In 1961, the American artist Robert Morris created a box into which he inserted a recording of the sounds generated by its making. Presented with a soundtrack of its construction, the work Box with the Sound of Its Own Making reveals the production process directly through the produced object, thus challenging the separation that the capitalist system tends to maintain between individuals, their actions and the products of their labour.¹

In her book Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, the art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson contextualizes this work in relation to the exhibition Robert Morris: Recent Works that was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970.² For this exhibition, Morris created monumental installations with the help of a large team of workers, using chance and automated processes in order to put into perspective the traditional privilege granted to the skill and authority of the artist. While the assistants were setting up, the exhibition was open to the public, thus making the collaborative nature of the artistic work apparent. Echoing the era’s socio-political climate — characterised by frequent protests against the Vietnam war and many uprisings initiated by teacher, student and worker unions — Morris subsequently decided to strike against the art system and shut down the exhibition several weeks before its scheduled close.

According to Bryan-Wilson, Morris’s efforts to transpose industrial materials into art objects and to stage physical labour testify, in a contradictory way, to a nostalgia for a preindustrial era as well as to a loss of masculinity associated with tough manual work. The author also underlines ambiguities regarding the parallel made between the artist and the construction workers. For example, a series of photographs that document the installation process shows Morris both in the role of a worker, who operates a forklift or lifts a large wood beam, and in the role of a foreman proudly puffing on a cigar.

Taking the Box with the Sound of Its Own Making and Julia Bryan-Wilson’s critique as starting points, I explored what the relationship between worker and artist may involve today. Together with my father who is a carpenter-joiner, I staged a repetition of Morris’ work with the aim of producing a video of the construction of a box. In this case, the term “repetition” is used to mean both the reenactment of a work of art and, also the work of the rehearsal when performers fine tune their interpretation. Through this approach, I sought to reveal the staging and filming process inherent to artistic work.

Karine Savard is an artist who designs film posters (Incendies, La vie d’Adèle, C.R.A.Z.Y.). She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Études et pratiques des arts at Université du Québec à Montréal. Her research addresses the representations of labour and the collaborations between art and industry (À bientôt J’espère by Chris Marker, Labour in a Single Shot by Harun Farocki, Artist Placement Group). In her artistic practice, Karine Savard appropriates the presentation mechanisms of publicity in order to produce stealth interventions that integrate directly into the urban fabric. Recently, she explored a possible relationship between the skills and tools of a construction worker and the instruments used for the manipulation of images, in light of the transformation from an industrially-based economy to one that is information- and service-based economy. which is henceforth based on information and production of services. Karine Savard received a scholarship from the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture.

Acknowledgements: Katrie Chagnon, Hugues Duguas, Pierre Julien, Stéphane Lebigot, Pavel Pavlov, André Savard, Michèle Thériault, David Tomas, Adam Wanderer, Giulio Wehrli and PRIM.