PLUMBER’S CRACK: WHO IS THE JOKE REALLY ON?
The idea for the painting began with a conversation about one of those strangely familiar images: fathers, grandfathers and working men bent over some household job, with the inevitable plumber’s crack appearing above the waistband. Everyone laughed because everyone seemed to know exactly what was being described. Nobody needed a photograph. Each person appeared to have stored their own version somewhere in memory.
A few days later, the conversation resurfaced in my mind as an image I wanted to paint.
At first, there is an obvious joke. Look a little longer and the joke becomes surprisingly complicated.
WHY IS PLUMBER’S CRACK SO FUNNY?
Human beings have an extraordinary ability to find certain bodily situations funny: somebody losing control of their presentation at an unfortunate moment, clothing revealing something it was designed to conceal, an unexpected glimpse of something private. There is nothing particularly sinister about laughing. Sometimes something is funny because it is funny.
Humour, however, often has an interesting relationship with vulnerability. Somebody trips and people laugh. Somebody accidentally exposes themselves and people laugh. The observer receives the comedy while the person experiencing the situation may be having an entirely different afternoon.
With plumber’s crack, the man usually has no intention of exposing himself. He is concentrating on something else. He bends, reaches, lifts, repairs, builds or crawls into an inconvenient space, and somewhere during that process his clothes stop performing their assigned duty. Something private becomes public without being part of the plan, and the person doing the work becomes the entertainment.
HE IS PROBABLY FIXING SOMETHING FOR YOU
This is the part of the image I find particularly absurd. The man with the plumber’s crack is probably not standing around waiting to be admired. He is doing something, and quite possibly he is fixing the observer’s problem.
The sink works because somebody crawled underneath it. The wall exists because somebody built it. Electricity, plumbing, air conditioning, roads, buildings, equipment and the physical infrastructure of ordinary life continue functioning because people repeatedly turn up and do jobs that require bodies to bend, lift, sweat, climb, carry, crawl, get dirty and occasionally look ridiculous.
We enjoy the finished result in a considerably more polished condition. There is something very human in the fact that the person benefiting from the labour can simultaneously occupy the comfortable position of observing and laughing at the person producing that benefit.
The worker often becomes most visible when his presentation is least controlled.
THE PEOPLE WHO KEEP THINGS WORKING
Technology is changing enormous numbers of professions and will continue to do so, yet physical life remains physical. Someone still has to install, repair, connect, build, move and maintain things.
No large business exists entirely in an abstract digital cloud. Beneath the polished brand, the beautiful office, the expensive development or the impressive technology is a long chain of human activity. Somebody drilled the hole, laid the cable, repaired the plumbing, carried the materials and turned up when something stopped working.
Families have their own versions of this. Many people can immediately picture a father or grandfather who was always building, fixing, sawing, repairing or disappearing into a garage to work on something. His contribution could become so ordinary that everyone stopped noticing it as a contribution at all.
WHEN THE PROVIDER BECOMES A FUNCTION
There is a family pattern I have observed often enough to recognise it. A man can gradually become defined by what he provides: earning, fixing, carrying, driving, building, paying, solving. Expectations accumulate around those functions because there is always another thing that needs to be done, while the person inside the role may receive far less curiosity.
What does he actually want? Is he exhausted? Is he happy? What did he once imagine doing with his life? Does anybody ask?
For generations, many families were organised with a father operating largely on the external edge of family life as provider while much of the emotional and domestic world developed elsewhere. In some families this arrangement worked well. In others, the man supporting the structure could become strangely peripheral inside the structure he was supporting.
Perhaps this is one reason the image of the father alone in the garage is so familiar. The garage can be a workshop, a retreat, a place of competence, an excuse to disappear for a while, or several of these things at once.
A person can be indispensable and lonely in the same house.
USEFUL PEOPLE ARE NOT ALWAYS POLISHED PEOPLE
Real work is often aesthetically inconvenient. Bodies doing physical work take awkward shapes. Clothes get dirty. People sweat. Hair becomes untidy. Hands become rough. A person crawling under a house does not have the same opportunity to manage their appearance as somebody presenting the finished project in a boardroom.
We tend to admire polished outcomes while becoming detached from the physical process that produced them. Plumber’s crack is an unusually concise image of that gap. Producing a clean, functional result may require somebody to spend hours in conditions that are neither clean nor particularly photogenic.
THE PRIVILEGE OF THE OBSERVER
Humour can create a temporary hierarchy because the person laughing has, for that instant, escaped being the person exposed. It is somebody else who slipped, lost control of their presentation or revealed more than intended. The observer remains safely outside the embarrassment and can enjoy the accident from a distance.
There can be a small feeling of superiority inside that position, yet the roles are unstable. Everyone has a body. Everyone eventually loses some control over how they appear. Most people have experienced a private embarrassment becoming somebody else’s funny story.
In PLUMBER’S CRACK there is another complication: the exposed person may be doing something useful for the person who gets to laugh. The observer’s comfort may depend directly on the labour of the person who currently looks ridiculous.
A SMALL MONUMENT TO WORK
I do not want to remove the humour from PLUMBER’S CRACK. The title is funny, the image is recognisable, and the phenomenon has survived across countries, professions and generations because people keep seeing it and people keep laughing.
EXISTENTIAL OBSERVATIONS does not need to prescribe a correct emotional response. My interest is in documenting the phenomenon, giving it a form and a name, and allowing a second look to reveal more than the first one did.
A man is working. His attention is on the job. His body has become temporarily vulnerable to somebody else’s gaze. The small accident of his clothing may become more immediately noticeable than the labour he is performing.
The painting can hold the humour while also preserving a very ordinary piece of contemporary life. Clothing will change. Work will change. Technology will change. Perhaps one day plumber’s crack itself will become a historical curiosity and somebody will have to explain why this particular strip of exposed anatomy was once so culturally recognisable that it had its own name.
For now, we know exactly what it means.
PLUMBER’S CRACK can remain an observation of something funny while also becoming a small historical monument to fathers, grandfathers, plumbers, builders, repairers, installers and other working people whose bodies have spent generations bending over the jobs that make everybody else’s daily life work.
You can laugh. Just remember who is fixing the sink.
