39 Microlectures by Matthew Goulish

Author:Matthew Goulish [Goulish, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
ISBN: 0415213932
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2011-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

8.2 WHAT IS WORK?

Question #2: What is work?

A human being is an organism that works; this man is a unit of labor. This is not a quote from Karl Marx, but rather what I thought growing up in Flint, Michigan, before I encountered people who don’t work. My grandfather, my father’s father, worked in the General Motors auto plant that gave birth, in 1927, to the United Auto Workers Union as a result of the massive sit-down strike that he participated in. At the outset of our performance How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies, when my grandfather was 92, I contributed what for me was a homage to his years on the assembly line – a sequence in which I stood very still, lifted both arms to chest level, rubbed the back of my right hand in a circular motion with the fingers of my left hand, dropped both arms, took three breaths, and repeated the gesture. Under Lin’s direction and with the input of the group, the homage took shape. After seven repetitions, I left my right hand raised, and lowered my left only. After nine repetitions of that, I left both hands raised. After twelve repetitions of that, I dropped both arms and began again. The performance of the action required considerable concentration, which I had not expected when I began devising it. As I performed it in front of an audience, in the stillness and the focus which ensued, I imagined the spirit of my grandfather descending on me, even though he was still living, and I imagined my gesture becoming a repetition of his countless gestures at work, my hands becoming his, my face becoming his. My work became the work of becoming my grandfather at work, and when his spirit joined me, it did not descend, but grew from micropoints inside me – in my hands, behind my eyes, in my arms and my chest, and in my feet. When I articulated my intentions at a work-in-progress discussion in Colorado Springs in the fall of 1995, an elderly woman in the audience volunteered the comment that she had once worked on an assembly line, and the experience was just like that gesture. When I called my mother from Glasgow in the spring of 1996 to tell her we had successfully premiered How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies, she told me my grandfather had died three days earlier. He had died on the day of the first performance.

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