SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Office Space cleverly subverts contemporary office culture as a means to explore labor practices in the 21st century post-industrial economy. As offices become mobile, the nine-to-five becomes a nonstop 24-hour cycle, and the service and information economy predominates, this exhibition reflects on the rise of "immaterial labor" in developed countries. Through video, sculpture, painting and installation, the artists in Office Space interrogate universally recognized aspects of office architecture, design, aesthetics and protocols as a means to understand the shift toward immaterial labor practices.

Participating Artists: Cory Arcangel, Mark Benson, KP Brehmer, Joseph DeLappe, Alex Dordoy, Harun Farocki, Bea Fremderman, Idle Screenings (featuring works by Stephanie Davidson, Jacob Broms Engblom, Manuel Fernandez, Paul Flannery, Kim Laughton, and Jasper Spicero), Joel Holmberg, Josh Kline, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Julien Prévieux, Laurel Ptak, Sean Raspet, Mika Tajima, Pilvi Takala, Ignacio Uriarte, Andrew Norman Wilson, and Haegue Yang.

Harun Farocki’s documentary A New Product (2012) shows how workers themselves become products. The film follows a business consultancy from Hamburg that specializes in the optimization of workspaces for advertising and technology companies, declaring that the new spaces allow greater employee independence, flexible attendance and a more adaptable environment. Pil and Galia Kollectiv’s surreal and darkly humorous film Co-Operative Explanatory Capabilities in Organizational Design and Personnel Management (2010) also considers how office design exerts a psychological hold over the workers within it.

KP Brehmer’s painting Seele und Gefühl eines Arbeiters, Whitechapel Version (Soul and Feelings of a Worker, Whitechapel Version, 1978) reveals the exploitative intent behind these sorts of efforts. The piece translates the findings of a sociological study about workers’ emotional states into an abstract composition that mimics the very charts and spreadsheets used to collect this data.

Some works demonstrate outright dissent regarding the office environment through humorous disruption. The Trainee (2008) by the Finnish artist Pilvi Takala is an installation that captures Takala as she works as an intern in the marketing department at Deloitte. Like a modern-day Bartleby, Takala refuses to do her work and spends hours riding the elevator or staring listlessly into space. Cory Arcangel’s Permanent Vacation (2008) sets up two computers on a continual out-of-office loop, a clever hack of a mundane aspect of office life.

A new commission by Mark Benson, Open Fields (2015), takes a selection of the most popular artificial office plants sold by retailers such as Staples, and squeezes them onto a platform placed underneath a large balcony within the gallery. Through this absurd gesture, plants ordinarily used to “brighten” the workplace appear cramped, constrained and misplaced.

A number of works draw on the longer history of office design within the 20th century. Mika Tajima’s sculpture A Facility Based on Change (2010) takes the Herman Miller Action Office system, the first widely used cubicle, developed in the 1970s, as a basis for an artwork that restricts the movement of the visitor—an effort that parallels the means by which the system itself restricts the movement of the worker.

Demonstrating how much labor has changed in the last century, Andrew Norman Wilson pays homage to the first motion-picture film ever made, by Louis Lumière, La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon, 1895), with his Workers Leaving the Googleplex (2009–11).

To make The Mouse Mandala (2006–15), Joseph DeLappe sourced discarded computer mice from electronics surplus stores in Silicon Valley and wove them into an intricate mandala sculpture. The work is intended as a tribute to the weavers and craftspeople upended by the industrial revolution in the 19th century; through the symbol of the computer mouse, it also foregrounds the ongoing reliance on the human hand that persists today.

Across all these works, the office becomes emblematic of the changing terrain for labor and productivity in the 21st century.