The standardized, mechanized, and annotated body. Fragmentation as cultural technique in recent video works by Kajsa Dahlberg, Kalle Brolin, and Hanni Kamaly

Abstract

For several decades now, audio-visual artworks have routinely been described as “research” or “research based”. However, the relationship between image, research and theory is often unclear, particularly when the artwork in question is produced outside formal academic frameworks like practice-based PhD or MFA programs. This essay asks how we can understand and interpret artworks that use materials and methods that approximate those used by academic researchers but do so through audio-visual means. Four artworks are discussed: Kajsa Dahlberg’s Reach, Grasp, Move, Position, Apply Force (2015); Kalle Brolin’s I am Scania (2016) and I am the Sun (2018); and Hanni Kamaly’s HeadHandEye (2017/2018). All four highlight how image practices establish, reinforce, and subvert specific attitudes, ideas, and practices relating to work or the human body. The author’s key argument is that the selected artworks can be understood as examples of the media-theoretical method of analysis known as cultural techniques. Cultural techniques have been defined within media theory as the chains of operations that link humans, things, and media. The scholar who uses this perspective searches for the rules, procedures, and documented practices that preceded and directed the development and formats of specific media technologies. This essay proposes that the four selected artworks show how fragmentation operates as cultural technique in different contexts. Fragmentation is shown to be at work beneath efficiency studies of industrial workers in the early twentieth century and the early twenty-first (Dahlberg); in the relationship between the sugar industry and coal mines in the south of Sweden in the early twentieth century (Brolin); and in the de-subjectification practices among colonial rulers in the nineteenth century (Kamaly).

Keywords

• Cultural techniques
• bodily technique
• art as research
• Gilbreth
• visual culture