Fiona Marron
As Topic and Tool
With an underlying interest in economics, Marron’s current video work relates to several interconnected social systems. She explores curiosities of behavioural traits through engagement with various sites within this context.
Marron was selected by the Joinery as part of their recent graduate programme 2010 for a solo exhibition. For her show last March titled As Topic and Tool, she used the mining industry as model to pursue her interest in the relationships between labour, knowledge and value. Many of her video installations to date have explored various aspects of trade within the economy. Marron’s new body of work shifts into a new direction to investigate such themes at a more primary level.
Fiona Marron: Production still, 2009, image courtesy the artist.
The multi-channel video installation All Surface Expectations Disappear with Depth, documents the activity within the realms of production at the present-day site of an Irish mine. The metaphor of the mine itself has long been a reference point for the championing of labour. Using a section of text by American sociologist Alvin Ward Gouldner, the video unfolds as more than simply a study of a labour environment, and much more about the relationships between the people embedded in these spheres. The sociological text in question is extracted from a field report by Gouldner, based on his first hand observations of an American Gypsum plant in the early 1950s. Entitled Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy: A case study of modern factory administration, this text explores a wider sociological subject than its title suggests.
“There are, of course, many standpoints in terms of which the raw data of factory life can be ordered and made meaningful; a theory of bureaucracy is only one of them.” (A.W. Gouldner 1954) [1]
It is in this light too, that Marron’s work takes up its endeavour. In this case, the geographical division of labour operations – in addition to segregation according to skill specificity- serves to substantiate a trend evident in Gouldner’s time (also implied in some of his later works) [2] and ever pertinent today. In the scope of the much discussed Knowledge Economy and the current epoch where we are seeing a re-evaluation of labour, it is now more than ever, important to attain an understanding of the factuality underlying these terms and how they are bound up within the context of the times. The role subjectivity plays in these valuations is also of consideration.
The combined physicality of the sculptural installation Many Benevolent Schemes, and the functional capacity of the materials utilised within the exhibition as a whole, serve as subtle reminders of the fundamental purpose of labour itself, the welfare of one’s own.
The Joinery, 25 – 30 March, 2010.
[1] Alvin W.Gouldner, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy: A case study of modern factory administration, The Free Press, USA, 1954.
[2] Alvin W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, Seabury Press, USA, 1979.
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There was truth in what they said (2009)
Stills and video excerpt from Marron’s 2009 graduate show at the Dublin Institute of Technology.
