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Furlan, Tomaž

Work in so-called ‘post-Fordist’ societies is usually conceived both as time-flexible and skill-flexible, if not an idiosyncratic mix of entertainment, team-based self-organization and ‘creative’ lifestyles. Were we to believe the rhetoric of the new workplace, the early mass concentration of workers inside the noise and danger of the industrial factory is on its way to being replaced by wired networks of independent remote workers, who create and exchange with their colleagues in a dynamic, self-made social interface. Deliberately mimicking contemporary social and productive routines with sculpture devices whose functioning and aesthetics hark back to makeshift industrial hardware, Tomaž Furlan’s Wear series pokes fun at the assumption that exhausting, repetitive and alienating labour is a thing of the past. His ‘machines’ – which fall somewhere between fitness machines, makeshift tools and torture devices – are tailored to satirize the dry and dumbfounding routines of the white collar worker from dawn to sunset, in a hilarious rendition of the contemporary disciplines of the body. The deadpan videos that accompany them recall late-night TV infomercials, pretending to demonstrate the qualities of Furlan’s products. “Lavorare stanca” (work’s tiring), wrote the poet Cesare Pavese. Furlan evokes the critiques of industrialism’s techniques of bodily domination immortalized in the work of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, in (to quote the artist) an “attempt to struggle banality with stupidity.” CM