How to Achieve

Work is a grind. Stuck in cubicles of confinement or the noisy and stressful open-plan offices; living one’s life with coworkers with whom the only shared interest is in the paycheck. Work colonizes one’s schedule. Eight hours per day, five days a week, plus commute and time spent getting ready. Even leisure hours must be used conscientiously: exercising, eating right and getting enough sleep to stay healthy and ready for work. With friends, family and interests to pursue it may be tough to find work/life balance.

An office is a place that makes me do work. As an artist-academic my main quibble is not with having too much work to do. Whenever I am not working, I always come up with new projects, new kinds of work to do. The problem is that the work I am supposed to or have to, often gets in the way of what I want to do. I am not against work; I very much enjoy working. I just do not enjoy the duty of having to be at the office to perform (in-)significant tasks with administrative (in)efficiency.

A common act of defiance against workplace drudgery is office pranks. I particularly enjoy the prank played out in the first episode of Twin Peaks. The Great Northern Hotel concierge is babysitting the hotel-owner’s bored teenage daughter, Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn). To relieve boredom and show the concierge what she thinks of the situation, Horne twists a pencil into a paper cup on the concierge desk. Audrey asks with equal parts sarcasm and curiosity: “What would happen if I pulled this out?” The concierge responds, “You wouldn’t”. Audrey turns to look at the concierge for a brief moment, before pulling the pencil to let coffee spill over the desk. As the concierge struggles to save documents, Horne laughs with childish glee.

Sharing Audrey’s dislike for being told what (not) to do, I try to find possibilities of freedom within confines. I am not one for pranks, however, as they usually involve cruelty against some unsuspecting victims. Neither do I enjoy acts of sabotage, because someone lower down in the workplace hierarchy will ultimately have to clean up or fix things afterwards. Stealing from the office gives me no rush, and besides, who actually need office supplies outside the office.

I don't want to work and add to the current economic system, but doing nothing isn't a good option either. Less anti-work, more art-work. Art-work as an alternative to utility, but also to idleness. Art-working can turn work into a prank, but also a something weird, useless, playful, trivial, exciting, novel. It’s something to pass time. It’s a way of working through cultural ideas of the office and creating personal mythologies in the spaces one frequents. Maybe work/life balance is achieved not by working less, but by finding more ways to do the work you want to do at the office.