Constructing Counter-Imaginaries
THE FOLLOWING was recorded on January 16, 2022 and transcribed for Imago in September 2022. Anupam Roy is an artist, propagandist, a member of the Locust Arts and Letters Collective (LALC) and member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation who lives in Kolkata and Delhi, India. Adam Turl is an artist and writer with the Born Again Labor Museum (BALM) and LALC, and a member of the Southern Illinois Democratic Socialists of America (SIDSA) who lives in Carbondale, Illinois. Tish Turl is an artist and writer with BALM and LALC who lives in Carbondale, Illinois.Anupam: Salute, comrades. For a while I’ve been wanting to talk to you both about the Born Again Labor Museum (BALM) because I know you’ve been working on this project for some time, working step by step on painting, objects, and photographic work. So let me know what is backstage of the works that build into the Born Again Labor Museum overall.
Adam: The name, Born Again Labor Museum, comes from an intentional conflation of evangelical Christian language, “born again,” with the Marxist concepts of dead and living labor. Living labor being working-class persons in the here and now, and dead labor being capital, the accumulated wealth created by previous generations of workers and exploited people. Part of the impetus for the project is a sense that too much critical or left-wing art avoids existential questions — a sense of pathos, history, mythology, primacy — and therefore cedes ground to esoteric philosophies that we have seen become reactionary with the rebirth of far-right and fascist populism in the United States. The acronym for BALM is also meant to convey a sense of healing, a connection to the shamanistic origins of art.
Part of what we wanted was to get at a particular kind of working-class history — not labor history in the sense that here’s a tractor or just a photograph of a strike, although those things are important. But a sense that individual working-class, exploited and oppressed persons have had a dream life and a “universe” that they created around themselves. Our idea is to try to represent — and this is impossible of course — what we’ve called the gravedigger’s multiverse. Of course, Marx famously called the working-class the gravediggers of capitalism. So we’re saying each gravedigger creates their own universe — that socialist culture is altogether a gravedigger’s multiverse.
This is kind of a political sublime because it isn’t really representable. To represent that differentiated totality, you would need the voices of the entirety of the working-class. In BALM, Tish and I try to represent that impossibility visually, narratively, and conceptually. This is related to the Stink Ape Resurrection Primer writing project that Tish started. But this is why we are also connected to Locust Review, where we can — with the rest of the collective — reach out to other artist-comrades, to try to advance, together, a little bit more of that political sublime.
Tish: I would elaborate that Adam and I come at it from very similar points with slightly different emphases. I tend to think of it as creating fanfiction for and about the working-class. We talk about representation and one of the things I get frustrated with sometimes is that there is no actual representation of us (the working-class). So if we try to create it, at least it exists. I’ve always tried to create stories and celebrations for and about us.
Anupam: You mean the working-class.
Tish: Yes, real people.
Wendy’s Parking Lot’s Wife, Burger King Parking Lot’s Wife, and Hardee’s Parking Lot’s Wife, Tish Turl and Adam Turl, salt packets, glue, salvaged pedestals (2021-2022).
Anupam: Tish, can you elaborate on the process of representation. As you both say, the representational impossibility is there. But still you produce. So how does that production come? In BALM there is an excess of materials, books, objects, and medium — there is video, audio, painting, there are lots of things happening. Where do these objects come from? What is the relevance of these objects? There are a lot of Wounded Tools for instance. There are a lot of photographs taken from different places. Why do you use cotton to disturb the image?
Tish: The Wounded Tools come from us thinking about things that used to be integral to daily life and then suddenly for some reason weren’t – an incredibly familiar thing for the working-class. Especially during the pandemic, you were a hero integral to health care or essential workers were told, “we couldn’t move on without you” and the minute capital became more important than coronavirus, it was: why won’t you go back to work for subpar wages and die? Why can’t you just accept your part in this? A lot of what we do with the Wounded Tools is to imagine that once these things have been discarded and forgotten, they take on some sort of supernatural-revenge aspect.
Adam: Overall, BALM is trying to evoke a limitless expanse of never-complete endlessness; something I think that you [Anupam] talk about as excess (borrowing from Georges Bataille) in your work. Each individual object, image, or gesture is a kind of poetic vignette or a passage, at the intersection of an automatic process and a more didactic Marxism. So the Wounded Tool Library — to build on what Tish was saying — flows from Marx talking about how the worker becomes an appendage of the machine. Those machines, like the workers, eventually become, as capital develops, anachronistic. Redundant. You get laid off. The tools are recycled. In the history of the US, unions are built which allows workers to climb out of poverty (partly) and then over thirty or forty years the unions are systematically dismantled and workers are thrown onto the trash heap. So, what if those tools have these magical narratives associated with them that show that the dead labor was once living labor, the actual living breathing human aspect to those tools brought back to life in an irreal way. What if what is thrown on the trash heap becomes object-revenge?
We augment the historic photographs with cotton and ash. Cotton was of course extremely important in the formation of global capitalism and British and US capitalism. And of course completely tied to slavery. Combining it with ash is a reference to the revolutionary process it took to abolish slavery — as incomplete as it was due to Reconstruction being stopped too early in the US. But specifically, this is a reference to General Sherman’s March to the Sea, the systematic burning down of industrial plantations as slaves emancipated themelves and joined the fight against the confederacy.
We want a record of the real in the work — as in the cotton and ash — as well as reclamations of our history and imaginaries constructed against the limits of working-class imaginations by capitalist realism. So the individual pieces are sort of vignettes of class pathos and poetry, often in an irreal idiom, and all together representing, as much as we can, the limitless expansive nature of these stories in aggregate.
For example, Burger King Parking Lot’s Wife started out as an automatic exercise. We didn’t know what it meant when we made it. It is a pillar of salt packets that you get at a fast food restaurant. It’s title references the Biblical story of Lot’s wife who turns around and looks at the destruction of Sodom and Gamorrah and turns into a pillar of salt. It was only after we made it — and it became clear that millions of people were walking away from the lowest paid jobs in the US, and some were starting to organize — that its meaning became clear to us. There was no reason for some folks to work ten hours a day for poverty wages, get sick with COVID-19 and go hungry. You could do all that without going to work. So it came to represent this moment where people are walking away from the most terrible jobs — or starting to organize them. Looking at the trauma could paralyze you — as with Lot’s wife — or radicalice you, turning you to salt in the sense of labor organizing.
Next to Burger King Parking Lot’s Wife is an assemblage titled, Bigfoot Resurrects the Screens, in which a mass produced bigfoot statue is surrounded by broken digital screens, anarchistic objects from the past born of the constant innovation of capitalism, which isn’t so much about innovation but profit and is incredibly destructive to the environment. So what if the screens are like people. What if they could be brought back? What if the discarded are redeemed?
Anupam: In a painting you may have a central figure, combined with a great deal of text, and multiple other figueres. What are their relationships? And how are you going about choosing various mediums? I am very conscious of how and why I use particular mediums. This seems to have a character of mobility. It has a mobile character. There are also a lot of smaller images repeated in your paintings or collages as well. How do the smaller images and text connect to the larger or more major images? It is a kind of tension. After you make one painting, what inspires or forces you to make another? Because there is already a multiplicity within the individual painting.
Broken Cogs in the Machine, Anupam Roy’s exhibition at the Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi, India (2022)
Adam: The reason why there are multiple images in one painting or collage is the same reason that there are multiple images and objects in relationship to each other throughout BALM. Within the collage/painting there are multiple images to reassert a differentiated totality; that nothing is singular or just unto itself. One of the problems I’ve had with the white cube gallery space is that it decontextualizes everything from the ensemble of social relations. So putting the different images and objects together — both in the canvas and in the art space — is partly about communicating how everything is socially connected. It’s all about our relationships with each other, our relationships with production.In terms of the materials. There’s a leveling aspect. I love the photographs of your [Anupam] work at the protest that you shared recently. Our painting/collages are usually on canvas tarps or wood, and sometimes stretched canvas. But they are usually on tarps because they have this carnivalesque, portable, quality. The individual images are often inspired by the working-class itself, by other artists, from writers at Locust Review, from Tish’s work in the Stink Ape Resurrection Primer.
Take our painting/collage, Snek Rallies the Oil Snakes, while Aelita Beheads Elon Musk, and Possums Sings Against the Rain. Snek is from a vignette that Tish wrote about these “snake people” rallying against fascists. The image is a snake head mixed with a photograph of the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. Aelita was an early Soviet science fiction film. Here she beheads the tech billionaire Elon Musk. And the possum who sings against the rain is based on Aimé Césaire, the AfroSurrealist, who wrote a poem about why the working-class and oppressed in his home country hadn’t risen up against colonialism even though they had the power to do so. He likened it to a woman who could bring forth rain with just the cadence of her voice but refused to sing. I put these together – which was partly automatic and intuitive — along with other drawings and prints by Tish and myself and digital collage elements and found material, fragments of text from the production of Locust Review. Again, all as a wedge of imagination against the limits of capitalist realism.
The painting/collage, Cat without a Grin, is about the left and the working-class and disaster capitalism, collaged with several different elements made over a period of time. There is a famous film about the French May of 1968, Chris Marker’s Cat Without a Grin. The movie is, in one sense, a lament by revolutionaries about the working-class failure to make a revolution after 1968. So we flipped that. It was not so much the class that failed the revolutionaries but the revolutionaries that failed the class. So instead of Grin Without a Cat, it’s a Cat Without a Grin. There are bombs falling around the grotesque cat we constructed. Next to that is an image made in response to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular Jase Short’s essay, “Under and Alien Sky.” And some paintings based on Robert Longo’s Men in the City drawings (of middle-class professionals in the 1980s). But now they are on fire — a reference to global warming — along with dozens of other images based on things comrades have said, automatic drawings, stickers. A lot of the stickers refer to my growing up around working-class punk houses. And this is on a canvas tarp. It is a weatherproofed outdoor canvas tarp meant for construction. Not meant to be used for painting in any way.
The painting/collage, The Space Comrades Aren’t Coming So Warm Yourself By the Riot Fire, is an irrealist exposition of the fact that no one is coming to save us from above, but there is warmth and solidarity in that fact.
Anupam: When I was in Switzerland, I saw a lot of punk images and posters. Many places did not allow political posters. So on the walls, or even the toilets in the bar, they used a kind of punk culture or imagery toward political ends. Can you talk about that historically? And how does this help when you are making a collage/painting?
Adam: There’s a leveling aspect to it. If you go into a punk house historically here in Carbondale (Illinois), there are posters from a thousand things on the walls. Nothing is really more important than anything else. It is a chaotic jumble in a carnivalesque way (in the sense of Mikhail Bakhtin discussing Francois Rabelais). There’s something really beautiful in this crowd of images that reminds me of a crowd of people rioting or rebelling or striking or fighting back. It’s not just one thing, it’s a million things. And each individual thing takes on additional meaning in relation to the larger thing.
There was a similar aesthetic during the Vietnam War when socialists, communists, and revolutionaries set up coffee houses near military bases to provide a place where soldiers could come and talk about the war and anti-imperialist politics. So there would be hundreds of rank and file antiwar GI newsletters on the wall. They had leaflets printed in Vietnamese that antiwar soldiers could give to soldiers in the National Liberation Front to show their opposition to the war. They would say things like, I am against the war. I am avoiding combat. I support the right of Vietnam to self-determination. So soldiers could take that leaflet with them to Vietnam. When antiwar soldiers were sent on search and destroy or “sweep and clear” missions they would engage in what they called “avoidance” instead. That came from these coffee houses, and that jumble of stuff to help people figure out how to navigate the world.
I think there is a beautiful aesthetic to it. It’s not one thing. It’s a thousand things. But it’s not just anything — the way the Internet is. There’s a curation of radical politics. It is an insurgent imagery.
As a kid I remember going to the more or less left-wing religious building in town — the Interfaith Center — and it was something similar. There were posters everywhere. There was a faux Gone with the Wind movie poster of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher kissing with a nuclear explosion behind them. And next to that poster a flier for a meeting of a campus Buddhist group. And next to that a poster calling on folks to stop the clear cutting in the Shawnee National Forest. And then some Young Socialist meeting or whatever. It was in this atrium. And in the center of the atrium was a rubber tree surrounded by these posters. It was like a left-wing tree of life.
Snek Rallies the Oil Snakes, while Aelita Beheads Elon Musk, and Possum Sings Against the Rain, Tish Turl and Adam Turl, mixed media collage, prints, paintings, and drawings, with coffee, cotton and ash on canvas tarp, based in part on Tish Turl’s Stink Ape Resurrection Primer, Alexi Tolstoy’s novel Aelita and the film adaptation, and Aimé Césaire's Journal of a Homecoming (2021).
It is the idea that individual expression is not unimportant, but it’s the individual expression of billions of people that matters in the end. I can only hint at that differentiated totality, being one person and being limited by my own knowledge and experience and identity. Together Tish and I can hit more of those notes. With the comrades at Locust some more of the notes. But I want to try to represent that if I can in some way. Or approximate. Or intimate. Or begin to describe. Knowing that can only be fully articulated if I combine with more and more artists, more and more working-class people, and ultimately can only really be articulated as this society is destroyed and replaced by something different.
Anupam: Tish, can you talk about the images you’ve made?
Tish: I haven’t done a lot of larger images. I make a lot of smaller drawings and doodles — often when I am writing and processing and thinking and coming up with ideas for the Stink Ape Resurrection Primer. And then Adam will get a big pile of these drawings that are the byproduct of processing what I am about to write and fold into Stink Ape or another writing project.
Anupam: And the puppets you’ve made?
Tish: Basically, I’ve made characters from things I’ve written.
Anupam: What mediums have you used?
Tish: Foam core, lots and lots of felt, wood, metal, wire, hot glue.
Adam: The puppets activate the artworks that surround them. They also have a leveling aspect because they’re not considered “serious” art.
Tish: No, they’re not. When I first started to put them together I was going to watch these Jim Henson quality videos, and really prepare myself to make them. And then I was like, No, I’m not! I’m going to figure out how to make these things myself. Because that’s the way I was taught to build things anyway but also, because I really liked the aesthetic of it looking like I was learning how to make them as I was making them. It looks more alien that way. And the first two I made are aliens.
Adam: Tish makes a lot of really great “doodles” that are related to the really rich imagery in their writing. And those written images inspire a lot of the visual art work I do as well being incorporated in the collages as doodles. Tish came up with something in the Stink Ape Resurrection Primer where there are these alien fascist vines called bourgifashea. The vines are at war with networks of communist fungus. This was part of what let me to make the collage/painting Don’t Turtle During Hyphal Fusion. Fungi tend to reproduce asexually — as I understasnd it, I am not a scientist at all — except some of their fibers reproduce sexually in a process called hyphal fusion. It made me think about this giant organism that is seemingly — and in some ways is — hundreds of different organisms, mushrooms, but is part of a mycelial network under the earth. So for me, hyphal fusion became a kind of process of class consciousness. And I turned an image of famous Bernini sculpture, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa into two mushrooms “getting it on.”
So Tish’s work is filled with these beautiful images coming from what they call “working-class fan fiction” — a democratic fiction about “reality,” not about a television show. Almost all the colorful doodles are from Tish. I tend to think in a very particular way about color — limiting color, or making color flat or pulsed in a particular way, subtle shifts from warm to cool — and Tish’s drawings interrupt that pattern to make it a rhythm.
Tish: I should have been more specific and said I am not the one who lays the paint on the canvas.
Anupam: Painting is usually understood as a sort of singular invention, event, or intent. So what is disturbing or intervening in your image, Adam, how does this interruption of that singularity enhance or change the making?
Adam: I think about what the Moscow conceptualist Ilya Kabakov said. Kabakov now collaborates with his wife Emilia Kabakov. But before that, he had been part of the underground Moscow conceptual art scene along with about a hundred other people in the end days of Stalinism. In 1989 he left Russia and came to the west. And he talked about how he had not realized how profoundly lonely art was in western Europe and the United States. Completely individualized. You brand yourself. This individualized sense that this is mine and mine alone is both profoundly lonely and not particularly helpful in terms of actually making work. My marks and my ideas are on every piece. But I want Tish’s gestures and ideas and marks there too.
It’s similar to writing. Writing is this solitary thing. But I am always sharing with Tish the work I am making. Tish is always sharing their writing with me. We comment on each other’s work. We help each other. I give Tish ideas. Tish gives me ideas. We edit each other. And there’s no reason for it to not be that way. It cuts against a lot of sexist shit as well as capitalist shit. After we had been together a while I realized we should share credit on more things because Tish helped me figure out what I was doing so much of the time. It’s not like we are going to have a big fight about how a painting is going to turn out, or a short story, or a poem. We discuss ideas and because it is never ending, because nothing is ever really finished, we don’t have a big investment in some notion that it must be this way or that way. It is about staying true to our own understanding of being in the world and our politics and principles.
Tish: I think you’re right that it’s really solitary. As a writer I have to go off and put the thing together. But at the end of the day I am putting something together that is also the product of conversations I’ve had with Adam, or with you, Anupam. It would be shit if you didn’t have the external stimulation that you’re using to make your work.
Adam: I remember when the fascist shit was percolating again and the lizard people myth came out (again) on the fringes of the far-right —the racist idea that some people had been breeding with lizards to make lizard people. I asked Tish to make a bunch of drawings of white blonde people getting fucked by lizards.
Tish: And I was so into that. I was like, let me make all of your lizard people porn! I am here for that.
Adam: And that became marginalia in a painting of cryptids — about monsters living in the “old insane asylum” near here. It wasn’t actually an abandoned insane asylum. People called it that but it had really been a poor house. If you didn’t have any money, you could go to the poor house and poor farm. You could work for a place to stay and some food. But in the public imagination, years after the poor house was closed, the locals started telling folks it was an abandoned insane asylum. So Tish and I imagined these monsters that lived in the abandoned asylum getting attacked by the town. We imagined the monstrousness of being labeled poor alongside the particular American myths of cryptids, cryptic animals. We put the anti-fascist pornographic drawings Tish made throughout this larger painting/collage of these monsters. And then each monster had a story written on this really cheap unstretched canvas we painted this on. I’ll be surprised if that painting lives as long as I do.
Cat Without a Grin (after Chris Marker, Jase Short, and Robert Longo), Tish Turl and Adam Turl, painting, collage, prints, mixed-media, coffee, glitter, wig-hair, cotton and ash on canvas tarp (2021).
Anupam: Adding to this, why do the paintings tend to have this muted or limited color, often black and white — often painterly — as well as a printmaking agit-prop kind of aspect? I already asked after the material, the medium — canvas, painted cloth, paper, etc. I came from a very painterly approach and moved toward more drawings. Around 2015, 2016 I was doing mostly painting — aside from drawings I made for the movement and so on. But then I sort of confronted the painting tradition that surrounds expressionist painting. You violently use your canvas, your brush. It can be a very violent act. Writers have talked about expressionist painting as expressing a very masculine approach to art, painting as penetration. But when you change the medium as I did after 2016, when I approach paper, or a small canvas with no tooth, that surface can’t hold that violence. You need a different kind of care when painting or drawing. If you put a lot of pressure onto your paper it will tear. You can have similar effects but you have to approach it more carefully. It requires more love toward your surface. I can see there are the bold paintings, but you are also drawing, and pasting things. There is a certain kind of care. The images are coming, the text is coming, the symbols are coming. Why this choice of medium, form, expressionist approach, which is multi-layered but also expressing some sense of violence.
Adam: I’ve always loved the expressionist idea that your hand and brain are connected to make some mark that expresses something unique about your relationship to the universe. At the same time, I like going back and forth between painting and drawing, also collage and digital work, to hit different notes of being. I am aware about how aggressive expressive marks tend to be gendered— although there have been great women expressionist artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner. I was working on a series a few years ago that I wanted to not be read as particularly masculine. I started adding glitter and fluorescent wig hair to the paintings. And I started to color several paintings. I would do the grisaille image and colorize it almost like a comic book or a cheap color print from the pre-digital era. I did this with water colors and sealed it in with medium or transparent gesso.
But it is also about how I am feeling when I am working. Do I feel like making some prints or drawings —something didactic albeit irrealist —like Daumier or Goya? Or do I want to more aggressively express myself? And then I always end up combining both. We recently started a series of paintings that are digital collages, printed out and attached to canvas, with painting and more collage on top of them — to try to hit these different notes (of being, of gendered being, and so on). I think that abstract expressionism has a particular meaning in the United States as it was the first major art movement to really matter here, and it was a protest at one level against a mass commodified culture. So those marks are meant to harken back to a particular rebellion; a rebellion that was reified very quickly and turned into office decor in the 1960s and 1970s.
The use of ash and other materials in patinas is related both to history and to the aesthetic sense of deindustrialization. There is an abstract rot that surrounds a lot of working-class communities near where I grew up and where Tish grew up. Most of the working-class midwest and northeast is full of abandoned factories, warehouses, trains, trainyards, places that are toxic that could be cleaned up but aren’t. If you just live nearby you will get cancer.
It is about those different notes — having a push and pull. You can zoom into the drawing, or the digitally created image which is crisp and clean or a passage of paint that is not crisp and clean. Then there is material that has a poetic meaning as a material in a duchampian way. Like our use of cotton and ash. Or the push and pull in the difference between how Tish draws something and how I draw something.
In terms of aggressive violence, it’s like that piece you made (Anupam) — the “I am Not Non Violent” zine we put in Locust Review #2. I am not non-violent. I don’t like violence. But to finally stop the horrible things that are happening it will require violence. The people who benefit from racism, exploitation, sexism, imperialism, they aren’t going to give that up. If there is an expression of anger or violence the truth is that I am angry. I’ve been angry for decades.
Anupam: In your visual work, in Tish’s writing. And in my work too, there is this kind of approach to how we understand animility. Animals, human figures mixing together making some sort of hybrid. In America, or in India in a different context, how do you view animals? Or, the animalistic body? Or the horrible demonic figures which are, in India, against the lower caste, against Black people, Dalit people, working people, against indigenous people. For example, Adam, you talked about my drawings at that public protest event. That was an event organized by student organizations in solidarity with an Adivasi professor, Papiya Mandi, who was discriminated against. Colleagues made remarks comparing Adivasi people to monkeys in their classrooms. When she complained and protested the university administration took no real action. You see a similar animalistic association in the US with various groups, with Adivasi people in India, with indigenous people. So creating this image of the human-animal binary or chimera is a well thought propagation of oppression. When you create this kind of image, what is your take, your translation of this kind of figure?
Tish: Obviously opposing the outright racism of animalizing certain persons is important in and of itself. Additionally, for me, I’ve always been attracted to the animal, alien, or the monster. Because if I am already considered a monster, fine. I am used to being othered. I recently had to immerse myself in some HG Wells. A lot of what he did reinvigorated this whole thing for me. In War of the Worlds specifically HG Wells was telling his fellow Englishmen, you’re terrified of de-evolving because of your fucked up and racist ideas that you have about the people you are colonizing. But you are no better. You are no more ordered. You are no more civilized. You are no less likely to violence. In fact, you are more violent. There is no separation. We are all animals. There is something liberating about embracing it. You want to call me an animal. I will be one. I will use my animal tendencies with the other animals to fuck you up.
Adam: This is one of the reasons we use possums in our work. There’s a culture of associating possums with the poor working-class, especially the poor white working-class. They are celebrated by some folks because other — wealthier — people consider them to be a “white trash” animal. So embracing that animal turns a small part of the dominant narrative upside down. The possum is actually really cool. It gets rid of parasites. It hunts ticks. It is super useful and if you get over your bullshit, a beautiful animal.
At the core of it is what Tish said. You’re going to call us monsters. We’ll embrace the monstrousness. One of the first pieces we did for the BALM project was a drawing and then a painting of a penis wearing overalls that had penises jutting off all over it. This was a reference to the mythology that the middle- and upper-class had about poor people — Black and white — up until the 1970s that poor workers tended to be queer and sexually indiscrimite. That shifted in the 1970s and the idea became that workers were promiscuous but also bigots. Basically as part of the upper- and middle-class became slightly less homophobic they projected their previous homophobia onto poor people. Of course there are poor people who are homophobic. But I made this painting of a penis in overalls reflecting this middle-class idea of poor people. The sentiment being that we were queer until we were bigots. But at both moments oversexxed and reduced to our biological impulses.
Solidarity with the monstrous, as China Miéville puts it, is very important. I know it is important in your work Anupam where you flip the meaning of signs in pursuit of solidarity. Of course this is tricky because I can speak authoritatively on things the ruling-class has projected on the entire working-class, or on those parts of the class that I have direct experience with. But there is also that impossibility of representation. I can’t speak in the same way about things I haven’t experienced or understood in a more direct manner. I can’t turn certain images of racism into object- revenge in the same way a Black artist could. And that is again why we need more and more artists working on these questions coming from lots of different working-class and subaltern experiences and vantage points.
Anupam: When I was in England I met a lot of Indian people who came from the upper caste — even thinking of themselves as white — but realized in England they have come from a colonized country, that they are looked on by the whites the way they might have looked on lower caste persons. They may talk about making solidarity with colonized people but look down on people with darker skin. But they (the upper caste) were the colonizers even before England came to India. It is a question of how they represent. There are a lot of movies and artworks that present the upper caste as more human. There is not an easy way to just supplement the visual. They show us as monsters and themselves as more human. In India we have draconian law. What does this mean? It is a community name in India. Or someone has used a mythological character mixing a buffalo and a demon. In that way when we use the image of this militant black and white identity it is not easy to say, there is a good, there is a bad. It does not work in this binary.
Broken Cogs in the Machine, Anupam Roy’s exhibition at the Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi, India (2022)
When we make an image and display something, it looks like a mind map, what is happening in your mind. When it comes into display, the singular work all becomes referrents. It becomes a zoomed out image. It’s become a background or backdrop. The works in the white cube become a kind of confrontation, confronting you, standing for something important, a particular thing. What is the relationship of the particular image to this total, this excess. Are you really standing for anything? Your singular image is actually a plurality, a multiple image.
Adam: The push-pull is really important. There is a chaotic excess, or discordant will as Richard Hamilton puts it, or a differentiated totality, but also each individual thing is also unto itself in that it has its own story, qualities, and importance. Just like the class itself. It’s not simple because we know the working-class is divided and that each oppressed group is also divided by class, or the class in India is divided by caste. We are trying to begin to get at that. And, of course, the work can’t do that. The only thing that can solve these problems is the movement itself through organizing, protest, struggle, strikes, and revolutions. But in the artwork that push-pull can begin to start to get at that dynamic. It is a Romantic sublime gesture in that we are attempting to capture a beautiful terror that cannot be copied.
You can make a piece that is critical of capitalism and then hang it on a white wall in a bourgeois art gallery. In ten years it may cease to have that anti-capitalist meaning. It ceases to have that meaning because it becomes a rarefied fetish. But if it is in relation to a dozen other iterations of working-class expression, being, and protest, it resists reification and abstraction. Perhaps one of the images in the collage will — in a hauntological way – resist that reification.
Push-pull is important in the work Tish and I make but also but also in the relationship of the work we make to your (Anupam’s) work, to Adam Ray Adkins’ work, to Ajith Nedumangad’s work, to Omnia Sol’s work, Laura Fair-Schulz’s work and to every comrade that contributes to Locust Review or that we work with. The meaning of the work only comes alive in relation to other works, just like our personalities as individual human beings can’t be fully realized unless we are combined with our working-class siblings. I can’t be a complete human being until everyone in the class is a complete human being. Let’s say a billion dollars drops on me and I become rich, I still don’t become a complete human being — because consciousness is determined by being. I’ll just become a rich asshole. There is no way to become a truly free and whole person until the capitalist system is gone, and we can only get rid of it by combining.
So the push-pull of the artwork, the importance of an individual piece in a collective, is a telegraphing of a utopian impulse born of class and the struggle against capitalism. But you are also right that the work is a kind of background. The Born Again Labor Museum is a staging area that we want other comrades and other artists to use. That’s why we are going to share artwork that is not by us. We are going to reach out to comrades and people who might want to use the space for organizing, when it is safe to do so (if the pandemic ever stops killing folks) {Since this discussion BALM was opened to the public.]. Obviously capitalism won’t allow the pandemic to end, but when it is somewhat safer. People who are organizing around housing, solidarity, community building, left-organizing.
Anupam: It seems related to the idea of decentralizing the idea of the artist, of the individual artist. This is going to be my last question, I think. For me it is a bit challenging. You talk about Omnia and other artists and how we’ve connected. Very early in India, in 40 to 60s there was a poet called Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (13 November 1917 – 11 September 1964). He wrote poetry and a lot of short stories. There is a book called One Writer’s Diary [Ek Sahityik Ki Diary]. We had started a collective discussion on his works. He analyzed his own process of writing, of giving forms to one’s idea. Sometimes we think the object that we make, the poem that we make, when we bring it to market becomes a commodity, a fetishization. But he argues the process can itself a part of the commodification. It starts off as a commodified object. How do you think this commodification and fetishization is at work in your practice?
Adam: I disagree with Adorno about a great deal, but he was right about one thing in particular. That the art object is a contradictory object. It has two different fetish aspects. There is the artistic fetish aspect that predates capitalism by thousands of years — and predates class society by thousands of years. We don’t fully understand that aspect of the fetish but it is related to the recording of human performance, whether it’s in the caves at Chauvet or Sun rock art in South Africa, or cave paintings in Argentina. Clearly human beings have placed a value on these recorded human performances of different kinds. So that fetish exists at the same time as the commodity fetish in the Marxist sense.
Of course those two kinds of meanings get overlapped and interwoven and confused in capitalist ideology but one of the strategies that we’ve had — and I think I see it in other comrades’ work — is to try to use the artistic fetish against the commodity fetish. When you put an art object in a museum, for example, it takes on this auric value, just because it’s in this institutional setting. Although, I don’t know about you, but the more time goes on, the more I hate everything I see when I go to art museums — with important exceptions. The Saint Louis Museum of Art is still a cathedral to me although I feel like I want to overturn the tables like Jesus in the temple. But you can use that auric meaning — and this is something Kabakov talks about in their installation work — against itself. For him it is against all authority because of having lived in a Stalinist society. For me it’s about underlining the value of working-class performance and lives as I see it.
For a few years I was selling a lot of work. I wasn’t making a lot of money but I was selling work. Enough that I could keep making more work. Most of the people who bought my work were other working-class people. But selling work became less important to me because when you are making stuff to sell it changes how you make the work. But if you make work to relate to other work and use the artistic fetish to underline the value of working-class lives, performances and subaltern struggles, that makes you more conscious of how you are approaching that contradictory fetish quality of the art object.
There is a danger, and I know Tish has talked about this, and Anupam has talked about it, and Brecht talked about it, of using the suffering of the class primarily as a vehicle for commodification. As raw material for more capitalist crap. Tish put it this way: having your trauma sold back to you. Of course I don’t want to do that. And that’s one of the reasons I’m an irrealist. I want to talk about the “real world,” but in a way that offers critical distance, Brechtian distance. If you are throwing up a gritty depiction of “reality” and the horror of everyday life that every working-class person is already familiar with, you aren’t really providing criticality but, intentionally or unintentionally, creating an apologetics for the world as it is. If I put up a picture of a police murder — and nothing else — I’ve just reminded people of every day terror. But if I imagine an irrealist fight against police murder…
At the beginning of the pandemic I imagined a war between two cemeteries in Chicago. A fight between the ghosts of the working-class cemetery of Waldheim (where the Haymarket martyrs are buried) and the bourgeois ghosts of Graceland Cemetery. As a way to think through the thousands of new daily working-class deaths that the pandemic brought. As Tish knows, when we got to ten thousand dead in New York City (early in the pandemic) I burst into tears. I couldn’t make a work about that. But I could make a painting/collage about our dead fighting their dead.
Anupam: I think that’s right. Muktibodh pointed out that he can’t stop a piece of his writing because of its complexities and layers and that’s why his writing are very large. The poem I am talking about is thirty-six pages long. He is saying I can’t stop. When I stops I start on another imagination. Because that imagination is pushing out limits. I have a duty to push our limits of imagination. Because of that complexity. Also as he articulated his works as each poem is an extension of his next poem…each one is an extension of the last one…
Carbondale Starbucks workers holding a union organizing meeting at the Born Again Labor Museum (BALM) in 2022.
Most of our images might be smaller. But in terms of how it is presented. BALM is located in a working-class area. You might make a proposal for an exhibition to some gallery, some museum, but with BALM you didn’t apply or anything, you just did it yourself in your own way. Because the gallery problem is that much of the time what is presented in the gallery has its politics that lie elsewhere. Folks think politics is always outside the gallery space. But it is in the gallery as well. If you talk about the gallery problem itself they [the gallery] will not allow you. How much you cross the logic of capital is related to how much capital judges you. If you cross that limit they are very protective.
Because of the working-class and the subject you are working with, it is not an outside subject, you are coming from the same kind of working-class subject. It is from one part of the class, it can’t represent the whole working class but part of it. When we display our work, workers know their everyday situation. It is not our duty to always remember that for them: this is your reality, etc.
I remember when the pandemic started and we were talking about how big the class is, how it actually works. There is a division of labor and there is a division of laborers. There are different kinds of jobs. There is the organized and the unorganized sector. There are a lot of people who we don’t know how they survive. What are the things they do? And the way they negate the “real,” they way they refuse to be a part of things, they are negotiating their own way, their own dreams, or their own aesthetic pleasure.
Adam: Some comrades don’t trust that working-class people understand their own lives. I’m not saying that working-class people automatically have good politics or know what the struggle should do, but they understand how they move through the world, their daily lives, their experience, and don’t need me to tell them what it is as a Marxist let alone as an artist. I can contribute something else. That imagined thing. Does it have to be this way? How does what we are experiencing now echo the past? I was reading about the mass death of the industrial working-class during the industrial revolution in the United States to try to make sense of the mass death now. How did people like us deal with that then? That’s something I can contribute. But to walk up to someone working at the fishing lure factory or making hamburgers or picking fruit in the orchards and start telling them what their daily life is like is absurd. They know! I don’t understand some of my comrades. They say, we think the working-class can run the world but then they talk down to workers. It’s bizarre. I think your social class should run the world but clearly you don’t know a fucking thing.
Anupam: [tongue-in-cheek] The working-class will make the revolution, but we’ll teach the working-class their role in all this???
A lot of people have the ability now to document their own lives. A lot of artists and propagandists document a lot of movements throughout history. But now people themselves can do this. People fighting for their land, at their jobs, can document themselves.
Adam: To be honest, the left has too many people documenting too much and not enough people actually organizing anything. You show up at a protest and there are thirty dudes with camcorders “recording for the movement.”
Anupam Roy is a visual artist and Assistant Professor at the Department of Art, Media and Performance, Shiv Nadar University, SNIOE. Anupam has a master’s in visual arts from Ambedkar University Delhi (2016). A recipient of the Charles Wallace long-term scholarship (2019-2020), Anupam completed a second master’s degree at the De Montfort University Leicester, UK (2020). Anupam’s artistic practice emerges from long-term engagement with the Indian hinterland, and dissent against dominating dystopian regimes. His work has featured in the 2018 New Museum Triennial: Songs for Sabotage, New York, as well as at group shows and fairs including the Frieze Art Fair, London; Indian Art Fair, Delhi. In 2019, Anupam has his first solo show at Project 88 Mumbai. In December 2022, the Vadehra Art Gallery, Delhi, hosted his second solo exhibition. Anupam is a recipient of the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art Emerging Artists Award (2018). Tish Turl writes revenge fanfiction for and about the working class. They are a member of LALC, a co-host on the podcast Locust Radio, and a co-editor for the (almost) quarterly Locust Review magazine. They and their partner, Adam Turl, are also working on the evolving art space Born Again Labor Museum where they live in Southern Illinois. Their published work includes the serialized novella Sound, the short stories, “Space Goths,” “Memez,” and “Sewerbot,” the serialized poems of the “Toilet Key Anthology” and, with Adam Turl, the Stink Ape Resurrection Primer.Adam Turl is a member of LALC and co-organizer of the Born Again Labor Museum with Tish Turl. Turl has exhibited their work at the Brett Wesley Gallery and Cube Gallery (Las Vegas), Gallery 210 (St. Louis), Project 1612 (Peoria, Illinois), and Artspace 304 (Carbondale, Illinois). They earned their BFA from Southern Illinois University (SIU) and their MFA from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2016 Turl received a residency and fellowship at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. They were, from 2017 to 2020, an adjunct instructor at the University of Nevada. They are currently working on a doctorate in media studies at SIU; which they wrongly believed was a good way to have health insurance during the collapse of civilization. They are a co-host of Locust Radio. They were recently denied a $25,000 grant to help create an irrealist mutual aid project in southern Illinois.