FAY INCORPORATED:

THROUGH THE MANUFACTORY
Stream-Repetition and Technology

“Fay Incorporated exemplify the dilemma of contemporary creation, not knowing whether it exists as art or industry it fails at both and recycles ideas from the refuse pit of history. Redundantly gnawing on its own insides, it is trapped in the repetitious cycles of its representation.”

Jon Williams, “Aporia”, Issue 26, pp. 14. 2006.

“I once bought a Calendar made by Fay Inc and it seemed useful enough to me. I like to think of their work as adopting an alternative mode of manufacture and distribution, re-establishing the labourer as the origin of a product, assigning him a place in the formation of an object’s identity”

Andreas Lügner, Curator at the Museum der Arbeit, Dresden.

“Fay Incorporated take no action and change nothing. It proposes a reality and then shows it as impossible and ridiculous. As a self-sufficient, female only workforce that makes no negative reference to a history of inequality it belongs in the realm of fiction, on the book shelf in between Kafka and Lewis Carroll”.

Margaret Zmija, Editor of “Woman’s Work”, Issue 9, pp. 58, 2006.

The activities of Fay Inc have always have always invoked curiosity, whilst the management attempt to resist definition the workforce continue to produce items that undoubtedly comment on working routines, repetition and the boundaries between creation and production. A whole department is dedicated to the manufacture of coin rolls, which are lengths of paper containing a continuous flow of screen printed coins.  These graduated prints are seen as a measure of time itself, and this printing activity is used to gauge the working day.

Another of our products that serves to measure time is our company calendar. This calendar plays a vital role in our organisation and every member of staff receives one. Each year’s edition enables the head of Time Management to accurately plan Calendar production for the forth coming year. Besides these products Fay Inc. also makes prints, photographs, books and broadsheets.

The Fay Incorporated building has developed substantially throughout the century. Originally containing 30 workshops, the Factory now houses a Department of Research, an archive, conference rooms and several cafeterias. The recent criticism we have received, namely from Williams, Lügner and Zmija, came as a response to an event in which we opened up our factory to the public.

As a recent addition to the research department at Fay Inc I found myself with the difficult task of delivering a response to this criticism. Using information from the Fay Inc archive I would form a research paper to be included in our forth coming publication, “Through the Manufactory”. This would explore the validity of these opinions in relation to our ethos and working methods.  

Williams alludes to contemporary culture’s reliance and reuse of history in order to survive and draws a divide between art and industry. Lugner focuses on Fay Inc’s industrial roots by addressing methods of production and the position of a labourer. His role within the Museum Der Arbeit giving him a Marxist perspective on our work. And finally, Zmija seems to regard Fay Inc as feminist project that fails to deliver a female account of inequality in the work place. She attacks our lack of activism, derogatively comparing Fay Inc’s activities to a work of pure fiction.
 
To begin my enquiry I decided to investigate the factor present in each of their criticism; Industry.

Beginning my research in Room 805, “Industrial History” I located one text that appeared central to my investigation. This was “Time, work-discipline and Industrial Capitalism” by E.P Thompson.  This piece reiterated the influence that working methods have had over the ways that we divide up time and the relationship a labourer has to his work.

The transition from piece work to time work had huge ramifications on the value of a labourer and the division of social time. Until around 1850 a craftsman, such as a potter, would produce an amount of objects per week and receive payment according to this number of items. By the turn of the century stages of production were divided between labourers in order to hasten the production process and augment profits. Payment was then received according to the number of hours one had worked. As well as controlling the previously sporadic routines of a worker, the division of labour also succeeding in fragmenting his tasks into a series of repetitive actions, separating him from the end product created.

This text also addressed the emergence of time thrift as a result of the new machinery that unified the routines of a workforce. Public Clocks were installed in towns by factory owners, dividing up the day with unprecedented precision, the bell set to ring at 4 every morning to summon workers to the factory. In this way the clock was an instrument of power. Only one in each factory had the authority to dictate the time and only the Clock Keeper had the authority to tamper with it.

This restructuring of working habits and the reduction of a craftsman down to an appendage of the machine forced workers into a position of powerlessness. Yet, repression lead to protest, which in turn encouraged the development of civil rights and the creation of “Leisure Time” for the working classes. Once the working class had the luxury of FREE TIME and a DISPOSABLE WAGE, the mechanics of capitalism had evolved to a stage in which it was able to channel these resources back into the cycle of capital. Leisure became an industry and whole lives could now be fragmented into a list of objects or services exchanged for a wage: a portrait of a man formed through a catalogue of receipts.

In the chaotic excess of a flourishing economy the exchange of the inessential rampantly prospers. Producing is now of secondary importance to Selling, to take Nike as an example, this corporation states that it is in the business of marketing shoes, not making them. Culture is absorbed into this ritual of mass production for mass consumption, and the creative act appears tied to a conveyor belt, destined to emerge again and again in identical forms whilst the media grinds its ecstatic mechanisms to instil a desire for purchase.

How does art function within this system of production for consumption, where labour is separated from the aura of the product by advertising’s mythology? Does Art provide an exit from this cycle of degenerate creativity or does it merely become the ultimate product, with value distant from the real world and undetermined by material qualities?

Williams states that Fay Inc. fails at being either Art or Industry, but what is the divide between the two at a time when culture is mass produced and ideological progress has given way to a cynical repetition of forms? In order to examine the nexus between art and industry I wanted to compare the figures of the artist and the worker and to see how artistic and industrial production could infiltrate each other. As print is a familiar medium to both art and industry I thought it might illuminate the boundary between the two. This led me to the print research room.

By viewing a summary of the development of print throughout the centuries I gained a sense of the inextricable link between technology and communication; each development aiming to disseminate language, knowledge, information and propaganda, technological progress extending the boundaries of human contact and experience. Yet, apart from advertising what is the use of print after utopian ideas of social change have faded into the desire for commercial gain?

Andy Warhol was an artist who succeeded in combining the non-unique form of print with a content that confronts us with the repetition and banality of a culture driven towards mass exchange. The car crash, the celebrity, cans of soup. All violence, personality and use drained from the image, what is left are the sociological myths of these symbols, reiterated in a tone of joyful irony.

The prints of Fay Incorporated do not deal in popular symbolism but do approach the banality of the everyday. Within the confines of the Fay Inc Factory, production takes precedence over product and the act of making is often the content and concern of our work. This places our activities in line with modernity’s drive for production rather than post-modernity’s focus on consumption. I agree with Lugner in that our work attempts to re-establish the maker as the nucleus of a product.  Yet, within Fay Incorporated, is artistic production likened to manual labour, or are the repetitions of everyday work seen to offer an opportunity for artistic contemplation?

Through the homogeneity of our workforce and the suppression of individuality I can see why Lugner identified us with collective productivity. Yet, how do our “products”, that do not generate surplus value, relate to the notion of production defined by Marx? Our raw materials are paper, ink, analogue equipment and our own products, these are used to produce new work, which intern is stored in the archive, copied or used to make something else. It is uncertain what value our products hold outside of this system of production.

The by-product of production is not surplus value, being converted into capital by the owners of Fay Incorporated, but surplus documentation being converted into History. History, in this case takes the form of documents and a narrative that allude to a heritage of past production, this pool growing with every new product made. In this way Fay Inc appears to be bypassing its own life and diving into a museological death, living in the past tense of the archive. Yet, does the storage of products, rather than their consumption, provide an exit from the cycle of commercial production or does it hold our activities in a loop of retrospection, our products and our past inextricably tied up together?

I thought it was necessary to look at other strategies of creation that aim to subvert the system of commercial production. One way that artists have done this was through creating multiple art works.

The artists multiple is both a technique of artistic production and a theoretical strategy that comments on the entire discipline of art. Although Artists attempt to stretch this definition, as with Bob and Roberta Smith’s “One-Off Multiples”, it is a term used to denote a series of artworks whose methods of production are not usually associated with the serial object.

The mass production of art is one way of distributing it to a wide audience, usually with low production costs. This was a characteristic of “Intuition”, a box made by Joseph Beuys in an unlimited edition. It is unknown how many exist today but 8000 had been produced by 1974. This vast network of tangible objects alters the traditional relationship between art and the public, ideas of the original and the reproduction are erased by adopting a structure of distribution similar to an attainable household product.

Pierro Manzoni’s ninety editions of “Artist’s shit” take a more cynical approach to the potency of the artists multiple, commenting on the unquantifiable value granted to an object at the hands of an artist. The multiplication of this product brings a grotesque twist to Baudrillard’s claims that contemporary art deals in nothing more than banality and waste.

As a strategy for making art work that emulates the commercial market of mass production and distribution, the multiple critiques both the industrial world and the artistic world of unique conception. In this sense Multiples can be viewed as the fulcrum, carefully balancing a lever of production that tips between art and industry. By analysing our activities within this framework of critical production I hoped to solidify a response to Williams’ claim that Fay Inc. remains outside of either sphere.

What defines the conceptual importance of a multiple is the dialectic between production methods that are associated with the unique and the manifestation of this artwork in a plural form. Objects associated with processes of reproduction, such as prints, photographs and books, are not usually considered multiples. As the products of Fay Inc. imply seriality through their traditional function my initial thought was that our work would be excluded from this category. Yet, the qualities of our products, the degraded, lo-fidelity images, the use of outmoded equipment, and the steady flow of manual action that defines our work ethic, made me reconsider this exclusion.

The choice to use analogue production methods is a conscious anachronism, preventing them from being a pure means to an end. Our methods reference an epoch of tangible, material value and comment on the present digital world of vast, intangible networks by denying its supremacy.

For our staff, the repetitious action, reiterates our emphasis on PROCESS and our idea of WORK as being a durational performance sustained periodically throughout one’s vocational life. This routine of action resulting in the multiple artwork succeeds in offering not one final object but many variations of a transformative practice.

The artist, Martha Rosler adopted alternative methods of distribution through her series of post card works and by using low cost, easily reproducible media in her collages and videos she rebels against the art market and the magical exchange value of its objects. Although these strategies are a fundamental aspect of her practice, her work is multifaceted and goes further than commenting on the value of the art object. The social concerns of Rosler’s work mean that her practice is not represented in a history of multiple art at all. In fact, I had to venture to another area of the Research department in order to find out anything more. I transferred my study to Room 849, Female Art Practises.

This room had once been called “Feminist Art Practices” but had been altered in order to accommodate female artists who do not place gender at the forefront of their practice. Yet due to feminism’s significance I had expected this room to outline its development.

Once I began to examine the files it became clear that this archive offered no such history. Instead the room contained an alphabetical list of female practitioners, and for each artist; a biography, documentation of works and related critical texts. I was not sure if the archivist had denied feminism a place in the archive or if, within Fay Inc’s female dominated environment, an emphasis on the otherness of a gynocentric narrative was redundant.

Regardless of the archivist’s intentions it was difficult to place the work of Martha Rosler within any historical context. Rosler’s Retrospective at the IKON Gallery provided the most in depth contextual exploration of her work. This institution traced a historical narrative around her diverse artistic practice, affiliating it with the development of both conceptual and feminist practices. Yet I struggled to identify Rosler’s involvement in conceptual or feminist art before this period. For example; she is absent from an exhibition curated by Lucy Lippard in 1973 that aimed to show the work of female conceptual artists, most probably resulting in her absence from subsequent reviews and criticism. This absence demonstrated a curator’s ability to define an artistic moment, suggesting that the curator and the critic, not the artist, own the power to create a history of art.

From this perspective, the arrangement of the archive could be understood, allowing both the researcher to form her own comparisons and the work of female artists to be viewed outside of an historical account of feminism. Many feminist artists attempted to contradict or subvert the historical tradition of male dominance by voicing alternative, and in some cases, biographical narratives. As the institution and the gallery were traditionally male dominated worlds has the absorption of feminist works into these spheres cemented them in the grand unifying narrative that feminist artists wished to critique, and escape?

In today’s democratic institutions, where many of feminism’s aims appear to have been realised, where is the divide between a female and a feminist artist? Is a female artist who does not consider her gender to be significant, feminist because equality is a prerequisite of her practice? Or, is the term feminist restricted to those who actively wish to address gender through their work?

This question is relevant to Zmija’s criticism, as, although we are not concerned with activism here at Fay Incorporated, the competence of a female workforce has never been doubted. We are not feminist in an active sense. Our primary concerns are with production and history. I think our management wish to avoid definition by making objects that question notions of work and repetition in relation to the creative act. Our Directors openly acknowledge the art world’s fraternity with the commercial market and for us, the embrace of repetitive action is our exit from the charade of originality in a world that has only appropriations from its past to offer. And so, here at Fay Incorporated we channel our resources into the simple tasks of documenting production and producing documents.

Yet by exploring the work of feminist artists within the archive I realised that production and history have an antagonistic relationship with female representation. In this sense, Zmija’s standpoint did have relevance to my research. Feminist attempts to undermine the dominant narrative of history made me see history’s predisposition towards power and its ability to cement disparate facts in an historical fiction.

At this point I looked back at my notes and was hit with a vertiginous feeling of confusion. Until venturing into this section of the archive I had not even begun to consider the author of the information that I had been studying, who had recorded this knowledge and why.

 With an irresolvable urge I rushed back down to Room 805, the room containing an account of Industrial History.  In order to form a response that accurately placed the activities of Fay Inc within the spheres of art and industry I would have to recognise history as a symptom of an epoch’s dominant forces, as a narrative, subject to bias and ambiguity. I would need to regard a document as a form in its self rather than a transparent method of transmitting information or academic opinion.

And so, I returned to the room in which my research began, in order to re-evaluate the sources and validity of the information I had previously gathered. By doing this I hoped to establish not only the motivations of a narrator but also the reason for a documents very existence within the archive. My only anxiety was that by returning to the beginning, my research had no foreseeable end.

.

Fay Nicolson April 2007