The labor movement in Europe and Switzerland seems to be deadlocked. Unions, without a strong position on the unstable and rapidly changing workforce that defines labor today, don’t know which direction to head to face their decreasing memberships. For the growing number of self-employed, non-organized workers, the idea of a radical labor movement and class struggle feel like a thought from another galaxy. This issue of the Fabrikzeitung focuses on Fred Lonidier, a San Diego-based artist, who as union activist and professor of photography at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) over the last 40 years, has made the labor movement and class struggle the center of his investigations and the space in which to position his artistic work. By doing so, Lonidier’s unique position as an artist working in the labor movement provides profound material needed to revisit and re-think a movement that has lost its power and radical meaning.
In the main texts written by Lonidier: “Won’t Critical Theory and Class Struggle Get Together?” (1982)1, “Working With Unions” (1985)2, “Working With Unions II” (1992) 3, “Blueprint for a Strike” (1996) 4 as well as in his artistic statements, he talks about his position as a visual artist within the labor movement. He outlines the difficulties of bringing the two self-contained systems — art and the labor movement — together, and the necessity of thinking of these two systems as one. For Lonidier, “the labor movement” means an engaged practice, based on guiding intellectual (and artistic) work by struggle and union organizing.
His activism began during his undergraduate studies in sociology at San Francisco State College (1962-1966) where he co-founded The Vietnam Day Committee. He continued his engagement in the anti-war movement as co-founder of Draft Resistance Seattle during years of trial for resisting his induction into the military during the Vietnam War. After arriving in San Diego in 1969, he became a member of The New American Movement, a non-sectarian, socialist/Marxist group that came out of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. During his graduate studies at the Department of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego, he worked with leftwing labor papers The Waterfront Worker and The Wildcat to reform and transform the stagnant labor movement of the time.
Lonidier identified strongly with these radical movements, even though he joined a far-from-radical union when becoming a full faculty assistant professor at the Visual Department of UCSD. In 1974, he joined the American Federation of Teachers San Diego, Local 2034, a union affiliated with the AFL-CIO, well aware that the federation was a Cold War organization. He later became a delegate to the Central Labor Council, and to the state-wide UC/AFT.
Since his first “labor” artwork in 1976 — The Health & Safety Game, first shown at the Long Beach Museum of Art along with Phil “Phel” Steinmetz’s Somebody’s Making a Mistake — , he has produced a number of documentary photo/text installation works made “for, by and about” class struggle. “For” class struggle by showing them in union and community spaces, “by” as a duespaying union member, and “about” by primarily, but not exclusively, focusing on labor rights within capitalism.
The main part of this issue shows excerpts from two of Lonidier’s later and larger work series: N.A.F.T.A (Not A Fair Trade for All), Getting The Correct Picture: A monolingual, trade union descendent of Swedish immigrants and Cajuns goes across the border of the United States of America and the United States of Mexico (1997-2011) and Welfare Is Poor Relief (1991) which consists of 96 photo/text panels with dense structures. This work tackles one of the most intractable and controversial issues: welfare. It is constructed of interviews with union members with welfare experiences and photographs from the artist’s personal archive, providing a welter of images of wealth and poverty. Parallel to this, newspaper headlines and citations from over 30 years of scholarship lay out a compelling story of their own.
In the mid-90s some of Lonidier’s former students at UCSD started to organize maquiladora workers in Tijuana. When NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, Mexico and the United States – came into force in 1994, it boosted maquiladora industries on the Mexico/U.S. border. Firms from the U.S., Canada and other nations relocated their assembly plants to these free trade zones, where wages were low, and labor and environmental laws lax. Around 1995, Lonidier took two or three sabbaticals in a row to spend the whole three-month period visiting Tijuana. He worked there with labor activist groups from San Diego who supported the struggles of maquiladora workers in their fight to organize themselves and build independent unions. (Mexican workers are unionized by law, but these unions do not represent their interests). In his text/photography works he documented maquiladora workers’ strikes, health and safety conditions at work and living conditions in the maquiladora zone. He also discussed the slow pace of U.S. labor unions in organizing labor across the Mexican border. The excerpt from this series here focuses on the Han Young workers’ struggle that pushed the whole movement to a higher level. Lonidier stopped going to Tijuana after the alternative labor struggle in Mexico had a setback in 2005.
A positioning and art historical contextualization of Lonidier’s works is given here by a shortened version of an essay by Jill Dawsey published in the exhibition catalogue The Uses of Photography: Art, Politics, and the Reinvention of a Medium (University of California Press, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2016) in which Dawsey writes about the San Diego group (core members Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Fred Lonidier and Phel Steinmetz), a community of artists that formed in and around the UCSD, founded in 1960, and its visual arts department, founded in 1967. The homonymous exhibition, curated by Dawsey, broadly investigates artists connected to the UCSD visual arts department in the late 1960s and 1970s. The exhibition opens on September 24, 2016 at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla, California.
The essay is published here accompanied by three works Fred Lonidier made during his early faculty years: Lee Friedlander Talks, Art Talks and Godard & Gorin Talk. They bluntly depict scenes of study at the UCSD and of discussion panels attended by Lonidier and other artists related to the San Diego group.
1 Fred Lonidier, “Won’t Critical Theory and Class Struggle Get Together?,” in Praxis, #6, Summer issue (1982).
2 Fred Lonidier, “Working With Unions,” in Cultures In Contention, eds. Diane Neumaier and Douglas Kahn (Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1985), 102–115.
3 Fred Lonidier, “Working With Unions II: A Photo Essay,” in Democratic Communications in the Information Age, eds.
Janet Wasko and Vincent Mosco (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1992), 125–136.
4 Fred Lonider, “Blueprint for a Strike,” in Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 8, Issue 4 (1995), 104.