Rae Culbert and Catherine Walworth:
testsite 05.2
Testsite
- Laura A. Lindenberger -
People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.
Raoul Vaneigem,
The Revolution Of Everyday Life
What is revolutionary about the everyday? In a country where the working class sides with conservative leadership, I often wonder what happened to the potential of the disenfranchised to demand change.
Rae Culbert and Catherine Walworth seem similarly befuddled. Citing/re-creating Alexander Rodchenko’s 1925 design for the Soviet Workers’ Club, the pair rephrases eighty-year-old questions on the role of the worker in a perplexingly absent revolution. Further, they use Rodchenko’s original design to do so, but add a touch of the personal, couching their re-creation of the Workers’ Club within a narrative of everyday life and a consideration of what it means to live in Texas right now. Visually, the result of their collaboration is a mixed bag. Conceptually, the project’s multiple layers and associations are thoughtfully made and worth revisiting.
Rae Culbert & Catherine Walworth, YUPPIE (Young Urban Proles), 2005
Exterior view testsite
Culbert used plastic cups to spell out “LENIN” in a chain link fence in front of testsite. Suggesting the kind of patriotic, low-budget signage found throughout the country, the piece plays off the blind jingoism in America today, using the name of a man once openly considered “public enemy number one.”
Inside, an overturned sofa sits beneath posters for the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels, the show at which Rodchenko exhibited his designs. The sofa—a sure symbol of leisure—is a telling counterpoint to the uncomfortable plywood chairs that surround a plywood table nearby. Adding to the intentional uneasiness of the installation, two lights click on and off, alternately blinding the visitor. The lights are carefully placed to disallow escape; one of them is always in your eyes. In a corner, a large curved mirror hovers, further suggesting the presence of surveillance.
On the table sits a copy of The Daily Prole, a custom newspaper created by Culbert and Walworth. The long, narrow table leads to a fireplace where an open book rests, its pages cut out and replaced by a red gun. The book is a Bible; handwritten notes on long division and salvation are scrawled inside its back cover.
The Daily Prole is the only source of text in the installation (keep in mind, the Bible’s pages have been torn out). The work comments on the failure of Communism in practice, as well as the drawbacks of state-controlled news media, as was the case in Soviet-era Russia and in post-9/11 America. It reminds us that if only one source is available, information need not be supported by fact.
Above the fireplace hangs a piece that restates the show’s ethos. A burned cowboy hat, a cracked John F. Kennedy commemorative plate, shredded flags, a “Don’t Mess with America” sticker and Patriot cigarettes are piled into a bloody, garish jumble. Blatant restatement delivered as weird, patriotic kitsch makes this one of the least successful pieces in the installation.
Rae Culbert & Catherine Walworth, YUPPIE (Young Urban Proles), 2005
Chess table after Alexander Rodchenko’s Design
Installation detail
A chess table occupies one side of the room, built to Rodchenko’s specifications. The table is convertible and anchors two chairs together—one red, one black. (Rodchenko was interested in convertibility as a sort of economy of objects.) When the table is flipped up, players are locked in until the end of the game, suggesting a subtle kind of terror in forced leisure.
Also included and deserving of mention is San Antonio artist Nate Cassie’s video Day Job. Cassie documents the workday of four Texas artists, one at an airport, one at a bar, one working on a house and one packaging and transporting art. On the subject, Walworth writes: “What if we were all allowed time and absolute freedom to think for ourselves? What if our creativity were not dulled by [the] overtaxing demands of wage labor? We might imagine everything differently than how it is presented to us.”
Rarely disturbing the spare directness of Rodchenko’s design aesthetic, Culbert and Walworth have created a project rich connections to the social, the political and the art-historical past. Contextualized within Texas, the artists draw from the history of Communist communities established by German emigrants and exiles including Fredericksburg, Boerne and New Braunfels. Culbert and Walworth also wonder about—and suggest—what Communist theory can offer us in our own period of political disillusionment. Using low-tech materials and working collaboratively, the result of their effort does not address craft or visual pleasure, but rather, how perception is shaped and manipulated—how work, art and leisure intermingle; how free time, while a luxury, can also be productive and socially useful. They are idealists championing the potential of the everyday.