Alvin Luong, Workers’ Dance (Young Workers, 2021), 2021. Digital render. Commissioned and originally premiered by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
“Thank you for contacting…
…your call is important to us. We are experiencing longer than normal wait times. Please hold and a representative will be with you shortly…”
It was March 2020 when the whole world woke up to a different reality. For some, their routines began to fill with sleepless nights waiting for updates from loved ones; for others, the days stretched long and slow as they watched their shadow edged with each passing hour, cast across the four walls of their cramped, under-maintained but overpaid apartments. Within these two groups of people, there were also those who spent days and nights on the phone in search of information on their unemployment benefits in Canada. Hold music slowly became a sombre soundtrack to endless hours of confusion, anxiety, and uncertainty. This type of sound, sometimes called “elevator music” or “Muzak,” was developed to improve the mood of listeners, drive worker productivity, and increase consumer consumption. The use of Muzak as hold music for the unemployment support call centre shows the contradiction of capitalism: even when unemployed, you still must remain productive.
One year later, Toronto-based multimedia artist Alvin Luong used Muzak in a new work conceived during a residency at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Luong’s Workers’ Dance (Young Workers, 2021) is a web-based project that reflects the experience of young Canadians in 2020 who lost their employment during the first waves of the pandemic. Luong worked with the performers through a series of virtual meetings where they discussed logistics and checked in on each other’s well-being. Together, they identified spaces inside the participants’ modest apartments to record themselves dancing to the hold music Luong provided. The final recordings last just over 30 minutes, the average wait time for support seekers to secure a place in the phone queue. During peak periods, people are usually told to hang up and try again later.
Alvin Luong, Workers’ Dance (Young Workers, 2021), 2021. Digital video. Commissioned and originally premiered by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
Inspired by Canadian photographer Jeff Wall's Young Workers series (1978–1983)—which consists of lightbox portraits of youths in the late 1970s and early 1980s shot in a manner that resembles images of Socialist leaders—Luong’s virtual work also includes a collection of outdoor photographs depicting the participants in a similar composition. In both instances, the sitters and their three-quarter profiles glance forward toward an invisible horizon in the distance. In a 3D rendering, Luong presents an exhibition proposal where each of the final portraits is paired with recordings of the participants dancing. The portraits, enlarged and mounted on monument-sized lightboxes, are hung high above the viewer’s head. Propped up by square brackets on the ground, monitors stand on their shorter sides, screening the videos cropped to show only the moving bodies. In the middle of this mausoleum-like room, exterior light filters through a large skylight; however, it quickly dissipates before hitting the ground.
The significant differences in size between the backlit portraits and monitors, and the distance between them, evokes a sense of disorientation. The feeling is akin to anxiety, hopelessness, or the discrepancy between aspiration and reality which envelopes perceptions throughout this particularly tumultuous period. With hold music playing on an infinite loop in the background, the installation also speaks to the level of bureaucracy that turns a system, designed to help distribute resources and support, inaccessible.
Unlike Wall’s Young Workers in which the artist embedded his subjects with a sense of “eternal passion” by ironically using nonworkers, Luong sought out artists and cultural workers who were affected by economic closures. In this light, Luong’s work inquires about existing socio-economic inequalities, showing the faces of people who spent hours pacing around their apartments, waiting to connect to an agent.
The most effective element in Luong’s Workers’ Dance is the Muzak. As a sound once used to promote productivity, the music has been transformed into a solemn soundtrack of uncertainty. With their contacts reduced to Zoom calls and virtual events, the performers remain engaged by dancing to the monotonous tune. Like these young workers’ ambitions, which have been battered by the pandemic, Luong’s exhibition may forever remain a 3D model online.
Alvin Luong (梁超洪) creates artworks based on stories of human migration, land, and dialogues from the diasporic working class communities that he lives and works with. These stories are combined with biography to produce artworks that reflect upon issues of historical development, political economy, and social reproduction; and how these issues intimately affect the lives of people.
Tak Pham is a Vietnamese contemporary art curator and art critic. He holds a B.A Hons. in History and Theory of Architecture from Carleton University, and an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practices from OCAD University. Pham’s curatorial work is concerned with spatial experience in exhibition architecture, contemporary consequences of modern architectural movements, and how contemporary art can offer strategies and suggestions to ameliorate our current circumstances. Pham actively looks for adaptive-reuse architectural projects and opportunities to not only investigate the sites, but also reimagine their possibilities.