Taro Hattori
Essay by Victoria Gannon


Day Laborer: One who works for daily wages especially as an unskilled laborer; first used in 1548 -Merriam Webster


Day laborers have existed throughout history. They are mentioned in the Bible, and they waited for work in the agora of fifth-century Athens and in front of the churches and public squares of medieval Europe. In New York in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Irish immigrants lined up near docks and ports hoping to get a day's work. In the Southern and Midwestern United States in the late nineteenth century, day laborers worked in the fields and on farms; in the early twentieth century, they traveled to remote rural areas to work in logging and on railroads. When their jobs were over, they returned to the city and rented cheap hotel rooms near the train station. The nearby streets became de facto labor exchanges -employment agencies posted listings in windows, and job-seekers packed the sidewalks. Such spaces are the predecessors of modern-day hiring sites.

Today, approximately 117,000 people look for work as day laborers in the United States. Like those who came before them, they stand on informally designated street corners, congregate in public spaces like parking lots, and gather along sidewalks. An estimated forty thousand day laborers work in California, where the average day laborer is a thirty-year-old male from Mexico with limited schooling and an 80 percent chance of being an undocumented resident of the United States.

This statistic reflects the intimate relationship between immigration and the day labor market in California. The day labor market, because its transactions are underground, accommodates these particular political circumstances. Current anti-immigration legislation, however, prevents many of these immigrants from participating in the formal U.S. economy. The day labor market, whose transactions are underground, accommodates these particular political circumstances. It offers temporary and informal work to laborers regardless of their citizenship or work experience, preserving their anonymity and, by extension, protecting them from discovery by government agencies.

But the market's lack of documentation also endangers laborers. Though required to follow federal labor laws, employers often abuse the market's informality. Many ask laborers to work in dangerous conditions; others refuse to compensate them for a job completed. Some even abandon workers at the job site at the day's end. The nonexistent paper trail discourages laborers from speaking out: How do they file a report on an employer whose name they never learned? How do they ask for deserved wages when they can't prove they did the job? Day laborers' frequently vulnerable social position further compounds the issue; If their presence in the United States is considered illegal, how do they report crimes committed against them? The day labor market is therefore a system of polarities: it is both opportunity and last resort, safe and dangerous, visible and invisible, populated by workers whose work goes unrecognized.

With Exinclusivity (2011), his project at Pro Arts, Taro Hattori has entered this underground economy of dichotomies. Selecting randomly from the forty thousand day laborers in California, he hired seven men from Oakland's Fruitvale neighborhood, all originally from Mexico or Guatemala. He offered them minimum wage and a contract with clear directives: enter a room, sing a song, destroy one of the room's walls, and leave the space, all while allowing him to film their performance of labor.

Engaging with ideas of work and its evidence, the piece echoes the market's contradictory dynamics, inhabiting rather than correcting them. Its excessive documentation speaks to the duality of record=keeping within the market. Hattori's footage provides irrefutable evidence of the day laborers' work, but it acts as another kind of evidence -a predatory surveillance- that speaks to many day laborers' fear of exposure. While the product of their labor is on view, the workers are absent from the gallery, a physical invisibility that mimics their bureaucratic erasure. The artist himself acts out one of the market's most pervasive injustices: although the day laborers created the installation, Hattori, their employer, takes credit for their work.

The absence fo the artist's handwork initially distinguishes Exinclusivity from the intricately crafted cardboard sculptures for which he is best known. Works like V (2009), a to-scale sculpture of a V-2 missile, and Oh, the Humanity! (2009), a 23-foot-long replica of the Hindenburg, display meticulous craftsmanship. Composed of equal parts positive and negative space, the normally monolithic structures are reduced to fragile and collapsed skeletons in Hattori's hands. Exinclusivity is an inversion of these works' principles: where they accumulated form, this exhibit breaks forms down; where they evince the artist's hand, this project negates his touch. But rather than isolating this piece from his larger body of work, these contradictions display a thematic unity with Hattori's practice, which is characterized by dynamic polarities. The artist is adept at mining meaning from pairing supposed opposites, and as we compare this broken wall with excavated flying machines and weapons of the past, we find it is the tension of their differences that ultimately unites them.