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The Gold Watch
By Live Drønen
Charlotte Thiis-Evensen’s grandfather, Eyvind Thiis-Evensen (1906-1998) worked as chief medical officer at Norsk Hydro, and played a central role in the development of occupational medicine as a discipline in Norway. This particular field, dealing with the relationship between work and health, is a central theme in several of the recent works of his grandchild Charlotte Thiis-Evensen (b. 1968), who has earlier put personal and family issues at the centre of her art, and it now seems a natural move to work artistically with the legacy of her grandfather.
The work The Gold Watch takes its starting point in a gold watch presented to Eyvind Thiis-Evensen by Norsk Hydro in 1965 as thanks for 25 years working in the company. The watch symbolizes both the employee’s faithful service and the employer’s gratitude and caring. In an exploration of the significance of work for human beings, Thiis- Evensen places the gold watch she has inherited in a glass case in the exhibition space. She has further photographed six young job-seekers from Notodden wearing it, in classic watch-advertisement postures, and interviewed all of them about the value of employment. Together the watch, the photographs and the text extracts from the interviews make up the work The Gold Watch, which is being shown for the first time in the Telemark Gallery at Notodden.
“I dream of living life”
“Take a Gernreich dress, add a Rolex Watch, and you have a woman who knows what time it is,” says one of the advertising posters for the luxury watch brand Rolex from the sixties, in which a beautiful woman has been photographed with her elbow on her knee and her hand wearing the watch at face height. “He is still making it,” says another, in which a man in a suit is tightening his tie – he too with a wrist boasting an exclusive Rolex. Watches have always been marketed as something timeless, as a value outside time – something that endures despite the passage of time. Giving a watch to someone imbues the gift with a certain weight – as in the case of Eyvind Thiis-Evensen; a gift that demonstrated gratitude for all the hours of work done for Norsk Hydro.
Such presentations are made in few Norwegian companies today. In a working life typified by more transience, more use of manpower services and greater competition in the labour market, there are few people today who work as long as 25 years for one company. More people change their jobs more often and fewer and fewer have a job for ten years or more [1]. The watch that the young people are wearing in the photographs thus becomes a symbol of something that today seems unattainable – permanent employment in a workplace that wants to invest in you.
For me having a job really just means having something to do so I don’t just sleep all day and sort of fade away. A job is really like an adventure ... I don’t know; just to turn up and feel that I have something to do, something new. After all it has to be a bit boring if your time has to consist of just being by yourself or loafing about. Everyone in the world has a goal after all: getting a job, finding someone to love, children. At any rate that’s what most people want. So yes... Start a family. Sort of live life. I dream of living life.
Bruno, quote from The Gold Watch
For Bruno to work is to live life. He is also part of a group that is in ever greater danger of losing the possibility of participating in this essential activity; young people with no higher education. Among these the percentage who are employed has gone down from 74 per cent in 2008 to just 64 per cent today. Fewer of the jobs that have been common among young people with low education exist today, and the competition for these jobs has become harder [2]. In addition the number of young disabled has doubled over the past 20 years.
What work means for human beings is something that has long preoccupied Thiis- Evensen. In the work Line 5 she bought 200 pairs of socks from a Roma woman at Majorstuen and turned the spotlight on her own working situation when the two women interviewed each other in Double Interview. In The Inspectors she turned the upper floor of Bergen Kunsthall inside out by printing huge images of the employees of the National Labour Inspectorate (which rents premises in the same building) on the facade, and in Solo she arranged an audition with an orchestra for a Kurdish barber who cuts hair six days a week and spends his remaining time playing music. Thiis-Evensen touches on something fundamental about being human in her portraits, and at the same time something fundamental in herself emerges: a sincere conscience in encounters with less privileged human beings. There is a political and activist aspect to her most recent works, expressed through a low-key poetic formal language. In The Gold Watch this comes to the surface in the openness of the young people’s quotations, which bears witness to the artist’s concern for and interest in the interview subjects.
The stream of consciousness
“To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt”, writes Susan Sontag in On Photography (1977). The photograph, like the watch, has something to do with time, and the artist possesses the power to stage the moment that is to be fixed in time. In the photographs in The Gold Watch we come very close, with no filter or beautification, as if we are permitted to be part of the raw material. The photographs are almost too honest, in the sense that they confront the person who looks into the eyes of the subjects. As viewers we are forced to look inward and perhaps ourselves confront the shame of being on the winning side in the market economy in which we live. For the great majority of people time means money. The time you work becomes money which in turn gives you economic freedom to spend the remaining time as you like. Sitting in the watch-advertisement postures thus makes the subjects in Thiis-Evensen’s photographs point to the paradoxical relationship between the luxury that time represents for a person who can afford a Rolex watch and the frustration and demons that time represents for someone who is unemployed.
Thiis-Evensen works intuitively. She draws her ideas from everyday life, through the well known “stream of consciousness” [3]. She takes what she needs and lives with all around her – in this case the legacy of her grandfather. The method lies close to both Nan Goldin’s personal and documentary photographic work and Sophie Calle’s continuous mixture of fiction and her own reality. As a journalist, producer and pro- gramme director for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation NRK Thiis-Evensen has been able for a long time to weave art seamlessly into journalism and journalism into art. From her very first artistic project – Dominance – where in ‘spots’ in the NRK programme Nationalgalleriet she let various artists decide over her and thus express their relationships with journalists – to the role of the interviews in The Gold Watch,Double Interview and The Inspectors. Yet there is an important but: Thiis-Evensen never claims that journalism is art or vice versa. There is a clear distinction here, and her in-depth knowledge of the press-ethical goals of objectivity and art’s quite essential subjectivity means that she can move freely between the two worlds.
Unemployment and the Devil
“Work keeps at bay three great evils – boredom, vice and need”, writes Voltaire inCandide, or Optimism (1759), a book that ends with Candide arriving at an existence he can tolerate by devoting himself to work and personal development. Idleness is the root of all evil is a Nordic version of the English adage The Devil finds work for idle hands, perhaps originally from the St. Jerome quotation “work and do something so that the Devil always finds you occupied”, but also a mixture of the Biblical verse “the love of money is the root of all evil” (Tim, 6,10) and “idleness is the Devil’s pillow”, from the Ibsen play Brand.
With a physical object, photograph and text placed in the same room The Gold Watchtells a story with an ever-topical theme. The media both interact and point back (the gold watch) and forward (the youths). This opens the way for valuable thoughts and the inevitable insights upon which the above-mentioned sources dwell, and to which research also points – that work has a positive effect on our health, and that standing outside working life can be bad for both mental and physical health. The work shows the mutability of working life over time – what we work with and how this is debated, before The Gold Watch zooms in on exactly those who stand in danger of being hit by the changes.
That a family bond is at the basis of the work makes it personal in a quiet way. Without becoming obtrusive this helps us to reflect ourselves better. Because the artist herself does it, we are invited also to look inward, and perhaps backward in our own history. In 1919 the Norwegian labour movement had one of its greatest victories ever, as the eight-hour day became statutory in Norway – around a decade before Eyvind Thiis- Evensen embarked on his working life. How do we ensure our rights today in a modern working life where the market forces rule? Here Thiis-Evensen lays her own and the public’s conscience on the table and asks the question: Can art do anything? The answer is something that perhaps only we who see it can give in the last analysis.
[1] An annual study of job changes carried out by the Manpower Group.
[2] Central Bureau of Statistics.
[3] “The free flow of thoughts, ideas, associations, impressions and emotions that constantly passes through a person’s consciousness” – William James, Principles of Psychology (1980).