A four-letter word

Published 01 December 2003

Until recently, there was one activity that preoccupied us constantly, but which was rarely represented in culture - work. Now the taboo has been broken. Comedy, theatre and photography are all turning to the office for inspiration

Last month, there was a play at the Barbican called Ideas Men, by a company called Ridiculusmus. "Sponsored by the London Mime Festival" has always been a tag line that sends a chill down my spine, so you can imagine my joy to find that there were words in this play, and furthermore, words connected in hilarious ways. The two-hander was about an office - not two friends who meet in an office, then go off to have adventures; not two lovers whose work provides a backdrop to their fabulous love; just two blokes, detailing with painful acuity what work is actually like, then spinning around on spinny office chairs for laughs.

This month, the Photographers' Gallery is showing an exhibition called "The Office", again, a kind of mournfully witty, exquisitely detailed exposition of the world of staplers, sitting still, looking bored, and mounds and mounds of bits of paper, the movement of which from one pile to another forms the backbone of pretty much all jobs. Crudely speaking, both of these cultural experiences derive from The Office, the most popular telly show of all time, or certainly the most popular one I can think of. Neither resembles it enormously, but The Office was the grand taboo-breaker, and this is what the world looks like afterwards.

There was a time when culture didn't have any sex scenes. That must be true, otherwise people would never have made all that fuss about Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Philip Roth would never have got so big in his pants about how cool and modern he was (although don't get me wrong, he is cool and he is modern). There were love scenes, passion scenes, heartbreak scenes, hate scenes, the full gamut of sex-associated emotional turbulence, but no actual sex. You could, if you wanted broadly to follow a philosophical school whose name you can't remember, say that for centuries, culture was defined by this void - this wilful failure to represent the one solitary thing that everyone was thinking about most of the time. There are probably a lot of people who wish life were still like that. You might be one of them, in which case you're not to worry. This isn't about sex; that's just a parallel. Because while sex was storming and colonising the whole of art, from low to high, there came a new void - a new unmentionable that occupied almost everyone for almost all of their waking hours, and yet never warranted even a name-check from any of the millions of cultural happenings that sought to universalise our experience while rigorously avoiding the only honestly universal thing about it - work, specifically, office work. You might hear it mentioned in a novel or play that a character has to go to work; you might see the fruits of their work in wealth or status accrued, or the unbearable pain of a lack of work; you might, in the 1980s, have seen films in which work pretends to be the point - Working Girl, for instance - where in fact the point is cash, class or power. You would never see or read of a character actually walking into an office and doing a job of work.

I can think of some very good reasons for this. The first is the nature of homeworkers, which pretty much all artists are. They see work as an activity, like bathing or chatting or shopping, that has no special status in the world of tasks, but simply shuffles along with other tasks, trying to fit itself in. To people with proper jobs, work is a concrete entity, like an airport. It has its own functionaries and rules, its own atmosphere, its own natural hierarchy (workers are the predators and Cup-a-Soup the prey). The activities taking place therein are a tiny aspect of the ecosystem as a whole. I know this because I've had both a job and a non-job. The job was much more consuming, though this non-job has its advantages (I haven't had a Cup-a-Soup in two and a half years). While many artists can make the grandest possible statements about the passage of time and the evanescence of man with just a hand-held camera and a field full of cows, they have remained, by and large, unaware of the glorious texture of the office, because they've never once seen one, except maybe when they went to the bank.

Furthermore, it is a bourgeois ideal that work should be a person's defining activity - that it should fulfil you, challenge you, express each one of your diverse, high-quality characteristics, generally function as the beautifully simple answer to that age-old question: "Why am I here?" The truth is that almost all jobs, even jobs of the highest possible status, are tedious beyond belief, and anyone who honestly feels themselves to be fulfilled by their day job is hurtling towards a nervous breakdown faster than you can say "two packs of Rizla and a paranoid fantasy, please". What is art to do with such an occupation? To paint it as the blessed end point of human endeavour would be dishonest. And yet, in the very act of becoming an artist, the individual is buying more completely than any other into this idea that one's work should consume and define and validate one's life - so to turn round then and portray regular work as the meaningless crud that it is might be considered slightly patronising.

Besides which, there is a counterpoint to this bourgeois tradition, which is the more modern, swinging, "work to live, don't live to work!" approach that you see on adverts for hideously expensive four-wheel-drive vehicles, wherein work is kind of tawdry and, while necessary, should never be allowed to infect non-work, theatre-and-gallery-visiting hours. This standpoint you have to admire, if only because it refutes the other, which is worse. But it is still dishonest - it might be cooler to go through your whole life's daylight on half-power, saving your full beam for socialising in a big car, but it does not in any way reflect what most people do, which is bitch on about work all the time.

Ricky Gervais, with The Office, sneaked in to culture through the back door of comedy, which is how taboos are always broken (the first sex happened, after all, in music hall; I don't know that, I'm just guessing). Just with the use of the word "Slough", he played up the joy-killing awfulness of the workplace with such terse bravado that there was no possibility of the shuffling embarrassment with which the rest of the culture alludes to this business. Here was the truth, in a jester's outfit, as Shakespeare would have wanted - work is like being dead. Moments of understanding and camaraderie only remind you how much like being dead the rest of it is. We were laughing with relief as much as anything else - the secret's out, and none of us needs pretend to be fulfilled for one more second. And apres, le deluge - we've had the theatre and the photography; now I give it four months before the appearance of the world's first office novel - a proper, boring office as well, not MI5.

Zoe Williams writes a column, Things You Only Know If You're Not at Work, for the Guardian

The "Office" group show is at the Photographers' Gallery, 5 & 8 Great Newport Street, London WC2 (020 7831 1772) until 18 January

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