WORKS
table
PRESS
- KLUB WRKR in Conversation
- lumpen radio interview: RAISIN
- Sixty Inches from Center: Review of RAISIN at 6018North
- WBEZ Chicago: ‘Raisin’ Exhibit Brings Seminal Chicago Play To Live
- e-flux Education: Portable Gray issue 6: Another Idea Exhibition Catalog
- Humanity in Action: Landecker Fellow Asha Iman Veal Announces Participating Artists for Upcoming ‘Raisin’ Exhibition
- In Practice: UChicago Arts Blog: Whoa de Whoa: The Gray Center’s “Another Idea” Comes To A Close
- In Practice: UChicago Arts Blog: Lunar Snails and Galactic Cocktails: Throwing a House Party on the Moon
- Mousse Magazine: “Another Idea: an actual conceptual art exhibition” at Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry
- Newcity Art: One Recommendation: July 2020
- Art Monthly, No. 434, March 2020: Letter from Chicago: Sweet Water by Agnieszka Gratza
- Sixty Inches From Center: New Political Imaginaries at the table: Interview with Kyle Bellucci Johanson
- Bad at Sports, Episode 671: table projects with Gregory Bae and Kyle Bellucci Johanson
- Art Institute Chicago: Perspectives: Tagging Along with a TEAM of Kids
- Imaginaries of the Future Symposium at CSUN and the MAIN Museum
- e-flux Education: Quantum Unlearning
- Hyperallergic: Inventive Responses to Labor and Immigration Issues at Human Resources
- Temporary Art Review: Making Plans at Human Resources
- Minneapolis Star Tribune: Bits and pieces of the zeitgeist in a new SooVAC show
- Minneaplis Public Radio News: Art Hounds: David Rathman, Steffani Jemison, and a glimpse into a schizophrenic mind
PUBLICATIONS
- No Necessary Correspondence exhibition catalog
- Portable Gray, Vol 4, No. 1, Spring 2021: Another Idea exhibition catalog
- Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft: Juniorprofessur und dann noch Habilitation: sinnvoll oder absurd?
- Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft: Formatwechsel. Zur Methodendebatte
- Writing for Sweaty Scales by Liang Luscombe
- Making Plans exhibition catalog essay
Installation views at council_st
Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles, California
KLUB WRKR
2024KLUB WRKR is a roaving, itinerant exhibition composed of interactive media and custom-made furniture inspired by Alexander Rodchenko’s Workers’ Club. The space for self-education and leisure of the soviet proletariat has been reimagined as a nomadic performance-architecture raising questions about identity, emancipation, and labor today. KLUB WRKR points to the oppositional forces of struggle and exploitation that form subjectivity, and centers the politics and economy of friendship as a method for revolutionary action.
The project’s components included a dialectical karaoke machine, a 24-hour comrade hotline, a 2-channel 2-player video game and arcade apparatus titled ‘lupa rossi,’ a suite of plans for utilitarian sculptures, and a neon sign of the project’s namesake hung in a salvaged crate frame.
and Axle Contemporary, Santa Fe.
KLUB WRKR exhibition text
by Annika Haas
Welcome to KLUB WRKR. KLUB WRKR is a show by Kyle Bellucci Johanson, a Chicago born artist who lives in New York. KLUB WRKR is not just an exhibition. It is also an invitation to gather and convene around questions of workers and to explore the relation of labour and how much it shapes our lives and identities in the US today.
Everything you see here is designed to fold up and fit in the back of a gig-worker’s vehicle. Kyle rented a Chrysler minivan to drive from New York across the US. Starting on Labour Day, May 1st 2024, he stopped in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Santa Fe before arriving in Los Angeles. One of the first things you might notice in the gallery space is the self-built furniture. You are free to use it, to rest, have conversations, fun, or have a snack. To add, there will be meals organized throughout the course of the show. Bringing together new and old friends around food connects to previous projects of Kyle’s for whom “[t]he only worthwhile reason to make art, or to do anything for that matter, is to make friends.”
For his KLUB WRKR show, Kyle took inspiration from workers’ clubs in early 20thcentury Europe. These clubs were set up by communist trade unions and parties and were especially popular in the Soviet Union. Artists like Elena Semenova or Alexander Rodchenko engaged with the idea by designing furniture and interior architecture for those clubs. Rodchenko imagined a workers’ club as a functional space to gather, host events, read magazines and books, and share news. Kyle adapts some of these ideas with the pieces you find and can use in the show. KLUB WRKR is a space. It contains furniture as well as a video game, a karaoke machine, a comrade hotline, and a video installation showing the cross-country drive to L.A. KLUB WRKR is pop-up space to gather all kinds of workers in the 21st century.
You think you are not a worker? Chris Smalls, founder and president of the Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island says, “… at the end of the day, we’re all a part of the working class, no matter what movement … And if you’re in the labor movement, everybody here is a worker, no matter what job you work for or what industry you work for, you’re a worker … This is a class struggle. It’s 99.9% of us versus the one percent class, the billionaires.” Whether you share this view or not. It is a fact that spaces for workers to gather, share information, relax or educate themselves, have become rare.
Where do workers in the post-industrial US come together? If companies provide them at all, breakrooms sometimes do not contain much more than some flimsy tables and a coffee vending machine. Workers spending time together is not a priority for employers, and perhaps is considered a threat with regards to unionizing. A good worker is an isolated worker bringing their mere labour to their desk at home, the warehouse, the production plant, or the courier fleet. Their story, their joy, or their everyday sorrows and needs are only of interest if they contribute to the companies’ goals. This disconnection from human needs and brutal pragmatism also shows in another observation by union leader Smalls, criticising that Amazon overlooks and forgets about “the little things … How do people get to work? How do they eat lunch every day?”
This show is not going to solve the existential problems that are put on workers’ backs by exploitative companies’ day by day. Instead, it is a reminder that work is not just about labour, but also about sharing much of our lifetime with others, and that it can be also a place of friendship and community. This is not as easy as it sounds when employers limit or even try to suppress any kind of substantial communication among co-workers. KLUB WRKR is an invitation to take a moment to explore ways that could expand the space for gathering, sharing and friendship at your workplace.
Lupa Rossi, 2024.
An opera performed by two players through a split-screen local setup in which one player assumes the role of a human opera singer, and the other, a dog. Oppositional forces of struggle and exploitation which form subjectivity are interrogated through the game itself as well as the arcade apparatus which seats two players across and beside one another.
a dialectical karaoke object, broadcasting musical compositions for duet and two-channel video. This platform for cultural reproduction and critique invites participants to perform political economies of friendship as theorized by other cultural workers. Set against popular music, their words offer multiple strategies for comrades who are antagonizing against hegemony.
Re-wired soviet telephone, folding lounge chair and side table, and contracted labor with Real Friends LLC, Tim Tsang’s friend-for-hire service, providing nurturing friendships through sincere human presence.
Acknowledgement
I am profoundly grateful for the support I received while making KLUB WRKR. Chloe Munkenbeck, thank you for being my partner and for many conversations throughout the development of this project, as well as lending your software superpowers. Charles Gaines and Roxana Landaverde, you are life-changing people. Thank you for believing in my work and for your extraordinary generosity and hospitality sponsoring the project. Kent Young of council_st I am inspired by your project and your life. It was a real gift to become friends through this project and to be so well cared for.
Thanks to the friends new and old we met along the way: Paolo, Tenley and Heather at LIKELIKE, Dan at monk parakeet, Jacob and the whole crew at inga books, Jerry, Nina and Matthew at Axle Contemporary.
Sara Pereira da Silva and Big Dance Theater, thank you for providing so many materials to make with, and for lending your performance talents to the project. Annika Haas your thoughtful and insightful words, collaboration and friendship spanning years and an Atlantic Ocean are deeply cherished. Andre Keichian I can’t imagine life without you. Thank you for checking-in, coaxing your star of a dog, and your unyielding thoughtfulness. Tim Tsang my comrade. Thank you for being a real friend in every sense. I miss you and I’m so happy your conversations and keys could travel with us across the country. Jen Vanselow thank you for giving voice to lupa rossi, it is exquisite. Rudy Schultz it sounds incredible. Finally, Will Lee, thank you for taking this wager and for being a brilliant friend, collaborator, and traveling companion. I’m so grateful for the chance to do this trip together and the game is far beyond what I thought possible.
KLUB WRKR was made possible with the generous support of an Emergency Grant from the Foundation for Conemporary Art.