Another bit of "Office Art"

I forgot to put up one of the best Office Art entries, by one of my favorite BusinessWeek writers. Here is Cathy's "idea":

"Arrange a bunch of useless promotional tchotchkes on your desk in a haphazard manner. Pile erudite magazines you will never read on the floor, alongside stacks of research on stories you may, or may not, write. Pile your bookshelf with equally erudite books you will never read. Tape ironic sayings on your wall about the the nature of work, and bad artwork by a kid (yours, or someone else's, to show you have a life outside of work). Hang a calendar featuring beautiful far away beaches, along with photographs of fabulous places you've been on vacation, far, far from the office, to keep you permanently dissatisfied. Be sure to prominently display any awards you've received, no matter how obscure, so any passing manager will remember that sometimes you do produce something worthwhile. Then scatter bits of papers, half-used notebooks, chewed pens and a layer of dust over all.

Some may call it just another messy office, but it is really an art installation."

Recently, I gave some friends on facebook a challenge: If earthworks artist Andy Goldsworthy, who creates elaborate ephemeral works of art out of twigs, leaves, rocks, etc., spent much of his time in a Manhattan office building, what might he create? The goal was to create theoretical projects using "natural" office resources-to create a whimsical work of art (complete with faux artistic rationale) that will start the day intact and be naturally worn away.

Here are some Goldsworth works, fyi.

























My idea--a silver screen made out of paper clips that covers the elevator entrance on my floor. Yes, employees must fight their way through it to get to work. Sure, you could see it as sending a hostile message, but, viewed another way, what says “I’m eager to get to work!” better than actually having to pry apart a barrier in order to get to your job?!


Marion responded by saying that "This reminds me of one of my daughter's art school projects: a "human trap." It consisted of a frame covered with opaque black plastic that had the same dimensions as the interior of the school elevator. On exhibition day, she set it up so her class walked out of the elevator and into the trap.

I don't know what I could think of that could top that, unless it was a pillar of Post-Its bearing phone messages, which I would entitle "Lot's Wife."

Edit Updika came up with this: "I think mine would be an electronic installation, perhaps an email that automatically replies to itself, creating an endless looping message that gets longer and longer and longer until it eats up all the bandwidth in the universe. Or until the sysops kill it.

This represents the boundless cycle of life, reproduction and growth ending in Armageddon, with or without (a) god(s)."

And Rachel weighed in with this: "I think that mine would be to take the utensils and napkins and affix them together as one unit and do this over and over and over again until i had enough for the next step...then I would take these units and build them into various symbols attached to one another with rubber bands and some of the various sticky stuff you've offered... there could be peace signs and butterflies and other images that suggest something other than the mess that this world mostly finds itself in...once it's done, people could remove the the utensil units and use it to eat with or whatever.

It would be utilitarian becomes arts becomes utilitarian once again representing the various dimensions of everything that we encounter but the cyclical nature of life."

What would you create?