“Labour discipline”. Damaging the Image of a Corporation Rafał Jakubowicz’s work Labour Discipline (2002) is another relevant example of sousveillance. The artist filmed a young guard in charge of watching a well-marked factory area, while the sentinel was walking along a barbed wire fence. The fence is, of course, a symbolic barrier between the artist and the security guard, but also between two completely different worlds. The factory land itself is extremely well-marked by the surroundings – inducing the feeling that the people who work in the building live in a much better world, a place where ordinary people have no access. However, we are also under the impression that the employees live somehow in a prison. The work provides multiple and at the same time ambivalent references. This ambivalence comes primarily from the existence of two distinct worlds, separated by the fence in question - the viewer must therefore decide to what world he wants to belong to: the inside or the outside. The barbed wire fence represented in Jakubowicz’s work raises a series of reflections on power and control - in this case the power of a corporation, which on the one hand employs an impressive number of people, but on the other hand it takes advantage of them. The title chosen by the artist for his work is also significant: Labour Discipline emphasizes from the beginning the fact that the employees of the production units can be “disciplined” – an action they, of course, comply with in order to keep their jobs. The work refers in fact to a particular case, namely the Volkswagen factory in Poznan. The German title is particularly fit for this purpose, as it immanently leads to a historical connection with the German-Polish relations over time - relations that can be euphemistically described as “complicated.” . Towards the end of the film, the viewer can see a tower - reminding of the observation towers in the Nazi concentration camps. In other words, the corporations’ power is compared to the particular control mechanisms of the concentration camps. The artist’s point is so obvious, that Jakubowicz’s work has been censored by the Town Gallery Arsenal in Poznań. The Gallery’s administration, which is funded by the municipality, was afraid to exhibit Labour Discipline, given the considerable number of city residents who were on the payroll of the Volkswagen Group. The work was finally exhibited in the building of an anarchist group in Poznań. Labour Discipline highlights and decreases the corporations’ power - in a figurative sense, of course. Although they are especially concerned to have the best public image possible, which they feed through many promises, corporations are in fact only seeking for profits, at the price of their own employees’ exploitation. Watching the images featuring the guard and the factory’s observation tower, we come to see the dark side of the corporation world. “Weakening” the Religious Power BASIS Artist Mirosław Bałka watched the live broadcasts of the first public television channel in Poland during the visit of Pope Benedict XVI at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The artist filmed a TV screen on which were broadcasted live images, the starting point for the 2008 work, entitled Audi F144 HBE. The images firstly present a black car, watched by six to eight young guards wearing elegant dark suits and white shirts. The following slides show the car located just below the gate on which the famous slogan “Arbeit macht frei” is inscribed – therefore, there is no doubt about the setting. The mirror-like window reflecting exterior images block us from seeing who exactly is inside the car. We can only imagine that the person inside must be really important and influent. Its importance arises from the presence of the numerous bodyguards and the dark car, typical of nowadays high-ranked people. We are also shown that the mysterious traveler doesn’t leave the vehicle – becoming an all-seeing character, without being himself kept under observation. The viewers of Bałka’s work certainly know that the images render a German Pope’s visit in the former Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi extermination camp. The artist prefers to leave the situation unedited, confining to monitor the movement of a vehicle surrounded by tireless bodyguards running along. The artist manages, even without any spoken word, to permanently dismantle and diminish the very power basis of the Church, which was never strictly related to real empathic companionship – an aspect in direct contradiction with the central Catholic doctrine. Sousveillance as Subversive Panopticon The examples presented in the text are all taken from the Polish artistic life and they all resort to a subversive use of Michel Foucault’s Panopticon and also to the analysis of sousveillance. They all present various types of power from an unusual angle: in order to weaken and finally dismantle the very mechanisms of control, we have a bottom to top view. Since power will always be identified with the “top” perspective of the complex monitoring and surveillance phenomenon, “rearranging” the circumstances allows the dismantling and even the dissolution of authority and domination. Polish artists have explored and continue to explore the whole range of power forms - not only dedicated to the brutal communist state authority, but also to the power mechanisms of cultural, economic and even religious institutions. We want to emphasize that the works of most of the artists presented in this text are mainly based on visual language, not on verbal comments. The Polish artists’ works on the subject of sousveillance usually unravel themselves so explicitly, so that additional explanations are actually useless. Therefore, the various types of power and its mechanisms present in the art world are gradually defused like real bombs. Let’s hope art will be able to defuse these threats in the physical reality as well, outside the realm of arts.
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