The Brooklyn Rail

Adriana Furlong makes sculptures about the grand history of class struggle and the vortical clinamen of economic transformation in Manhattan, from a workers’ town to a neoliberal haven for financial speculation and accumulation. The political concern of her practice takes center stage at island, where Furlong’s incisive investigation into the self-representation of the New Deal-era proletariat results in a series of sculptures haunted by the forced disappearance of workers as a legible category of analysis and intervention.

Furlong works alongside/against various apparatuses of capture in creating these sculptures. First, she matter-of-factly photographs the facades of Rockefeller Center and 100 Avenue of the Americas, both of which were born out of state-sponsored urban construction projects around the early 1930s and are now home to services for the uber-wealthy. These Art Deco facades stand out due to their stylistic affinity for then-burgeoning Socialist Realism—sharp, geometric, and angular. The clinical gaze of the artist’s photographic apparatus transforms the monuments into mere digital signs and symbols. The precarity of material labor in a post-Fordist moment is further confirmed by Furlong’s recreation and replication of her photographs in the 3D modeling software Blender. The processual backdrop to Furlong’s sculptures reflects how contemporary technological mediation seals the laboring body in transmedial flows of affect.

Labor continues to be differentially embodied. The virtual pixels are 3D printed into fractured tiles, individually molded into a miniature brick, cast in concrete, and coated with copper powder and foil. Then, Furlong rearranges fragmented blocks within a fixed grid in a range of positions and directions that do not remotely correspond to the original picture. Such is the point of departure for Furlong’s sculptural conceptualism: the historical monuments that signified workers’ insistence on the ownership of their material labor have ultimately capitulated to the deterritorializing flux of globalizing capital that flattens everything into smooth surfaces for consumption and absorption.

However, upon a closer examination, I realized that Furlong’s sculptures move beyond detailing the semiotic rupture of our digital epoch and point to alternative imaginaries yet to come. Each sculpture’s hybrid materiality attends to the unsupervised onslaught of oxygen and endures oxidizing processes in extended exposure. Elusive losses of electrons, palpably ordered by chance and time, can only be indexed by visible change in coloration. Surveying notations of oxidation out of line with any recognizable pattern, I was struck with a brewing sense of affective excess. This will to life, albeit loosely attached to digital channels of manipulation, has an aggressive virility uncontained by pre-programmed maneuvers that seek to render all objects in a singular system of technical artifice.

Moreover, the topology Furlong meticulously and laboriously spells out is a plenitude of pronounced edges, dislodged projection, and other uneven stratification, irreducible to structured semantic interpretations. Functioning as an unruly, cryptic deposit, each sculpture galvanizes the disembodied voices and breath of bygone workers for new fictions of progress. Though Furlong’s rerouted images could only conjure fleeting impressions of historical proletarian subjects partaking in the campaign for the right to produce official culture of the sovereign state, their sedimented information erects multiple pathways exceeding the homogeneity of warp and weft and longitude and latitude. Disrupting the continuum of space, Furlong’s sculptures take on an architectural logic that is decidedly amorphous. Juxtaposing sections do not join in a shared modality but form a labyrinth of points that escape modulation and equalization.

At the same time, each sculpture seductively demands reified intimacy and prompts renewed affection for the atomized self. Various anonymous faces showcasing tender care for and attentiveness to their product of labor and body parts in stern movements, either a multiplication of the same unidentifiable source or an accidental encounter never intended in the original monuments, strive for a map of connectivity where the subject of history can be slyly restored. Yet in another glance, the newly formed self fragments into pieces again. All lines of connection sketched out in the prior gaze evaporate into thin air.

Still, Furlong is uninterested in penning grand eulogies for the assaulted working-class Americans, drowning in the empire of audiovisual signs. In this fractal cinema of identification that is political art, where images of martyrdom exercise another psychic violence on the subject of complaint and grievance in the extended present, lamenting the disintegration of construction sites and factories sometimes is synonymous with the romanticism of free action—the propelling desire for confronting and defacing existing forms of subjugation. In her sculptures, Furlong carefully suggests another side to physical tactics of resistance, namely infiltration into the grid, and the ruses of living in the slippages among the machinery of capital. What granulated science of labor or desire for self-mastery (or lack thereof) can be propagated in these ever-changing structures of feeling? For now, Furlong offers affirmative associations, be it the yearning for unalienated labor or the drive for reenacting the drama of history, lingering at the limit of our current discourse.