After pressing 07-02, the speakers of a Rowe Ami Compact Disc jukebox start to spout fuzz in that way only a jukebox can. My ears start to adjust themselves, preparing for the static to assemble into “Rocket Man,” as it most likely did once upon a time. But instead, the white noise turns into an even more familiar sound: the sizzling of a griddle.
The voice of Pat Hansen, a café owner from Hensonville—as the album card tells me—comes crackling out of the jukebox. What the track I had chosen, “Order up!” lacks in musical genius, it makes up for in calories. Hansen from Hensonville fills the small gallery room with chit-chat about the ins and outs of his and his wife’s French toast special—with two eggs, two slices of bacon, toast, and potatoes—while simultaneously preparing one.
photo by Kelly Spencer
I flip through a few more of the album cards while Hansen gets the eggs ready. A cheesemaker, a forester, and a bartender are among those recorded for this peculiar jukebox, all talking and working over the course of their tracks, which vary in length. While the sound of sizzling bacon is something many would find worth listening to, it’s just unusual coming out of a jukebox in art gallery.
The jukebox itself, currently situated at the Athens Cultural Center in Athens, is the culmination of an oral-history art instillation titled Wage/Working by Brooklyn-based duo Tennessee Watson and Laura Hadden, who asked some residents of Greene and Columbia counties the usually taboo question, “How much money do you make?”
Watson, 33, and Hadden, 29, met while both were enrolled in the Integrated Media Arts MFA program at Hunter College. While in the program, they realized they both had similar interests in the area of oral histories. Laura Hadden worked largely in first-person storytelling, which is essentially what the project is a collection of. Both artists, Tennessee in particular, were influenced by author-historian-broadcaster Studs Terkel. It was his broadcast radio show featuring average-Joe oral histories that helped form a blueprint for how the pair wanted to design their project. Watson says, “He did all those interviews in a time when the American economy and the global economy were at a point of crisis and transition, and a lot of the people he talked to had jobs that were phased out. . . . That type of labor didn’t exist anymore.”
This influence became particularly relevant when the pair, living in New York City, experienced firsthand the Occupy Wall Street movement. Watson says, “There was this vibrant conversation in New York that came with Occupy Wall Street, where people are looking at the economic crisis and labor issues and the upper class and the lower class.” This led them to ask the question of themselves: Where did they fit on the spectrum of wage? They noted that these same issues that Terkel had reported were again pertinent. But something was missing from the conversation on Wall Street, as Watson saw it, and that was a personal narrative.
Then, last April, Hadden and Watson were chosen for a residency at Wave Farm in Acra, a nonprofit arts organization focusing in particular on media arts and transmission arts. The artists’ pairing of audio recording and community outreach made the fit nearly perfect. Wave Farm also airs a community radio station, WGXC, that first featured the stories recorded by Hadden and Watson before they were loaded onto the jukebox.
They worked on the project out of Wave Farm, interviewing local residents working in the area. From a lawyer to prison inmates, Watson and Hadden recorded their stories and compiled them into individual CD “albums.” Then the albums were put on a jukebox. The jukebox itself is important to the overall story the work is meant to project. It’s a nostalgic medium that’s “situated in a physical place and a physical community and it really lends itself well to a communal listening space,” as Hadden puts it.
But there was a difference in duration of the tracks of each person interviewed. The restriction—the “catch”—was that the length of each track was determined by the length of time it took the interviewee to earn $1. This component is really the heart of the project, and is meant to “answer the question of what it really means to earn differently than your neighbor.” So when Pat Hansen was able to make and serve an entire French toast special over the course of his second track, it puts his labor into perspective. It does even more so when in comparison to that of the lightening-fast tracks of lawyer Andy Howard. While both work hard and are passionate about what they do, there is a clear difference in the value given to different types of labor.
Determining the math behind the equation of hourly wage was easier for some people and jobs than it was for others. The artists allowed the interviewees to devise their own way of determining how much they earn per hour.
“We also allowed people to develop their own equation,” Watson explains. “A part of our interview is asking, ‘Well, how would you do this math?’ and some people take it straight from their fixed hourly income; but then there are people who work for themselves, and the way they crunch that number is up to them.” Hadden adds, “We were working with some folks and it seemed like it was the first time they really figured out how much they make per hour, which was a really interesting experience.”
There were a number of things that needed to be taken into consideration on the part of those crunching the numbers; things like transportation costs or health insurance weren’t always already factored in. More importantly, in each interview it seemed that each person took pride in what they were doing and actually enjoyed their work. The artists found that there was an imbalance when trying to value work strictly monetarily.
“They really love what they do, and there is some tension there,” Watson says. “I see where it’s like, how do you charge for enjoying your time? Which I feel is an interesting conundrum.”
Hadden says, “The value of time changes, it’s not just monetary.”
Ideally, perhaps, there would be more of a correlation between monetary value and enjoyment in what you’re doing, but that’s not the world we live in. Watson says, “I have more utopian views of a different society with more wage equality but an important starting place, and really my place as an artist, is to create a thing that is a catalyst for conversation.”
When asked what the audience, ideally, would take away from the jukebox, Hadden explains that it was all about the level of engagement. She notes three levels, from just listening to the stories and reflecting personally, to opening up a dialogue about income and wages with others. Also, when interviewing, they saw that there was a finesse each person had in the way they did their work. “Like George—the chairlifts can really smack you, and he has this whole style that he has thought about and perfected, and he has his own pizzazz that he brings to it,” Watson says of George Pitluga, a chairlift operator who was interviewed for the project. The artists hope that those who experience the jukebox will consider the same thing in their own work, and wonder what their “style” is.
Both Watson and Hadden found joy throughout the interviewing process.
“If I think of this as a job, I don’t think I’ve ever had a more fun one. Basically it’s just following people around on their jobs which is, granted, a very strange work,” Hadden says.
While Wage/Working is rooted in attempting to understand income disparity, Watson also recognizes that “when people think about wage and hourly wage, things are reduced down to dollars and cents. I think sometimes the art and creativity and problem-solving get cut out.” But after interviewing and seeing the style of each individual, it allowed for a deeper understanding of what they were bringing to the table.
“People reflected and realized how intentional they are in what they do.”
Hadden and Watson saw the entire project as a collaborative one with those that they interviewed. “It’s their wisdom that makes the project,” Hadden says.
Wage/Working will be on display at the Athens Cultural Center through Nov. 30. The artists hope that it will continue to travel throughout Greene and Columbia counties, collecting more stories as it goes and, ideally, more bacon.
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