D-I-Y POP-UP GUIDE TO JOY IN WORK II

by the Sandwichman

with the Saint Simonians, industrial labor is seen in the light of sexual intercourse; the idea of the joy of working is patterned after an image of the pleasure of procreation -- Walter Benjamin

The British artist Eric Gill gave a series of lectures in the 1930s, which was subsequently published as a book, Work and Leisure. What he had to say was largely in the tradition of 19th century English moralists on work, such as Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and William Morris. He summarized his argument in a letter to the editor of The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs responding to a critical review of his book.

I reproduce Gill's summary of his book below, but first a word about Gill's curious sexual (mis)conduct. In addition to countless encounters with models, prostitutes, patronesses and anyone else in a skirt who came within hailing distance, Gill had incestuous relations with his sisters, his daughters and "experimented" with his dog (and he wasn't even a Republican!).

An indignant sketch of Gill's proclivity was given by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison in a 1989 review -- "Perversity raised to a principle" -- of Fiona MacCarthy's ERIC GILL A Lover's Quest for Art and God. My own view is that Harrison's indignation was misplaced. Not to condone or celebrate Gill's behaviour, I would place the blame for it instead on modern industry's failure to realize the utopian dream image mentioned in the above quote by Benjamin. And now, without further ado, here's Gill's summary of Work and Leisure:

In Chapter 1 of the book, I dealt with the nature of art as embracing the whole of human making. In the course of this, I endeavored to show that by the use of modern machines responsibility is denied to the individual workman -- he has been reduced to a subhuman condition of intellectual irresponsibility -- and that machines in their perfection do not help the labourer but are a substitute for him. It is argued therefore that machine-made things, however good in their kind, are not, properly speaking, human products and are therefore ultimately unsuitable for human use.

In Chapter 2, I argued that in human society, commerce springs naturally as the business of exchange and that there is not normally any "art" which is not an object of commerce--for no painter can eat paintings but must exchange them for bread. The trouble arises, according to my argument, when the trader or middleman becomes insubordinate and obtains control of production and consumption, thus perverting production to "the vicious aim of profit." In this commercialism, machine-production is the natural instrument. It enables those who control it to make more things more cheaply and, therefore -- the machine-minders being dispossessed -- more profitably, and they are not worried by any questions of inhumanity.

In Chapter 3, I argued that though art is all human making and commerce is the right and natural business of the exchange of goods and services, there is a quality in human beings and therefore in human works which is not patient of valuation in terms of prices and that it is this quality which, in ultimate analysis, is man’s reason of being or final cause, and without which there could be no need to bother about art or commerce, right or wrong, justice or injustice, piety or politics. This is the quality of holiness and in humane societies, societies not ruled by finance, societies in which things are made by men for men and not by machines, the quality of holiness is a common quality, a common-place quality, nothing to write home about or put in glass cases in museums.