My friend Chris got a job a few weeks ago. He’d been sniffing around for one for a time. Freelance work wasn’t reliable enough. I remember I realised the same thing years ago. He explained his new job to me but I didn’t quite understand it. I thought I’ll get the gist as we go along. It’s an engineering/architectural firm that works with older buldings, sometimes of historical interest, repairing and renovating. Chris, as I understood it, as an art historian, was to be a kind of consultant on art and historical matters. He says he manages the gallery where they don’t really do any exhibitions. I think he said he makes the other workers fill in documents about the work they’re doing. Is he a kind of documentalist? I don’t know. One, not unconsiderable, thing he is doing is adding to the culture in the workplace.
People have funny jobs sometimes. There are jobs where you are the resident storyteller, which doesn’t mean you tell everyone nice stories as they get on with their day’s work. I’m not quite sure what it means, but I suspect the main function is to break the uniformity of the culture.. Of course, many years ago when I worked in France, I had probably the strangest job. Three of us would go into companies around France and work with a group from the company, (say, the director. the head of sales, the director’s secretary, a couple of people off the shop floor, someone from marketing). We’d make them sit on a rug while wearing a variety of masks and go through an exercise based on Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, Moreno’s psychodrama and Grotowski’s ideas on spontaneous expression every morning for a week. There was a lot of theory we went over back at the Paris headquarters of CESDEL (Centre d’Expression Spontanee Dramaturgique et Linguistique). What we did was a method based on a methodology, not a mere procedure. The word procedure was only uttered with disdain. Dramaturgy was the investment of time and space, whch we tried to bring into the method, especially in the the triangle of space and time elements. We got into a lather about all this stuff. Of course, there was a lot of money in in-house training in France in those days and some companies were up for the latest methods. And, to tell you the truth, it taught me a lot. In the years of teaching that have followed, I have never worried about preparing lessons. If you are not working material through with students spontaneously, it’s dead meat. It’s not a method!
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