Works about working stiffs
As with many a cube farm, the still waters of “Office Space” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts run deep.
Beneath the quiet, deceptively serene surface sheen — echoed in, say, the campus comings and goings of Andrew Norman Wilson’s “Workers Leaving the Googleplex” — roil simmering dissent, hierarchical struggles and existential dread, among other delights.
There are showier works in this group show, curated by Ceci Moss, YBCA’s assistant curator of visual arts. Seoul-Berlin artist Haegue Yang’s “Office Voodoo” marries an Ikea drying rack with officesupply detritus. Reno artist Joseph DeLappe’s “The Mouse Mandala” manages to echo both a spiritual symbol and a nastily ominous rat king.
Yet the heart of the exhibit might be the stillborn faux internship of Helsinki-Istanbul artist Pilvi Takala, who, after getting hired as a marketing trainee at Deloitte, spent her workdays staring off into space and riding the elevators, much to her co-workers’ bewilderment. Their responses are documented in e-mails like “There has been a person sitting in the Tax library space and staring out of the window with a glazed look in her eyes. ... She sat in front of an empty desk from 10:30 on, went for lunch ...”
“It reminds me of ‘Bartleby,’ ” Moss says, referencing the Herman Melville short story. “It’s a performance that plays with the status quo and people’s expectations.”
What attracts so many artists to the stuff of working stiffs?
“I think it’s just a major aspect of contemporary life, and the subject matter has a real resonance with San Francisco and the startup culture here,” Moss says. “People coming to the exhibition will recognize a lot of the conversations on display.”