My colleagues and I are finally breathing a sigh of relief after three weeks of high pressure and workplace stress. This is why I haven't posted for a few days. An ambitious program has spent the last two months running seasonal ad campaigns, changing and relocating the foodservice area, renovating the back rooms where we do signs, changing the sign look for the whole store, and preparing for an inspection visit from the chief executive of the entire corporation. We had been promised that we would get a sign workroom of our very own, once the old sinks and tubs and fixtures had been removed from it. During the renovation frenzy, we had to do our signs while workmen and painters and construction people worked in the same space, as well as the usual customers coming through.

Early this week, during a re-painting job and store re-arranging, our designated space was crammed with all sorts of extra equipment and furniture and paint, along with our own signmaking equipment, file boxes, and art desks. The room was literally packed solid with stuff. Only the slimmest and youngest of our sign crew members could wriggle his way through to some sort of improvised flat space. The rest of us made do with any place we could find. Just before the Executive Visitation, I was doing signs on the bare floor of the now-emptied foyer where I had always done my work. Our sign crew, in my opinion, did a heroic job under these trying circumstances. But the Executive Verdict has not yet come down to us.

On Wednesday, by the time I came in, the Visitation was over and the employees, having worn themselves out making the store perfect for the inspection, were circulating about looking rather shell-shocked, or at least peanut-shell shocked. And, having done what we could, we in the sign crew were now authorized to pull all the stuff out of our chamber and arrange it to our satisfaction.

I spent that day, with another sign crew member, hauling and scrubbing and wiping the construction dust from everything. We threw things out, such as old signs or dead equipment, which we had always wanted to toss. We cleaned the floor and walls thoroughly. Then we put our newly dusted furniture and art equipment back inside. This was our "Promised Land."

Our new studio is a tiny back room, no more than fifteen feet by eight feet, and there are no windows and no skylight. Illumination is provided by fluorescent lights. But finally, after all these years of working in a busy, well-traveled spot we had to share with the tasting kitchen staff and their pots of pasta and stew, as well as the customers using the restrooms, we, the signmakers, have our own special place. And we rejoice!

Our sign room saga reminded me of a story by the famous British surrealist/dystopian writer J.G. Ballard from 1961, called "Billennium." In this "Ballardian" dystopia, vast numbers of people in a grossly overpopulated world are tightly confined in immense cities while the rest of the earth's usable space is used for mechanized agriculture to feed them. They must live in dormitories and tiny cubicles carved out of what used to be "normal" living spaces. In the story "Billennium," a pair of young men rent a double cubicle in an old run-down house filled with dozens of seedy tenants. By accident, one of the roommates discovers that their cubicle actually leads into an abandoned, and empty, room. Since the housing bureaucracy doesn't know about it, they claim it for themselves. Here's how Ballard describes the moment of discovery, and how the new tenants feel about it:

"Directly in front of them, faintly illuminated by a … skylight, was a medium-sized room, some fifteen feet square, empty except for the dust…"Do you realize what we've found? Do you realize it, man?" Rossiter was staring into the room, his mind staggered by its vastness. "You're right, he murmured. "Now, when do we move in?"… For an hour they exchanged places, wandering silently around the dusty room, stretching their arms out to feel its unconfined emptiness, grasping at the sensation of absolute spatial freedom. Although smaller than many of the subdivided rooms in which they had lived, this room seemed infinitely larger, its walls huge cliffs that soared upward to the skylight."

Unfortunately, their idyll in the new room doesn't last. They invite their girlfriends to stay with them in the room, and the girls bring in their elderly relatives, so that at the end of the story, even their new "abundance" of space is filled with seven people and their possessions. We artists can enjoy our cozy atelier knowing that we can go home to what would be, in Ballard's Billennium, a gift of infinite space.

Posted at 4:06 am | link