White-Collar Wit

It’s tempting to suggest that this column about “Work/Space: Visual Relations Incorporate” (at the UC Irvine Art Gallery through Feb. 8) should be read only by people with advanced degrees and specialized talents who have toiled at low-level office jobs.

For anyone who has chafed at draconian regulations, groaned at the inane chatter of co-workers, yawned through mind-numbing assignments and felt tempted not to bother correcting a boss’ atrocious grammar, the show contains enough seriocomic comment to fill a warehouse of file cabinets.

Yet the exhibition of installations and other work (first shown at Southern Exposure and a downtown office building in San Francisco) is not just a group gripe for initiates. At its best, “Work/Space” offers a wry look at office culture at a time when more work is being squeezed out of fewer employees--who, likely as not, are disposable temporary workers rather than benefits-earning staff.

The intriguing aspect of the show, curated by Catherine Greenblatt and Stephanie Ellis, is that artists (many of whom have worked as temps) are uniquely positioned to address the physical design as well as the psychological and sociological subtexts of office life.

Heidi Brant has designed a “Privacy Tent”--a gauzy enclosure for a desk that purports to solve the problems of trying to hold confidential conversations or work on sensitive material in today’s open-plan office.

Viewers can peruse the plastic-sheathed pages of a prospectus illustrating various tent fabric designs with such images as an Old Master landscape and a reproduction of 16th century books, wistfully evoking the ethos of another age, with titles suggestive of executive leisure accouterments (“Weekender,” “Navigator”).

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Made entirely of compressed discarded paperwork, Molly Bleiden’s “Streamliner Desk”--a self-contained, aerodynamically styled unit--combines vintage sleekness, ecological virtue and a perky alternative to downsizing. In her brochure--complete with an omitted word, relegating the pages to eventual pulping--Bleiden asks, “Why slash your payroll to reduce costs when you can just as save by making mistakes?”

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Julie Zemel’s sequence of typewritten daily memos, “Memoranda,” documents the roiling mental state of a man hired as a “recepresentationist” for a female boss who inspires successive waves of adoration, subservience, protectiveness, comradeship, bitterness (“Am I just your automaton? . . . You don’t know anything about the real me”) and self-doubt.

Underneath the amusing self-dramatization lies a cogent reading of the curious codependency of boss and underling, both forced into unnatural behaviors by the code of the workplace.

Fritzie Brown’s graphs plotting “The Effect of a Love Affair on the Productivity of an Office Worker” are likely to produce smiles of recognition. By merging quasi-statistical documentation with human frailty, Brown points up the eternal gulf between real life and the bean counters’ mandates for productivity.

Similarly eager to erase the line between reality and rules, the duo calling themselves Men of the World (Mark Alice Durant and Mathew Wilson) photo-document themselves in the San Francisco business district, performing a range of workaday actions showing varying degrees of acceptability (shaking hands, scolding) and inappropriateness (dancing, cradling a partner).

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Several of the artists re-create office tableaux, none so richly as Sarah Lewison and Heide Solbrig. Viewers are encouraged to rummage through the desk drawers, stacks of cardboard boxes and time-card cubbyholes to find workers’ personal effects.

The bottles of nail polish, inspirational plaques, pet photos, handwritten essays, doodles and resumes reveal the diverse traces of humanity--boredom, subversion, escapism--that grease the wheel of business.

The personal merges with the political in pale photocopies of old photographs and prints of workers from other eras, annotated with brief scribbled social commentaries and stuffed into the files.

There are flashes of humor here too: One resume highlights the skills of a former drug runner for an “alternative cartel” in Bogota, Colombia: “ability to work well under pressure” and “creative use of high budgets.”

A desk drawer holds a copy of Herman Melville’s novella “Bartleby the Scrivener,” the story of a clerk who mysteriously replaces his initial gung-ho approach to his job with the constant refrain, “I would prefer not to.”

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So long as “Work/Space” sticks to aspects of office culture, it rarely goes too far astray (despite a few overly contrived pieces).

But the occasional yelp of pain from artists teaching in art schools or universities seems misplaced. Yes, everyone is jerked around in some way by the big boss, and even a seemingly prestigious teaching position may not offer much in the way of salary or power. But teaching has other perks, and academic culture is distinctly different from that of low-level workers in a profit-chasing business.

Meanwhile, some interesting questions seem unprobed, such as how the amount of mental energy a worker must devote to a job affects personal and intellectual freedom.

For those who want to pursue issues of corporate culture and the workplace, the gallery will host a free panel discussion on Feb. 4 at 7 p.m. in the Nixon Theater. Writer Stephen Barker will moderate. The show’s curators, artist Nancy Barton and writers Mark Poster and Lawrence Rickels will participate.

* “Work/Space: Visual Relations Incorporate,” through Feb. 8 at the UC Irvine Art Gallery (off Bridge Road on the UCI campus). Hours: noon-5 p.m., Tuesday-Saturday. Free. (714) 824-6610.