I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you

Words by Alex Hull

Dear James,

 I promised you an essay to accompany your photography book, documenting your experience of drifting through office spaces, journeys into and out of work, physically and spiritually, as you daydream, linger on moments of boredom, or a desire to escape.  I worry I over-promised, as I’ve been trying to fit my writing practice alongside a full-time job. At the end of the working day, I just want to crawl under my duvet and switch my brain off. 

 At the height of industrial capitalism, during the 19th century, when time began to be structured and experienced by the long hours clocked in or out of the factory, there was a tradition of absenteeism by workers called ‘Saint Monday’, a day when they would refuse to go into work. They were rebelling against their excessive working hours, lack of leisure time, economic and moral pressures to work, and labour exploitation. Sunday was their only permitted day to rest and recover from work. This rebelling free time would be spent at the theatre, playing sport, seeing friends but moral panics around its connection to drunkenness and laziness also followed suit. 

 It can be tempting to draw a line between work then and work now. Risk to life is, in some cases, significantly less, as we have increasingly moved out of the factory and into the office and labour has dematerialised, becoming cognitive. But this dematerialisation accompanies a seeping of labour into all of our time. Spaces of social media, once a place to upload images of blurry nights out and sad sandwiches tinged with sepia tones or excessively saturated, are now endlessly occupied with work-related self-promotion: look at this essay I wrote, this exhibition I curated, this award I won. All this working working working exhausts me. I delete the app. I can’t participate; maybe it’s better if I just don’t know what anyone else is up to these days. 

 When we first met, over Zoom, we chatted about your work, about my work, about jobs in general. I was at a moment of transition, having left a job that I had tied my personality to but that wasn’t giving me enough in return. I became so bored at work that I became stressed. Every day became another existential crisis to go home and vent to my friends about and as I spiralled into a deeper inner turmoil, I lost any ability to be objective and see the truth (or ubiquitous cliches): everyone hates work, all work is boring, and it’s never going to love you back. We all know that ‘it’s not Mondays you hate, it’s capitalism.’ Or, perhaps what is more apt in the context of your book, that ‘Rainy days and Mondays always try and get me down’ (I can’t not sing that line every time I hear it, thanks to the 2002 cinematic hit About a Boy). 

 Whether these platitudes caused this or not, it’s impossible to not associate work with boredom, and by work I’m talking about wage labour and not what I am doing right now, although you are generously paying me for this, and I hope you are reimbursed for this project in some way - for the hours you dedicated to it and the weeks you spent waiting for my emails. I read somewhere that boredom is ‘an averse state of wanting, but being unable to engage in satisfying activity’, and Tolstoy defined it as ‘a desire for desires’. 

 When I’m bored at work, I often find myself daydreaming about what my life would be like if I was a writer full-time. This state of boredom becomes a space of possibility, a space for desires to be born. It also becomes a space where I will mindlessly scroll through my phone in an attempt to numb my boredom but I become paradoxically bored at the homogeneity of the flat images flickering past me - the dopamine hits don’t work like they used to. I think that’s why I like looking at works of art and it’s why I enjoyed looking at this book; it became a site of possibility, a space outside of the internet to focus my unending gaze. 

 Although the office spaces in your photographs are absent of colleagues, traces of life indicate that they are occupied: a used Tupperware smudged with orange oil, with scraps of noodles clinging onto the sides; a decaying banana skin hangs over the edge of a desk; a grey suited trouser leg donning black leather brogues marches the concrete slabs outside of the building; a hand pushes up against a window, searching for an escape.

 In other photographs, the drift of the bored gaze looks up at the sky, dreaming of another life outside of the trappings of the office space. Streaked with pinks, blues, purples and oranges, the sky offers more moments of possibility: another day, another horizon, another life beyond work. 

I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you.

Alex 

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This text, written by Alex Hull, was commissioned for the publication of James Clarkson’s self published photography book Monday Has Come and Gone Before.