Word: laborism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Lehyt’s exhibition overlaps with a musical on campus also dedicated to labor. On April 2, first-time director Brandon J. Ortiz ’12 opened “Working”, a musical written by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso that celebrates workers ranging from a supermarket checker...
...labor—“Working” by using art as a means for glorifying the worker and welcoming the viewer into the workers’ sphere, Lehyt’s sculpture by exploiting the ambiguity innate in abstract art as a means for proclaiming that labor is impossible to understand from the outside. And both “Working” and the sculpture throw into sharp relief the inability of art to embody labor, particularly on a campus where so few individuals are involved in the manual labor the pieces represent...
...philosophize all day about social issues but… it’s just hard to imagine what life is like for people who have to do that type of backbreaking manual labor all day to survive,” Ortiz said. “So that’s why I thought it would be perfect to do ‘Working’ again here. I wanted to get this point across to students...
Whereas HUCTW is an active union and “Working” represents labor in a positive light, Lehyt presents a bleaker picture of the average union’s social weight. Lehyt’s research at the Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program made evident that unions in Massachusetts are not what they once were. “The heyday of unions was in [the] 1950s and 1960s in which you have basically hard-core industries—manufacturing,” explained José Luis Falconi, the curator of Lehyt?...
Moreover, Leyht is suspicious of art’s ability to communicate real understanding of the hardship of labor. While a play may help instill a new respect for workers, it cannot teach the audience what it is like to perform backbreaking work. That cannot be understood from a seat in a theater—or at least, Lehyt would not think so. “Art cannot directly address these things in any way that his helpful,” he says. “There is action and there is art. Art is about thinking about things...