Portrait of a Textile Worker

May 18, 2007 1:00 AM

Terese Agnew's Portrait of a Textile Worker.
posted by serazin (13 comments total)

And a close up of a few of the labels that make up the quilt.
posted by serazin at 1:00 AM on May 18, 2007

These links are great. So often when people post links to artists, I come away underwhelmed. Agnew's work and Agnew's positions on her work are thoughtful and important. Thank you for posting these.
posted by beelzbubba at 4:31 AM on May 18, 2007

I find the URL kind of interesting.
posted by tommasz at 4:40 AM on May 18, 2007

Interesting. I don't know about the positions, though. Is the picture a metaphor? If so I don't quite follow it. International brands make up our picture of Indian workers?

It does also seem a bit of a flaw, if she's trying to 'reconnect consumers to the people that make our clothes' that she doesn't actually know who the woman portrayed is. If Agnew is making money out of this work, it might seem just another example of ruthless Westerners colonising and exploiting everything, even other people's perceived grievances.

Did the woman freely agree to be photographed? Did she know what would be done with the picture? Did she get any kind of fee?

What if they find this woman and instead of being pathetically grateful for the gesture, she says she's going to sue? What if she says:

Take your patronising quilt and stuff it up your pretentious, profiteering white arse. You know what? My son's an IT graduate. In twenty years he'll be buying and selling your son. Make a quilt out of that, fucker!

I do like the quilt, as a work of art. Maybe the tensions and ambiguities actually make it a better piece than the plonkingly didactic thing it might otherwise have been.
posted by Phanx at 5:54 AM on May 18, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

A quick Google reveals that the Shah Makhdum factory (in Dhaka, Bangladesh - did I say 'Indian'?) was indeed a hellhole up until 2002, when as a result of protests, the owner made significant improvements. Unfortunately the same protests led Disney to remove all its work from the factory.

Here is Lisa Rahman being pathetically grateful for the support of Western campaigners, and asking if they can help get Disney back.
posted by Phanx at 6:25 AM on May 18, 2007

Did you RT same FA that I did? Anonymous workers who are denied their identity make up our picture of international brands, not vice versa.

Why is their identity important? Here's one anecdote: I worked for a manufacturing company where every shipment carried an inspector number, much like the "inspected by No. 23" you might find in the pocket of a new pair of pants. So, if a complaint came about as a result of the quality of manufacture or damage in shipping, the company knew who, or at least which group was responsible, and there were negative consequences.

We had an ok track record with our largest customer, and then we bought our biggest rival, who did things pretty much the way we did. Anonymous workers who got punished, but beyond a pay check, never got commended for their work. After buying Brand X, we were now our largest customer's worst supplier, with a 13% defective shipment record and an on-time performance of 65%.

As the account manager for Customer Big, it was my responsibility to find a solution. I got an apartment near the plant (500 miles from home) and went to the plant each day. My job, as I saw it, was to change the attitudes and change the culture. I'm already boring everyone with this, so I won't go into the fine details, but I wanted each person in the factory to see that they had a part in the product we produced, and to see each other as important, not cogs in the wheel. By the end of three months, we had a .5% defect rate (still too high!) and a 98% on time delivery. One of the small things I implemented was a personal sign off, so that if they noticed something wasn't right, the person at any station could talk to the last signer.

I got the management to recognize this as a strength and so the former insistence on getting a supervisor's approval for an hourly worker to talk to someone in another department was ended, and there were regular company sponsored dinners and breakfasts for all--not tied to specific performance goals, for two reasons, one, the quality should be assumed and, two, because reward for performance is closely tied with the punishment for performance and can quickly revert. The money for celebrations came from not having to spend money on expediting overnight shipments (costly when shipping literally tons of product) and from not having to write off or toss defective product.

This is of course different than the issues that Agnew is working with, but at root they are the same. If people can take pride in what they do and get treated fairly while doing it, they will feel good about themselves and everyone benefits.

Take away their names, their dignity, and treat them as interchangeable dispensable commodities, and you have exploitation.
posted by beelzbubba at 6:45 AM on May 18, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

Who's taken away their names? I think bad pay and conditions are the issues.
posted by Phanx at 8:22 AM on May 18, 2007

Adamson: Proper names play an important role in the quilt you're making, yet you don't know and probably can't find out the name of the textile worker depicted in the image. It occurs to me that her anonymity acts as a kind of center for the work - a fulcrum between all the 'fake' names of the manufacturers on the labels, and the 'real' names of your label contributors. But then again, that anonymity could be seen as denying her agency or humanity, and rendering her into a kind of prop or symbol instead of a person. Do you feel that the work would change significantly if you did have her name, and if you had it, would you put it in the title?

Agnew: Let's get this straight: she is denied agency or humanity by the system that allows her to be driven like a machine. I intend to find her name. My idea from the start was that the title would be her name. Regardless - the larger purpose of the work is to make the unseen or hidden visible - to make it possible for us to connect the seams in our clothes with an image of one face, an identity. Though she is just one of millions of anonymous textile workers - that's really the point - every individual life is significant. I thought it was important to represent the intimate uniqueness of her as a human being-she's clearly not a wasteable drone in a productivity statistic here.

If workers are interchangeable dispensable commodities (which includes taking away their names symbolically, then bad pay and bad conditions are so much easier to get away with.
posted by beelzbubba at 9:15 AM on May 18, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

I rest my case. Apologies to serazin for taking the discussion in an unproductive direction.
posted by Phanx at 2:22 PM on May 18, 2007

serazin, When you commented in the thread about the circuit board art I was really excited to see the ocd art, lol. I love detailed stuff. But when I looked at Terese Agnew's site I felt disappointed. She didn't have images of her art, just this photo of a factory seamstress. No gallery of images. No art details!

If you were interested in her art, I figured it must be interesting. So I went Googling. I wanted to see Terese Agnew's details and I found a teensy bit. This is a stunning quilt. An interesting statement concrete stumps work.

Then I could better see the beauty that Textile Worker quilt is made of labels. Labels as pixels. wow.

Ah, so this is how she made the Textile Worker quilt.

She sounds like an amazing artist, making a meaningful statement but trying to find decent images on the web of any of her works, or the details for which she is known, is really hard. However, it's cool to know she made a photographic portrait, incredibly, out of stitching labels together. May her effort and art work benefit the workers it meant to represent.

beelzbubba, Your comment about changing the attitudes and productivity outcome of the work at the plant is awesome. I could very much relate because for four years I worked in New Delhi in the fashion biz. Western companies struggled to get quality shipments and huge money was lost all around when clothes were shipped with pockets on the back of a shirt, one sleeve longer than the other, buttonholes too small, fabric that shredded or bled dye etc. I ran a company for an American designer that manufactured clothing shipped to Pier One, UFO Jeans, Putumayo and others. A lot of the bs was at the upper echelons of the factories. Like you, I found that working one-on-one with the people who did the work, finding practical solutions, rather than treating them like drudge-work nobodies, the end product drastically improved. Really satisfying all around.
posted by nickyskye at 7:47 PM on May 18, 2007

Right, so the quilt is about how we can get better productivity and quality control out of these workers?
posted by Phanx at 1:24 AM on May 19, 2007

nickyskye - thanks for finding the more detailed images. Her site is remarkably lacking in detailed images.

As for benefiting workers, I guess we can all debate the relative helpfulness of art in these kinds of matters, but at the very least, she is selling high-quality prints for $50 each, the profits of which all go to support sweatshop workers in Asia and Latin America.
posted by serazin at 9:22 AM on May 19, 2007

Right, so the quilt is about how we can get better productivity and quality control out of these workers?
posted by Phanx

No, although I can understand how a limited perspective could get that reading. From a business perspective, it is application of the Deming philosophies that completely contradict your assumptions that I was talking about, which really has nothing to do with the quilt except trying to explain that the identity issue is quite adequately explained in the interview with the artist.

Despite your attempts to trivialize it, the work and the theory behind it are solid and well explained.
posted by beelzbubba at 6:55 PM on May 19, 2007