I. Women in labour

Labour is an instance of exertion: the work as a noun, to toil as a verb. But it is also, of course, the name we give the act of childbirth. We ‘go into’ labour as though we are physically engulfed by it; swallowed up. From experience, this seems an apt descriptor. Labour as in workers, collectively, becomes a floating signifier—in that it is open to contestation by different, even opposing political projects—consider labour market flexibility c.f. precarious labour.1 Labour lost, labour in vain, and labour of love are different ways of ascribing value to one’s work. This is to say nothing (or nothing much) of women’s work.

Etymologically speaking, labour derives from the Latin for toil and trouble.2

Arnold’s labour—the work—means here largely works of concrete poetry on paper; a form that emphasises the visual and material aspects of language. Here and there, her poems are defiantly aphasic, breaking language down into its component phonemes, as though they are building blocks (of matter and sense both). The repetition of manual labour used in these works to reproduce text as dry-transfer—a superfluous gesture in today’s digital age—seems to nod to the toil and trouble of gendered labour.

A Measure of Disorder, Part 1 at Gertrude Glasshouse last year featured only large-scale paintings and sculptures: none of the type of intimate works on paper included here. Here, however, Arnold’s thematic concerns crystallise in form and content as an economy of language.

A sometimes noted connection between women and concrete poetry is that writing freed from the constraints of syntax, of grammar, of the phallogocentrism of a normative use of language contains the seeds of resistance. Using language in open-ended, lateral and poetic ways wrests it as a tool away from logic, reason and rhetoric: uses associated with and reinforcing patriarchal ideology. Such (mis)use of words can amount to an alternative way of being in the world through language. It is this excess of meaning that precisely locates Arnold’s work.

Such a use of language is a poetic force that Franco Berardi has argued ‘reopens the indefinite, through the ironic act of exceeding the established meaning of words … ’ It is an instrument for ‘semiotic insolvency, for the disentanglement of language from the limits of symbolic debt’.3

It is in producing this excess of meaning—this insolvency of language—that (text-based) art’s special ability to challenge the status quo lies.

II. Entropy and atrophy

The physical science of thermodynamics foregrounds the relationship between energy and work. Within this branch of knowledge, entropy is the name given to measure the disorder of an energetic system. The more disordered (entropic) a system, the less energy is available to do work.

The second law of thermodynamics describes this more precisely as the phenomenon by which in time, entropy can only increase in a closed system. In everyday experience, ice melting and boiling water for tea are common examples. Both state changes, from solid to liquid, liquid to gas (steam), see a resulting increase in entropy: in both, disorder increases and energy dissipates.

Metaphorically, it’s a useful concept for describing life’s chaos, life’s decline.

Life’s treachery.

Atrophy is rather like the entropy of the human system. It’s a wasting-away of the body as a whole or in part.

And so, the metaphor of entropy and its human correlate, atrophy, become perhaps a means through which to grasp the radical potential of language thus far described. The excess of conventional meaning spanning the gap between these two words conveys something inexplicable about the fragility of the human experience.

With such fragility in mind, how might we reconceive of care (like language) as a radical act?A quietly horizontal organisational model is on offer here, at a time in which paying heed to effective models of collective responsibility seems each day more urgent. Here is one that tenderly cultivates collaborative relations to make life more endurable, at the same time as confronting (tacitly) the political conditions that define what care means.

Arnold’s use of language is itself an enactment of care, which aspires to mutuality and collaboration on all fronts. By valuing language as more than just sense-making, indeed, as an alternative mode of being in the world: as a verb? As an ontology?

Arnold’s labour is thus radical. These are her fruits and her pains both.

Brooke Babington

Brooke Babington is a curator and artist based in Naarm/Melbourne. She is a current PhD candidate in Curatorial Practice at Monash University and was previously Associate Curator at Heide Museum of Modern Art (2018-22) and Director of Slopes Gallery (2014).

1 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London ; New York: Verso, 2005), 131.

2 “labour, n.”. OED Online. September 2022. Oxford University Press.
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/labour_v?tab=etymology#39841349 (accessed October 20, 2023).

3 Franco Berardi, Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, Semiotext(e) Intervention Series 26 (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2018), 32.