Artministration
Dear Bureaucritics,
This issue is a report on recent work on bureaucracy in the arts. Before coming up with the intentionally silly portmanteau “Artministration”, we considered a number of different titles for this missive, including “The Administrative Work of Art”, “Bureaucracy on Display”, and “The Museification of the Bureau”, each reflecting some aspect of the interplay between art and administration that we want to spotlight in this issue.
Although David Graeber famously labeled bureaucracy “a dead zone of the imagination” in his eponymous 2012 essay, officialdom and its paper trails are stubbornly present in imaginative works.
View from The Seduction of the Bureaucrat. Photo: © We Document Art, 2023, courtesy of Pieter Vermeulen.
What’s more, it seems that bureaucracy produces self-reflecting images at an accelerated pace, increasingly inspiring artists who work in various media and infiltrating into curatorial and editorial projects, both online and offline. The phenomenon has not gone without academic scrutiny: to name just one example, since 2024 is the centennial of Kafka’s passing, scholars gathered at the Archiv der Zeitgenossen in Krems just last month to discuss The Kafkaesque in the Arts [Das Kafkaeske in den Künsten]. The program (in German) is available here.
To keep some sort of record of this marked presence of bureaucracy in the contemporary artistic imaginary, we’ve documented for you a series of exhibitions, photobooks, installation and mixed media projects aiming to apply an imaginative stamp on the world of administration.
We have also had the pleasure to discuss a recent exhibition that interested us greatly (The Seduction of the Bureaucrat) with its curator, Pieter Vermeulen, who kindly agreed to answer some questions about the featured artwork and about his perspectives on bureaucriticism. Below our overview of contemporary art projects dealing with bureaucracy, you will find a deep dive into Pieter’s seductive exhibition.
I. Exhibitions (physical and digital)
→ BürokratieMuseum (22.04.2024 - 25.06.2024, Berlin, Germany) The free, heavily advertised, pastel colored exhibition on German bureaucracy has a de-regulating lobby agenda. A brand of facile humor frames state administration as a source of infinite frustration that impedes swift development and economic progress. Exhibits include the “Authorities Mill”, the “Waiting-Waiting-Waiting Room”, “The Paragraph Jungle”, and the “Faxer by Rodin”. Visitors were invited to measure the loudness of their laughter at various state-sanctioned absurdities, or to shred a regulation of their choice into confetti.
View of the “Faxer by Rodin” [Der Faxer von Rodin] exhibit in the BürokratieMuseum. Photo: © Alexandra Irimia, 2024.
→ Zwischen Tür und Angel (07.02.2024 - 10.03.2024, Siegen, Germany). A collaboration between the Kunstverein Siegen and the University of Siegen, this student exhibition examines “the visible and invisible regularities” of the office environment.
→ The Seduction of the Bureaucrat (15.03.2023 - 04.06.2023, De Garage, Mechelen, Belgium). The exhibition featured photography, mixed-media installations, video and performance art signed by around 20 visual artists and artist collectives articulating their outlook on administration and its interferences with artistic practice.
→ Sea of Files by Dayanita Singh (15.10.2022 - 22.01.2023, Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, Sweden). Winner of the Hasselblad Award 2022, Singh presents a photographic corpus that reflects poetically on India’s overflowing archives and record-keeping practices. Her visual essay has subsequently been published with Steidl Verlag.
→ The Cabinet of Bureaucratic Wonders (07-09.04.2022, The New School, New York, USA). A collection of artifacts found in Brazilian and US public institutions, exhibited in conjunction with an interactive, immersive performance. Albeit short-lived, this collective exhibition based on observational fieldwork in the Brazilian National School of Public Administration (ENAP) did not vanish without a trace: it can still be glimpsed through the accompanying CBW Zine (2023), but also in a full-length article which will be included in the forthcoming issue of the journal Administory.
→ Bureaucratics by Jan Banning (2008 onwards, traveling exhibition available online). Perhaps the most well-known among our examples, this collection contains 50 photographs of state civil servants from 8 countries on 5 continents: Bolivia, China, France, India, Liberia, Russia, the United States, and Yemen.
Fragment from Jan Banning’s Bureaucratics series in The Seduction of the Bureaucrat. Photo: © We Document Art, courtesy of Pieter Vermeulen.
→ The Institute™: Or, What We Do for Love by Vera Frenkel (March - October 2006, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa). In this multimedia project – installation, website, wall works, songs –, Slovak-born Canadian artist Vera Frenkel imagines a governmental program for the professional retraining of unemployed state bureaucrats for new careers in a fictional institution: the “National Institute for the Arts”.
→ Office / Kontor / オフィス by Lars Tunbjörk (2001, exhibition available online). With subtle humor and surreal tones, this collection – also printed as a photobook – does more than merely document office environments at the turn of the century in New York, Stockholm, and Tokyo; it also doubles as a comparative critique on corporate-administered uniformity in the late 20th century.
→ Museum of Bureaucracy. This ambitious online exhibition project seems to have remained uncompleted. Its anonymous author(s) aimed to create a physical Museum of Bureaucracy in Washington D.C. as the culmination of a three-step initiative to “explore major aspects of [the US] bureaucracy, from the lighter side to the darker.”
II. Photobooks, Concept Books, Visual Essays
→ Dayanita Singh, File Room (Steidl, 2013; 2024 for the 2nd edition) and Sea of Files (Steidl, 2022, with an essay by Orhan Pamuk) are both visual meditations on the enduring frailty of paper and its carefully curated decomposition. Paper records are the material support par excellence of memory and history. The spectre of their secrecy looms large in these collections of black and white photographs of Indian archives and their custodians.
→ Jan Banning, Bureaucratics (Nazraeli, 2008). Much like the eponymous traveling exhibition, this volume reflects on a variety of administrative cultures through the mediation of spontaneous workplace portraits of civil servants in different government services. A collaboration between the photographer and the writer Will Tinnemans, the book gathers material from 8 countries on 5 continents: Bolivia, China, France, India, Liberia, Russia, the USA, and Yemen.
→ Lars Tunbjörk, Office / Kontor / オフィス (Journal: 2001). Bordering the documentary genre, this photobook (adjacent to an eponymous exhibition, now available online on the artist’s website) compares office environments from New York, Stockholm, and Tokyo. Uncanny, alienating, and at times downright claustrophobic, the de-territorialized, cable-infested carpeted cubicles set the stage for a humorous critical commentary on corporate aesthetics at the end of the 20th century.
→ Geeke van Bruggen, De Organisatiemens [The Organization Man]. With a strong focus on administrative design, this self-published book is a written and visual diary which documents empirical research conducted at the Dutch Ministry of Health by the author. Van Bruggen graduated with this project from the Royal Academy of Arts in the Hague in 2017.
→ Dominique De Beir, Poésie administrative (Imprimerie Leclerc à Abbeville, 2021). In this artist’s book, as well as in parts of her exhibited work, De Beir overwrites templates of administrative forms with dotted, felt-pen colored patterns, painted lines, and perforations. Their newly acquired illegibility evokes the inaccessible chatter of bureaucratic encodings, reminiscent of but not quite identical with Morse or Braille graphic embossings. For Sans fin mais pas sans début (Accroc et Caractère 3), her 2023 exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen, the artist played with repetition, seriality, and duplication on a variety of paper surfaces, including real work logs and accounting sheets from factory archives.
Sheet from the series Sils indemnités (2000) by Dominique De Beir, exhibited at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen. Photo: © Alexandra Irimia, 2023.
→ Kylie Gilchrist and Megan Stockton (eds.), Notes: On Administration (Portland: Printed Matter, 2016). The anthology explores the institutional organization of creative work by way of personal notes, lists and other documents produced in the course of artistic projects, but also poems and photos dealing with bureaucracy.
III. Installations, Performance, Mixed Media
→ Jill Magid, The Spy Project (2005-2010). After this mixed-media project was commissioned by the Dutch secret service (AIVD), only to be later confiscated and classified by the same organization, American conceptual artist and writer Jill Magid exhibited what remained unredacted of her censored work. She drew inspiration from on-site observations in the institution and from anonymized interviews with the agency’s employees.
→ Pilvi Takala, The Trainee (2008). Finnish performance artist Pilvi Takala infiltrated the accountant firm Deloitte and, posing as a trainee, conducted a month-long performance project, recording and publishing her co-workers’ bewildered reactions to the trainee’s increasingly peculiar working methods. The project is exhibited in the shape of video footage publicly available on Vimeo, a PowerPoint presentation, a keycard, and a letter.
→ Collaborative project, The Office for Bureaucritic Imagination (2018). The original “bureaucritics”. A participatory speculative performance inspired by Hannah Arendt’s theories of state bureaucracy and participatory democracy. Performed iteratively in various contexts, including at the 2018 Participatory Design Conference at Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture.
IV. Art Collectives
O.J.A.I. - The Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence (since 2015) is the collaborative artistic practice of Chris Dreier (DE) and Gary Farrelly (IRE/BE). The witty, tongue-in-cheek institution is organised as a “para-intelligence agency operating between Brussels and Berlin.'' It creates performances, installations, publications, but also music and a radio show. According to Alicja Melzacka, cited in the duo’s work Auditing Intimacy (Berlin: Fantôme Verlag, 2022), “O.J.A.I. doesn’t mimic the organizational aesthetics of cyber-capitalism, of startups and ‘corpotainment.’ Rather, it cultivates a hyperbolic, extravagant archetype of bureaucracy – at once dystopian and romantic, timeless and out of time.” Their work, “fuelled by recurring obsessions with architecture, infrastructure, finance, institutional power and magic” is thoroughly documented in self-produced annual reports, available on their website.
B.M.R. - The Bureau of Melodramatic Research (since 2009). Through this project “interested in the ramified circulation of affect that lies at the core of neoliberal society”, Romanian artists Irina Gheorghe and Alina Popa look at the “automation of affect” and the “algorithmic modulation of mood” currently at work on the political scene. Their artistic research practice distorts and repurposes “multiple forms of hierarchies, structures, and statistics” in order to “interrogate the circulation of emotional capital” through a specific methodology, labeled “melo-critique”.
Curator’s Corner - Bureaucritical Insights from Pieter Vermeulen
No memo would be complete without an addendum.
In order to better understand the thinking that informed one of the most exciting art projects that have come to our attention, we reached out to Pieter Vermeulen, curator of the art exhibition The Seduction of the Bureaucrat, which was on display at De Garage (now Kunsthal Mechelen) in Mechelen, Belgium (15.03.2023 - 04.06.2023). As literary scholars “seduced” by bureaucracy, we were curious about Pieter’s perspective on this topic as a researcher and curator operating in the art world.
How does one exhibit bureaucracy, and why?
View from The Seduction of the Bureaucrat. Photo: © We Document Art, 2023, courtesy of Pieter Vermeulen.
Our informal chat with Pieter about bureaucracy and art revealed overlapping research interests, given that we have been separately investigating questions to do with “administrative aesthetics” (the topic of our forthcoming special issue of the journal Administory). Pieter is chiefly preoccupied by the ways in which the art world has moved from reflecting on the mere “aesthetics of administration” (a phrase coined by Benjamin Buchloch theorizing on conceptual art in the 1960s) to a closer, self-reflexive examination of the “administration of aesthetics” (Jelena Vesić) and the “institution of critique” (Andrea Fraser).
Pieter has a long-standing interest in uncovering the ways in which bureaucracy not only constrains but also breeds creativity, a dynamic that he delves into in his curatorial report on the exhibition. If you read French, you can find the full report in this issue of Facettes: Revue annuelle d’art contemporain. For the English version, see here.
The exhibition is a part of an ongoing larger project, which has also resulted in a public program that Pieter produced in collaboration with the Hannah Arendt Institute. The project also entails an extensive publication (we will keep you posted!).
A significant influence on the concept of the exhibition goes back to Canadian artist AA Bronson's seminal 1983 essay "The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat,” a title that Pieter considered borrowing for the exhibition before he settled on “The Seduction of the Bureaucrat”—also a phrase used by Bronson.
For the visual identity and the scenography of the display, Pieter worked with designers Christophe Clarijs and Robin Vets, who integrated bureaucratic paraphernalia (binder rings, information sheets, files, folders) into the presentation.
As for the process of arranging the exhibition itself, Pieter described it as a highly stimulating exchange of ideas between himself and the approximately 20 artists and artist collectives featured in the exhibition. Here are some of the works on display:
Apparatus 22 (Erika Olea, Maria Farcas, Dragos Olea, Ioana Nemes), Formulaire no. 45 - installation
Jan Banning, Bureaucratics (2008) - photography
Deborah Bowmann (moniker for Amaury Daurel and Victor Delestre) - installation
AA Bronson/General Idea, A Mare Usque Ad Mare (1987) - litography
Anna Bella Geiger, Burocracia (1982) - video
LAb[au] (Brussels-based collective), What Hath God Wrought? (2016) - installation
Ariane Loze, The Archipelago of Me (2018) - video
Wesley Meuris, Department of Art History (2017) - installation, Notes (ongoing) - assemblages
Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence - on-site performance
Vijai Patchineelam - fragments from his residency at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht for the PhD thesis “The Artist Job Description for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution” (2022)
Pilvi Takala, The Stroker (2018) - two-channel video
Vermeir & Heiremans, A Modest Proposal (in a Black Box) - film
The list of artists also includes Tiago Duarte, Sarah Hendrickx, Lieven Segers, Axel van der Kraan, Herman Van Ingelgem, and Philippe Van Wolputte.
Their shared goal was to spotlight what Pieter describes as “the unmistakable visual vocabulary” of bureaucracy, through playful framings of administrative artifacts, but also through foregrounding seriality and repetition in the shape of patterned and decorative artwork featured in the exhibition.
The exhibited works are as many "strategies of seduction": not straightforward or linear, but rather “indirect and oblique” ways of seeing and experiencing bureaucracy. Performativity, (speculative) fiction, and humor have been essential principles for uncovering the complexities of bureaucracy, including its libidinal aspects. In this regard, Pieter got his inspiration from Tess Lea’s 2021 article “Desiring Bureaucracy”, where she notes that “Such probes go beyond the easy assumption that bureaucracy automatically repels and alienates. It attracts. It seduces. Looked at from the inside, it is libidinal, driven by ardor and passion.”
View from The Seduction of the Bureaucrat. Photo: © We Document Art, 2023, courtesy of Pieter Vermeulen.
Pieter concludes: “Bureaucracy’s encounter with the imagination, understood in an aesthetic, social and political sense, can manage to break the spell of polarization and leave room for ambiguity and ambivalence. This is the infinite conversation to be held between the artist and the bureaucrat.” Excitingly, he has plans to continue to engage with this infinite conversation through future research and curatorial projects, following up on what was a well-received exhibition.
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Thanks for staying with us!
Bureaucritically,
Alexandra and Jonathan