5 Questions with Hoang Tran Nguyen
Hoang Tran Nguyen is an artist living and working in Naarm Melbourne, the unceded lands of the Boonwurrung and Woiwurrung language groups.
Work, Worker’s first staging at the former Australian Natives Association in Footscray, 20 Jan 2022 (credit: Keelan O’Hehir)
No.1
How was Work, Worker conceived? What was on your mind when you felt driven to make it?
A version of the project was originally staged in 2013, where I was asked to contribute to Big West, a local arts festival in Melbourne’s inner-west. As the area was going through gentrification I wanted to look at the changing nature of work and how that impacted on the places we live.
Having made previous work using the karaoke format, I looked at another form of public performance that had thematic resonances with music and notions of work—the public protest. For example, in western cultures like Australia, protest is often associated with labour movements and popular music; the 1960s for example was a period which saw big social changes that inspired and mobilised popular music of the day. In thinking about karaoke, its own history has been traced back to a fishing port in Japan where, at the end of the working day, musicians at a bar played popular tunes for workers to wind-down and sing along to.
Both these forms, protest and karaoke, have a dynamic where the participant’s role can change between being an onlooker to a performer, or not. Whether active, passive or actively-passive, in karaoke-speak, you are part of a scene. The nature or character of a scene depends on its composition of participant, site and what is being performed.
For me, growing up in a working-class suburb in Melbourne’s north, now living and working in the inner west as an artist researcher, I was interested in how conditions and kinds of work have changed over recent decades, how this change impacts on our relationship to place and how we then might think about class and expressions of collective identity.
From this I devised a series of public events situated at sites whose history spoke to some of these ideas. Each event consisted of a work-related song menu offered to guests to choose and perform as the song lyrics and backing music is projected onto the facades of public buildings and sites.
No.2
So Work, Worker takes the form of a participatory karaoke performance, staged sporadically over three dates. How does this tie in with ideas around late capitalism and labour you’re trying to express or interrogate?
When I was collating the song menu, what struck me was that the changes in work that can be represented geographically or architecturally, could also be mapped through popular music. For example, the bulk of the songs compiled for the menu were first popularised from the 1970s to 1980s: think Cyndi Lauper and Bruce Springsteen, or even a band called Men At Work. Moving forward to the 1990s, work-related songs in popular music became harder to find, up until the early 2010s. In this sense, in western cultures, we stopped singing about work for a period of time. For me, this says something about the relationship between forms of labour and subject formation. Previously, it was thought by some the rise of machine automation would liberate humans from work, allowing for increased leisure and creativity. However, what eventuated was more a re-composition of the what, where, when and how work is performed. When work-related songs started to reappear from the 2010s, there was a noticeable shift in tenor and subject matter.
The staging at each site over the three dates is a kind of mapping, [at least] of these developments across the city. Going back to the active/passive/actively-passive dynamic, the karaoke format allows a way to express certain kinds of relationships to labour from or through these scenes, to ask what kinds of subjectivities or publics are at play.
No.3
For those unaware, your artistic practice is socially-engaged, participatory art that addresses cultural histories and politics of place. As a result the venues you’ve chosen for Work, Worker are meaningful: in Footscray, at the former Australian Natives Association; in University Square at the University of Melbourne; and finally at West Gate Bridge, which is known for the tragic loss of workers’ lives during its construction, and most recently as a backdrop for riots in the pandemic era against COVID-related government mandates. Can you speak more to this? Why these three sites in particular?
It’s probably the case that the tenor of the times and my own diasporic biography influenced the concerns and choice of sites, which were chosen for their histories and compositions of labour and place. While the earlier iterations of the project focused on Melbourne’s western suburbs, the current version travels more towards the city. Each site has its particular timescale and situated-ness which help frame the project.
Responding to ACCA’s Who’s Afraid of Public Space? program I gravitated to sites that told aspects of the social politics that shape the city, sites that allow the project to consider certain public cultures of work. The recent events at the West Gate Bridge was a reminder of how meaning can be unstable or brought into contention. Here, a city’s site of pride and past sacrifice became a backdrop (or plinth) to what many view as the continuing rise of ethno-nationalism (the previous day’s protest occurred at the city’s Shrine of Remembrance).
My own recent return to study after twenty years also prompted questions like what a university is and who it is for. For example, the sector is emblematic in the way industries have become financialised in recent decades, dispersing the kinds of activities from what was previously thought of primarily as a site for collective study. In this instance, if the knowledge economy relates to the student as a client-worker what kinds of subjects arise from this?
No.4
Notions around labour are something increasingly explored now, particularly in a pandemic era where class inequalities deepen, and workers face more precarity. How do you think Work, Worker works to address this? How do you continue making socially-engaged art with and for your related communities while still resisting gentrification?
I live and work in a rapidly gentrifying area and cannot claim to be outside of the process. What I can claim is my own diasporic position that allows for certain ways of relating to and questioning of things.
Going back to the song menu, there are some recent inclusions that talk about class in contemporary terms. For example, Briggs’ 2019 song “Life Is Incredible” positions an Indigenous artist parading/parodying a life of privilege. This is interesting as it felt in recent decades the only way to talk about class, at least in Australia, was a kind of nostalgic longing, one that had long been co-opted by market interests. In terms of gentrification, my own sense of longing harks back to the kinds of solidarity I felt as a working-class kid going to democracy-for-Vietnam protests in the city, in which music offered a collective belonging in an uncertain future.
During Melbourne’s lockdowns, a vivid image for me was the empty city streets punctuated by delivery drivers on two wheels keeping much of the city fed. I imagined many of these workers would have belonged to international student communities that were excluded from government support, exposing the nature of their welcome. While this project is not the kind of undertaking that seeks to change the material life of these workers, what it can do is attempt to address ideas of collective belonging and forms of solidarity.
No.5
What do you hope the staging of Work, Worker will do for the conversation around labour in so-called Australia?
In researching this latest series of events, a text I looked at was Humphrey McQueen’s A New Britannia, which considers the foundations of the Australian Labor Party leading up to Federation and beyond. In McQueen’s telling, the drive for land and white nationalism is integral to modern Australia’s labour movements, socially and politically. In other words, the White Australia policy was designed not only to exclude non-white workers, it also was part of an effort to socially reproduce a particular type of white (male) subject. McQueen looks at the global market forces as well as imperial drivers that shaped culture and policy. As someone from the Việt diaspora who arrived here in 1982 as a refugee, these dynamics are really important to understand when thinking about what kinds of subjects are at work today.
Although this wasn't the starting premise, the project in its own way is also an attempt to participate in the broader cultural and political reckoning this country continues to grapple with. The apparent terra nullius that gave dubious legal and moral grounds for British colonisation continues to inflect much of social and political life. The word karaoke translates from the Japanese into “empty orchestra”. Through ideas of work, maybe the idiosyncratic void that is intrinsic to karaoke is a way to riff on the persistent emptiness in modern Australia?
But enough talk, where’s the 🎤!
Top: Participants singing karaoke at Work, Worker at the former Australian Natives Association, 20 Jan 2022 (credit: Keelan O’Hehir)
Bottom: Audience watching karaoke at Work, Worker at the former Australian Natives Association, 20 Jan 2022 (Credit: Keelan O’Hehir)
Work, Worker 2021–22 is the latest project in Hoang Tran Nguyen’s ongoing performative series Labour, which draws connections across the histories and changing conceptions of work in Melbourne, Australia and in western capitalist societies more broadly.
Work, Worker takes the form of a participatory karaoke performance, presented over three evenings across the course of the exhibition. With a list of songs that are themed and or titled in relation to work, working and workers, the repertoire spans trade union songs to pop music, and includes tracks in both English and Vietnamese.
The song menus for this project will also be available at ACCA in advance of the events, in the Project Space: The Hoarding.
More info here.