Citations Ed. 8: Allan Sekula - Performance Under Working Conditions

In 2003, the Generali Foundation exhibited the first retrospective of the photographer Allan Sekula (b. 1951, d. 2013) in Austria. Performance Under Working Conditions, named after one of his early video works of the same title, juxtaposed his contemporary output with his early and mid-career works, including 1972’s site-based performance Meat Mass and 1988-95’s Fish Story. Born in Erie, PA and raised in San Pedro, CA, Sekula earned his MFA in Visual Arts at the University of California at San Diego, a then new institution whose legacy of experimental arts persists today. Studying with artists John Baldessari and David Antin, as well as the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, Sekula used photography as the venue to exhibit his performance, installation, and sculptural works. His graduate work set the foundation for lifelong practice as a multimedia artist, in the truest sense of the word.

1970’s Sculpture Commemorating the 102nd Anniversary of the University of California documents the erection of a sandbox in UCSD’s “free speech zone,” around which barbed wire wraps the central pit. Between the strands hangs a sign that reads, “Property of the Regents of the University of California. Permission to Enter or Pass Over Revocable at any Time.” Sekula removed the sign from a nearby post on campus, and the sandbox was built without permission of the school; Camp Pendleton is not far, and the campus was often visited by Vietnam War deserters. Naturally, the sculpture was quickly removed, and its only evidence of existence is the photograph, as well as accessory texts and ephemera—such as body bags stuffed with animal organs—that Sekula placed around it for as long as it stood. The piece critiqued not only the war, but also the university administration.

Sekula’s politics were not conventionally liberal, motivated by the counter-cultural movements of the late sixties and seventies. His socially committed art was concerned with the material conditions of society, where its production takes place in the contradictions between labor, the commodity, and the capitalist. Considered his magnum opus, Fish Story epitomizes Sekula’s research intensive, emotionally wrenching “critical realism.” Sekula spent seven years traveling on freight ships sailing from the world’s most active shipping ports, from South Korea to his hometown of San Pedro, as globalization took hold toward the end of the twentieth century. Deploying a deceptively straightforward documentary style, Fish Story narrates the then impending ecological disaster and social recession that neoliberal consumption promised to wreak on the world.

The images in Fish Story veer from austere to abstract, sympathetic to restrained. Such affects point not to a stylish detachment, but rather a critical self-reflection about photography itself. The project was exhibited at both sea ports as well as fine art galleries; the text was introduced by a political scientist, and not a credentialed art critic. Such choices align with Sekula’s persistent engagement with the contradictions of art-making under neoliberal capital, and index his commitment to the real toll at the heart of every one of his visual and textual critiques and investigations: The individual disconnected and prevented from imagining and building solidarity.