SMILE? CRY POWER (2019)

SMILE? CRY POWER is a video work (9:24 minutes) that seeks to inscribe power into a gesture of crying by placing it into an “unnatural” position of authority, while in contrast with a depiction of affective labour through a secondary flight attendant character. The basis of bringing in the flight attendant figure as the model of affective labour within capitalist space is based on the original text on the subject, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling by Arlie Russell Hochschild, and then the contemporary reading of it in Affective Labour and Feminist Politics by Johanna Oksala, who takes a Feminist- Marxist approach. Schoenberg is attempting to create an image, that of grotesque tears as seen in the image above, that undermines the commodification of the affect for a capitalist, patriarchal system. In the lowered sound, slowed down image and scale, the affect that may be produced by the viewer is intended to be one without economic value, in contrast to the highly commercialized gestures of the flight attendant.