

81
Melanie Gilligan, Five Scripts. (Annandale-on-Hudson: Center for Curatorial Studies Bard College
2009), 97.
94
and enrichment of its productive capacities.”
82
Using their knowledge and creativity to
enact these fictional financial scenarios, the bank capitalizes on these employees’
productive value. The improvisation activity marks an exercise by which the bank
wrings the bank employees dry and thus expendable. The distinctions between reality
and non-reality are hard to parse in financialized capitalism, but it nevertheless can
produce real, and in this instance painful, effects. Part of the irony of Gilligan’s series,
and of this abrupt ending, lies in how these employees are so wholly consumed by
financial desires that they are incapable of attaining, and will, in fact, dispose of them.
Like players in a game, they lose, becoming victims to the very system, that is, the
spirit of capitalism, that they believed in and helped to buoy and defend. In the realm of
the financial, the worker never wins.

82
Lazzarato, 146.
95
Figures 41-42

Melanie Gilligan, Crisis in the Credit System, 2008. Still from HD video, 37 min.
Commissioned and produced by Artangel Interaction.

96
Figures 43-44

Melanie Gilligan, Crisis in the Credit System, 2008. Still from HD video, 37 min.
Commissioned and produced by Artangel Interaction.

97
Figures 45-46

Melanie Gilligan, Crisis in the Credit System, 2008. Still from HD video, 37 min.
Commissioned and produced by Artangel Interaction.

98
Figures 47-48

Melanie Gilligan, Crisis in the Credit System, 2008. Still from HD video, 37 min.
Commissioned and produced by Artangel Interaction.

99
Figures 49-50

Melanie Gilligan, Crisis in the Credit System, 2008. Still from HD video, 37 min.
Commissioned and produced by Artangel Interaction.

100
Figures 51-52

Melanie Gilligan, Crisis in the Credit System, 2008. Still from HD video, 37 min.
Commissioned and produced by Artangel Interaction.

101
Figures 53-54

Melanie Gilligan, Crisis in the Credit System, 2008. Still from HD video, 37 min.
Commissioned and produced by Artangel Interaction.

102
Figures 55-56

Melanie Gilligan, Crisis in the Credit System, 2008. Still from HD video, 37 min.
Commissioned and produced by Artangel Interaction.

103
Figures 57-58

Melanie Gilligan, Crisis in the Credit System, 2008. Still from HD video, 37 min.
Commissioned and produced by Artangel Interaction.

104
Figures 59-60

Melanie Gilligan, Crisis in the Credit System, 2008. Still from HD video, 37 min.
Commissioned and produced by Artangel Interaction.

105
Figure 61

Melanie Gilligan, Crisis in the Credit System, 2008. Still from HD video, 37 min.
Commissioned and produced by Artangel Interaction.

106

CONCLUSION
THE INTERVIEW, THE JOB, THE TERMINATION

Harun Farocki, Pilvi Takala, and Melanie Gilligan overlap in their use of fiction
to reveal the structural constraints that the capitalist system places around working
subjects. Rather than simply studying the forms of labor that these artists critiqued, this
thesis has aimed to define and differentiate the different modes of critique these artists
employed. Beginning with Farocki’s use of recordings of interview training videos in
Germany, continuing with Takala’s hidden camera style infiltration of a corporate
Helsinki office, and concluding with Gilligan’s dramatization of investment bank
employees as they are about to be let go, this thesis traces a trajectory of three
economies in Western Europe over the last few decades, but also three approaches to
representing labor and the economy in visual terms.
Farocki’s deadpan documentary “essay” reveals inherent truths in the shifting
system of work, casting its gaze upon real citizens as they struggle to learn the codes
and choreographies of finding work in a recently reunified 1990s Germany. Unlike
Takala and Gilligan’s pieces, Farocki’s film does not depict the realm of work itself,
but rather, the preparatory constructions of the worker. This video reveals that the rules
of the realm of work can be learned. As such, the piece manifests as a dress rehearsal,
where his subjects study and memorize a script, practicing its lines. Farocki’s work
resists the filmic device of narrative: the instructional script on how to behave and what
to say repeats, albeit in slightly different ways, in every scene. The artist nevertheless
teases out the layers of striving toward the goal of obtaining a job.
107
Takala’s work examines the context of the corporate office, using absurdity,
humor, and irony to examine the themes Farocki also addresses. Her performative
workplace intervention likewise looks to real life, yet she depicts her subjects as they
work, or rather, as she pulls them away from working in her humorous performance
that subverts the conventional modes of working. Unlike Farocki and Gilligan, Takala
inculcates herself into the video, as an actor enacting an experiment in the office. Her
colleagues’ reactions drive the plot before onscreen and off, which Takala may control
in real time. Unlike Farocki and Gilligan’s pieces, her work manifests not only as a
video, but as an edited document of a performance and as a museum installation.
Whereas Farocki and Takala take ultimately more distanced approaches to
analyzing labor under late capitalism, Gilligan explicitly looks to the structures of
capitalism, contrasting the real time data about the crumbling 2008 economy with a
fictional scripted tale of employees tasked with brainstorming solutions to the crisis.
Presenting her ideas about the credit crisis in the context of a kitschy TV show, she
adopts the internal, psychologizing conventions of the television genre. In this context,
however, she references real time events within a fictional plot that hinges upon irony
and humor. The characters Gilligan constructs are led into group exercises that reveal
their dreams and fantasies of power and integration into success, even when they are
asked to imagine the opposite. While Gilligan’s work assumes the episodic storytelling
of the television drama and mimics the serial narrative, it is still not a television show.
While it is aesthetically more experimental, both in its budget, the length of its episodes
(each approximately 10 minutes), it is an artwork much like that of Farocki and Takala.
My investigation of the overlap between work and its performance in the films
108
of these artists has shed light on the way that behavior, value, and time has both shifted
and remained stagnant over the past twenty years. By making films about the structures
of labor in their own society, these artists depict the overlap between aesthetic reality
and its multivalent fictions. My interest in these three film-based artworks and their
modes of critique has not been characterized by a desire to find an alternative economic
or political model. Rather, in examining these three instances of labor, I have come to
understand the questions put forth in my introduction about the structures of labor I
know today. Considering the combination of the fictive and the real in art making,
Brian Holmes writes, “Art can offer a chance for society to reflect collectively on the
imaginary figures it depends upon for its very consistency, its self-understanding. But
this is exactly where our societies are failing, and failing miserably, as a result of the
way artistic invention and display has been instituted as a central function over the last
twenty years. We are looking at an extreme limitation on the varieties and qualities of
self-reflection.”
83
Foregrounding the presence of fiction, that is, of acting and
performance, in the realm of working, these film works make room for this mode of
self reflection. These artists produce, in different formats, and with related but differing
sets of problems, the diverse ways the individual adapts to—but also resists—the
capitalist system.

83
Holmes, 549.
109
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alter, Nora M. “Two or Three Things I Know about Harun Farocki.” October. Volume
151. Winter 2015.

Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York and
London: Routledge, 2008.

Becker, Jörg. “Images and Thoughts, People and Things, Materials and Methods.”
Edited by Thomas Elsaesser. Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2004.

Boltanski, Luc and Chiapello, Ève. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by
Gregory Elliot. London and New York: Verso, 2005.

___________________________. “The New Spirit of Capitalism,” Paper to be
presented to the Conference of Europeanists Chicago. March 14-16, 2002. Accessed
February 19, 2017. Accessed February 16, 2017.
http://www.darkmatterarchives.net/wp-
content/uploads/2011/11/boltanskiSPIRITofCapitalism.pdf

Bishop, Claire. “Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity.” October. Volume
140. Spring 2012.
Blümlinger, Christa. “Harun Farocki: Critical Strategies.” Harun Farocki: Working on
the Sight-Lines. Edited by Thomas Elsaesser. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2004.

Boutang, Yann Moulier. Cognitive Capitalism. Translated by Ed Emery. Cambridge,
UK: Polity Press, 2011.
Bryan-Wilson, Julia. “Occupational Realism.” TDR: The Drama Review. Volume 56,
Number 4 (T216). Winter 2012.

Casmir, Fred L. “’Wir sine ein Volk”: Illusions and Reality of Germany Unification.”
Communication in Eastern Europe: the Role of History, Culture and Media in
Contemporary Politics. Edited by Fred. L. Casmir. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates: 1995.

Cunninghame, Patrick. “Autonomia in the 1970s The Refusal of Work, the Party and
Power.” Cultural Studies Review. September 2005.

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New
York: Zone Books, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59. Winter 1992.

110
Demos, T.J. “Moving Images of Globalization Source.” Grey Room. The MIT Press.
Number 37. Fall 2009.

Donovon, Thom and Gilligan, Melanie. “5 Questions for Contemporary Practice.”
Art21 Magazine. (May 22, 2012). Accessed Februrary 26, 2017.
http://magazine.art21.org/2012/05/22/5-questions-for-contemporary-practice-melanie-
gilligan/#.WYS1yneGORs.

Dülmer, Herman, Ingvill C. Mochmann, and Malina Voicu, eds. “Values and Attitudes
in Times of Crisis.” Values, Economic Crisis and Democracy. London and New York:
Routledge, 2015.

The Economist. “The Origins of the Financial Crisis Crash Course.” The Economist.
(September 7, 2013). Accessed March 9, 2017.
https://www.economist.com/news/schoolsbrief/21584534-effects-financial-crisis-are-
still-being-felt-five-years-article.

Farocki, Harun and Halle, Randall. “History Is Not a Matter of Generations: Interview
with Harun Farocki.” Translated by Sabine Czylwik. Camera Obscura. Duke
University Press. Volume 16 Number 1. 2001.

Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work,
Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79.
Translated by G. Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Foster, Hal. “Vision Quest: the Cinema of Harun Farocki.” Artforum. Volume 43
Number 3. November 2004.

Garrel, Thierry and Oliver Hahn. Arte – Der Europäische Kulturkal: Eine
Fernsehsprache in Vielen Sprachen. Verlag Reinhard Fischer, 1997.

Gilligan, Melanie. Five Scripts. Annandale-on-Hudson: Center for Curatorial Studies
Bard College, 2009.

______________. “Affect & Exchange.” Intangible Economies. Edited by Antonia
Hirsch. Vancouver: Fillip Editions, 2012.

Gilligan, Melanie and Tom Holert. “Subjects of Finance Melanie Gilligan Interviewed
by Tom Holert.” Grey Room 46. Winter 2012.

Graw, Isabelle. “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’.” October 130. Fall 2009.

Halle, Randall. “History Is Not a Matter of Generations: Interview with Harun
Farocki.” Camera Obscura. September 2001.
111

Hardt, Michael. “Immaterial Labor and Artistic Production.” Rethinking Marxism.
Volume 17 Number 2. April 2005.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005.

Holmes, Brian. “Artistic Autonomy and the Communication Society.” Third Text.
August 6, 2006.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London
and New York: Verso, 1991.

Lazzarato, Maurizio. “Immaterial Labour.” Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential
Politics. Edited by Michael Hardt and Paulo Virno. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997.

Reuss, Alejandro. “That ‘70s Crisis.” Dollars & Sense Real World Economics.
Accessed February 19, 2017.
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/1109reuss.html.

Rosenberg, Dorothy J. “Stepsisters: On the Difficulties of German-German Feminist
Cooperation.” Communication in Eastern Europe: the Role of History, Culture and
Media in Contemporary Politics. Edited by Fred. L. Casmir. Mahwah, New Jersey:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: 1995.

Spencer, Catherine and Pilvi Takala. “Interview: Open Access Pilvi Takala Interviewed
by Catherine Spencer.” Art Monthly 397. June 2016.

Swader, Christopher S. The Capitalist Personality: Face-to-Face Sociality and
Economic Change in the Post-Communist World. London and New York: Routledge,
2013.

Terranova, Tiziana. “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.” Social
Text 63. Volume 18, Number 2. Summer 2000.

Tervo, Juuso Ville. “Corrosive Subjectifications: Theorizing Radical Politics of Art
Education in the Intersection of Jacques Rancière and Giorgio Agamben.” PhD diss.,
The Ohio State University, 2014.

Tsogas, George. “The Commodity Form in Cognitive Capitalism.” Culture and
Organization. Volume 18 Number 5. December 1, 2012.

Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of
Life. Translated by Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson. Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

The art of staying: Theaster Gates and the Rebuild Foundation

PDF

Surveillance surveyed: the effects of remote sensing technologies on perception through the films of Harun Farocki

PDF

Performative futurity: transmuting the canon through the work of Rafa Esparza

PDF

Explorer-at-large: artist-led inquiry and the rise of the museum as athenaeum

PDF

Teaching freedom: the power of autonomous temporary institutions and informal pedagogy in the work of Tania Bruguera and Suzanne Lacy

PDF

Death from above: art contemplates drone warfare

PDF

Museum programming and the educational turn

PDF

Nude performances in the practice of Fiona Banner, 2006-2010

PDF

Re/locating new media in the museum

PDF

The plausible, ongoing, and disappearing acts of James Lee Byars: early performance works (1955-1967)

PDF

The trouble with Radical Women: anti-Blackness, Latinidad, and contemporary curating

PDF

What’s the wig deal?: Exploring the use of wigs and head accessories in queer performance

PDF

Territories of resistance: the impact of the Zapatista Rebellion on artistic practices in Mexico City, 1994-1995

PDF

The constellations of Holocaust representation: performative monuments, museums, and survivors’ artworks

PDF

Contingent practice: contemporary methods in art process dependent on architecture of the exhibition space

PDF

LatinX excess: from the Baroque to rasquachismo, tracing a culture of extravagance

PDF

Performing excess: the politics of identity in La Chica Boom

PDF

Face lift: the reconfiguration of three North American museums from the outside in

PDF

Subverting madness: on translating the mental illness memoir into a curatorial practice

PDF

the experience of art and the art of experience: museums, theme parks, and van gogh in the 21st century

Asset Metadata

Creator Krug, Simone (author)

Core Title Business casual: performing labor in the work of Harun Farocki, Pilvi Takala, and Melanie Gilligan

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere

Publication Date 08/08/2017

Defense Date 08/07/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag art criticism,Art History,Ève Chiapello,film criticism,Harun Farocki,immaterial labor,Labor,Luc Boltanski,Marxist theory,Maurizio Lazzarato,Melanie Gilligan,neoliberal capitalism,neoliberalism,OAI-PMH Harvest,Pilvi Takala,postindustrial capitalism

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Wedell, Noura (committee chair), Moss, Karen (committee member), Tain, John (committee member)

Creator Email simonemkrug@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-424017

Unique identifier UC11264456

Identifier etd-KrugSimone-5687.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-424017 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-KrugSimone-5687.pdf

Dmrecord 424017

Document Type Thesis

Rights Krug, Simone

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA