Output details

A Guide to Office Clerical Time Standards

In this choreographed mime, seven costumed performers sit in three rows representing the office hierarchy – clerical workers, middle management and senior management – on a stage set as a stripped-down, furnished office. The action ranges from synchronized repetition of work gestures (such as typing, filing and stamping) to performative interpretation of abstract managerial tasks (such as “inspiring and providing guidance”). A film projected onto a screen instructs the performers as well as the audience as to the specific action being performed by each tier.

Stemming from a 1960s corporate manual that analyses the time necessary for the accomplishment of minute labour procedures in the office, research for the piece involved an investigation of the nature of contemporary labour and its relationship to aesthetics, performativity and visibility. There has been much discussion of the changes to work in the West following the decline of manufacturing, with Post-Fordism labour increasingly emphasising the specificity of employees’ knowledge and cognitive skill. The performance’s aim was to examine a complementary but opposing trajectory: the proletarianisation of white collar work, which has given rise to more bureaucracy, target assessment and control in previously looser creative professions, from academia to the arts.

The mid-twentieth-century office is the meeting point of these cultures, where the assembly-line efficiency-management of the factory meets the quantifying control of the knowledge economy. ‘Guide …’ explores the transposition of one regime into its successor, following the lines of combined and uneven development that have turned the emancipatory promise of non-material labour into the ‘perma-temp’ hell of the cognitariat.

The movement is accompanied by a score of guitar, bass and drums representing, as components of the rock ‘n’ roll music that rose from car factories and cotton fields in the US, the same junction of expression and control.