The Lunch Break Times, October
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1 The OCT. 2011 / BAY AREA EDITION LUNCH BREAK TIMES d d SHARON LOCKHART: LUNCH BREAK RUDOLF FRIELING Newspapers these days seem to be for our daily 20-minute bus or train commutes or for those too-long waits at the bus stop or train station. Or for our lunch break. Sure, some people still read actual newspapers, but most of us now feed our notoriously short attention spans by constantly checking our smartphones. There’s no denying that the end of the newspaper as we know it is nearing. But as the newspaper is increasingly becoming obsolete, the Los Angeles–based artist Sharon Lockhart has decided to take a closer look at this medium. These free copies of the Lunch Break Times are an extension of the exhibition Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break. Lockhart and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a fine art museum located in a city that has cut almost all of its ties to its industrial past, including its legendary steel and shipping industries, share with many of the collaborators a desire to understand better what happened to the region’s industrial labor force, what cultures have emerged, what fights were fought, and what rights were gained. The right to a lunch break is a crucial one in this context. To this Sharon Lockhart. Outside AB Tool Crib: Matt, Mike, Carey, Steven, John, Mel and Karl, 2008. Framed chromogenic print, 49 1/16 x 62 7/8 in. end, the artist has composed a wonderful menu of voices, stories, and images in a spirit High Tide, Low Ebb SARDINE MAN of collaboration and generosity. JOSHUA JELLY-SCHAPIRO JOE HANNAN In 2008, Lockhart began a long-term collaboration with the workers of Bath Iron I left my home in Georgia The Colossus of Rhodes was one of the Seven Works, an historic shipyard in Bath, Maine Headed for the ’Frisco bay . Wonders of the Ancient World. Dedicated in (although Lockhart was born in Massachusetts, 280 BC, the hundred-foot bronze statue of the she spent much of her childhood in Maine, and It makes all kinds of sense that the modern Greek sun god Helios stood astride the har- her family still lives there). Over the course of soul song most identified with San Francisco bor of the ancient city of Rhodes, a maritime one year, she interacted with the workers and should mimic the sound of waves lapping a crossroads in the eastern Mediterranean. gained their trust and collaboration. From this pier and be voiced by a singer who had washed Drivers entering Maine on Route 1 from experience, she produced a series of works up from afar. When Otis Redding composed New Hampshire in the 1950s and 1960s were that include the films Lunch Break, Exit, and “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” in 1967, he greeted by a similar colossus—a 30-foot figure Double Tide. These works also include three was not only a Bay Area resident but a musi- of a fisherman in yellow slickers. It bore the series of photographs: one depicts workers’ cian passing through: he penned its first verse legend “Maine Sardines Welcome You to Va- lunch boxes, which function as unconventional on a friend’s houseboat in Sausalito, after his cationland and Sardineland.” The sign was an portraits; a second, certain independent storied appearance at the Monterey Pop Fes- emblem of the thriving sardine fishery along businesses in the shipyard, where workers tival down the coast that summer. Released the Maine coast—and the 50 or so sardine sell snacks and sundry items to other just after the Summer of Love had made San canneries that then dotted that coast. In an workers; and a third, genre scenes of workers Francisco the center of global hippiedom, and old postcard of the sign, a small man leans during their lunch break. The photographs as the Black Panthers were building Oakland’s nonchalantly against its shin. Who hatched foreground the actuality of individual objects, reputation as a font of black revolution, “Dock the idea for the sign? Did it actually exist, or routines, and spaces, from the stickers on “Giant Sardine Fisherman.” Postcard of promotional of the Bay” used a timeless leitmotif of African highway sign, c. 1950–70. Painted wood. 30 ft. high. CONTINUED ON PAGE 22 the lunch boxes to the handwritten signs American culture—sea, ships, and waiting— in the snack booths. In addition, Lockhart to offer a timely invocation of this newly hip also produced an artist book titled Lunch region. Yet, as with most great pop laments, Break featuring selections from an archive part of the song’s lasting power comes from of images she compiled—ranging from Old a story that resonates with a larger social his- Master paintings to contemporary works— tory. In this case, it is the history of thousands representing workers on their lunch breaks of emigrants from the Jim Crow South who’d and related subjects. come west looking not to put daisies in their SFMOMA’s exhibition focuses on the hair but to build the boats and guns that won centerpiece of Lockhart’s project: an World War II—and who then remained, after 80-minute film installation titled Lunch Break the shipyards and factories closed, to make (2008). In this film, Lockhart’s camera travels the bay their home. in extreme slow motion past a long row of The U.S. effort to defeat the Axis powers workers as they take their lunch in a hallway during the Second World War brought more that stretches nearly the entire length of the profound changes to the Bay Area than to shipyard. The depicted space is echoed in the any other region. The larger Bay Area—one architecture of the viewing room, which was of the world’s great natural harbors, linked by designed by the architects Frank Escher and rail to the Midwestern steel needed to build Ravi GuneWardena. In addition, it is enhanced ships, and by water to the war’s key Pacific by a musical composition that includes theater once those ships were built—was industrial sounds collected from the factory transformed with astounding speed into an space by the composer Becky Allen and the immense shipbuilding center. It turned out filmmaker James Benning. The exhibition also 1,400 vessels during the war—more than a features a small selection of the photographs. Woman welders on lunch break, Richmond Shipbuilding Corporation, Shipyard Number 2, California, c. 1942–45. CONTINUED ON PAGE 21 CONTINUED ON PAGE 23 Courtesy Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University. LBT_2ndEd_p02_2.indd 1 9/26/11 5:47 PM 2 Shifts in the Wind WHY CAN’T I GLENN STOVER The Golden Gate Bridge, one of the great- CATCH est architectural icons ever built, will com- memorate its 75th anniversary in May 2012. A BREAK? This kingly traverse over the Golden Gate Strait is a monumental tribute to its build- RAMONA MIKELSON ers and the clout they carried with them to Today I spent lunch outside. We sat on the construction site daily. They were an all-male menagerie of ironworkers (riveters benches, laughing and lounging languidly and cable spinners), carpenters, electricians, in the sun. It was pleasant to talk about the engineers, painters, divers, and laborers. New Testament in preparation for our test The women’s workforce would rise up soon next period. It was beautiful and simple enough, as “Rosie” and legions of female and a break from the chaos of six class pe- riveters with their “We Can Do It!” attitude riods strung together and then three hours would make history working for victory dur- of homework. Yet I know that later in the ing World War II. year, when the sun isn’t shining as brightly, My original intention was to interview any- and rain streaks the windows, I will be sit- one—builders or their family members—con- ting inside an ugly, crowded room. Then nected with the construction of the bridge. I I will run to the next crowded room to do learned that Harry Fogle, believed to be the some research before my advanced place- last surviving builder, died in February 2011 at ment literature class, to finish that last age 97. But I connected with Dick Zampa, Jr., essay, to read that last paragraph in my whose grandfather, Al Zampa, was one of the psych book. This is what my lunch break, original builders—and the namesake of the and my friends’ lunch breaks, have come Carquinez Bridge (Alfred Zampa Memorial to: studying and rushing through heaps Bridge), the first bridge in the world named of homework that we couldn’t complete in honor of a blue-collar worker. Dick is an the night before (even if we hadn’t squan- ironworker and Apprenticeship Director for dered that half-hour on the new episode the Field Ironworkers District. Our conversa- of 30 Rock). tion gave me a sense of what those original In economics, we learned about oppor- builders were made of. tunity costs. The “real cost” of something is Dick told me in one word what might much more than its dollars-and-cents val- motivate a man of that period to show up daily for some 10 hours of strenuous, gruel- ue, or even its apparent value. That lunch ing, death-defying activities that pay alone break that I spend in the library reading could not justify. He spoke of a kind of in- or writing is directly costing me the hap- testinal fortitude…well, actually, he referred piness and freedom of the sun outside and more bluntly to those twin orbs of the male a table full of friends.