Rodrigo Valenzuela's new show at the Frye, The Future of Ruins, and his growing body of films and photographs, direct us to questions about labor that are not easy to answer. For him, what does not exist is a line between, say, making art and cleaning a football stadium (see the short "13th Man"). Work is an activity that transforms a place or a space. Work always makes something. Indeed, the root of our English word poetry is found in the language of the ancient Greeks, in the word poïesis, which means "to make." To make a room clean, to make a customer happy, to make a new condo. But we also live in an age where workers in cafes or minding parked cars or writing software are encouraged to see themselves as artists, as creative, as innovative. Management literature over the past 30 years has even convinced many CEOs that the man they see in the mirror is actually Leonardo da Vinci. What can we say about these developments in the light of Valenzuela's claim that he, an educated artist, is doing the same thing as a Mexican gardener? Has he crossed a troubling line?
No, he has not. What is important to understand is that the kind of work Valenzuela always has in mind goes mostly unnoticed. His are workers who're often not in but outside of the standard society. They often do without papers. They are often what the French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call "the excluded."
What we have to remember is that before there was serious talk about inequality in our society, many Americans believed that class no longer existed. Almost everyone was thought to be a member of a vast middle class. And because everyone was in this one and only class, there was effectively no class at all. Also, what replaced the stable class identities of old, which were social in nature, was the creative individual, the enterprising clerk, the genius CEO, the artist. But what if you weren't in the middle class, what were you then? Exactly: the excluded.
This was a classless mass of humans who just failed to be a part of the main economy for reasons relating to personality disorders, to mental shortcomings, or a simple lack of papers. They existed and still exist outside of the system for reasons that cannot be addressed or solved by those who are within. How do you fix a bad attitude, a bad upbringing, a bad nationality? That's your problem. It is this group, the excluded (I call them the inhabitants), we find in Valenzuela's art. The artist in the CEO or software engineer or events planner would never make common cause with the excluded. Valenzuela does.
