Jankowski’s work centers the belief that crafting depictions of class structure, class identities, and the relationships between individual classes is quite an ambiguous challenge. Where did the gallery director get the scar on her hand and is her ring any different from the one worn by the custodian? How about the watches worn by the artist and the security guard? Are the hands of people in executive positions more delicate and better groomed than those of the blue-collar personnel? The longer we look at the photographs, the more aware we grow of just how dangerous such a method of determining class is and how biased and biasing our gaze can be – of the risky proximity between a class-conscious and classist gaze. By producing a series of black-and-white photographs – intended to be hung next to one another on a gallery wall, in identical frames –Jankowski provokes us to identify (also by way of comparison) specific hallmarks of class position. Jankowski not only points out the picture’s ancillary, supporting status – the missing link of visual production – but, by rephotographing it, delves deeper into the matter of class differences. To create this template for his “powerful” image of the working class, he took a photo that exposed the fundamental attributes of social classes: their relationality and interdependence. In the ancillary picture, Siqueiros coincidentally captured the process of transforming a work tool into an aesthetic object and a symbol of a social class. Held out before the artist, the slender, bejeweled hand with painted nails presents the drill bit, which likely soon found itself blown up in one of the artists’ murals, in line with the then prevailing iconographic framework that associated the working class with the underground, the drilling of tunnels and extractive labor (simultaneously offering a visual interpretation of the social ladder metaphor). But even more interesting than the contradictions between his ideology and both his lifestyle and the provenance of the funding that fueled his artistic work, was the somewhat incidental peek behind the scenes of his own artistic effort, that is the creation – in this case the painting – of representations of the working class. One of the photographs in the series, the one featuring the director, found itself on the cover of the first of two Widok issues that will explore the equally convoluted relationship between class and representation.Īccording to the author, the series, titled Studies for a Monument to the Bourgeois Working Class, aims to expose the inconsistencies in the position of Siqueiros himself – who was both champion of the working class, eager to embrace radical political solutions (he took part in the failed attempt to assassinate Leon Trotsky), and a bon vivant reluctant to turn away the patronage of rich business magnates.

In 2012, German artist Christian Jankowski found it and used it to create a series of twenty-eight photographs showing employees of the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros and the Proyectos Monclova gallery in Mexico City – ranging from the executive director and the curator, to custodians, drivers, and receptionists – holding Siqueiros’s picture.

Diving straight into the center of this mise-en-abyme: the archival photograph was taken in the workshop of acclaimed Mexican painter and mural artist David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974). We see a hand holding a picture of a hand holding a drill bit. The story behind the photograph on the cover is particularly complex. Christian Jankowski, Studies for a Monument to the Bourgeois Working Class, 2012, courtesy of the artist

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