ARLES.- The thematic exhibition …et labora starts from an exploration of the collection of Ruth and Peter Herzog, which comprises more than 600,000 photographs – some anonymous, others by renowned practitioners. The one hundred or so images presented here are a mixture of pioneer photographs from the nineteenth century and those dating from the first half of the twentieth century onwards, and interrogate work in its representation and daily execution. This selection is brought together with Provençal ex-voto paintings and the works of contemporary artists, capturing or sublimating the different realities of places of work. Their mutual encounter offers multiple points of entry into the theme of work.

Taking up the famous phrase Ora et labora (“Pray and work”), associated with the way of life followed by monks in the Benedictine Order, the exhibition evokes, in a roundabout way, the withdrawal of God’s hand and of spiritual work in favour of the invisible market forces that have continuously reshaped our lives since the first industrial revolution.

The assembled images orchestrate a panorama of the technological developments of the century that saw the advent of photography: on the one hand, they bear witness to factories and major construction projects – metros, tunnels and railway networks – linked, among other things, to the rapid growth of the metropolises, and on the other document the mechanisation of agricultural labour. They also capture the fragile presence of the individual in these changing or closed environments.

In their large-scale photographs, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth conduct their own investigation into the mechanisms of today’s work. Represented with a surprising distance, the workplaces of a globalised and high-tech world are here brought into contemporary art. The emergence of the human cyborg, the exploitation of working-class minorities and the presence of street vendors are all subjects addressed by the contemporary artists presented at the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh Arles.

Another specific look at human activities is found in Provençal ex-votos of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – votive paintings born of a simple and direct act of faith and depicting work-related accidents. Able to illustrate scenes that the photography of the era could not yet capture candidly on film, these objects of folk art also reflect the secularisation of attitudes, discernible through the evolution of their iconography.

The development of industrial society was accompanied not only by the emergence of new activities, but also by the profound transformation of socio-cultural categories.
The beginning of the twentieth century thus saw the unionisation of the new proletarian class. The demands made by the workers would enable subsequent generations to benefit from unprecedented social rights, allowing them to go on vacation, enjoy entertainment and recreation, and travel around more easily. These moments of leisure would be continually documented thanks to the new medium of photography, which had become more democratic.

The dynamism experienced by Europe at this time went hand in hand with a striking evolution in living environments. As a consequence of the rural exodus, cities abounded in small trades and businesses, of which various representations have come down to us. It was also the era of the rise of the tertiary sector: the professions of catering, services and communication flourished and, in the eyes of the young people of this first half of the twentieth century, were seen as the jobs of the future.
Industrial development did not exclude the world of agriculture, however. On the contrary, it led to farming’s intensive modernisation and restructuring.

If the machine, ever more present, seems to be the powerful symbol of this evolution, the human being, an essential cog in production in pre- and post-industrial times, remains at the heart of the implementation of these changes. Our body is our first tool, as attested not only by Incremental Self Transparent Bodies (2017), Emmanuelle Lainé’s film about the interdependence of humans and their mechanical prostheses, but also by all the anonymous photographs immortalising manual workers posing in their workplace.

Today, the economic and technological materiality of late capitalism is gradually giving way to a dematerialised and deterritorialised economy, the most accomplished form of which could be cryptocurrency. With his work The Ideal (2015), Yuri Pattison nevertheless reveals to us the rudimentary and eminently political aspect behind the development of the most famous of these digital assets, bitcoin.