{"id":38527,"date":"2022-04-21T11:52:00","date_gmt":"2022-04-21T09:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/prospections\/what-a-way-to-make-a-living\/"},"modified":"2022-04-26T13:50:00","modified_gmt":"2022-04-26T11:50:00","slug":"what-a-way-to-make-a-living","status":"publish","type":"prospection","link":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/prospections\/what-a-way-to-make-a-living\/","title":{"rendered":"What a way to make a living"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For\u00a0his\u00a0One Year Performance<\/em>\u00a01980<\/em>\u20131981<\/em>:\u00a0Time Clock Piece<\/em> (1980\u20131981),<\/em>\u00a0the artist Tehching Hsieh set out to register his arrival at a worker\u2019s time clock in his Manhattan studio, every hour, on the hour, day and night, for an entire year, beginning on 11 April 1980. He photographed himself each time he \u201cclocked in,\u201d and the 8627 resulting images were then made into a time-lapse film, condensing 365 days into 6 minutes.<\/p>\n

At the foreground of the work\u2019s multiple temporal registers are two standard units of time: the hour and the year. But while the imposed mechanical structure of clock-time is perversely obeyed across an entire annual cycle, other temporal measures are completely disregarded. Units that are longer than an hour but shorter than a year\u2014weeks, months, seasons\u2014are bypassed, and diurnal rhythms of light and dark\u2014perhaps our most primal marker of time\u2019s passage\u2014as well as the body\u2019s circadian rhythms and sleep patterns, are overridden. As a result, Hsieh\u2019s performance is one of always being\u00a0right on time<\/em>\u00a0while also becoming totally out of sync with the rest of the world.<\/p>\n

The time-lapse film shows the hands of the clock device whirling menacingly through the abstract temporal units of hours and minutes, while the body that tries to obey the clock becomes a site that registers other kinds of times. We see the artist\u2019s hair grow out, and we see the enfleshed temporalities of endurance and exhaustion, as he becomes more and more pallid and bleary-eyed over the 365 days. The 133 punches that Hsieh failed to make, out of the 8760 hours that are in a year, are also a crucial component of the work, because they are the corporeal slippages where the full internalisation of clock-time is shown to be unachievable.<\/p>\n

A coincidence: during the months when Hsieh was in his studio punching away at the time clock, Dolly Parton\u2019s hit single 9 to 5<\/em> (1980) was saturating the airwaves. The song appeared on 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs<\/em> (1980), a concept album about work which also featured covers of working class folk and country classics like Merle Travis\u2019s Dark as a Dungeon<\/em> (1947), a rallying song among unionized coal miners, and Woodie Guthrie\u2019s Deportee <\/em>(Plane Wreck at Los Gatos<\/em>) (1948), a lament for 28 migrant farm workers who died in a plane crash while being sent from California back to Mexico (\u201cYou won\u2019t have your names when you ride the big airplane \/ All they will call you will be \u2018deportees\u2019\u201d).<\/p>\n

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Karl Marx Communist Manifesto<\/em> and Dolly Parton 9 to 5<\/em> meme, via Know Your Meme, 2019<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Karl Marx The Communist Manifesto<\/em> and Dolly Parton 9 to 5<\/em> meme, via reddit, 2019<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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The song 9 to 5<\/em> was written for the film of the same name\u2014a feminist revenge comedy which was released in 1980, with Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin playing three overworked and underestimated company employees who manage to kidnap their \u201csexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot\u201d boss and run the office on their own. The film came out of Fonda\u2019s production company IPC Films, which was named after her antiwar organization Indochina Peace Campaign. The title 9 to 5<\/em> came from an association for women office workers founded in Boston in 1972, which eventually formed the national union SEIU 925. Fonda had known some of the women involved in the organization through her involvement with the antiwar movement, and their stories inspired her to make the film.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

The song plays through the film\u2019s opening sequence, and right away, time is depicted as a problem. Parton apparently wrote the song while she was between takes on the set, tapping her long, acrylic nails together for the percussive clicking that runs throughout (her nails are credited as a musical instrument on the album\u2019s liner notes). The fast clicking resembles the sound of typewriters, as well as the sound of ticking clocks\u2014and throughout the film\u2019s opening credits, clocks are everywhere. A montage sequence with different alarm clocks going off in the morning is followed by a series of shots of women in skirt suits and high heels, rushing through the city to make it in time to the office, while anxiously looking at their wristwatches or at the public clocks that loom over them.<\/p>\n

Metronomes are shown ticking in unison in a shop window as commuters in the race to get to work are brought into mechanically regulated sync with each other. But time is moving too fast, and the body can\u2019t quite keep up with it. \u201cPour myself a cup of ambition,\u201d Parton sings in the opening lines; only with the buzz of caffeine will she be sped up into the time of optimized productivity. One of the women in the rush hour sequence from the film\u2019s opening credits is shown sipping a take-away cup of ambition, but she spills it as she looks at her watch, because she\u2019s in such a hurry.<\/p>\n

In the office where Parton, Tomlin, and Fonda\u2019s characters work, the struggle over time continues. One of the first things the women do once they have gotten rid of their boss and taken over the running of the workplace, is to remove the disciplinary time clock\u2014which happens to look almost identical to the one in Hsieh\u2019s contemporaneous One Year Performance<\/em>\u2014so that workers are no longer forced to clock in and clock out. They also install childcare facilities at the office, and introduce part-time options and greater flexibility with work hours\u2014and all of these changes are shown to enhance workplace productivity.<\/p>\n

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Colin Higgin\u2019s 9 to 5<\/em>, 1980, film still, courtesy IPC films<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance\u00a01980\u20131981:\u00a0Time Clock Piece<\/em>, 1980\u20131981. Photo: Michael Shen, \u00a9 1981 Tehching Hsieh. Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Besides the 9 to 5<\/em> song and film, another thing that happened in the United States during the year when Hsieh was checking-in every hour, on the hour, 24 hours a day, was that Ronald Reagan was elected as president and sworn into office, ushering in an era of neoliberal reform and aggressive union busting. His concerted attacks on workers\u2019 rights would destroy much of what the US labor movement had fought for, and his time in office came with a sharp acceleration in income inequality.<\/p>\n

In the years since, the rise of post-Fordist precarity has vastly changed the time of work. While many waged workers in the US are still brutally exploited by the mechanized clock\u2014think of Amazon workers having to urinate in bottles while on the job, to avoid getting fired for clocking too many minutes of break time\u2014there is also, for many, an increasing problem in the blurring of the distinction between work time and nonwork time: work becomes an all-the-time<\/em> condition, for which Hsieh\u2019s 24\/7 performance of constant arrival in 1980\u20131981 comes to seem incredibly prescient.<\/p>\n

To linger on this historical shift in work-time politics, I turn now, with deep sadness, to 5 to 9<\/em>, the new version of the 9 to 5<\/em> song, which Parton recorded for a Squarespace commercial that aired during the 2021 Super Bowl. Have you seen it? It\u2019s heart wrenchingly grim. The original was crystal clear on the conditions of worker exploitation: \u201c9 to 5, yeah, they got you where they want you . . . It\u2019s a rich man\u2019s game, no matter what they call it, and you spend your life puttin\u2019 money in his wallet.\u201d In the new version of the song, all proletarian discontent is evacuated as Parton sings a creepy ode to the contemporary gig economy, where workers clock-off from their dreary day jobs at 5 p.m., and then they work, joyously, on their entrepreneurial dreams\u2014with their own Squarespace websites\u2014from 5 p.m. until 9 a.m.<\/p>\n

The original 9 to 5<\/em> lyrics were furious in their insistence that \u201cYou\u2019re just a step on the\u00a0boss-man\u2019s ladder.\u201d In 5 to 9<\/em>, the fury has been replaced with a cheery invitation to \u201cbe your own boss, climb your own ladder!\u201d It\u2019s disguised as a promise of self-empowerment, but this image of being your own ladder points to the extent to which workers have been atomized as part of an historical project that has sought to destroy all solidarity. 40 years ago, Parton\u2019s song acknowledged that collective discontent can lead to collectivized dreams for something else: \u201cYou\u2019re in the same boat \/ With a lotta your friends \/ Waitin\u2019 for the day \/ Your ship\u2019ll come in \/ And the tide\u2019s gonna turn \/ An\u2019 it\u2019s all gonna roll your way.\u201d Today, her song tells workers that they should be excited to let work completely saturate the hours that used to constitute nonwork time: \u201c5 to 9, you keep working, working, working \/ \u2018Cause it\u2019s hustlin\u2019 time, a whole new way to make a livin\u2019!\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a cautionary tale here about what can happen when struggles to improve certain aspects of working conditions ultimately leave pro-work ideology unchallenged. Back in 1980, the flexibilization of work hours at the end of the 9 to 5<\/em> film was depicted as a win for workers, but Parton\u2019s new 5 to 9<\/em> song tells us that discontent with the drudgery of the \u201cnine to five\u201d work day can be easily absorbed into the system of exploitation, so that new forms of atomized and flexibilized precarity\u2014with the constant encroachment of work into nonwork time\u2014can be sold back in colorful, celebratory packaging, as an image of \u201cfreedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking back on the eight-hour movement (which the \u201cnine to five\u201d work day is a product of), the antiwork feminist theorist Kathi Weeks has argued that historical struggles for reduced work time have too often been divorced from a broader critique of the wage labor system.[2]<\/a> In contrast with these previous struggles, Weeks outlines the possibilities of a contemporary demand for shorter working hours, without a decrease in pay, that would be rooted in antiwork politics and postwork imaginaries. Such a demand would seek not only to achieve less work time, but also to confront the racial and gendered divisions of labor, and the social organization of domestic and unwaged reproductive work, which the wage labor system has both depended on and invisibilized.<\/p>\n

Weeks shows that previous struggles to reduce work hours have often presented the rationale that such a reduction would allow for more time to be spent with family. Wanting to distance the demand for less work from a further perpetuation of the ideology of the family, she returns to a popular slogan from the eight-hour movement which said, \u201cEight hours labor, eight hours rest, and eight hours for what we will.\u201d The \u201cwhat we will\u201d displaces family duty as a core rationale for shorter work hours, allowing instead for the demand to be animated by the prospect of pleasure. Weeks also points to an interesting ambiguity in the phrase \u201ctime for what we will,\u201d which might refer to \u201ctime for what we want\u201d but also to \u201ctime for what we will into existence.\u201d She writes, \u201cis it more about getting what we wish for or about getting to exercise our will? Is it a mater of being able to chose among available pleasures and practices, or being able to constitute new ones?\u201d[3]<\/a> In the new time movement that she\u2019s proposing, the demand would be<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cfor more time not only to inhabit the spaces where we now find a life outside of waged work, but also to create spaces in which to constitute new subjectivities, new work and nonwork ethics, and new practices of care and sociality.\u201d[4]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Having grown up in Taiwan, Hseih arrived in the US in 1974, when he was 24 years old. He had been working at sea on an oil tanker, and when it docked near Philadelphia, he jumped ship and took a taxi to New York. He lived for the first 14 years without legal status; as part of the undocumented immigrant labour force that the US economy has long been dependent on, he made a living by cleaning floors and washing dishes for cash in downtown restaurants\u2014usually during \u201cafter-work\u201d hours, while others slept.<\/p>\n

If a pro-work ethic ends up getting snuck into the 9 to 5<\/em> film as an unquestionable given\u2014with the workplace reforms at the end ultimately re-affirming productivist values\u2014Hsing\u2019s contemporaneous performance piece was far less redemptive, and far more invested in noninstrumentaliszed time<\/em>. It was an enactment of punctual arrival as an emptied-out gesture, wherein the artist is always arriving on time<\/em> without doing anything else in time\u00ad\u00ad<\/em>. \u201cIt\u2019s not the question about \u2018how\u2019 to pass the time. Just passing time. This is my philosophy,\u201d Hsieh said in a 2017 interview. \u201cYou see, tons of talented artists out there, and I thought of myself as a talentless idiot.. but then I thought, my talent is wasting time.\u201d[5]<\/a><\/p>\n

The Time Clock Piece<\/em> was one of five year-long performance works that Hsieh completed while his existence in the US was illegalized. The final one, which he did from 1 July 1985 until 1 July 1986, involved not doing any art (\u201cI do not do ART, not talk ART, not see ART, not read ART, not go to ART gallery and ART museum for one year. I just go on in life\u201d).[6]<\/a> After the no art piece, he embarked on a 13-year work, in which he would make art but \u201cnot show it PUBLICLY.\u201d[7]<\/a> That work ended on 31 December 1999, and since then he has stopped making art. \u201cI don\u2019t do art any more,\u201d he said in a 2009 interview, \u201cI don\u2019t have other things to say.\u201d Instead, he remarked, \u201cI\u2019m just doing life.\u201d[8]<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> See 9to5: The Story of A Movement<\/em>, directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert (PBS, 2019); and Karen Nussbaum, \u201cWhy 9 to 5 Still Resonates Today,\u201d Jacobin Magazine<\/em>, March 2022, https:\/\/jacobinmag.com\/2022\/03\/9-to-5-film-documentary-jane-fonda-dolly-parton<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 151\u2013174.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Weeks, The Problem With Work<\/em>, p. 169.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Weeks, The Problem With Work<\/em>, p. 174.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> KaiChieh Tu, \u201cDoing time, passing time, wasting time: An interview with Taiwanese-American artist Tehching Hsieh,\u201d The Theatre Times<\/em>, August 2017, https:\/\/thetheatretimes.com\/time-passing-time-wasting-time-interview-taiwanese-american-artist-tehching-hsieh\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> See Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance<\/em>, 1985\u20131986: https:\/\/www.tehchinghsieh.net\/oneyearperformance1985-1986<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> See Tehching Hseih, 1986\u20131999 (Thirteen Year Plan)<\/em>, 1986\u20131999: https:\/\/www.tehchinghsieh.net\/thirteenyearplan1986-1999<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Barry Schwabsky, \u201cLive Work,\u201d Frieze<\/em> 126 (October 2009).<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

This text reworks ideas and material from presentations previously given at public events with Tehching Hsieh at the TATE Modern in 2017 and at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst in 2022. The author wishes to thank the artist, as well as the organizers and attendees of those events.<\/h6>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In deze essay reageert Amelia Groom op Tehching Hsieh’s werk Time Clock Piece <\/em> (One Year Performance 1980\u20131981) (1980-1981), een van de stukken die te zien is als onderdeel van de tentoonstelling No Linear Fucking Time bij BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. Door een lezing van het gelijktijdige anti-werk lied 9 to 5 (1980) van Dolly Parton reflecteert Groom op de historische verschuivingen in de manieren waarop werknemers werden en nog steeds worden uitgebuit door technieken van tijdsdiscipline. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":38330,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"focus":[301],"prospection_category":[194,236],"class_list":["post-38527","prospection","type-prospection","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","focus-no-linear-fucking-time-nl","prospection_category-essay-nl","prospection_category-nieuwe-bijdrage-nl"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/prospection\/38527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/prospection"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/prospection"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38527"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/prospection\/38527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38837,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/prospection\/38527\/revisions\/38837"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"focus","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/focus?post=38527"},{"taxonomy":"prospection_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.bakonline.org\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/prospection_category?post=38527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}