by Tara Heffernan.

I won’t let myself be tyrannized by the three-ring binders.

— Thomas Bernhard, Extinction, 1986.

We study “power,” but without any interrogation of the kinds of power embedded in the assumption that our institutionalized role is one of endless, infinite “critique.”

— Catherine Liu, “External Compliance, Internal Defiance,” 2024.

From the mass strike to the go-slow, refusing work has long been a tactic within labour movements. However, in the wake of the 1960s counterculture, this refusal was often aestheticised; stripped of its collective dimension and recast as an individual lifestyle choice. Rather than emphasise the importance of dignity in the workplace and pride in work—values earlier working-class movements championed[1]—many on the New Left embraced a complete rejection, or refusal to work as a political stance in and of itself. TCB’s current exhibition Sneak Out (19 July – 17 August 2025) offers a telling contemporary manifestation of this attitude. According to the blurb, the exhibition was inspired by “counter-social responses”[2] to the pressures of contemporary work and home life—sneaking out, time-stealing, and quiet-quitting.
        Many of the works exhibited consider aesthetic features of the white-collar workplace. For example, Ella Valentine’s assisted readymade It’s like a receipt of my brain (2025) features a welcome mat. The homogenised surface of heavily textured, tightly bound dreadlocks of fabric are presented for close inspection at eye level. Scraps of paper bearing drawings and scrawled notes curl off the edges of the carpet like bleached tongues. There’s something of the three-ring binder writer about it—the exertion of creative energy in frustrated doodlings during work hours. Remember, French novelist and art critic J.K. Huysmans drafted his novels from his desk at the Ministry of the Interior, altering their letterhead to read “Ministry of the Interior Life.” Conventionally, the welcome mat provides a surface upon which to discard debris carried underfoot—an often-futile attempt to maintain the boundary between the inside and outside; the personal from the semi-private/semi-public bureaucratic environment of the workplace. Elevating the ground—in this case, homogenous office turf—to the verticality of art, turns the carpet into a horizontal landscape: the non-space of white-collar labour that encourages regulated civility.
        Modelled on the dome convex mirrors found in shops and street corners, Chloe Nolan’s Interior #1 and Interior #2 (both 2025) depict warped, fictive office spaces. A surveillance staple, the convex dome condenses multiple lines of sight into a single field. From the Arnolfini Portrait’s embedded mirror to avant-gardist optical tricks that mesmerised the early twentieth century bourgeois, the device has shaped ways of seeing. Nolan’s mirrors hold sparse scenes: bold lines and block colours render the banal architecture of contemporary labour in a sterile pop style—Howard Arkley meets Mike Judge’s Office Space.
        Grace Connors’s opening-night spoken word performance, Keith—drawn from a broader performance series based on her experiences working for a debt collector and as a witness to a company CEO’s odd speech at an EOFY party—channels the swaggering, hard-edged rhetoric of capitalism’s hustlers and middle-management gangsters. The brash machismo of these flawed characters is a jarring departure from the rest of the show, which deals mostly in the softened yet still malevolent euphemisms of the HR-sanitised workplace.
        Curator Paul Boyé provides a densely written curatorial agenda which makes bold, though rather scattered, claims. In line with the theme, it seems that Boyé “quiet-quit” before proof-reading. It begins: “‘Sneak Out’ pathologies [pathologises?][3] the blurred boundaries between home and work spaces as domains of limit, and looks to heighten and/or mitigate anxieties around such spaces.” Though the syntactic muddiness and conceptual redundancy are consistent with much art writing today, there’s a lot going on in this sentence. "Pathologi[s]es" is vague without a clear subject or mechanism—the sentence gestures toward criticality but doesn’t clearly establish what exactly is being rendered pathological, by whom, or to what end. "Domains of limit", while it has an appealing psychoanalytic gloss, is an opaque nominal construction lacking semantic precision. The phrase "heighten and/or mitigate anxieties" reflects muddled rhetorical intent, collapsing opposing actions into an uncommitted formulation. Moreover, despite dressing in the garb of lofty, poststructuralist discourse, “heighten and/or mitigate,” with the disjunctive conjunction, also echoes the therapeutic solutionist language of the managerial class.
        It’s tiresome to quibble over grammar and punctuation. It is content that matters. Pedantry about things like spelling, punctuation, and pronunciation is usually a tell for rule-lovers who balk at sincere intellectual curiosity. That said, when over-writing is used to craft the illusion of conceptual complexity, it is difficult to ignore. It is form as content. Moreover, this use of linguistic flair and (stilted) labyrinthine sentence structure reflects the forms of white-collar work—or subversions of work—sanctioned within professional class workplaces that thrive on symbolic capital.
        Dan Bourke’s featured series Values (2025) specifically addresses the use of language, and the ideological conditioning promulgated in white-collar workplaces. The works consist of stuffed animals sourced from second hand retailers, suspended from the ceiling in three bulbousy columns. Lettering affixed to each spell out words often touted by Australian art institutions: INTEGRITY, DIVERSITY, RESPECT. In a recent review, Francis Russell aptly examined Bourke’s conflation of cuteness and buzzwords as a reflection on managerial kitsch: the symbolic, aesthetic and rhetorical gloss of inspirational, human-centered and morally upright language used in workplace culture.[4] By suspending these plush mascots of virtue mid-air, Bourke exposes the soft furnishings of managerial ideology—the way language in the contemporary workplace is padded, packaged, and displayed for effect.
        One of the most distinctive bears in Bourke’s arrangement is patterned with love hearts and peace symbols, an icon of the hippie generation. Its foot touches the gallery floor. No other toy makes contact. Though likely inadvertent, it strikes me as a “grounded” critique not only of work culture, but of the rhetoric the exhibition extols. Championing free love, preaching anti-establishment rebellion, and launching full-throated attacks on the family as a patriarchal and repressive construct, the utopian idealism of 1970s hippie flower power laid the foundations for today’s cultural climate of individualism, extended adolescence, and the erosion of any meaningful distinction between art and life, aesthetics and politics. One of the more emblematic slogans to emerge from this moment was Timothy Leary’s mantra: “TUNE IN. TURN ON. DROP OUT.” Debuting in 1967, the slogan quickly circulated through underground press, featuring on posters and pamphlets associated with the psychedelic and anti-establishment movements. However, Leary, a former Harvard psychologist turned psychedelic evangelist, was less interested in systemic critique than in personal transcendence via LSD. Though his call to “drop out” became a popular shorthand for resistance, for most of his followers, this break from normative society was more symbolic than structural. These were not the original “dropouts” for whom the term was coined, those expelled or excluded from educational institutions, working life, and social legitimacy, but rather individuals who could afford to romanticise nonconformity. Leary’s rhetorical sleight of hand allowed this privileged class to cosplay rejection, collapsing the figure of the dispossessed with that of the bohemian, and in doing so, aestheticise marginality without confronting its material stakes.
        Like “drop out”, “sneak out” is an infantilising term: it recalls schoolchildren playing hooky, or suburban teens climbing out the window at night. Just like the child who slips away from school to loiter in public, or the teenager who quietly exits the family home to get clumsily fingered in a night-sheathed playground—both eventually returning to their disciplinary structures, ideally undetected—so too does the worker re-enter their workplace, their micro-act of dissent absorbed without notice, allowing their normative relationship to capitalism to remain intact.
        Infantilising, but also in line with the cadence of managerial neologism, sneaking out, quiet-quitting, and time stealing all suggest illicit behaviour—yet crucially, they also evoke a calculated navigation of disciplinary risk. What happens when one abdicates their responsibilities in the workplace? Perhaps, if we occupy bullshit jobs,[5] there are no repercussions. However, sometimes others take on the burden.[6] At best, quiet-quitting, sneaking out and time stealing are therapeutic—but ultimately superficial and likely counterproductive—solutions to broader problems with work and managerial culture. At worst, they function as a way to flaunt one’s relative lack of precarity with affected nonchalance.
        In their 1972 book, The Hidden Injuries of Class, Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb tell the stories of working-class people in America during the late 1960s. One common experience shared by their upwardly mobile subjects is surprise at the nonchalance of their middle-class born co-workers. “A poor man,” the authors explain, “has to want upward mobility in order to establish dignity,” while for the educated, presumably born with dignity, “their status means they can cheat.”[7] Demonstrating its continuity, Catherine Liu reiterated in 2023: “Working class children of all races were told by parents or grandparents that obeying rules was a mode of survival in a world that was hostile to their interests.” Thus, “the countercultural disdain for squares,” often harboured by the children of the well-off, typically carries “class-based contempt.”[8]
        The iconic film Nightcleaners (1975) provides a telling historical anchor in the exhibition, illuminating the cleavage between pre- and post-‘68 attitudes towards work. The documentary, by the Berwick Street Film Collective (Marc Karlin, Mary Kelly, James Scott, and Humphry Trevelyan), follows a campaign to unionise women night cleaners in London office buildings during the early 1970s. It intercuts nocturnal footage of women cleaning under harsh fluorescents with shaky scenes of union meetings. Fragments of conversation reveal the spillage between the women’s paid work and their unpaid domestic labour. The campaign was ongoing at the film’s completion.
        Many critics have noted that—due to its lack of resolution, eschewal of a narrative or clear political message—tensions arose between the filmmakers, workers, and unionists involved in the project. “The film doesn’t fulfil the messianic functions the organized Left ... require of a film,” argued Lucy Waugh, a feminist featured in the film. “Our struggle,” she continued, “is ... as much with the Left as it is with the film making tradition.”[9] Though a compelling document, in retrospect, the film’s ambiguity and self-referentiality read as a kind of acquiescence to the broader post-’68 treatment of “work” as a floating signifier, untethered from the Old Left’s understanding of work as primarily productive labour. In the film, work is anchored both in its literal subject matter, feminised labour, and in the meta role of the documentary as artistic labour. This is made visible through self-reflexive techniques that foreground the film’s status as a representational, ideologically loaded medium: shots of clapperboards, editing tables, slow motion, extreme close-ups of strained faces, and warping effects that muddy sound and vision. This self-conscious formalism risks draining urgency from its subject, leaving the cleaners’ struggle suspended in an abstract play of signs—a symptom of the post-’68 retreat from labour’s material conditions into the insulated circuits of avant-garde discourse.
        The retreat into formalism, where the representation of labour eclipses its material stakes, is taken to an extreme in a Cronenbergian sculpture by Oliver Hull. In entropy (the monotony of inner movements seizes upon fleeting visions) (2025), Hull has practiced self-surveillance, measuring the capacity of the artist’s hand. The sculpture consists of two mounted industrial devices linked to a metal junction box, their conduits snaking like veins or umbilical cords. Each clock-like circular face displays the numbers 1–9. These numbers light up seemingly at random. The order, however, is determined by the artist’s “cognitive fingerprint,” based on sequences manually entered every five minutes over several days. Though Hull aimed to pick numbers at random, when analysed, these inputs revealed the human bias toward pseudo-randomness and apophenia—the tendency to perceive and impose patterns even in acts intended to be arbitrary. entropy echoes the surrealist explorations of the inner psyche, but in a Ballardian register that reveals its limits through sophisticated data analysis. It critiques artwork—an ideologically loaded compound noun—through exposing the poverty of the human mind when it is liberated entirely from meaning and romanticised as free. Even creative attempts at chaos and ambiguity are usually driven by something concealed, ideological, idiosyncratic, and entirely unconscious.
        In Hull’s work, the act of making becomes less about engaging with the material conditions of labour and more about tracing the artist’s own cognitive residue—a clever move that, in its austerity, coyly parodies both the contemporary obsession with mining (and revealing) inner worlds, and the post-’68 withdrawal from the shop floor into the closed loops of avant-garde introspection. The question of skill itself comes into focus, and with it, the shifting stakes of what counts as labour today. Manual labour, long considered low-to-no skill work, still requires competence with the tools. Art and intellectual work, however, have been thoroughly de-skilled. As a credentialed member of the managerial class, you can swap a verb for a noun and, unfortunately, few people will notice. However, for the janitorial staff, using a mop on carpet likely won’t go unremarked upon.

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Footnotes:

1. Julie-Marie Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 33.

2. This is in stark contrast to the Old Left, who could be described as pro-social. The Old Left promoted collectivist ideals through labour unions and advocated for universal welfare systems and state planning for the common good. They saw the working class as the key agent of change and viewed “the social” as a shared realm of solidarity against capitalist individualism. Catherine Liu recently reflected on the role of social life for the working class: “people for whom failure is ... future destroying have few resources to fall back on when they are rejected or do poorly at work. Building strong social bonds creates the much-touted ‘resilience’ so often invoked in discussions of adversity, whether in business or in life... The Professional Managerial Types who tout resilience have learned to instrumentalize depersonalization.” Catherine Liu, “Don’t take it personally: the advice on rejection,” CLiuAnon (Substack), May 24, 2023, https://substack.com/@cliuanon/p-123309479, (subscriber-only).

3. The original text contains the irregular use “pathologies.” This might be intended as an artful grammatical bending, treating a noun as though it were an active verb. 

4. Made to withstand crushing hugs and rough handling, these toys seem to pointedly growing infantilisation of adults, particularly under the dogma of social justice language. The craze for collectibles, plushies, and tiny pets points to a generation freed from traditional family roles, finding ersatz “families” in workplaces and professional networks.

5. Magdalena Soffia, Alex J. Wood, and Brendan Burchell, “Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs,” Work, Employment, and Society, vol. 36, no.5 (2022), 816-840.

6. A fun coincidence poetically aligned with the theme: when I visited TCB during opening hours and waited outside for 30 minutes with the scrawled promise of “back in 5” keeping me, another person working in the building let me in. The gallery-minder didn’t reappear during my hour visit.   

7. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (Knopf, 1972), 22.

8. Catherine Liu, “External Compliance, Internal Defiance”, CLiuAnon (Substack),November 1, 2024, cliuanon.substack.com/p/external-compliance-internal-defiance (subscriber-only)

9. Lucy Waugh quoted in Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: Documentary Grierson and Beyond, second edition (Bloomsbury, 2008), 197.  

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Images of Sneak Out (Dan Bourke, Grace Connors, Oliver Hull, Chloe Nolan, Ella Valentine, Berwick Street Collective. Curated By Paul Boyé) at TCB Gallery, 19 July 2025 – 17 Aug 2025. Photography by Nina Rose Prendergast.