draw together

This is the first of a few vignettes that I will use to capture glimpses into ways of being that are either driven by the economic necessity, or by my inner need to sustain myself amid attending to the economic necessity.

The below is a fragment from an exchange with a friend. The day I took the pictures was when I went to see American Psycho (the musical) after work.

There is a physical sense of inflicting the City skyscrapers on my being. The plasticky air circulating indoors, drying out my skin and eyes. The relentless lighting. Cheap office furniture that makes up the interior obstacle course, through which a specific kind of middle-aged white men stroll to survey their fiefdom. (They are the kind that demand people come back to the office, so that patrolling enforces deference through the coercion of capitalism. Corporate panopticon.)

Look at all this matter! The glass and steel cages of the City – and what you can’t see in the distance, Canary Wharf. In a corner hang pressed blue Oxford shirts delivered from the dry cleaner. The firm took out the lease and changed nothing from the showcase layout, and now I’m trapped in 1980’s style booths with pushpin dividers. Company banners with the recently updated font. Ice-pick-sharp glass awards in the boardroom that Patrick Bateman would gleefully pierce & pierce the director of the Fisher account with.

And then, the anti-matter: when the company leadership calls staff the leading cost to the company on a disembodying video call, talk of reducing staff and bringing in contract roles to maintain metrics that have some importance conferred to them on a budget sheet – I hear a further hollowing out. Words are spoken with a chipper lilt and without sentiment. I wonder how many of the hundreds on the call are attentive to what is being said: or whether it gets lost in the real fog that pervades the City, erasing labour from their consideration.

Outside this glass menagerie, there is Yayoi Kusama’s public art work. It’s called Infinite Accumulation.