Routines are supposed to feel demeaning, to destroy our imaginations. I like routine, perhaps because whatever routines I have are not imposed by anyone else. In Ways of the Hand David Sudnow (1993) reflects on learning to play jazz piano. The routine of practice gives him a baseline from which being creative becomes possible. His fingers learn where they need to be to make certain chord shapes, and that means they know where they need to go next to make certain sounds. Unpredictability — new sounds — relies on this knowing. It’s a process that becomes un-thought, and once it is un-thought, Sudnow says creativity is possible.

Nick Dunn is a freelance shoe designer.He draws shoe after shoe after shoe, tiny variations, maybe 50 at a time.Then he takes a few of the best and refines them. It’s someone else’s job to build a prototype, to make them real. There is joy in seeing the prototype, sure, especially as the trainer moves from the page into three-dimensionality, and Nick is fully engaged in the conversations that make this happen. But the biggest pleasure of his work is in the routine, the repetition and the refinement of the sketches. Nick describes drawing as therapeutic, occupying a calm space beyond thought. Creativity needs the routine; creativity is in the routine; the routine permits flow.

In the sketches, this flow is present in the pencil lines that outline the shape of the trainer, and that mark the details. I didn’t expect from Nick’s description that each idea comes in three sketches, showing the left side, back and top. Whilst he draws on flat, seemingly translucent, paper, the three dimensional trainer that ends up on your foot is already in his imagination. It’s not that routines end up with creativity; to say that would be to viciously misrepresent the experience of controlled, routinised work such as that portrayed in Pravda. It’s that creativity is not well-conceived when it’s seen as a product of free-floating inspiration produced by a romantically starving artist. It stems from practice, skill and routine.

References

1. Austrin, T and West, J (2005) ‘Skills and surveillance in casino gaming: work, consumption and regulation’. Work Employment and Society. 19 (2) 305–326.
2. Braverman, Harry. (1998) Labor and monopoly capital: the degradation of work in the twentieth century. New York : Monthly Review Press.
3. Leidner, R. (1993) Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
4. Sudnow, D. (1993) Ways of the hand: the organization of improvised conduct. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

There was no-one else around, but it was not quiet.

They were so busy in that rusty corrugated iron shed. I could hear radio 1, and creeking, scraping and whining machinery. They were laughing. I think they mended boats; I have no understanding of what that would involve.

We don’t always notice other people’s work spaces; some are public and yet hidden, but sounds call our attention to work activity and give us clues as to what people are doing even when they cannot be seen.

In tune

I recently went to the workshop of a double bass maker and repairer. My friend was taking his battered bass there to see what parts might be glued and otherwise made to hold together again. ‘Can’t you clean it up whilst you’re at it?’ I asked naively, attending to the finish rather than the sound. Apparently there is value in layers of varnish and Roger is cautious. It seems to me that he’s sort of ‘reading the wood’ as he looks at the instrument, and he knows not to touch where he can’t be sure of the impact of changing something. ‘No, you wouldn’t want to do that…’ he concludes.

Waiting

The workshop is an extraordinary place for an outsider. There are pieces of instruments all around the single room, sections and strings and bridges and necks, and a pan of glue on the boil on an old camping stove. I can’t take it all in, and I can’t see how Roger manoeuvres his way through the arrangement of objects. As well as making new instruments, what he does here is to work on things produced through the craftsmanship of others, undoing and remaking them. It takes a careful eye and a trained ear, an understanding of the whole process of creating a double bass, a lot of patience and dexterity, and a kind of respect it seems to me. He’s not an old man but he’s been doing this for a long time already. Several years ago, he decided to take a break. ‘I tried being a driving instructor,’ he said. ‘I lasted a year.’ When he was doing his apprenticeship, the man who taught him had already told him his future: ‘You’ll never do anything else.’ And here he is, in his own workshop, in tune with his instruments.

I was walking through New Cross in South East London recently when I saw these photos of fire-fighters’ hands. They were fixed to the railings outside the fire station, as a kind of heroic celebration it seemed to me — and with just cause — of the work that fire-fighters do.

But there’s something odd about these images too. Fire-fighters certainly use their hands, but they’re known for their all-round fitness, and for their team-work. In these photos, there is a single pair of hands and nothing else shown to be working. Aside from the obvious phallic reading of what’s happening with the hose, the images can be read as reducing the body — and work — to the hands. In them, fire-fighters become their hands — a point made in a different context by Janet Zandy in her book Hands: Physical Labor, Class and Cultural Work (2004: xiii; see also Sennett, 2008: 174).

It turns out that these images were part of a local art project sponsored by the New Deal for Communities regeneration programme in 2005, and undertaken by Artmongers. A series of images of hands ‘in theatrical positions’ was used to bring beauty to a construction site hoarding and to humanise public space (http://www.artmongers.com/participatory.html). I don’t know the rest of the story, but I’m guessing the fire-fighters liked these pictures and somehow or other they ended up outside the fire station. But it makes me wonder why they would want this representation of what they do on public display, and how it is that they see their own work.

References
1. Zandy, J. (2004) Hands: Physical Labor, Class and Cultural Work. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
2. Sennett, R. (2008) The Craftsman. London: Penguin.