Month: December 2021

The Trainee has been produced in collaboration with international accounting firm Deloitte. In order to realise the project, the artist worked for a month as trainee in the marketing department of Deloitte, where only few people knew the true nature of the project. A modern reworking of Bartleby.

During the month long intervention an initially normal-seeming marketing trainee starts to apply peculiar working methods. Gradually she shifts from the position of someone others believe to be normal, to the object of avoidance and speculation. The videos and slideshow reveal a spectrum of ways of handling the odd member in a group. Sincere interest and bewildered amusement are juxtaposed with demands directed at the superior regarding the strangely behaving worker.

We see the trainee sitting at her workstation in the consultant’s open plan office space, or in the tax department library all day doing nothing. One of the videos shows her spending an entire day in an elevator. These acts or rather the absence of visible action slowly make the atmosphere around the trainee unbearable, forcing the colleagues to search for solutions and to come up with explanations for the situation.

Masking laziness in apparent activity and browsing Facebook during working hours belong to the acceptable behavioural patterns of a work community. However, sitting in front of an empty desk with your hands of your lap, just thinking, threatens the peace of the community and breaks the colleagues’ concentration. When there is no ready method of action, people initially resort to avoidance, which fails to set their mind at ease if the situation drags on.

What provokes people about this ‘non-doing’, aside from the strangeness, is the element of resistance. The non-doing person isn’t committed to any activity, so they have the potential for anything. It is non-doing that lacks a place in the general order of things, and thus it is a threat to order. It is easy to root out any ongoing anti-order activity, but the potential for anything is a continual stimulus without a solution.

Supported by Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art and the Finnish Cultural Foundation

An absent figure in so many ways (he says little, does little, is little), Bartleby has a powerful presence, and we are astonished, I think, at how so slight a character can represent, in F.O. Matthiessen’s words, “a tragedy of utter negation” (493). The haunting reality of Bartleby’s situation is real enough, and his increasing isolation combined with his determination not to comply creates the most intriguing and perplexing psychological profile of passive resistance in nineteenth-century literary history. In 1978, Q.D. Leavis, declared of “Bartleby” that in spite of “plenty of critical attention… there is no disagreement as to its meaning and the nature of its techniques… present no difficulty” (199). This characteristically dogmatic view is not only outmoded, but is demonstrably inaccurate. The proliferation of critical readings of “Bartleby” testify to the story’s complexity and significance. Some critics, like Morris Beja, have warned against an “either/or approach”, but the tendency has been to view the story as either a socio-economic parable or a psychological study. This probably accounts for why much of the critical work on “Bartleby” is disappointing. Some readings overemphasise aspects or elements of the story at the expense of others. In 1962, when the psycho-critics were refining their notions of doppelgangers and split selves, Marvin Felheim, in an article in College English, tried to categorise the various treatments of the story. His categories were not helpful, but his project highlighted two readings of the story that were particularly popular.

10The first, political, reading locates the story within the context of America’s capitalist expansion. Bartleby refuses to accept the structures imposed on him by a modernising world interested more in collective strategies and “Yes” men than the individual seeking to live outside mainstream ideals. The lawyer-narrator’s chambers become, so to speak, Everyoffice. Bartleby becomes the archetypal clerk, a figure bowed to his task and of whom it is demanded absolute compliance and reliability. His preference “not to” becomes the insistent and impeccable articulation of resistance in the wilderness called Modern America. He fights by refusing to fight and so he has become an icon for various Peace Movements in the twentieth century. Thus “Bartleby” is an allegory of modern America and the failure of democracy to preserve the individual’s right and freedom to choose. It is a story about the failure of modern social life. It is also the story of political unrootedness, of the consequences of living in a society operating at an alienatingly high level of production and consumption.

https://vimeo.com/119535540