Sarah Rodigari

It is commonly accepted that crises create problems. Yet it is perhaps a more accurate observation that crises detect fractures already present in systems and, during states of tumult, cause them to crack wide open. Last year, one of many existing societal issues of inequity widened by the global pandemic was the precarity of the position of casual and contract workers. For those in public-facing roles in industries that received little financial support from state and federal governments – such as the arts and tertiary education sectors – this rupture was resounding. In response to this, artist and academic Sarah Rodigari begins a conversation about casualisation in On Time (2021), her commissioned work for the Carriageworks iteration of The National 2021. Rethinking myriad connotations of the word ‘casual’, On Time draws attention to the lyricism of labour, making audible pauses and hesitations often left unheard.

Between 1996 and 2016, the number of workers engaged on a casual basis in Australia grew by 51 per cent. (1) Still, On Time is not preoccupied with statistics. Rather, Rodigari engages with the phenomenon of casualisation from a distinctly personal position, performing a script bricolaged from snippets of 12 interviews conducted over 12 hours with casual back- and front-of-house workers at Carriageworks. (A disclosure: one of the voices is my own.) In doing so, Rodigari’s monologue forms a collective voice, almost in the tradition of a choral address. Traversing topics of labour and process, value and exploitation, On Time presents the paradox of institutional critique from within the institution. Rodigari claims: ‘The institution is us.’ (2) Here, the artist acknowledges Andrea Fraser, who explained in 2005 that: ‘Every time we speak of the “institution” as other than “us”, we disavow our role in the creation and perpetuation of its conditions … It’s not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution.’ (3) It is also important to extend our consideration of who exactly is included, or excluded, from participation in ‘the institution’ – especially within a post-colonising context.

Site responsivity and the mastery of technique, which so often characterise Rodigari’s work, are integral to On Time. Through text-based performance and metal work, the artist’s explicit conversations with current Carriageworks employees are enriched by her implicit engagement with the site’s former workers. Carriageworks occupies the western site of the former Eveleigh Railway Workshops, which, in the first half of the 20th century, housed one of the largest industrial workforces in Australia. This comprised a range of trades requiring technological expertise and physical skill, ultimately rendered obsolete by the passage of time. Importantly, one of these practices was blacksmithing, which Rodigari acknowledges through the presentation of 12 smithed clock hands. While these objects may reference time, they do not ‘tell’ it.

The Great Strike of 1917, one of the nation’s largest and most significant industrial conflicts, was born at Eveleigh in response to the implementation of a card system to record workers’ hours of labour. Through this system, workers’ movements were timed and logged with fastidious attention. (4) Their industrial descendants, today’s casual ‘Carriageworkers’ whose words constitute Rodigari’s script, had the hour in which they conversed with the artist included on their timesheets as a task discrete from their usual duties. In On Time, the notion of a fair day’s pay for fair day’s work, and the question of how we can fairly exchange time for money when faced with the challenges of social upheaval, are timely concerns indeed.