Back at the office, time stands still

Returning to the office after a Covid break things just are not the same. Those partitions and chairs seem flimsier and the palette of cream, grey and beige, peppered by fluoro post-it notes, even more offensive. Even the water cooler conversation seemsmore inane.

Heating up leftovers in the microwave, you listen to the ceiling ducts trying to bring life to dead air. Facemasks! We now have to wear stationery over precious openings, dulling the senses.

Working in an office cubicle right now is about as on trend as the smart ambitious artwork of Mark Schroder and Glen Hayward, showing at the Dowse and City Gallery respectively. Suchwork is not big on biennale or big prize shortlists right now but it remains totally relevant. This is sculpture taking on neoliberalist infused late capitalism.

For Schroder’s satirical corporate office installation Fortune Teller (No. 2) (Branch Office) a small gallery is turned into a partitioned office: a rat maze of cheap walls, props and fittings.

A clever job in architectural compression, it is akin to a Shortland Street-like television set, providing the viewer multiple new shots at every turn.

This is no accident: thework was first staged in Gus Fisher Gallery in actual Shortland Street, a response to its history as the site of TVNZ’s first studios.

Like a timewarp to a 1980s-1990s age that ushered in the internet, the work’s hollowness asks us today – just what is real and of physical value any more? While office spaces have become increasingly open plan (the buzzwords ‘‘collaborative hub’’ appear here on a door), we now navigate the same false walls and doors in digital space. Anyone who works in a bureaucracy is familiarwith tired aspirational language, sent through emails and intranets. Here it is on posters, postcards and mugs.

Welcome to Schroder’s fictional office of ‘‘The Bureau of Happiness’’, where the trite cliches of wellbeing-speak have infected the office like a virus – a space designed by a profit-based algorithm. No surprise to find Schroder has a day job as a corporate lawyer. But he has been to art school too, building a practice around exploring the confidence tricks and sheer waste of resources that are boom-and-bust companies.

Schroder began as a painter and it shows. He has clever clownish funwith cheap office ornaments and equipment. They seem arranged chaotically but are tied strongly through colour – lurid green-screen green, with banana peel and hazard tape yellow.

Mixing in fake grass, trellis and dried leaves, indoor and outdoor space surreally meld. I feel like I am in one of the queasy, claustrophobic warrens of my bad dreams – like an office party of Christmas past.

The sporting and game playing analogies of corporate vocab are alluded to in tension-relief props like tennis balls and mouthguards.

A postcard featuring a racing yacht jibes ‘‘don’t rock the boat’’, just one reference to ‘‘being a good sport’’ and ‘‘playing the game’’.

This is all about the push for individual competition rather than collective satisfaction.

Fortune Teller wouldmake a great set for a late 1980s dystopian themed Lazer Strike, where the last living office zombie wins. Glen Hayward also explores the modern slipperiness ofwhat is real and of value with shared objects.

Recognised for his remarkable craft carving and painting, Hayward makes wooden physical facsimiles out of utilitarian objects that we take for granted: fire extinguishers, pipes, handrails, nails, paint tins and false walls.

Our attention is drawn towhat protects the gallery from theworld.

This survey is titled Wish You Were Here, surely a reference to the Pink Floyd album that meditates on human absence and mental instability. Absence here too can feel cold, like the Floyd’s Roger ■ Fortune Teller (No. 2) (Branch Office), Mark Schroder, until June 26, Dowse Art Museum

■ Wish You Were Here, Glen Hayward, until September 11, City Gallery Wellington

Waters cry ‘‘Is there anybody out there?’’ that echoed through many a teenage boy’s suburban bedroom.

With Hayward’s conceptualism, it is you who activates these objects – opening false gallery doors, or touching a rubbish bin with your mind. You are pushed to try and find personal resonance in things manufactured and antiseptically cleaned for mass public use.

Look close and you can see the pencil marks or that an exit sign is blurring. In his majorwork of an upturned abandoned car and teenage detritus ‘‘dendrochronology’’ I like the attention to memory.

A car made out of assorted used timber, leftover paint and glue – as an amalgam of stories, it is a warmer work than most.

While Schroder’s chaotic colourful work serves as a counterpoint to the white cube, Hayward draws attention to it.

If there was ever a signwemight be near the end of that white space as dominant exhibition mode, it is an artist displaying models of golden gallery handrails in a large seemingly empty room.

Or Hayward’s installation this month of false security cameras in public galleries around Wellington.

Ten years on from the City Gallery sculpture show that Hayward appeared in, The Obstinate Object, Dane Mitchell collecting and exhibiting gallery dust, and Simon Denny fabricating the personal effects of Kim Dotcom, I amnot sure the art jokes are as funny any more. Or that, at least, they earn taking up the entire bottom floor of this gallery.

The dulling of objects through reproduction and our fledgling digitalworld is powerfully examined in Hayward’s impressive reproduction in wood of an office cubicle from 1999 film The Matrix (first shown here in 2013) right down to pencils and pins. The work is even more vanilla andmanila than what it reproduces. It may be the last thing you need to see after Covid – but thenmaybe that is just exactly the space for reflection this sculpture has to offer.