Susan Johanknect
Working Note
“The Feeder” loop and the book Modern (Laundry) Production began as reformations of laundry trade books dating form the 1940’s. These books were written in the ambitious management-speak of their day, describing the processes and machinery which structured ‘operators’ lives. The authors predicted their industry would expand hugely in the future, that soon the ‘housewife’ would prefer to send her washing out to the industrial laundry rather than do it at home. Most ‘operators’ today are in open plan offices linked to their PCs rather than in sorting rooms or feeding calender machines, yet similar managerial rules structure their institutions. The twentieth century time and motion studies which divided up and photographed cycles of work with a view to standardization and increased production, refigure the panoptical efficiency of twenty first century ‘transparency.’
Installation: “The Feeder” and Modern (Laundry) Production
Modern (Laundry) Production
Bio: Susan Johanknecht is an artist and publisher under the imprint of Gefn Press. Her recent work locates animated imagery (with output onto CD-ROM or DVD) in relation to sequential material in books, questioning the role of the book when it no longer needs to function just as a container for information, but is a format specifically chosen for its cultural references, structural or tactile possibilities. In 2000 she co-curated Volumes (of vulnerability) an artists’ book project including the work of twenty artists, which toured internationally. She is currently Subject Leader of the MA Book Arts course at Camberwell College of Arts (London).