This Ain’t China- a photonovel
Feb 6th, 2010 | By Chris | Category: Random Shanghai stuff...Eflux has published a new article by Monika Szewczyk on Allan Sekula’s work, ‘This Ain’t China.’
Monika Szewczyk considers the role of labor in art through Allan Sekula’s 1974 work This Ain’t China: A Photonovel, an exhibition of which she is curating at e-flux’s project space from February 20 to April 3. Documenting labor and social conditions at a fast food restaurant where the artist was once employed, the work’s forty-one photographs alternate between the mock-heroism of demanding worker’s rights in a typical American restaurant, the products of labor (pizza, hotdogs, burgers), and, as Szewczyk points out, the spectral presence of mass workers’ movements in Mao’s China and elsewhere at the time.
