![]() Many people are familiar with “the man who lived in a tub,” scorning all material possessions except for a stick and a ragged cloak. ![]() That seems to be the case with Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynic philosopher who lived in fourth-century Athens and later Corinth. Indeed, some refusals are so remarkable that we remember them many centuries later. From within unquestioned cycles of behavior, such refusals produce bizarre offshoots that are not soon forgotten. At their loftiest, such refusals can signify the individual capacity for self-directed action against the abiding flow at the very least, they interrupt the monotony of the everyday. Likewise, Takala might be bemusedly remembered by even those who sent the frantic emails, as the one employee who did the (very) unexpected. After quite a crowd had amassed, he got up, looked around, and nonchalantly walked away.Īs alarmed as the sidewalk crowd might have been, the TV audience delights more and more in Green’s performance the longer it goes on. Slowing his walk to a halt, he carefully lowered himself to the ground and lay facedown and stick-straight for an uncomfortable period of time. Tom Green poked at this convention when he performed “the Dead Guy,” on his Canadian public access TV show in the 1990s. A crowded sidewalk is a good example: everyone is expected to continue moving forward. Stopping or refusing to do something only gains this status if everyone else is doing what is expected of them, and have never allowed that anyone would ever deviate. Looking at The Trainee, it’s clear that the reactions of others are what make such acts humorous and often legendary. “Appearing as if you’re doing nothing is seen as a threat to the general working order of the company, creating a sense of the unknown,” they wrote, adding solemnly, “The potential of nothing is everything.” It was the image of utter inactivity that so galled Takala’s colleagues. As observed by a writer at Pumphouse Gallery, which showed her work in 2017, there is nothing inherently unusual about the notion of not working while at work people commonly look at Facebook on their phones or seek other distractions during work hours. “Appearing as if you’re doing nothing is seen as a threat to the general working order of the company, creating a sense of the unknown.” Others urged her to accept a more discreet bag for her money.” Christy Lange describes the piece in Frieze: “While this obvious display of wealth should have made her the ‘perfect customer,’ she only aroused suspicion from security guards and disdain from shopkeepers. In a piece called Bag Lady, for instance, she spent days roaming a mall in Berlin while carrying a clear plastic bag full of euro bills. The silent employee was Pilvi Takala, a Finnish artist who is known for videos in which she quietly threatens social norms with simple actions. It turned out that the staff had unwittingly taken part in a performance piece called The Trainee. When a coworker saw this and asked if she was “thinking again,” she replied: “It helps to see things from a different perspective.” The employees became uneasy. Whenever someone would ask what she was doing, she would reply that she was “doing thought work” or “working on thesis.” Then there was the day that she spent riding the elevators up and down repeatedly. In the midst of a bustling work environment, she didn’t seem to be doing anything except sitting at an empty desk and staring into space. In 2008, employees at an office for the accounting firm Deloitte were troubled by the behavior of a new recruit. She sat in front of an empty desk from 10:30am, went for
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