Tanya Bonakdar

THE OFFICE

The Office is conceived as a group exhibition featuring selected works by contemporary artists who utilize objects and materials normally found in the workplace, products whose original form and structure are inextricably linked to their functionality, production and utility in an office setting. In its intended setting, the value of an office object is gauged according to its efficiency in assisting a particular task or efficacy in serving a specific function: the desk, the overhead projector, the water cooler, the file cabinet, and the document are all examples of workplace objects streamlined and whittled down to their essential functions. Rather than emphasize our normative, ‘use-value’ assessment of these objects, however, the work in The Office allows them to become poetic elements of contemporary art, celebrating their potential to transcend their mundane nature. Incorporating these structures into new narratives, these artists give workplace objects a second life as part of landscapes, divine abstractions, and, in one instance, as part of a stage set. Objects designed and produced for narrow means are extracted from their intended usage and exploited for more esoteric, even spiritual, means: to describe beauty, to suggest identity, or generally to comment on alternative conceptions of use, value and content.

While there is a strong movement among contemporary artists to embrace the transgression or even outright elimination of the boundaries between art, design, and architecture, this movement is generally more interested in illuminating or enhancing function, often using art as an accessory to production. In contrast, the artists in this show liberate these objects, plucking them from the storeroom and offering them a unique experience to function as the Other: the storyteller, the role player, the building, the actor.

As with any group show, the works themselves will speak more articulately, broadly and poetically than any framework or thesis can possibly describe here, however, it is hoped that the exhibition as a whole might inspire some consideration with regard to the economics of workplace culture, or the culture of exchange more generally. On some level a classically Surrealist maneuver, i.e. the deliberate misuse and re-contextualization of the found object, this exhibition hopes to suggest a more specific rumination in the context of social organization and order, subverting utility and functionality as the grand metric by which all social value is measured.