Lunch Break

Through an anthropological perspective of documenting the socially invisible, Sharon Lockhart brings to the forefront a working culture overlooked by the same society it helps sustain. Lunch Break is the result of the artist’s yearlong study into the everyday routine of the shipyard workers’ schedule at Bath Iron Works, in Bath, Maine. After traveling to Vienna, New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Maine, St. Louis, and Milan, the exhibition is currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, though this iteration includes only a handful of photos and one video, rather than the show in its entirety.

Displayed within an installation resembling the interior of a massive pipeline, the eighty-three-minute-long video Lunch Break (2008) is a single shot along the factory’s corridor in slow motion. Lockhart is known for redefining spatial boundaries between social disciplines and various artistic mediums, and Lunch Break is no exception. The dark interior of the enclosed screening area creates the illusion of that featured corridor extending its boundaries toward the audience, while the monotonous and overpowering industrial hum of the accompanying audio further heightens the work’s immersive quality. The awkward feelings of impatience and unease that surface as a result of the film’s manipulated speed physically remind viewers of the uncomfortable distance between their world and the workers’. Lockhart’s technique of fusing the boundaries between photography and film transforms a passing moment—a lunch break—into a more permanent condition and forces viewers to stop, take notice, and consider the realities of working class culture. The film demands that viewers take a closer look into the socio-cultural foundations of America’s geopolitical economic structure, to a subtle yet disenchanting effect.

Lunch Break (Assembly Hall, Bath Iron Works, November 5, 2007, Bath, Maine) (still), 2008; 35mm film transferred to HD, 80 min. Courtesy of the Artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles. © Sharon Lockhart.

The photographs of the break room and lunch boxes in the adjoining room provide further insight into the workers’ cultural lifestyle, while the free newspaper-style brochure that accompanies the show invites the viewer to participate in that lifestyle. The Lunch Break Times is the second edition of a paper initially launched at the opening of Lockhart’s first version of the show, in Maine. It includes diverse content, including recipes, crosswords, historical photos, workers’ obituaries, material related to lunch breaks in general, Bay Area narratives, an article on historical Bloody Thursday, and Lockhart’s mother’s account of her daughter’s relationship with newspapers. Another nostalgic symbol of a dying culture, and one closely affiliated with the labor force, the paper constitutes yet another means through which Lockhart successfully pauses time and unites the past with the present, the relevant with the forgotten, the local with the international, and the transient with the ongoing.

Lunch Break is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through January 16, 2012.

Maria Nicolacopoulou is a London-based independent curator currently conducting curatorial research at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.  She holds a BA in Philosophy from CUNY, a Master of Research in Humanities & Cultural Studies from the London Consortium and is working towards a further MA in Museum Studies from Johns Hopkins University.