It was the quiet corner of the most goth art gallery ever, Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art, MONA. Trying to avoid another trip through the noisy tunnel, I’d sought refuge in a room dominated by an artwork where wind-powered cogs forced a rollerball pen to draw on a piece of paper. Were the pen capable of consciousness it would surely know where this inexorable effort led, for its work cast a shadow on hundreds (I’m guessing) of broken, worn out pens whose mass grave gave the contraption its macabre resonance. We are all, perhaps, worked to death.
Image: video of artwork described. I did not download the MONA app before I was underground and couldn’t easily access information, but a description of this wind-powered artwork is here.
Overwork was a theme of the many conversations I had with the gynaecological oncologists who very generously invited me to speak and participate in their conference on Hobart, Tasmania. I joined them on an excursion to MONA, which is a brilliant, but also pretty creepy, gallery curated in generally very low lighting in tunnels underground. General themes of sex, poo, death, shock, pollution and play seems like it was the brainchild of a 19 year old goth circa 1994, though it is nevertheless a brilliant combination of ‘old and new art’ – and economically, it is to Hobart what the iPod was to Apple when it was released in 2001.
Image: Wall of vulvas, picture by me artist Jamie McCartney, Read about it in Overland here (also, subscribe to Overland, FABULOUS magazine)
Having given a paper describing Virtue Capitalists, doctors spoke to me about their A-type ambitions, about the delight with which they entangle their identities with their profession and the passion with which they seek both prevention and cure for cancers, like the successes of efforts to tackle prostate cancer, the global death rate of the profoundly preventable cervical cancer and sneaky, deadly ovarian cancer. [Perhaps you would like to support the Ovarian Cancer Foundation, which has a horrifying 49% five year survival rate]. Surgeons all, many were conscious of the ways their work was controlled by a managerial class who most frequently got in the way of this effort, or insisted that they use equipment that was less effective for patients and in some cases made for larger masculine hands, causing in one woman’s case, constant hand pain.
But it was overwork that most people discussed. Often enough, we shared work-ethic addictions, but in other cases excessive work was caused by the expectations of senior, male surgeons who had once been pressured to work relentlessly themselves and were supported by wives who did everything else. One woman told me that her male partner took this role, too. Others said that it was a matter of the sheer impossibility of imagining a hospital run another way. Cogs turn a piece of wire bent in a way that makes for work that looks like variation, but allows for almost no selfhood beyond the work, encouraging you to submit to a relentless career that pushes you until you die.
At the Hobart Penitentiary, MONA’s gothic tone made more sense to me, resonating as it does with Tasmania’s convict heritage. Seriously impressive integration of material heritage with digitised archival records of 75,000 humans whose lives were reduced to the category of ‘convict’. Those records were taken from these humans in a process that was often in itself humiliating, I learned. Height, eye colour, occupation, place of origin, often combined with an assessment of their looks, the straightness of their noses, pockmarks on their skin, took the characteristics that made the refuse of Britain’s industrial revolution and turned them into the metrics that now form the historical record.
Image: Democrat Apple tree, on the Apple Isle. Picture by me.
With Penny Russell and her husband James, who happened to be in Hobart at the same time, I was privileged to be given a tour by Hamish Maxwell Stewart. We started in a darkened old courtroom with the extraordinary interactive display that actively rehumanises those who passed through the penitentiary. An AI integrates information about each individual with images of their hometown, items associated with their occupation and perhaps their crime, and information about what happened to them - did they serve out their sentence, or die before they could? Did they become a famous artist, political agitator, or marry and have children, later?
The darkness continued through corridors and cells, including the horrifying isolation cells in a way that reminded me of MONA’s gothic tone.
I couldn’t help reflecting on the convict heritage that I’d seen in Sydney as a kid, and since. At Old Sydney Town, for example, redcoated actors playing British soldiers turned the horrors of convict living into family fun, telling circa 12 year old Hannah in one memorable moment, to ‘get in the gutter where you belong’. We’d eat our lunch watching a re-enactment of a flogging, actors hamming up the vaudeville in ways that helped to ‘other’ the past and turn the horrifying experience of convict life into a palatable heritage.
While the Hobart Penitentiary actively sought to minimise the voyeuristic possibilities attached to the convict gothic, it nevertheless allowed one to feel its horror. The hard, heavy work in leg irons that literally built Tasmania. The lashes that reduced skin to bloody pulp, punishment for misdemeanours intended to motivate good, hard work. In display cases, this past carceral system is connected to the present one, showing modern handcuffs alongside old leg irons, for example.
Metrics turned people’s selfhood into convict records, overseers punished, in dehumanising ways, a failure to increase their productivity in the building of Tasmania’s infrastructure, sometimes working people to death, while the state’s judicial system enforced these workers’ behaviour with violence.
When we go to work in the present the horror is less obvious, now, but the logics have hardly changed. Metrics turn our selfhood into managerial KPIs, failures to increase workplace productivity enable those we hope to please to refer to that selfhood as rubbish. Stupid metrics stymie careers and livelihoods, sometimes working people to death. And while the system’s violence is mainly spiritual for professionals, it is more material for the humans most exploited, the ones also known to be ‘essential’ and therefore on the front line of the Covid pandemic, but rarely rewarded with decent pay or conditions. The same people also bear the brunt of the techniques designed to ‘reduce inflation’ as if those levers are magic, not violence.
And for those for whom ongoing colonialism measures and then discards, all in the service of veiling their unceded, inalienable sovereignty, the violence persists. Today, there have been 562 Australian First Nations deaths in custody since the Royal Commission, and thirteen already this year. It is the 13th of March.
F*cking Capitalism.
Image: on the ferry to MONA. Picture by me.
Home now, I am sitting in the outdoor kitchen while a cool breeze reminds me that, 30+ degrees C days notwithstanding, winter is coming. Tomato relish bubbles on the outdoor stove, representing just two of the five kilos my beloved picked while I was away. Relish and sauce making will be constant companions until late April, when the imminent frost will force us to take out the last still-green tomatoes. We make a wondrous green tomato relish, but my pride and joy is green tomato sauce spiced with jalapenos, amazing on chicken burgers (we won’t eat Tilly…though she is still naughty).
Histories of Capitalism - how is it changing Australian history?
On 3 April, Sophie Loy Wilson and I will speak at the State Library of New South Wales about Histories of Capitalism - lots has happened since we gave a paper in 2015.
With a thousand thanks to Mike Beggs (Sydney political economy) for chairing the session and Jesse Adams Stein (UTS) for organising the History Now! seminar and the State Library of NSW for hosting - and for being just always fabulous.
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