There’s a better life and you think about it, don’t you? was an evening of political song featuring vocal and choral performances to coincide with Ruth Ewan’s High Line commission Silent Agitator. Installed on the High Line at 24th Street, Ewan’s commission was a giant clock based on an illustration originally produced for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) labour union by the North American writer and labour activist Ralph Chaplin that reads “What time is it? Time to organize!”

Chaplin composed many of the galvanising songs for the labor movement of the early 20th century, including the famous “Solidarity Forever” for the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek coal miner strike of 1912 in Kanawha County, West Virginia. Celebration and song have always played key roles in the efforts of the Industrial Workers of the World, which has come to be known as the “singing union.”

Building on this history, the performers in There’s a better life and you think about it, don’t you? use music to relieve the fatigue of organising and celebrate labor rights victories, activists, and historical movements. For this event, Tayo Aluko performed excerpts from his one-person show, Call Mr. Robeson, about the life and times of the singer and activist Paul Robeson; the Sing in Solidarity Chorus sung a selection of their original choral arrangements for lyrics from the IWW’s Little Red Songbook; Lynn Marie Smith brought her energetic covers of pop songs recast with labor organising lyrics; NYC Labor Chorus performed selections from their repertoire developed over the last 28 years of singing together; and Brooklyn Women’s Chorus sung works including “We Were There” that speak to the central role of women in labor organising. Morgan Bassichis hosted the evening. Additionally, there was silk-screening of IWW graphics available on-site, provided by Shoestring Press.

In 2003 Ewan produced the first version of ‘A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World’ an ongoing archive of music with a broadly left-wing, political agenda presented on a CD jukebox. In 2018 she expanded the Feminist section of the project and presented the collection of 800 songs in a wall mounted jukebox. 

In this exhibition the Jukebox was accompanied by a series of found posters produced in the early 1980s as ‘Aids for Ending Sexism in Schools’. These champion female pioneers and campaigners for gender equality. Ewan added a new layer to these, inviting her five-year-old daughter to draw over the glass sheets, partially obscuring them. These works follow previous pedagogical experiments where Ewan produced drawings in collaboration with young children.

The exhibition drew on the work of the Swedish music archaeologist Cajsa Lund, an expert on prehistoric instruments from the Scandinavian region – such as the whistles made from bone and wood that have been found preserved in peat bogs.

Part of Ruth’s research for the project was conducted in Christiania, and the exhibition also featured a series of performance events and posters created in collaboration with children from the free town.