Artist's Book Yearbook 2003-2005 - Book Arts - University of the ...

Artist’s Book Reviews
Andrew Eason
Modern (Laundry) Production
Susan Johanknecht
Here’s a world where the supply of soiled linen
must be consistently maintained, and where
special precautions must be taken to preserve
the continued “bore and flow of the dirty
liquor.” Despite the vivid language, this is the
world of laundry.
Susan Johanknecht’s Modern (Laundry)
Production interposes the minute and arbitrary
observations of 1940’s handbooks on
industrial-scale laundry procedures, with
images of a figure carrying out some arcane
part of the processes described. The figure in
these repetitive, grainy images is reduced to an
arm and a torso, endlessly loading linen into an
unknown machine. Cut off from their original
contexts, both words and pictures take on the
qualities of poetic statement, an effect
intensified by Johanknecht’s decision to
organise the text into free-floating units.
Language used to describe the mundane
routines of sorting, washing, ironing, etc, starts
to constellate deeper meanings. Some
meanings resonate with body imagery, others -
those categorising materials and types - spark
off ruminations on the definition of material
substances, and how these definitions have
been organised in many ways over the
centuries.
This field of play is an interesting way to cast an
eye over the laundress’ activities. Repetitive as
these activities are, the weave of description
begins to suggest an alchemy, or a set of
Aristotelian transmutations that turn the
endless waves of cotton, silk and wool into
the days and thoughts of the operator.
153
Turning back, though, to the descriptions in
the book, there’s still a madly-impending,
Brazil-like totalitarianism to the sorts of things
categorized and commented upon. In this
world, the people must be the right shape for
the machines, and the text bristles with words
and phrases of control and subjugation.
Clothing is washed in a cage, processed
through a cuff and yoke press. Time itself is a
commodity to be used in the most efficient way,
or it is wasted time. Every action, every
movement is under observation (a method of
control associated with 19th Century penal
theories). Calibration, observation, control are
the emphasised qualities. But still, the language
of the text (mostly an apparently honest lift
from the 1940’s originals) is rebellious.
It springs into forms that rebel against the
[1940’s] author’s original intention. The effort
of maintaining the cyclopean rigidity of these
incantations-against-waste struggles against the
language’s tendency to suggest bodies, feelings,
tactility. This in turn reflects back on the
imagery. The grainy, boring-looking pictures,
each with their original, hand painted numbers
start off seeming identical. One notices
eventually that there is movement. This, one
discovers, is a picture of one of the processes
described so minutely in the text. A woman
(well, an arm, actually) is feeding clothing into
a calendering machine. Eventually, through the
repetition and the gradual drift between text
and image, eventually our imagination steps
out of the frame. Fills in, however sketchily,
some of the gaps. Adds the missing head and
limbs. Supplies the thoughts and boredom of
the operator, supplies the texture of the
clothing and the noise of the press.
The last words of the text seem to turn from
the voice of the machine/management to that