“I do think work is gendered. But the more personal the process of discovering a gender for the work, or issues about gender, the more interested I am. The way decisions can be ignited beyond manifestos, doctrines and theories is what inspires me. The female occupation of space could begin with an emotional response about a relationship to a certain kind of behaviour.”

Phyllida Barlow

This exhibition is inspired by the Pantone Colours of the Year 2000-2023; colours of the beach—rosy coral sunsets, bold blue skies, azure seas, also of the nursery—soft pinks, baby blues, sunny yellows, the colours of discarded plasticine projects and decorated cupcakes. This ‘hidden code’ of a colour scheme holds up a mirror to what for the last 23 years has been considered one of the pinnacles of good taste. And the artist proceeds to question the validity of such an elitist notion. These colours, often representing human skin, are a bit too vivid, too livid, to be healthy. Something unsettling has also happened to scale, said body parts are shrunken, or blown up to extraordinary effect. In Bustle Tongue and Stopper (both 2022) the abstracted muscular organ is an alarming size. WAG (finger hook) (2023), made from polymer clay and wood, is a protruding, dismembered finger is the colour of a cartoon bruise. The pretty glazed porcelain Josiah Heads series (2023) are too small, eerily sightless, yet beam up from the floor at the viewer, tiny freakish playthings urging us to pick them up so they can bite us. Akerman describes the subtle story behind their creation:

The series started as a collection of men traipsing around on Saturday after their wives – a vignette of gender relations. But through making they morphed into a troupe of jolly industrialists. These were in part inspired by the contradictory figures of philanthropic industrialists who created model villages for workers with good living conditions, yet whose hierarchy and implication in the negative social and environmental impact of industrialisation are still felt. 

Despite the clouds on the horizon at the seaside, humour appears in abundance. Marble nose on a butcher’s block (2023) might remind the viewer of the wonderful nineteenth-century short story by Russian author Nikolai Gogol, The Nose. In Gogol’s satirical, surreal tale a civil servant is not only alarmed to wake up without his nose, but aghast to discover it has made its way in the world more successfully than him, outranking him and clothed in such a way as to convey ‘it held the rank of a state-councillor’. Just as Gogol uses wit and comedy to poke fun at empty narcissism, Akerman uses nonsensical ideas and imagery to ridicule contemporary society’s value systems, particularly in the area of current perceptions of beauty. Concepts of ideal beauty have changed across the histories of art, but more recently artists have challenged rather than reinforced such ideas; Mossy Leg (2023), Seaweed Groin (2023) and de Bayonne (2022) all display imperfect, monstrous bodies as bold, enchanting and unembarrassed. The latter work on paper adds another linguistic twist to the narrative; Bayonne in France, is famous for its legs of artisanal ham, served up in this painting with added grapes, varicose veins and nail polish. Similar etymological creativity is used in the exotically titled Chilopoda (2022). This bright ceramic plate set on brass castors is a perfect example of the kinds of dichotomy on display throughout the exhibition. Chilopoda gives the impression it might at any moment scuttle under the gallery’s shadow gaps, with its cyclopean single eye and tar-toothed mouth, like much of the work in Fat Rascals, the temptation to touch is short-lived.   

Akerman has worked with the idea of scrolls and unravelling for some time, included here is the large installation, Wandering Parts (2022). The artist worked with technicians to adapt three Ikea blinds, using sculptural choreography to create a random sequence of unfurling and rolling-up. She explains her thinking behind these:

These drawings morphed into visual representations of the connections women (in particular) make with each other; the intimacies we share in brief meetings and the closeness you can develop with someone whose social or political values you might not share. The shared experience of the female body leads women to overcome differences to forge really strong relationships.

Such works share the imagery of popular interior design which appears, slightly altered, throughout the exhibition. They also refer, as the artist explains, to the female body as depicted by the British artist Beryl Cook, who was popular in the 1970s and ‘80s. As Akerman explains, ‘The way Beryl Cook played with those forms, and I enjoy the populist reference, especially after reading a scathing review of her work by a well-known male art critic. I think she was very shy in her private life.’ These subtle references to the female experience in society align with Barlow’s words; there is no manifesto here, rather a measured, emotive message.

Turning to the Fat Rascals or as they are officially listed Fat Fingers (and Boobs) (2023), plump and fruity scones, the artist has said that the inclusion of these edible sculptures was intended as a contrasting generosity within the exhibition, ‘in opposition to other more uncomfortable emotions the work is intended to illicit embarrassment, schadenfreude, meanness, the feeling of blushing, social anxiety.’ She also describes the unexpected but satisfyingly appropriate effect of these works as people tentatively ‘danced and dithered’ around the cakes, unsure quite what behavior was allowed in the formal atmosphere of the art gallery. Akerman, like many artists before her who have used edible components in their work, selected prosaic objects to convey complex ideas.

God is in the detail, as is often said, but Jessica Akerman’s most recent exhibition recalls the idiom, extending it into the devil is in the details. Her bright and cheerful art belies first glance. She has frequently worked with preordained colour schemes including, ‘the fluorescents of market signage, or Microsoft’s default colour palette’. It is a subtle and intelligent method of triggering collective memory and industrial choice. Through shades of sunbeams and roses Akerman reveals the disturbing narratives of societal assumptions.

Kirstie Gregory, Henry Moore Institute, July 2023

Cork Caryatids celebrates the history and strength, physical and symbolic, of female labour in Cork. This series of banners makes reference to the Shawlies, Cork’s famous street traders, but also points to larger stories of changing labour practices and the ways in which these changes to the ways in which we work impact the urban landscape. Akerman’s imagery draws on the history of caryatids, carved female figures which were used as pillars in Classical architecture. Caryatids were mythological women subjected to the hard labour of holding up a heavy temple, but were also associated with celebratory rituals where the women would wear baskets of fruit on their heads. The graphic design of the banners uses the layout of Excel sheets, each cell filled with vivid colour, to engage with contemporary office based work practice and the new architectural landscape in Cork that accommodates this digital labour.

PATTERN RECOGNITION

If power is designed, then that design is fundamentally invisible. Interrelationships of vast assemblages of power are formed in the shadows, through a nearly incomprehensible play of cause and effect. Following the Industrial Revolution, and accelerating beyond and into our own post-digital moment, the contours of the designed power of infrastructure ascend to dizzying heights of abstraction that make their form difficult to concretely grasp in material terms. Whilst rapid advancements in social and technological complexity operate to augment the density levels of these entanglements, invisibility itself does not denote immateriality. What is invisible is still there, it still exists, even if only perceptible as symbolic abstraction. As an extension of this, the map of power is often times invisible, because it has been intentionally designed in such a way.

Throughout the history of art, power has often sought to symbolically freeze and extend itself, consolidating in the construction of monumental forms. This is, more often than not, a history forged through the reification of great men, but this is but 1 one kind of historical tract. What of a history from below? Whilst power does indeed consolidate, its coalescence is always the result (1 This ideology is famously elucidated in Thomas Carlyle’s ‘great man theory of history’, which proposed that the history of the world was the history of powerful men. See: Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History, Yale University Press, 1841/2013. ) of the manipulation of individual currents. Surplus-value generated by workers is abstracted and rerouted in order to cultivate vast explosions of overly-concentrated wealth. (2 Revealing the surplus-value generated by the worker was one of the key interventions in Marx’s theory of political-economy: ‘The transformation of surplus-value into profit must be deduced from the transformation of the rate of surplus-value into the rate of profit, not vice versa. And in fact it was rate of profit which was the historical point of departure. Surplus-value and rate of surplus-value are, relatively, the invisible and unknown essence that wants investigating, while rate of profit and therefore the appearance of surplus-value in the form of profit are revealed on the surface of the phenomenon.’ in Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume III: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, 1894, 29.) The value of work in a capitalist economy is always undersold, and so there exists a fundamental gap between the labourer and their productive worth, as the system requires the generation of surplus. In essence, the value of work becomes abstracted, invisible, and impossible to accurately diagram — many employers outright forbid, or tacitly discourage, the discussion of pay amongst their workers.

Rendering visible the practices of labour power is the central concern of Jessica Akerman’s Cork Caryatids, which takes form as a set of four flags hoisted above the Port of Cork. Representing a transhistorical celebration of female workers, the situating of the piece, rising into the sky, operates as a monumentalisation of contemporary labour power. The radically bold colour palette and observable sectors of geometric design, expand upon the artist’s work of reconfiguring Microsoft Excel as a creative tool. The act of refactoring this spreadsheet software for artistic purposes functions as a means to subvert the flows of labour, performing a reclamation of the artist/worker’s time (as value proposition). (3 In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau refers to this as la perruque: ‘the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer.’ in Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, 1984, 25.) In this action Akerman recalls Michel de Certeau’s formulation of tactical response: practices of everyday life which deviate from what is set out by the ordered systems of power. In comparison to the strategies of dominant control, tactics are non-institutionalised, polymorphous, and seek to introduce random and disruptive elements into established power structures. (4 ‘I call a “tactic,” on the other hand, a calculus which cannot count on a “proper” (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of a tactic belongs to the other. […] The “proper” is a victory of space over time. On the contrary, because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time - it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized “on the wing.” […] The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them.’ in Ibid, xix.) Tactics interrupt into the established order, and when considered against the practice of misusing the Microsoft Excel program, this particular action reveals something of a glitch aesthetic. Though a glitch is typically called upon in order to refer to a technological error, its identification as such is just another form of ideological power formulation that seeks to establish singular uses for machinic tools.

Much like Akerman’s excavation of the often occluded labour power of women, the glitch itself, in both its technical and conceptual deployment, is that which renders a gap in the information circuit, and so through this error it becomes possible to experience absence. (5 Vendela Grundell, Flow and Friction: On the Tactical Potential of Interfacing with Glitch Art, Art and Theory Publishing, 2016, 14.) Glitching the system is hacking it to unearth hidden pathways. The technological coordinates of the glitch are also useful for thinking the ways in which the category of work exists in our post-digital era. Computation has utterly transformed the conditions of labour in the 21st-century, and yet, despite the overwhelming prevalence of technology in our lived reality, its history and contemporary status has been rewritten as an overly masculine enterprise. Against this singular genealogy, the task of recoupling women with technology is taken to be one of the prime directives of Laboria Cuboniks’ xenofeminist agenda, as they proclaim to ‘mobilize the recursive potential of contemporary technologies upon gender, sexuality and disparities of power.’(6 Laboria Cuboniks, Xenofemnism: A Politics for Alienation, 2015, available @ http://laboriacuboniks.net/20150612-xf_layoutweb.pdf) Whilst for xenofeminism computational rationality itself may be inhuman, the philosophy asserts that the domination of science and technology ‘by masculine egos’ places these fields fundamentally at odds with themselves: ‘Reason, like information, wants to be free, and patriarchy cannot give it freedom.’ (7 Ibid.)

To unleash the true emancipatory potentialities of technology, it is required to perform an archaeology of historical trajectories that uncover the moments when computation breaks free from the of its masculine-infused narrative. An example of such an impetus is observable in the writings of one of xenofeminism’s ancestral kin, Sadie Plant, who reminds us:

“The computer emerges out of the history of weaving, the process so often said to be the quintessence of women’s work. The loom is the vanguard site of software development.” (8 Sadie Plant, ‘The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics’, in Body & Society, 1(3-4), 1995, 46.)

Tracing a procedural line of flight that unfolds over the course of 8,000 years, (9 ‘Evidence of sophisticated textile production dates to 6,000 B.C. in the southeast regions of Europe, and in Hungary there is evidence that warp-weighted looms were producing designs of extraordinary extravagance from at least 5,000 B.C.’ in Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture, Doubleday, 1997, 61-62.) the gridded logic of the loom eventually makes an appearance in our modern rear-view through Ada Lovelace’s Analytical Engine, Ani Albers’ weaving practices at the Bauhaus, the calculation and plotting of missile courses, the construction and operation of mainframe computer systems, Delia Derbyshire’s machinic experiments at the Radiophonic Workshop, and then into the structural form of software solutions intended for spreadsheet design. Embarking upon cybernetic feedback loops with, and of, machine accelerates beyond all recognition, and soon these woven entanglements reach levels of sophistication that begin to overcode individual human autonomy in favour of market forces feverishly enthralled by growth.

Paralysis is enacted as a series of strict commands that condemn any deviation from the program as error. All design is ideological, and Excel’s attempts to operationalise information into a series of rigid columns that attest to the values of functional universality. But functional for who and for what? The task of rewriting the history of technology requires not only a more detailed investigation of its past, but also a reevaluation of its current statuses and future directions. Akerman’s practice tactically reclaims the quintessential tool of contemporary office work, redirecting surplus towards a productivist aesthetic. For Cork Caryatids this deconstruction of the database is furthered still, exploding like light into a series of figurative depictions that euphorically announce the manifest power of women’s labour. The body of lived experience returns, not as an inert unit wrapped up in the discombobulating flows of power, but here as the chief designer.

Laurence Counihan is an Irish-Filipino writer and critic, who is currently a PhD candidate and teaching assistant with the History of Art department at University College Cork. His research is located at the intersection between art, technology and continental philosophy.

Artichoke, producers of the 14-18 Now Processions artwork, has collated all of the banners made across the UK, with groups and artists in London, Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh.