The Wellbeing Complex [excerpt]
Taking to task the empty signification of wellbeing by corporate entities, Mark Schroder’s Fortune Teller, 2021 acts as a synecdoche of corporate wellness discourse. His largest work to date, Fortune Teller was enacted as a site-responsive commission for the University of Auckland’s Gus Fisher Gallery and stages a commentary on the use of wellbeing initiatives in support of institutional agendas, where the language of wellbeing masks the more exploitative nature of corporate labour.
Fortune Teller was installed in the Gus Fisher Gallery’s foyer, formerly a reception area for the television studios that once occupied the building’s wings. Schroder, a corporate lawyer by day, was influenced by renovations to the building in 1986, which saw the removal of the foyer’s low ceiling to expose a previously concealed glass dome in efforts to increase the happiness of the studios’ employees. Seizing on the question of what ‘happiness’ comes to mean in a corporate environment, Fortune Teller—the title of which evokes both a clairvoyant and a clerk (in the sense of ‘bank teller’) of good fortune or happiness—transforms the erstwhile reception space into an ad-hoc administrative hub named the Bureau of Happiness, a fictionalised company that produces affirmational materials for firms and their employees.
The installation is a surreal set, a maze of tarpaulin and prefabricated walls that unfold in no clear order. Viewers navigate through a series of dishevelled ‘offices’, throughout which are plastered the ostensible products of the employee’s labour: aspirational posters, corporate value statements, and stock images of smiling, suited professionals. Of course, there are no employees in sight, and the only palpable traces of their presence belie the motivational tenor of the materials strewn throughout the exhibition: the empty desks, boardroom, and smoking area are littered with rubbish, haphazard arrangements of office ephemera, and de-motivational memos, including such phrases as, ‘Don’t Wait for Failure. Create It’, and ‘Success Doesn’t Happen to You’. Exposing the rift between real employee experience and the nominal values espoused in corporate marketing, the installation reveals a disordered, deteriorating, and apathetic reality behind a façade that proclaims happiness and success.
The Bureau, furthermore, is entirely non-functional; lifelike props turn out to be made from ceramic, rendering office supplies like tape dispensers and telephones into useless items. The rooms, in a state of disarray, do not follow any kind of logical order, and shuffle viewers back and forth without any clear hierarchy with which to view its sections. And as much as the rooms fold in on themselves, so does the vague labour of its employees—the material evidence of their ‘work’ clearly insufficient to fulfil the corporate targets that line the office walls. In this way, Fortune Teller recalls the late anthropologist David Graeber’s thesis of ‘bullshit jobs’, which he claimed exemplified the nature of labour in late-stage capitalist society.[1] Proposing that much of the paid labour undertaken today is meaningless, Graeber explained that workers are inducted into self-satisfying chains of labour that simply act as a means to their own end, rather than serving any kind of greater social function. Ticking boxes, fulfilling metrics, and middle-managing all fall within the ambit of ‘bullshit jobs’: roles established for no other purpose than to fulfil the gratuitous chain of labour within which they reside.
The disordered nature and non-functionality of the firm reflects the precarity of the Bureau’s raison-d’être, and, more broadly, the absurdity of mobilising wellbeing in the name of corporate outcomes. Not only does Fortune Teller reveal the disjunction inherent in the whitewashing of working reality with tokenistic expressions of wellbeing, but also the meaninglessness inherent in the signification of wellbeing in corporate initiatives, which themselves have become self-satisfying endeavours without any tangible or constructive results.
[1] David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (London: Allen Lane, 2018).
Alena Kavka