Bartleby, Kafka and Co. LLP

 

MODERN SERFDOM:The Bureaucracy Of Living

 

 

In Herman Melville’s novella Bartleby the Scrivener (1853), Bartleby “would prefer not to” do his job. He goes on to lose his job, but having no home, continues to live in the office. By the end of the tale, he “would prefer not to” eat, and dies. In Franz Kafka’s The Castle (1926), a man named K. is summoned to a castle to perform a logistical task, and enters a hermetic void of paperwork. That there is never any mention of the castle’s physical attributes or location suggests that the ‘castle’ is simply modern bureaucracy. A contemporary and more light-hearted spin on the absurdity of bureaucracy can be found in movie Office Space. Milton, an awkward and ineloquent man, is ignored at work by all. His experience is rather similar to Bartleby and K.—he was fired, but through an internal processing error, continued to receive a paycheck until that was terminated, to which he responded by burning down the office building.

             Jimmy Chen’s series of office paintings embrace these paradoxes by romanticizing the formal aspects of corporate architecture (printers, copiers, cubicles, etc.)—imposing a sort of subjective naivete which makes the bureaucracy bearable, resulting in an almost inadvertent uncanny grace.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jimmy Chen

A Life of  Drafts  (2006)

Jimmy Chen

The Anguish of Again (2006)

Jimmy Chen

The Temporality of Falling (2006)

The Kafkian implications of A Life of Drafts are twofold: 1) the ceaseless propagation of paperwork fluttered out by a copier, and 2) the author himself, whose posthumous ‘life’ is exponentially more notable than his living one—as if life of earth (not only for Kafka, but for us all) is merely a test run. For Jimmy Chen, the concept of reincarnation is pleasant, but he is more loyal to the flawed life which precedes it.

             The Anguish of Again, taken literally, describes a copier churning out copies of an original—and while this may seem like a perfect launching point into the concept of postmodernist pastiche—the artist wishes to think of The Anguish of Again as a metaphor for modern human plight—the repetition of each breath, each day at the office, even each ostensible shot as a human being.