Vol. 1, No. 17: Politically Perplexed
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Dear Soft Labor,
I work as an arts administrator in a university art gallery. The university’s art program is one of the best in the world, and I am grateful to work within a cohort of renowned artists and curious, talented students. It’s an understatement to say that we’re all stricken by the ongoing political disaster both at home and abroad. It is exceptionally distressing to watch the university grapple with Trump’s policies and their impact on the school and most of all, the students.
Here’s the real situation though: I’ve been shocked to discover that my colleagues and I are not in unilateral agreement. I have an administrative colleague—someone I must interact with daily—who frequently expresses pro-ICE sentiments at work. She does this in the social sidebars between meetings, but sometimes she even drops by my office to “chat.” I always feel like she’s attempting to suss out allies and I feel that my general friendliness has made me her mark.
I am so surprised to encounter this kind of thinking. And yet, isn’t a university precisely where one might expect to find differing viewpoints? How do I handle this?
From my office,
Politically Perplexed
Dear Perplexed,
We reserve this diagnosis for rare circumstances but Perplexed, you are, in a word, triggered. Are you really surprised to encounter pro-ICE sentiments in the (presumably copacetic) workplace, or are you simply uncomfortable with the feelings doing so raises inside of you?
Allow us to paraphrase feminism’s second wave and remind you that the personal is indeed political. This is an opportunity to exercise your personal beliefs in an everyday setting, regardless of how interpersonally difficult it may feel to do so. In short: Make it clear to this person in no uncertain terms that you do not agree with her position. You don't have to be a Pollyanna about it. Serve it straight up. We guarantee that she won’t be dropping by your office anytime soon.
Hold your ground.
Yours,
Soft Labor
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🔗 Thanks to Verso for the galley copy of Trevor Paglen's new book, "How to See Like a Machine: Images in the Age of AI." We've known Paglen's work since our San Francisco days—a solid twenty-plus years—and have been thrilled to watch its evolution since the first time we encountered it at experimental gallery The Lab. From the book: "We've entered a protean, targeted visual culture that shows us what it believes we want to see, measures our reactions, then morphs itself to optimize for the reactions and actions it wants." "How to See Like a Machine" promises to be a boon for an entire field of visual and critical thinking.
🔗 Paglen is and has been way ahead of the conversation surrounding AI; his work on the relationship between machine learning and images vastly predates the public release of ChatGPT and subsequent public discourse. Here's a piece by Sarah M. Miller published by Aperature back in 2024, "Trevor Paglen on Artificial Intelligence, UFOs, and Mind Control."
🔗 John Vincler's recent feature for Cultured magazine previews Paul Chan's solo exhibition, “Automa Mon Amour,” which opens this Thursday, March 12th, at his longtime gallery, Greene Naftali. Chan and Vincler discuss the latest additions to his Breathers series but more provocatively, Paul' (or, Paul Prime) a personal A.I. agent—or what Vincler deems a "computational self portrait"—trained on his own personal data. Chan has been working on this project privately since 2018. Like Paglen, Chan began grappling with artificial intelligence years before ChatGPT went public. Paul's Soft Labor Questionnaire is one of our favorites.
🔗 The 2026 Whitney Biennial is upon us, along with the associated crush of art press hot takes. We skipped the opening and don't read press before we see shows, but we did enjoy this Artnet feature by Sarah Cascone on Andrea Fraser's mom, the 92 year-old Carmen De Manta Flores, who looks amazing.
🔗 Anrealage designer Kunihiko Morinaga's ready-to-wear collection at Paris Fashion Week stunned us. Garments were embedded with up to 10,000 individually-controlled LED lights in a runway show inspired by the 1995 anime film Ghost in the Shell. WWD covered the whole runway, but Vogue's Instagram footage captures the true spectacle of the work.
🔗 We're heading to Silverlens gallery ASAP for Jen Liu's solo show, Pound of Flesh. In the words of Wassan Al-Khudhairi, "Jen Liu excavates a haunting parallel: the invisible labor sustaining our digital present finds its mirror in the erased histories of Chinese migrant women who entered the United States between 1850 and 1899." Jen answered the Soft Labor Questionnaire a while back.
