Time for a new post. There’s always something unsettling about reading stuff written a while ago. Like finding some forgotten adolescent writing and only half believing that you could have been like that. The first few posts could be by someone else, but this is mainly because I was attempting to find my boundaries, by trying out whatever came to hand, and sinking into books and theory.
Since then I have had to earn some money, always a great leveller – In a way it suits me, because it fits with the way that I tend to work on projects – something akin to a brewing process;
Put loads of unlikely ingredients into the pot, dilute with generalities, boil with intense concentration, put on lid, and let the process happen, lift lid occasionally to add carbohydrates (careful not to disturb contents). Wait/do something else until you think you have forgotten about it, and no longer notice the all pervading smell. When the time is right siphon off some of the stuff and try it – If you are lucky it will be good for cooking.
So you see some completely unrelated work purely for the money is a great way of forgetting the real work – plus the all pervading smell of the stuff that is fermenting means that everything that occurs in the surrogate workplace, could provide the magic ingredient, the thing that could never have been planned.
Some themes are beginning to emerge – I have been working in a barn on a dairy-farm, along with 3 others, making a faux building for some press-launch photo-shoot. While there I have noticed the way that the people I am working with have very different involvement with the day’s tasks. A younger maker seems to suspend life during the work hours, and treats everything like a race. Another older maker is moralistic about the disciplines of work, he’s the one that times coffee-breaks, gives the impression that although like sour medicine, work somehow builds dignity and the sort of respect that he values. Yet another was once a go-getter, but a fairly unpleasant brush with bankruptcy, made him philosophical about suspending quality of existence to fund some notional better life in the future. The farmer moves things around all day, he is always at work, and yet he never leaves home, he plays with his kids while he fills the udder-wash container, there is no work/play distinction that you would notice. Then the clients arrive, they are shockingly young, with them comes corporate culture – positive strokes – primacy of paperwork – friendly management banter, a learned language that says far more than it seems. The ‘creatives’ (bored photographers), up talking everything, aware of their feint celebrity and using it well to get what they want painlessly. Then there are the cows, who feed, then feed some more – drag themselves to the parlour, and feed while they wait. Dead curious.
