Punching the Time Clock: Punching Out

Punching In

I watched an old movie that took place many years ago. It was before my time, save one familiar element: workers punching in for work, out for lunch, back in after lunch, then back out at the end of the day. The sound of a time stamp on an hourly worker’s time stub. Pick up your timecard from the OUT board, Punch In, Place the card on the IN board. Pick up your card from the IN board, Punch Out, place it in the OUT board. Punch In, Punch Out, Punch In, Punch Out, Punch In, Punch Out, Punch In, Punch Out. It was what hourly workers did to get paid. The checks were always a week later. They weren’t very much, after the deductions. But it was money. Spent already.

I recall that the purpose of timecards was to keep a worker honest. There were ways around it, such as punching a friend’s card for them, giving them more hours than they really logged. But never mind that. Making minimum wage and punching a card seemed somehow humiliating. It was just the way it was.

I thought back to those times when I punched the clock and can enumerate them. First, there was the Stokely Van Camp canning factory where I ran the depalletizer on the late shift, sending empty tin cans onto a line where the cans would be filled with, in this case, green beans. Punch In, Punch Out. Then there was the County Road Commission where I mowed Interstate 94 during summer break, I was mowing just north of Detroit in 1968, yes, then. Punch In, Punch Out. The single day I worked for the Public School District, I painted a classroom with off-white latex, then found a better job. Punch In, Punch Out. I had not made enough money to bother collecting the check. Punch In, Punch Out. I ran a draw bench at Mueller Brass, extruding copper rods as I set some kind of production record and ended up being knocked unconscious. Enough of that shit. Punch In, Punch Out. My final job at which I was expected to punch a timecard was a full fifty years ago, it was in a major art museum. This was the job at which J. Paul Getty’s two-thousand-year-old marble elephant crushed my left leg in three places. Punch In, Punch Out. Someone must have punched out for me that day. Punch In, Punch Out.

A boss never punches a clock. I found out why. I found out as a boss myself that the boss is always on the clock, unless he or she is foolish, silly, or lazy. Punch In. An hourly wage earner can punch out and forget about the job until the next day. A boss is always on the clock or had better be. Some folks who do not know imagine that artists and writers are always off the clock. No, they punch an invisible time clock. One artist, I know for a fact, keeps a time clock in his studio. He punches in and punches out, marking which artwork or artworks he worked on between punching in and out. He gives himself an hourly value and prorates each finished artwork at that rate, depending how much time was spent.

He underpays himself, but it is still somewhat better than minimum wage*.


*Assuming his dealer finds an art collector who wants the piece.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jackson Pollock's Over-Splatter

Image
  Jackson Pollock's Over-Splatter,   How They Happened, Where They are Located, Why They Went Unnoted for More than Fifty Years, and How They May be Understood and Put to Use By Sandy Kinnee and Lauren Kinnee, Ph.D. Once You See the Drips You will Always See them PART 2 Jackson Pollock’s Stray Drips (Over-Splatter): Their origins and implications   Abstract   This paper proposes a wholly new method for reconstructing the chronology of Jackson Pollock's oeuvre based on the presence of drips of stray pigment on otherwise cohesive canvases.  Pollock, after having finished a painting and let it dry, moved it to the side in his studio where it occasionally accumulated drips and other marks that were the byproduct of his working method.  These marks, here termed ‘over-splatter,’ are present on both recto and verso of many Pollocks in major museums.  Lavender Mist of 1950, for example, has a large and distinctive red splotch on the front, right s...
Read more

The Mummy's Curse and the Armani Suit

Image
    There’s a reason it’s called rag paper.   For centuries, ragpickers supplied the papermaking industry with cotton and linen. Discarded clothing scraps were the aluminum cans of the past. They provided a livelihood to the unskilled. At the dawn of the Industrial Age, everything changed. A rising bourgeoisie and the success of education lead to increasing demand for printed material. The impact upon paper and the rag   supply chain was unanticipated. Consumption of traditional cotton and linen scraps outstripped supply.   The price of rags rose. When demand for papermaking material exceeded supply, alternate sources were sought.    One long forgotten trove of very, very old rags was rediscovered in the 1800s: linen wrapped Egyptian mummies. A Maine papermill owner imported a boatload of them and removed the linen wrappings. The linen was then converted into pulp with the end product being butcher wrap.   Production of the brown   ...
Read more

Isamu Noguchi and His Nisei Muse

Image
Noguchi Doing Time While it is true that at Poston Isamu Noguchi was neither fish nor fowl not fully Japanese and was in the internment camp voluntarily None of those who had reason to not want him around had the authority to release him He was a perpetual outsider Much like Pollock was portrayed as a cowboy but was anything but Except for Jackson's drinking Two artists doing time in ill-fitting Pigeonholes The book tells the story of Isamu Noguchi's girlfriend and muse during his time in the Poston Internment Camp, located in the Arazona desert where she inspired his famous lamps. CLICK HERE TO BE TAKEN TO THE FULL PREVIEW OF THE BOOK. The book is a limited edition of fifty copies.
Read more