Worker Posters

I designed this piece to be a protest.  The idea is that by pasting the posters around town, especially near McDonalds and Starbucks (the settings in the posters), I would be create an awareness into the concept of work, particularly our reasons for working poor jobs for little money.

The French philosopher Georges Bataille comments on something he calls the accursed share.  He argues along the lines of excess energy being a necessity.  A system must produce more than enough energy that the amount needed to create its basic requirements, e.g. a chicken must lay 5 eggs in order for one to hatch.  If every chicken laid 4 eggs, they would die out.  If each chicken laid more than 5 eggs then chickens will multiply.  If we take the same basis into economics, then any capital-based system must produce more than enough energy (money) to support its civilisation.  The gap between the minimum needed and the amount actually produced Bataille calls the accursed share, and he argues that this is a necessity.  This is the share which sustains luxury and excess, and is the share which accounts for the types of jobs that I wanted my posters to aim at.

Too often, we deem such jobs a necessity.  But in reality, they are not.  They are a luxury that supports another luxury.  Films like Fight Club deal with this issue, and to quote one famous line from the film (and book), “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need”.  Nicely put, and the kind of sentiment that is reflected in Bataille’s philosophy, and what I wanted to utilise in this piece.

The reason for the posters being based on a painting rather than on a photograph is to echo, in some small aspect, socialist realist painting.  From the 1930s, communistic countries (especially Russia) enforced this form of art that was always very positive, flattering and realistic.  It was used as a kind of propaganda to show how great communism was, when the reality was usually far from this.  The settings that both workers in my posters are placed are quite bright, light places.  I contrasted this with the mellow tones of the faces and the glum expressions.  It is easy to read and quite strong visually, and this ties in with my low-tech approach, making accessible and easily understood artwork.

During the occasions I protested against the cuts to education in London, I realised that there is an importance to physicality, in sheer presence.  That is one of the reasons why the paintings have been reproduced as posters.  The other is that they need to be read in my unart philosophy.  If they existed as paintings, they would be too close to fine art and would not be able to read as the protest that they are intended to be read as.  As a result the original paintings have been destroyed.  They were simply the means to producing the posters, and if they were to be shown as paintings they would do something completely different from my original intention.

The posters were pasted up around town, especially near McDonalds and Starbucks (the settings of the paintings).  I pasted them up on a Sunday night, and when I went to photograph them early next morning, only one survived.  The ones which had been pasted up on properties had been removed, but the one which survived I’d posted on a deserted shop.  I couldn’t help thinking about Lenin’s “When there is no property, there is no state.”  The next week I headed into town again and posted more copies up, this time focussing on walls which didn’t belong to any businesses.