Work-Art-Balance:
On the Labour of Attention, Subversion, and Neoliberal Subject Production in Pilvi Takala’s The Trainee (2008)

Fig. 1: Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Image © Pilvi Takala 2026. Courtesy the artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; and Stigter Van Doesburg, Amsterdam.

Both concentrated and absent-minded, she stares past the camera into the distance with her hand on her face, deep in thought (fig. 1). She has been sitting at her empty desk like this all day, as an alarmed email from a co-worker reports to her superiors on the other side of the split-screen video. During the clandestine performance upon which the installation The Trainee (2008) is based, Finnish artist Pilvi Takala infiltrates the offices of consulting leviathan Deloitte as an intern doing solely “brain work.” Whether she occupies the library without touching any books, sits at an empty workstation, or stands in an elevator all day, she quickly garners negative attention from her colleagues who avoid, bully, and report her. Unbeknownst to the perturbed office workers, her performance inside the Helsinki high-rise is in fact an artwork commissioned by upper management, and the secretly filmed footage of their reactions will grace the walls of the national Museum of Contemporary Art later that year.

While the cause for disturbance in Takala’s performance has been interpreted to be non-action—a Bartleby—¹, I propose a more agential reading of her trainee as a mental labourer putting herself in deep focus. Taking screen breaks and enjoying the movement of the elevator boost her concentration, as she explains to her colleagues, aligning herself with the general goal of productivity. Why, then, is her sustained execution of mental labour illegible as a form of working? In this essay, I argue that the artist’s radical reorientation of attention reveals its multimodal enmeshment in post-Fordist production logic—particularly as part of the performative imperatives of neoliberal work, as Western societies have shifted their domestic economies from the industrial production of goods to the arguably performative provision of services from the 1970s onwards. Stripped of the material markers of industriousness, Takala’s mental labourer destabilises implicit workplace conventions and lays bare how attention must be configured along affective, relational, and spatio-temporal vectors. Understanding attention as an act of agency and a force in the making of capitalist subjectivity, I will bring into focus the subjectivation processes of post-Fordist work––and how Takala re-appropriates them in her aesthetics of art-making when artistic critique is co-opted by capitalist production.

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Residency at the Office

The performance took place as part of an artist residency at the Helsinki office of the auditing and consulting firm Deloitte in February 2008.² The program’s proclaimed goal was having artists develop a work of art inside the office building, so that the employees could learn how to work more creatively from the artist’s process, or in other words, to imbue the consultants, accountants, lawyers, and PR specialists with the nebulous quality one might call artistic spirit. The performance and video artist Pilvi Takala (b. 1981 in Helsinki), known for her interventionist strategy of subtly irritating specific social conventions––she previously carried a large amount of cash through a shopping mall, and confidently hung out in a Turkish men-only café––was recommended to Deloitte by a curator from Kiasma, the Helsinki Museum of Contemporary Art. In return for the liaison, the company pledged to fund the commissioned piece, which was to enter into the museum’s collection.³

Inside the towering office building, Takala, using her middle name Johanna and a fictitious identity as a marketing student, is officially employed for a one-month internship as part of her master’s thesis⁴. She initially spends her time in the marketing department, performing regular office tasks such as typing on her laptop and photocopying documents.⁵ During her last week at the company, she withdraws from her regular work activities.⁶ On each of the three days documented in the final artwork, Takala visits a different location in the company outside of her original department and spends her entire workday there doing exclusively mental labour. On Monday, she sits at an empty desk in an open-plan office in the consulting department, and on Tuesday in the library of the tax and legal department. She spends Thursday standing in a glass elevator that connects the different department floors––riding along aimlessly with the other employees without operating the elevator or getting out. “I’m just doing some brain work,” she explains when asked.

Takala performs this mental work through gestures and facial expressions of contemplation: she touches her chin with her fingers in various poses of thought, runs her fingers through her hair, lets her unfocused gaze wander pensively, and allows different emotions of cognisance  to wash over her face. No physical work tools such as computers, phones, writing or reading utensils are present. The artist uses her body to occupy only the basic physical infrastructure of her chosen workspaces: sitting at an empty desk on the first two days and standing in the elevator on the third—two formal and one informal workplace. Her colleagues react with curiosity and polite inquiries, but also with increasing discomfort, avoidance, and visible anger, even to the point of making urgent demands for her to be disciplined.

I’m Just Doing Some Brain Work

Takala uses hidden cameras to film her performance and the reactions of the employees, which, together with internal company communications about her behaviour, form the basis of the three video works of The Trainee, each documenting one day of her final week at Deloitte. In the installation, they are displayed along with Takala’s employee paraphernalia (her keycard and standardised onboarding letter from the company), and an arrangement of office furniture reminiscent of a conference room (fig. 2). Within the video artworks, the artist employs an aesthetic that oscillates between surveillance footage and investigative journalism. The workstation video recordings have at least one edge of the image encroached on by indistinct black areas—as if cloaked by camouflage material so as not to be spotted. The blurry, low-res, low-angle shot of the body camera she wears in the elevator evokes the look and feel of the secretly taped behind-closed-doors dialogue of a damning exposé. On the other hand, the motionless overhead view of the consulting department’s open-plan office in the first video work, February 25, a Day at Consulting (2008), gives the impression of authoritative CCTV. After Takala enters the room and settles at an empty desk in the center of the frame, time-lapse sequences contrast her static, silent presence at the table with the bustling activity of the other employees, who type away on their computers, approach each other for short conversations, and frequently cross the room to adjacent meeting rooms. She abstains from all of these movements, in which office work becomes codified.

Fig. 2: Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Installation view, On Discomfort, Goldsmiths CCA, 2023. Courtesy the artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam; and Goldsmiths CCA, London. Photography by Rob Harris.

When Takala is spoken to, the video slows down to show her colleagues’ polite questions at normal speed (“Are you starting here now?”, “You have to wait for something or...”). While she does not initiate any conversations herself, she provides friendly, neutral responses to small talk and openly describes her activity as mental labour, occasionally mentioning plausible advantages: “You know when you’re always staring at the monitor, so it’s good to sometimes try to do the work just in your head.” However, she evades questions about the content of this work, thus withdrawing her attention both from building personal relationships and from engaging in substantive collaboration in the workplace. The first moment of anxiety arises when a colleague approaches her, trying to check in about emailing her some files. Visibly overwhelmed by the unfamiliar situation, the office worker nervously stifles Takala’s response, “I’m just doing some thinking. Brain work,” and walks off.

In the second video, February 26, a Day at Tax & Legal (2008), a two-channel edit combines the artist’s gestures and facial expressions as she works in the library with transcripts of several emails that are being sent about her. With the priority set to “high,” the inquiring tone of the emails quickly shifts to disparagement (“What on earth is this [...]? [sic]”), and another presumed superior is CC’d in. There seems to be an urgency among the employees to mitigate the occurrence and alleviate their anxiety (“People at Tax not only thought this is weird and funny, but also scary to some extent.”) One of the people in the know about the performance responds with reassurances following capitalist logic—the situation has been personally reviewed and the work is in fact progressing well. The juxtaposition of the ongoing email correspondence with the visibly clueless Takala arouses empathetic unease for her perceived surveillance, while simultaneously positioning the viewer in the uncomfortable role of an overseer comparing the reports to the taped evidence of her behaviour (fig. 3).

Fig. 3: Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Image © Pilvi Takala 2026. Courtesy the artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; and Stigter Van Doesburg, Amsterdam.

The emotional tension experienced by the Deloitte employees finally comes to the fore in the   cramped confines of the elevator—the setting of the third and longest video work, February 28, a Day in the Elevator (2008). In addition to being avoided, the artist is now confronted with sardonic undertones, derogatory jokes, and passive-aggressive interrogation (“Is your job driving the elevator?”). Withholding her attention from visibly registering and verbally ameliorating the affects produced by her colleagues, she keeps her focus firmly placed within her own mental activity. With its low-angle view, the hidden body camera reinforces a sense of helplessness vis-à-vis her colleagues and the social pressure they exert in the enclosed space, while concurrently suggesting the self-empowerment of conducting a covert investigation into company culture. The movement of the elevator is visually emphasized in the occasionally shaky footage. Takala employs this movement as a means of contemplation, as she explains to an inquirer: “Like on a train, so I’m able to think in a different way when it’s moving.”

Her use of the elevator reveals its standardised space-time as part of the office building’s infrastructure: the automatic door-closing mechanism repeatedly interrupts her conversations, as they take longer than the lift is programmed to anticipate, due to the need to discuss her unusual lack of elevator operation. In the video, all employees submit to the prescribed spatio-temporal rhythm of the elevator, including the singular person who displays an earnest interest in Takala’s method of working—regardless of sympathies, they all end their chats with her abruptly as soon as they arrive at their destination floor and exit the lift.

My Working Is Still the Work

Within her performance, the artist challenges normative codes of conduct of the office workplace, particularly in terms of working methods. The intern’s chosen way of labouring violates both notions of laziness, which generally must be masked by busyness, and of productivity, which is evidently not or not sufficiently attributed to her by the Deloitte employees. The question of whether it is her job to operate the elevator reveals that Takala’s activities are not perceived as labour by her colleagues. Thinking, meaning mental work, which the trainee sincerely describes as her occupation when prompted, is indeed a fundamental part of the work carried out at Deloitte as a service company (and also to be expected in the context of scientific research for a thesis). And yet, the seemingly consistent performance, i.e., the execution of mental labour is not acceptable to her colleagues, neither at an established workplace (the desks) nor at a creatively chosen location (the elevator). Takala’s performance thus raises questions around the conventions and codifications mental work must be subject to in contemporary capitalism in order to be legible as such.

As Western societies have transitioned from industrial to service economies and the production of intangible goods has gained precedence over material manufacturing from the 1970s onwards, both the quality of paid labour and its power structures have equally been transformed. Superseding the hierarchical and inflexible factory work and long-term employment patterns of Fordism with more flexible, short-term, and self-governed labour models, the sum of these shifts in production methods and organisation is commonly denoted as post-Fordism.⁷ Against this backdrop, Takala’s mental labourer is emblematic of the type of work that post-operaist theory has identified as the predominant mode of value production in post-Fordist capitalism: immaterial labour.

Maurizio Lazzarato uses the term ‘immaterial labour’ to describe the quality of work that produces the informational and cultural dimension of goods.⁸ This requires the direct production tasks of processing and generating information and communicating it extensively within the company.⁹ Immaterial labour thus produces immaterial products, such as ideas, strategies, forms of communication, emotions, or social relationships.¹⁰ In the specific office context, this is reflected in activities such as the preparation of analyses and concepts, the drafting of plans and presentations, the provision of consulting services, and the development of advertising campaigns.¹¹ However, Takala’s performance reveals two dimensions of materiality along which immaterial work must be configured. On the one hand, the artist’s radical renunciation of physical work tools highlights the compulsion to codify immaterial work directly and immediately, using material devices such as pen and paper or a computer. This becomes particularly apparent in February 25, when her colleague abruptly ends the conversation with Takala upon realizing that she, without a computer, cannot receive the employee’s materialised work (and, at the same time, a material work tool for further usage) in the form of the digital file—no alternative solution is sought that could provide the information apart from the transmission at this particular encoded level. Immaterial work thus needs a carrier to become usable.¹² In the installation, Takala’s Deloitte keycard is presented on a plinth, while her default welcome letter from the company is framed and hung on the wall (fig. 4). As physical means of authentication, they underscore the necessity of materially encoding the contingency of work and thus marking the body as a potentially working one—for both the trainee doing an internship and the artist actively producing an artwork. In this sense, the museal paraphernalia underlines itself as a vessel that may accommodate more or less material artistic productions, including their own conditions, to artworld circulation.

Fig. 4: Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Installation view, On Discomfort, Goldsmiths CCA, 2023. Courtesy the artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam; and Goldsmiths CCA, London. Photography by Rob Harris.

On the other hand, Takala’s approach to the physical infrastructure of the office highlights it as a material vector along which immaterial labour must also be configured. The intern’s violation of the norm consists in her treating the infrastructure as merely static. In February 25, the time-lapse footage illustrates the high level of movement her colleagues display in the open-plan office, which is deliberately designed for mobility and exchange; in February 26, she eschews the movement to and between the bookcases for which libraries are set up. However, the standardization of movement in a material environment becomes particularly clear in the elevator. Its highly conventionalised use (immediate button pressing, occupying it only until the destination floor is reached) reveals its standardisation of space-time for working bodies—in contrast to Takala’s lingering presence without operating any buttons or actively negotiating the direction of travel, which suggests the possibility of structuring the space-time of the elevator differently (fig. 5). Immaterial labour is thus dependent on spatial organisation to ensure productivity, as was once the case with the optimised machine hall layouts of industrial capitalism.¹³ The artist also refers to this aspect of materiality in the installation. The placement of the conference room furniture in the exhibition space contrasts the dynamic, task-oriented movement regime of the office infrastructure with a different movement protocol: that of the contemplative exhibition venue. The artwork thus expands the concept of immaterial labour to the materiality along which immaterial work is codified and performed—based on spatio-temporal usage protocols for the material infrastructure, which may regulate the subject’s epistemic attention, as Marina Vishmidt has argued.¹⁴

Fig. 5: Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Image © Pilvi Takala 2026. Courtesy the artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; and Stigter Van Doesburg, Amsterdam.

My Performing Will Be the Work

Immaterial labour must first be situated within the subject and loop back to it, as the previous considerations have shown. In order to become legible as work, immaterial labour, as Takala’s performance demonstrates, must be codified through the body of the subject—using material work tools and spatio-temporal infrastructures. It is precisely the material output that stores the results of the work and makes them accessible to other people (e.g. emails, reports, presentations, books, etc.). It thus integrates the content of the work into communication, which, according to Lazzarato, must be performed by the subject and represents the second fundamental aspect of immaterial labour. He specifies the context of this communication as productive, communicative cooperation in networks with collective learning processes.¹⁵ In this way, the production process of communication can become a direct means of exploitation—as corporate goals such as optimisation, diligence, sociability toward customers and within the team, and reliability are set up to be internalized by workers through their self-management.¹⁶ Also required to overlap with capitalist logic are personal preference and self-development, as is reflected in the contemporary desire to have an interesting job and experience some degree of self-realization at work, as well as in aligning one’s educational choices with market demands (including flexibility and the willingness to perpetually learn).¹⁷At the heart of this analysis lies the subject, who must make their personality, communicativeness, creativity—in short, their subjectivity—available, while at the same time adapting it to the conditions of production.¹⁸ In other words, social, affective, and creative human characteristics are used in and for post-Fordist work and thereby standardised.¹⁹

The Trainee investigates this construction of the neoliberal subject, i.e., its subjectivation. For the performance, the artist creates a subject that massively violates the central axes of cooperation and communication by speaking only when spoken to and then only briefly, and by not revealing the contents of her mental labour—neither in the form of a codified materialisation nor verbally in conversation. She does not disclose her work process and visibly does not participate in any cooperative work processes with other employees. The only communicative act that contributes to cooperation and collective learning within the Deloitte network is Takala’s occasional verbalisation of the advantages of her chosen way of working—as the artist has stated, it is important to her to display a logic behind her behaviour, so as not to appear mentally ill.²⁰ She also keeps her personality largely inaccessible, in that she only provides factual, concise answers to small talk questions and avoids any further conversation in which she could reveal personal information. Conversely, Takala’s intern exceeds the authorised levels of subjectivity and creativity with her idiosyncratic working methods.

Through this contrastive subject configuration, the artist opens up a critical perspective on the dimensions of its normative construction qua immaterial labour. With the intense reactions of her colleagues, Takala foregrounds the underlying power dynamics governing the decidedly complex processes of subject formation in post-Fordism. To speak with Lazzarato: subject formation is constituted and controlled by the horizontally open structure of the workplace.²¹ In bringing the self into communicative cooperation, one’s own activity is simultaneously managed and thus controlled, while also partaking in the coordination of the immaterial labour of others—one is always on the lookout for identifying suitable partners to add to the informal network for potential future projects.²² As the articulation of power moves from the concentrated, clearly demarcated and inflexible hierarchy of industrial capitalism to a society of control, as Foucault and Deleuze have argued, in which power is rendered decentralised and invisible, it is reproduced within the self and between each other.²³ Takala renders this tendency toward mutual (rather than strictly hierarchical) control and evaluation inherent in the cooperation paradigm visible with the intensity and variety of reactions from the Deloitte employees: They intervene quickly and urgently, whether through questioning or the building of social pressure and bullying, even though they bear no official responsibility for Takala within the formal company hierarchy whatsoever—the people who do are all privy to the performance. The worker’s attention is thus twofold: directed inwards as constant self-surveillance to remain in total exchange, and directed toward others to search for connectivity and halt deviance.

Fig. 6: Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Installation view, On Discomfort, Goldsmiths CCA, 2023. Courtesy the artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam; and Goldsmiths CCA, London. Photography by Rob Harris.