Happiness in the Age of Personalised Corporations, Smart Tech, and Digital Media [excerpt]
A sprawling, ‘total installation’, Fortune Teller fills the entire main space of the Gus Fisher gallery with a maze of prefabricated walls and tarpaulin that leads to nowhere. Schroder, a financial lawyer by day, extends his interest in establishing fictitious companies to the foyer of the heritage building, once a reception area for the television studios that occupied its wings. The work is site-responsive in a further sense: it was also informed by a 1986 renovation that removed the foyer’s low ceiling to expose its grand glass dome in an attempt to improve the happiness of its employees. Seizing upon the question of what “happiness” comes to mean when it enters the corporate vocabulary, Schroder transforms the space into an ad-hoc administrative hub by installing 'The Bureau of Happiness', a fictional firm entrusted with the production of affirmational materials for companies and their employees.
A labyrinthine set strewn with aspirational posters and corporate value statements, Fortune Teller frames the expropriation of the language of happiness and wellness by corporate entities as a useless machine. Viewers are carried past desks, a smoking area, and a boardroom, all in a state of disarray. Littered with office ephemera, trash, and motivational memos, the haphazardness of the office’s display communicates the precarity of the firm’s raison d’être. Its prefab walls are plastered with policy statements that list nominal values such as “integrity”, “excellence”, and “respect”, sided next to stock images of suited men and women, and copies of pages from the motivational business text, 'Who Moved My Cheese?' The absurdity of the corporate setup is reminiscent of the late anthropologist David Graeber’s thesis on ‘bullshit jobs’[1], which proposes that much of the paid labour undertaken within late capitalism is meaningless. According to Graeber, workers are inducted into self-satisfying chains of labour that act solely as a means to their own end: employees tick boxes, fulfill metrics, and middle manage, actions established for no other purpose than to complete the gratuitous chain of labour within which they reside.
Fortune Teller expresses the meaninglessness of the Bureau’s labour in a firm that purports to ensure the wellbeing of corporate staff, while impossibly striving to fulfill monthly KPI’s through the vague labour of its employees. The installation folds in on itself: there is no logic that binds office to meeting room to boardroom, but a mess of rubbish and aspirational slogans that get worse the closer you look (“Don’t Wait for Failure. Create It” / “Success Doesn’t Happen to You”). Lifelike objects turn out to be made from ceramic. The structure shuffles viewers back and forth, with no implicit hierarchy to dictate the viewing of its sections. An endless loop. As much as the firm speaks of its own uselessness, it also points to the similarly meaningless, and paradoxical, signification of corporate ethics through discourses of “happiness” and “wellbeing”. This language, like the structure of the installation, has become divorced from any concrete signification of meaning. “Integrity”, “success”, and “excellence” become empty signs used to personify corporations in order to elicit trust from their customers and employees. As the suggestion of an ethical awareness or personality translates into revenue, it is precisely the emptiness of these words—their commodification—that ensures corporate success.
[1] David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (London: Allen Lane, 2018).
Alena Kavka