The Hum of Inactivity
You’ve been here before. This gleaming office strewn with motivational phrases and post-it notes. The tangle of computer cables and the uneaten lunches on office desks. A glimpse of blue sky through a window at the end of a zig-zag corridor. It could be the sky above any regional city centre. But here it’s Lower Hutt, and the occupants of this office, with all their casually strewn detritus, do not exist. Even so, their endless chatter, tedious meetings and uncomfortable office drinks are vivid in your mind as you walk the empty corridors. It feels wrong though, like you’re somewhere you aren’t meant to be, like you’ve gone in to the office while it’s Alert Level 4. Your colleagues have left their files and notes open on their desks. You really shouldn’t look. And then some children run past: “What is this place?” says one to the other, and you don’t know if it’s the office or the art gallery that’s strange to them.
Mark Schroder’s exhibition Fortune Teller (No. 2) (Branch Office) at the Dowse Gallery takes us into a branch office of The Bureau of Happiness, a corporate organisation that hums with a vague sense of purpose. The work force turns up every day, they produce reports and statistics, they repeat slogans and peddle motivation, but the meaning of all this endeavour remains beyond their grasp. It is an environment that most of us will recognise, whether we’ve sat in the offices and breakout spaces of a large organisation ourselves, or we’ve been forced to interact with one.
After two years of disruption, when offices sat empty not just at night but through entire months, this installation lets us examine the purpose of these spaces with fresh eyes. A poster proclaims the organisation’s values: communication, respect, integrity, and excellence. Perhaps in the busy round of meetings and stand-ups, some of the workers can kid themselves that these words say something vital about the company, but when there is no one around the words are as empty as the office. ‘Happy staff, happy customers', runs the slogan at the bottom of the poster, as though staff well-being is a primary consideration. Right beside reception, though, there is a door marked ‘Exit Interview Room’, reminding staff that turnover is high and they must perform to survive. Schroder further undercuts the “happy staff” assertion by scattering mousetraps throughout the office, as much to catch the staff as any curious rodents. “It is safer to search in the maze, than remain in a cheeseless situation,” runs the line on another poster, superimposed on a large hunk of gruyere. Must life in the maze be our fortune?
At the centre of the cluster of offices and corridors is a space behind a door marked ‘Collaboration Hub’. These spaces are common in the modern, agile office environment, but rather than the brightly coloured furniture and coffee machines we might expect to find in such a hub, this space is an incongruous garden area, with cracked tiles and astroturf underfoot and skeletal trees sprouting from beds of white stones and dead leaves. It’s exactly the sort of untended space you would find out the back of a run-down office building, the kind of place where the exiled smokers congregate and discuss office politics. This unexpected twist hidden behind an office door is an effective way of jangling our sense of reality.
Schroder is adept at playing with what is real and what is not. The office environment is so familiar, even down to the bananas and meat pies left on people’s desks, and yet on closer inspection these food items turn out to be Schroder’s own ceramic creations. The rubber stamps and Sellotape dispensers? Ceramic too. The framed poster advertising the book “Why Lawyers Should Eat Bananas” appears fictional too, in the vein of the “happy staff” poster. But a quick search confirms the book is real and has 3.33 stars on Goodreads. This blurring of the lines takes us out of our reality for the time we stroll the switchback corridors of the installation, only to find that reality folds back on itself and we could follow these corridors forever. And perhaps we will, imbued with a sense of purpose by the empty words crowding the walls of the city, while half a kilometre away the river flows on without a mission statement.
The disruption caused by the pandemic presented an opportunity to examine our lifestyle in a way that wasn’t possible in a state of endless continuity. It accelerated a move to flexible working for those who were able to and forced many people to seek a different career as jobs vanished and offices closed. There is talk of the “Great Resignation” as people begin to question the purpose of their lifestyles.
Schroder’s work poses these questions with subtlety and humour. The colourful modern office with posters and slogans and break out spaces is in many ways an improvement on the stark, hierarchical offices of past decades, but the central questions of purpose and function remain. There is already a sense that as we return to more normal conditions, so too will we resume the patterns and practices we knew before the pandemic. But when the armies of office workers return, streaming from trains and buses in the spreading light of morning, what will they find in the maze? Will they return to the desks and tear off last month’s post-it notes, and reopen the same spreadsheets and files, or will they find themselves in a new space entirely, asking themselves, what is this place?
Robert Metcalf