Born Again Labor Museum (HM London)

The following presentation by Adam Turl was given, along with papers from artists Anupam Roy and David Mabb, on different strategies for salvaging the “utopian impulse” in contemporary art, at the Historical Materialism conference in London in November, 2019. The Born Again Labor Museum (BALM), a collaboration between Adam Turl and Tish Markley, is an evolving memorial/installation to current and past generations of working-class lives – oriented to a participatory working-class audience. This installation, which will eventually become a semi-permanent sited “museum,” will also serve as a space for community and cultural collaboration. In theology, apocatastasis refers to the reconstitution of the primordial; the salvation of past souls. Walter Benjamin transposed the concept to a cultural Marxist framework; arguing the messianic (revolutionary) generation enacted a materialist apocatastasis — the redemption of past generations of the exploited and oppressed. The working-title of this project, Born Again Labor Museum, inspired by Benjamin, mixes the classical Marxist schematic of living and dead labor (people and machines, etc.) with evangelical language. This project serves as an evolving memorial. In part, anthropomorphic art objects are based on creative or found texts about famous, unknown, historic, contemporary and fictional working-class subjects. These will conflate anachronistic populist and avant-garde gestures, borrowing tropes from folk/outsider art (paintings on tools, salvaged post-industrial materials), early zine/punk aesthetics, comics, Dada, surrealism, constructivism, arte povera, etc. The eventual “museum” – and earlier iterations of the project – will be open to community groups and used in collaboration with other artists. Exhibits would include interactive elements in which materials are distributed to visitors, and where visitors are invited to alter and produce art works. This will include irrealist “Bible-tract” like comics based on Marxist politics. A “museum website” is being created along with memes that mix the analog and digital. This will also include manifestations of the “digital” in analog space. For example, crafting three-dimensional “pixels” in conflict with art objects.