This is the final installment in a series of performance GIFs curated by Jesse Darling. Previously: Maja Cule, Legacy Russell, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Creighton Baxter, Genevieve Belleveau, Jennifer Chan, Marisa Olson, Dwayne Strike, Paul Kindersley.
(quote: Henry Ford)
Life coaches and therapists and venture capitalists and personal trainers and art students talk about The Work; you've got to put The Work in, they say, as though there were a way to live lazily. Living takes some doing and dying takes some doing. The Work is just the shit we do as we plod the treadmill of this old Möbius mortal coil. Everybody telling each other how hard we're working—on our art, our relationships, personality disorders, careers. At the benefits office you tell em the same.
"There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something. " — Henry Ford
Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile or the production line. Maybe he invented the American Dream—"set the pattern of abundance for 20th Century living"—or at least set out a route by which to achieve it. Seamless, momentous mass-production is a glorious thing, all right: even God can't make 1000 things that look the same, so you gotta admit that shit's impressive. The goal is homogeneity. The goal is automation. When I get rid of all this fat shit from that pattern of abundance and
become a cyborg twink lookalike is the day I'll become a man.
Nobody is gonna pay you if you don't love yourself, and love is ill-remunerated labor. Just Do It™ is both romantic and tyrannical, suggesting a way of shutting out the doubt and hesitation and other mental and physical handicaps that prevent you from entering into a totally automated burn for a better life/world/whatever. Back in the 60s when they were all about stepping off the production line of 20th Century living and reclaiming love from whence it had become desktop wallpaper and Facebook headers, there was a yung revolutionary called Hans-Jürgen Krahl. Dude was going on about how the tendency to automation basically means that if you ain't working you ain't shit. Like your life has no meaning. Like you're offline. Like work is an organic process between man and nature. I could give you the quote but I'll just give you the punch line: Hans-Jürgen Krahl was killed by an automobile before he was thirty.
