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Looking at City Hall

Mayor Nutter and myself

 

Today, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., I am sitting in a desk in front of Philadelphia, PA's City Hall on South Broad street. I am once again exploring stasis while reading Alfred Jarry's Supermale, a book that "is obsessed with the potentialities of man and what he considers to be his limitations, with the idea of extending frontiers, pushing the possible to the limits of the imaginable, discovering what might be done by will power to liberate and control the energy of the universe" (Jarry XIII). It would appear that finding similarities between Supermale and my work, performances that deal with human capability, should be easy. I am placing myself in a public context with a wardrobe that provides assumptions as to my line of work and what I should be doing during the work day, yet I am doing the quintessential leisure exercise, reading. In my last post I talked about the sacrifices one must make when joining a social group; conforming is needed for order. Questioning the status quo though is fundamental to the human condition. Here, I am playing the role of the white-collar worker at his desk, doing something he presumably enjoys. It is my hope that passerbys question the available enjoyment opportunities in their work place environment. Does their job allot time for said enjoyment. What if the job world had time set aside where you engaged in fun physical exertion, and on other days you read your favorite literature?

View down South Broad Street.

Donated by City Hall Coffee House, by accepting I entered an inadvertent advertising agreement