Installation view of Andi Crist "Office Hours" at Tiger Strikes Astroid. Photo courtesy of Tom Van Eynde.

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay there’s the rub: it is to dream of labor that we can begin to enter something of Andi Crist’s irony laden, yet sincere, exploration of the workspace through the shadows and facsimiles she crafts. Walking in it, sparse in its presentation, it felt as if a stage set. We see many varied objects scattered along the wall, surrounded by debris, worn down, in front of one large wall drawing taking up its length, odd and abstract. Everything feels hidden just behind a veneer, performing for us in their inertness, and yet it is like having walked into a theatre just in time to see the play’s aftermath. Opposite this massive wall we have a kind of backstage: another small wall drawing of an approximately life-size chair, and tools built specifically to make that main drawing. But here’s the rub, transmuted now into our contemporary use of the word, no longer an obstacle as Shakespeare would have it, but a literal action taken by the artist, that performance which bridges objects and image, the working-space and the thinking-space that is Crist’s focus within this show. These objects, made of chalk and covered in a sandpaper-esque coating are both things made useless in the failure for them to perform their original (humanistic) purpose, as well as tools made useful in their new role as drawing implements. Contained amongst these objects we begin to see what they were and are, the act of casting objects making them image-objects. As indicated in the collective title of these objects, the scattering consists of: “tape measure, mop, coffee cup, stapler, two clocks, roll of tape, hammer, cornice, two calculators, horse leg, two desk phones, clamp parts, magazine file, three keyboards, two computer mouses, saw blade, two power strips, partial mop head, torpedo level and a conference speakerphone.” Reminiscent of Laurie Parson’s object collections of the late 80s/early 90s, the objects both refute cohesion and begin to build their own unique tableau simultaneously. Like Parsons, Crist understands the social function of objects, and especially things, as they are not symbols—at least not here—but are what guide and dictate what we do in our work. The feedback loop between people and things, changing each actant in the equation through relation. 

I asked a sculptor friend about her opinion of my writing in this review. She pointed out, as was my concern, that perhaps my language did not align with where it was the work wanted to live (my own paraphrase). I’ve gone back and forth in language, and I still arrive at what I believe to be something near the precise conundrum that Crist is providing us with in my own syntactical struggle. How to reconcile thought and action? Will there always be a loss between the labors we perform, and our ability to articulate it through language? I began with that oxymoron dreaming of labor, because at the heart of our relationship to our labors is an idea of the “dream job” and if we choose to subscribe to its possibility or not. I’m of the belief, as I believe Crist’s work plays out for us, that labor as in what we do in our job, is not the issue, but rather what labor we value, and how we are valued through it. To dream of labor free of exploitation. As it pertains to art, value is more and more a question of the financial speculation of labor, and the assumed outcomes that value can be said to be mathematically mapped onto, that creates any semblance of financial value. This becomes the only value worth anything to those who have the power of value determination, finance as abstraction. Crist’s work then becomes a way to think against that. Instead of creating value now in anticipation of a possible future labor, she reminds us of labor’s fleeting corporeality. After all, in the use of her objects as drawing utensils they wear away and explicitly lose value, as the works are sold for $50 a pound. Labor’s constant fight against entropy and devaluation: the floors will always need to be mopped again.

Installation view of Andi Crist, Office Hours at Tiger Strikes Astroid. Photo courtesy of Tom Van Eynde.

Crist’s investment in this question of labor as having passed, as always eroding, comes deeply embedded in the material explorations of her work. Both in the drawing itself, a sort of performance that can only come beforehand, as well as the cast objects strewn about. The objects come straight out of her studio, things occupying it. Ones which you’d expect such as a hammer, a roll of tape, a saw blade, a torpedo level, clamp parts, etc. are these things we see as part and parcel of a sculptor’s studio. And yet, these are not the end. That is, they are not enough to outline for us the labor of the studio. We also have two clocks, two computer mouses, calculators, a conference speakerphone, three keyboards, two power strips, etc. that outline for us the administrative labor side of a studio practice; it’s not about simply making the things. There is also the maintenance-labor given to us by the mophead, and the collection-labor in the cornice and the horse leg. Even these categories I place them within create divisions which are against Cross’s vision of labor. We can think again of Parsons’ installations, in which the objects refuted any perfect rhyme or reason, and instead it was in the act of bringing them together under a singular rubric that let us think differently about them. For Crist’s work, it is not simply that these objects represent the studio labor, but rather that they are there in the studio labor, they participate, they are necessities and compatriots. Something like the comradely objects idea of the early Soviet Union, or as Alexander Rodchenko writes here in a letter from Paris, 

The light is from the East… not only the liberation of the working class. The light is from the East – in a new relation to man, to woman, and to objects. Objects in our hands should also be equal, also be comrades, and not black, gloomy slaves like they have here.

The art of the East should be nationalized and rationed out. Objects will be understood, will become people’s friends and comrades, and people will begin to know how to laugh and enjoy and converse with things…

Crist’s objects then in becoming things through the failure and frustration of their original use, now are raised to the level of collaborator once more in the drawing performance. When you encounter these things in the installation, not a single one is untouched in the process of drawing. All are partial, worn down, parts of their bodies turned to dust and debris on the floor. But they also bite back in their way, the sandpaper-esque coating on them taking some of the wall with them as they draw so the parts of their bodies now eroded to dust intermingle with the dust of the space. Rather than see this as something to be swept away, Crist has kept it, and it illustrates in a material way that labor that exists between the artist, the object, and the space quite directly. Add in the tools designed for the specific purpose of the creation of the large wall drawing and we start to arrive at an ecology of labor within the space of the gallery. We could say then that this is a performative material ecology that Crist creates for us in the simplicity of her choices. Or perhaps not simplicity, but a shift in use, art labor as a foil, or a mirror, of labor as it exists more generally. 

Let’s come at it another way, through what is for me the oddest object in her list of cast objects: the horse leg. It does something odd in its placement amongst keyboards and clocks and phones and mop heads. The labor Crist has performed for us is present only in its evidence, the chalk debris, the drawing, the worn down objects. To say it again, drawing’s evidential labor becomes that “ironic” metaphor for the labor of the everyday. On the one hand we have drawing’s labor which appears to us as having its end goal in the thing produced. On the other, we have various labors accounted for within the studio: the individualized and secluded labor of the office cubicle, the janitor after everyone has gone home, the art handler whose job is to make their labor invisible to support the work, all of those labors which become reiterative—the paperwork must get done again, the floors mopped again, the show deinstalled to make way for another, a fight against entropy just as entropy provides the impetus for the labor. And yet, the slow wearing down of these objects of labor in the drawing activity point us towards the eventual end point of the labor. The ills of labor allowed and performed ad infinitum to avoid thinking of what comes in the wake of the labor. Or as I believe Crist begins to let us see, what happens when the labor we do becomes that joyous occasion, detached from the value we create for others, and instead invest in it the value it provides for we the laborers. We must imagine Sisyphus happy; or rather we must imagine he finds in his own ways things which make his labor iterative, not simply reiterative. 

Ok, but what about the horse leg? Its small and out of proportion so we can see it comes from some kind of small reproduction of a horse. It’s a playful object both now in its recreation and in its original form. It becomes a kind of bridge object between the original functionality and its new function. Horse leg becomes a thing which points us out into the wide world of labor’s multifunction. While it may be hard to find the joyous occasion in something like a keyboard, or the clock that can’t keep time, or the ornamental moulding, or the power strips, it becomes easy to see what Horse can point us toward. The beast of burden and the leisurely ride with the horse, companionship and racing (gambling), a free and wild animal and humanity’s coterminous history with it. Embodied perhaps most potently in the (often disparaging) label of the horsegirl, they are someone whose relationship to horses at its best is a labor of love, a love of labor. To ride a horse is work, its effort, one must build a relationship with them in order for the trust necessary for them to do the work for you, its a back and forth. I think of Viggo Mortensen’s relationship to the horses he worked with on Lord of the Rings that turned into decades long companionship. 

What this brings us back to then is something at the core of Crist’s vision of labor, and what perhaps could be said to be her major critique of it—even as she does clearly love it as evidenced in the piece Jigs (victory templates) which were created for the express purpose to be tools to draw the wall mural—isolated and alienated labor is not the labor she or we can dream of. If we turn to Hamlet’s “To be or not to be…” soliloquy—which the first line of this review riffed on—as pertaining in some way to labor, it is that he speaks it to himself as a monologue that is the problem he encounters, not the existential weight (as if his contemporary time’s own Sisyphus) he places upon his own ills. His is a paranoia and anxiety of the laborious nature of life itself extended onto death that is self-cycling and self-reinforcing. He speaks with no one, he has isolated so as to have no one (think of his characterization in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead). We have in the figure of the horse a necessarily companion based labor—and an importantly nonhuman one at that, thinking again of this work’s thingly potential—and following this we can bring in Crist’s perspective as art handler laborer.

Installation view of Andi Crist “Office Hours” at Tiger Strikes Astroid. Photo courtesy of Tom Van Eynde.

 Art handlers have an interesting perspective on galleries due to their participation in the maintenance and installation of exhibitions and their quick turnovers. Gallery walls are made up of years of buildup of paint, spackle, pesky wall anchors, etc. that become a kind of condensed art-geologic time. Crist’s objects then do something particular with this history, as we look at the material condensation of her labors for in their initial scrape against the wall with their sandpaper coating, they mark wall with chalk and have their debris fall to the ground, the debris of the wall mixes with it, but this debris is also evidence of other’s labor, archaeologically speaking. However small in relation to actual geologic time, its own history gathers and intermixes with the objects that give through their diminishment, their value decreasing as they perform their duty. But it is this recognition of the gallery space as a collective gathering of many over the years that helps mark this labor ironically as both one performed individually—that specter of the tortured individual artist looming always in the solo exhibition—but also as one performed within the collective, always built in relation to what came before and what will come after, to think the artistic labor, this action, as being in relation, not linearly, but through “Repetition, refinement, amplification, loading, overloading, rebuttal, overturning, destruction, denial, invisible use” can take “a linear (vulgar) idea of ‘influence’” and turn it into an “open field of possibility,” as Edward Said elucidates for us following Paul Valéry’s thoughts on influence in his essay “Notes on Mallarmé.” Where have we arrived then? I characterized earlier this notion that we could think Crist’s Office Hours as a kind of stage set, and then went on to try and think through what it is about labor that she’s presenting to us. But it’s right there in that original characterization, the notion of play/Play. I never quite got at the wall drawing itself and what it depicts. Titled Victory the wall drawing is a large scale abstraction of the win screen one would see after winning desktop solitaire. The cards bouncing around, presenting the player with a pleasant celebration of their own singular accomplishment. It is a game which can be played easily enough in a secluded environment, such as an office cubicle, without creating a clear scene of shirking one’s responsibility. But play does not free us from our labor, anymore than labor negates the possibility of play. Perhaps it is easy to say this in the context of artistic production as we as artists should be so lucky to do what we do, but as the variation in objects demonstrates to us, the labor of the artist’s studio is not relegated to fun and games exclusively. The maintenance work, the administrative work, the work which sustains the studio, continues on. Here the irony of this space, that thing which amuses us comes front and center. The artist having vacated their space of “activation” and labor—literally producing the work partially in the gallery, turning it into its own production space—leaves us simply with the remnants, for us to imagine the labor, the feel of the objects, what it is that occurred, how it happened, was it tiring, etc. etc. etc. Like waiting for the curtains to open, or perhaps rather close, on this, our victory screen, solitaire all done, now back to work.