An Exercise in Gallery Hypnosis

The Working Life, by Danish art collective Superflex, seems oddly out of place in the GL Strand museum’s exhibit. This was likely because the ten-minute video is a short hypnosis session, somehow triggered by the audience member picking up the headphones in the room in which it is screened; the hypnotist (Tommy Rosenkilde) then guides them through an involved mental imagery surrounding a working environment.

The hypnosis starts with the participant looking into a large busy building. Inside, they see hundreds of workers busily attending to the day’s tasks. The participant is then instructed to enter and begin working alongside them. They are told that working makes them happy. Then, the participant simply cannot keep up and forgets how to perform the tasks at hand, so they are instructed to go to the bathroom for a moment of solace. They look at themselves in the mirror and feel the shame of not being able to produce at the level at their peers, until the hypnotist instructs the participant to let go of this shame and let it wash through the building. The participant then is instructed to walk outside and observe how all the other buildings are empty and how the buses are no longer running anymore—these workers are all, as it turns out, “hiding in the bathroom with you” and have liberated themselves from their working lives as well.

The piece is intended to critique the pressure to prioritize productivity and a robust working life within capitalist societies. The artists’ decision to perform this critique through a hypnosis video was a fascinating—and ultimately successful—move.

Most videos displayed in a gallery are passive experiences in which the viewer waits for the beginning and views what is provided. In The Working Life, however, the viewer constructs the entire experience. The lone man featured in the video becomes inconsequential. He is not the subject of the piece, nor are the formal qualities of the video’s composition, lighting, sound, etc.—the viewer is. Indeed, by virtue of the fact that the video is an exercise in hypnosis, the viewers are directly required to place themselves in the scenario that the artists are attempting to critique. Much art desires to construct a space in which the viewer can experience hypothetical situations or understand the parameters of the artist’s societal criticisms. In making hypnosis the medium of an artwork, however, The Working Life does this in a uniquely direct way. The construction of this hypothetical space in which the viewer can consider the artists’ intent becomes not just a byproduct of the art piece, but rather is the art piece itself.

This piece is particularly interesting within the context of Denmark’s uniquely large social security system. Inherent to such a robust welfare system is the cultural goal of work as not only a benefit to oneself, but also a benefit to society as a whole. The ideas set forth by The Working Life subvert the entire premise of and functionality of such a large social safety network.

The major complaint about this piece is a simple matter of technicality. In the gallery space, I could very clearly hear the sounds of the video being screened next door, even with the large headphones provided. Given that this piece is such an exercise in concentration and hypnosis, it would have been nice to not have to work against the distractions of the loud video playing next door.

All in all, though, The Working Life was wildly thought provoking and pleasantly unsettling. To be guided through a hypnosis session during a visit to an art gallery was not just jarring in retrospect, but also deeply rewarding. The concept of hypnosis as an artistic medium is fascinating, and Superflex executed it in a quiet and powerful way.