Break Hour
The Vogues sang in 1965: ‘It's a five o'clock world when the whistle blows / No one owns a piece of my time’. But are we truly free when we step outside of work? The cigarette break, the lunch hour, the end of the shift, the Sunday rest, the holiday: these times are regimented or ritualised and exist in opposition to work. So too the leisure and tourism sectors have grown as an effect of industrialisation – even if recently they have been losing their romanticism. Downtime is used by these artists to highlight and critique the idea of work.