Danielle Dean with HereIn

Asset (American Road!, Ford, 1952), 2019, gouache on board, car stickers, aluminum frame, 29 1/2 x 39 in. (photo: Alwin Lay) 

[Image description: A framed painting of a landscape. At the bottom of the image, a road stretches in front of a mountain range. Overlaid on top of the blue sky is a mass of various black bugs.]

Danielle Dean’s practice combines historical material with fictional devices to explore relationships among race, gender, class and capitalist structures of labor and living. Much of her work pulls from media and advertising, which she transforms through drawing, animation, video, installation, and, often, collaboration. Dean talks with HereIn about her larger practice, as well as her current work on the Ford Motor Company and e-commerce site Amazon, an evolving project that will be featured in an upcoming exhibition at the Tate Britain in London. 

The series arose from Dean’s interest in the history of the Fordist labor system and how it continues to shape contemporary life. Some background for HereIn readers: In 1913, Henry Ford constructed the first moving assembly line, breaking up work into repetitive tasks and radically shortening the time it took to produce a car. In doing so, Ford transformed the worker’s experience of labor in the ultimate quest for capitalist efficiency and profit. During a stint teaching in Michigan, Dean began research in the Ford Motor Company’s archives, which led to a series of works drawn from historical advertisements. 

As she completed further research, she learned of the company’s activities in Brazil. In the late 1920s, Ford purchased two million acres of land in Brazil to build a city, which he christened “Fordlândia.” The company cleared enormous swaths of the Amazonian rainforest to build a rubber plant that would supply Ford’s factory in Detroit with rubber for tires and other car parts. Fashioned after a Midwestern town, Fordlândia was to be an industrial utopia, where Ford projected his ideal ways of working and living onto Indigenous laborers. Not only did Brazil’s Indigenous people reject Ford’s lifestyle— which included year-round, 9-to-5 workdays, vegetarianism, and square dancing for leisure— and stage regular strikes, his effort to mold the Amazonian rainforest into an industrialized landscape failed dramatically. The unnatural manner in which Ford planted rubber trees drew masses of native insects that fed on the expansive crop, decimating the very material upon which Ford intended to capitalize. Fordlândia shut down in 1945. Dean’s drawings and videos illustrate the landscape’s transformation, dissolution, and rebellion. 

The project’s next iteration, which Dean is currently developing, will include collaborators who perform online labor for e-commerce company Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program. These laborers perform repetitive, tedious click work, earning, on average, $2 per hour. The program is perhaps the ultimate example of the Fordist assembly line in today’s world. Dean will be working across digital space to collaborate with AMT workers to create a series of drawings, sculptures, and photographs. 

HereIn: Looking at your biography, you’ve had a varied geographical trajectory. You were born in Alabama, grew up in a suburb of London, and have lived in New York, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Detroit, Houston, and now San Diego. Do you feel that place has affected your practice?

Danielle Dean: I grew up in England and in 2010 I moved from London to Los Angeles to study at CalArts. This move blew my mind because it was the first time I’d ever lived outside of Britain. I realized that the context of being in England was really framing how I thought about the world and even how I spoke. 

I was born in the U.S. but I was a baby when I left, so I don’t remember anything from this period. So culturally I’m British—I grew up in a white, working-class community—but I’m also half Nigerian, and this situation of being a social exception to the rule was very formative for me. I don’t look typically “British” and was never really treated as fully British because of the way racism works in Britain. But this was an interesting contrast when I moved to America and realized that race operates slightly differently here; even though we use the same language—English— there’s a real difference in how we perceive the world. In other words, just as there is not a singular Britain or a singular America, there is not a singular form of Blackness.

And yet, despite this lack of singularity, I was struck by how there were also a lot of continuities: things I saw in the U.K. that were also present in the U.S., like consumer products or cultural issues that circulate globally. Certain things circulate across the whole world because of the movement of goods and services through capitalism. That was very interesting to me. Realizing this really influenced the way I started to think about making work at CalArts. It was about how consumerism frames who we are, how we think. I started out looking at language found in advertising or newspapers and then it developed further as I continued to make work through the years. Now I am also thinking about the material contexts that enable consumerism, like systems that reproduce class, race, and gender. 

Private Road, 2020, HD video, 36 sec. clip from 4 min. video

[Video description: The animated video moves through heavy rain in a dense forest landscape of a type found in North America. Halfway through the video, the scene transitions to a lush rainforest.]

HereIn: Are there any particularities about Southern California that have influenced your work?

Dean: It was such a cultural shock for me to come to California. Particularly Los Angeles, because of its relationship with the ‘culture industry’: the production of movies, advertising, and all these different products of culture that get disseminated around the world that I would watch on the TV in my mom’s small apartment in England. I’ve only been in San Diego for a year and that has its own interesting aspects that I’m discovering. But I do think California has had a big influence on my work. It was one of the reasons I chose to go to CalArts. I grew up watching Disney films and CalArts was founded by Walt Disney. In a way, my work is often about deconstructing the damage of watching films like Snow White as a kid, which was my mom’s favorite film. Classic Disney films were beautiful and captivating. But the ideal of whiteness they implicitly conveyed was really awful to watch as a person of color, even though as a young child you don’t usually understand where those hurt feelings are coming from. 

HereIn: Something that comes up in most of the writing about your work and you include in your bio is that you were born to a Nigerian father and British mother in Alabama. Does that specific background shape your work? 

Dean: My Nigerian background is a big part of who I am, including the ways in which I don’t know it. This dimension of being connected to Africa, but through a lack or a gap of some kind, is a powerful experience. I think it always comes back to how much we as humans are framed by our surroundings and our historical conditions. Class is also a big part of my work, and the intersection between class (or labor) and race. 

“I am hiding in here,” 1919, 2018, watercolor on paper, 20 x 14 in.

[Image description: A framed watercolor depicting the left side of an open book. Illustrations of antique furniture are spread across the white page. A figure leans out from behind a sideboard at the bottom right corner. They have medium-dark skin and short black hair, and are wearing a green top. On the left edge of the page is a brightly colored curtain with an elaborate pattern of fruit and birds on it.]

HereIn: Your practice is deeply rooted in research and in archives. It’s apparent looking back through your work’s trajectory and, most recently, in Bazar and your current project on Ford and Amazon. How do you select your material and what is your research process like?

Dean: It’s very intense. I love research. That’s really a key part of the work I make: to actually use archival material in a different way than how it’s housed and ‘supposed’ to be used, depending on where you get it from. So recontextualizing the archival material through drawing, for example, is one way that I do it, or through digital animation or making props and utilizing those within videos, performances, or in dramatic scripts. It’s exciting for me because our history and our future has to do with the materials that ground our lived experience, how they also frame and articulate our lived realities. Or, to put it another way: what’s the materiality of culture? 

In the case of looking at archives of advertising, you can say that advertising is this amorphous, ephemeral thing that surrounds us. Everyone knows it definitely influences us— that’s not new—but how it influences us and actually how it is present materially in that context is something I’m drawn to. So, for example, for the history of a print ad, sometimes I’ll look through archives of where print ads are geographically situated, seeking to unearth the specific context that is abstracted by the ad. Sometimes I’ll look through periodicals or magazines— I’ve done that in the past and selected out copy from adverts. For early videos I did that a lot. The scripts were based on copy, during a period where I was really obsessed with language. 

It is important for me to look at this history, because a previous ‘print’ ad printed on paper has a direct relationship to the way advertising works now, on Facebook and Twitter for example. There is a visual language that is connected to a media-history of how we live amongst advertising and the products that are sold to us. 

Fordland, 2019, HD video, 2 min. 44 sec.

[Video description here.]

In the case of the Ford project I am currently working on, there are two sets of archives: the first is print ads of Ford cars that go back to the 1920s. Sometimes those are physical print ads I get hold of and other times they might be a digital file I found that is a scan of an advert. For example, I visited a private archive in Detroit kept by an old advertising professional. I got to photograph what he had, so those photographs became part of the project. I basically redraw and translate them for the work. The second archive is the official Ford Motor Company archive in Dearborn. Here I focused on Fordlândia, an industrial company town in the Brazilian Amazon that Ford tried to set up the 1920s. I spent days going through, reading and photographing stuff that I found compelling in this archive. This formulated the basis for a series of drawing works and a new video I’m currently working on. It’s really important to me that the videos are based on material histories. Most of the time it’s about rigor— there’s something in the world and I want to use it, because I believe that is the way to engage in a process of informed change, as opposed to just using my own personal intuition. It’s about how history is present now and also will be present in the future, that the future is also basically the past.

HereIn: You’re using these concrete archival materials, but in a manner that is inventive. 

Dean: I think it’s ok to have a relationship between a material reality and the imagination. This is really important to me, carefully releasing the ties of context and the ties of history to those things.  I’m utilizing abstraction because of the fact that there is a big part of the history of art that relates to abstraction. I’m using it to relinquish it from its context in history, to then make a possibility that maybe is different or open or is about sharing that possibility with the participants I’m working with. It’s like a collective moment of both discussing and figuring out the present but also creating a real, actual potential. 

HereIn: That’s illuminating as to how you avoid one of the pitfalls of working with archives, in that your work does not feel didactic. It really opens up this material. The way you’re making these connections between historical archives and the present is so powerful. Can you tell me more about this piece on Ford and how you’re connecting that material with the current labor of Amazon workers?

Dean: It’s really quite a simple gesture in some ways because I was thinking about the history of Ford and the Ford assembly line. We take it for granted, but wow, the ways in which work is divided up to produce cars in an assembly line. That’s something very specific to Ford and it’s so evident in Detroit. I was living in Detroit for a while, so that’s why I turned toward it. I’m in this place that at one point in history was the most booming city because of the industry of cars. And because of this moment in history, the development of a Fordist way of working exploded into every aspect of our lives. 

I was thinking about certain types of work we are engaged in. Perhaps not you and I, in a direct way, because we’re in a different type of industry. But, say you are a person who, like the majority of people, does a job, for example, delivering Amazon goods. You’re one part of a massive chain of jobs and you’re doing that one thing over and over again. This Fordist mechanical manner of producing a car has been expanded into the post-Fordist situation that we’re in now. It’s in many different ways, not just in the division of labor but also how labor is accounted for in a numerical way so that the most profit can be extracted from it.

I’m interested in how that affects us, what that does to our lives, and how that creates a type of subject or a type of person. The Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) example was something I came across as an extreme version of this, as well as a digital version of work being channeled through an online space. AMT structures what is known as “click-work,” such as quick surveys, questionnaires, data processing, and so on. Many other people are doing the same work across the world through the online AMT interface, and then that labor is taken by a big corporation and they can gather that data and plug it into all manner of capitalist enterprises. It’s interesting to think about the future of this type of workspace. There were, before Ford, other ways of doing it. I was listening to a radio story the other day and they were talking about this Taylorist production, I think in Japan, that didn’t isolate the workers in the same way. It produced the same sort of results but it was more about allowing the worker to develop and learn new skills. In America particularly, it’s so much about this feeling that there is no escape from capitalism. But we are questioning that now. It structures our very breath, how we use our bodies, the way we wake up, the way the workday is divided up, and how much time we get to enjoy ourselves. How much leisure time we have is actually another source of the assembly line. It’s all there in the history of Ford cars.

Installation view, Bazar, 2018, 47 Canal, New York

[Image description: Multi-colored cutouts are arranged in the gallery space, some standing on the floor and others hanging from the ceiling, like a stage set in the theater. On the right is a camping tent, while on the left is a curtain with an ornate pattern of fruit and birds. Interspersed between them are foliage and small vignettes of landscapes. The video Bazar is projected on a screen in the center of the installation.]

HereIn: There is a dizzying array of references in your work. You’re layering together multiple mediums, as well, and it feels like there’s a parallel between the layering of information and of form. What is your strategy for weaving together these different components in your work?

Dean: It’s to not give too much hierarchy. For Bazar I entered an archive of shopping catalogues for BHV (Bazar de l'Hôtel de Ville), the shopping mall in the center of Paris. They had this amazing archive of shopping catalogues and they gave me access to all of it. Now I think it’s not open to the public anymore, so I really got in there at a time when it was possible. This archive of shopping catalogues starts in the 1800s and goes up to the present. They hadn’t gone online with all of this stuff. They were still sending out physical catalogues to all these French shoppers of BHV around Paris. 

Bazar, 2018, HD video, 4 min. 38 sec. clip of 10 min. video

[Video description here.]

In terms of method, with that project, I did several things. I was working with a group of young women who live in the peripheries of Paris, because I wanted the project to talk about the ways in which a certain type of nationalism or a kind of ideal of being “Parisian” developed in relation to consumer goods. Bazar de l'Hôtel de Ville is a key example of that, to think through how a shopping center can be this institution of power. I wanted to work with people who are French but may not be perceived as French because they come from colonies France used to own, like Guadeloupe and Martinique. I began a collaboration with these young women of color who are from second or third-generation migrant families, but have difficulty being seen and treated as French. So that was one strategy, to analyze that material, not just by myself but with other people who are affected by it. I always like to do that, because otherwise it’s just a project about me. In the case of Amazon, they’re workers from AMT spread out all over the world. The other strategy I employ is to use the archive as a source of material. For example, I’ll re-draw the landscape of an advert and that will become material for a video. It can become digital, it can be drawn. It’s often about that, translating something that was once drawn by hand to another medium. Maybe it’s drawn by hand again and then it’s translated into a digital file that can be printed many, many times and sent around to different museums. I like that process because that’s how material moves globally anyway, so I’m using that method, also, to point out the particularities of this global network and how our subjectivity and our collective life is constructed and how it might be changed.

HereIn: Collaboration is prominent in your work— you collaborate with your family, laborers, performers, and other artists. What does that process mean for you? 

Dean: I love it, it’s just wonderful. Part of it is about engaging workers that are often purposefully isolated and exploited, and bringing this exclusion to the foreground. Properly acknowledging their work conditions, their lives and dreams, and giving them a forum to think through the possibilities of collective action, as well as paying them proper wages, of course! Last Friday I had a Zoom meeting with a young woman who works on Amazon Mechanical Turk and she wants to join the project. She was so great. I was talking to her about her life. Maybe I’m just nosy, but I often get completely and utterly distracted by everyone’s life. Maybe that’s why my work ends up getting complicated, because I just allow for things to be in it. I put a framework together and then I allow for my collaborators to break that framework. I think that’s when it’s the most exciting. If I just try to control every aspect of it, it becomes a little dead. I’m both a control freak and a person who likes to collaborate. Everything I do ends up being a collaboration. I’m always working in that way because all people are both fun and deep thinkers, if they are given the chance.

This conversation has been edited by HereIn and the artist for length and clarity.