Exhibiting can be heartbreaking. You have poured yourself into artwork, for it to potentially culminate in nothingness. An example comes in the third season of comedy series The Office. Pam Beesley (Jenna Fischer) has taken evening art classes, culminating in water color paintings shown in a group exhibition. She eavesdrops a conversation between the only ones actually attentive to her paintings: “Real art takes courage, okay, and honesty … Those aren’t Pam’s strong points … that’s why this is motel art”.
As the distraught Beesley begins taking down her paintings, her boss, Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) comes by. Unlike the previous onlookers, he expresses unconditional enthusiasm. In particular, he enjoys the painting of their office building: “That is our building. And we sell paper”, Scott exclaims with gravitas, purchasing the painting to hang in the open-plan office to inspire the workers. The naivety of the watercolor and the grandeur it provokes could be considered pathetic or sincere in its innocence.
The final punchline is Scott saying the painting would not exist without paper, “unless you had a camera”. He confuses material foundation with production technique; it is of course not the paper that would be replaced by the camera but rather the act of painting. A similar mix-up of production and display is also a central source of ambiguity and energy in exhibitions outside of traditional gallery spaces.
Such exhibitions follow from Walter Benjamin’s remarks that photographic reproduction allow artwork into situations beyond the scope of the original. Artwork can today be installed in all kinds of unconventional settings, to be distributed online. My own practice has involved offices in Office Nostalgia (2014), Office Nostalgia: Back 2 Work (2021) and Company (2024). Such exhibition requires courage since it forgoes the grandeur guaranteed by the white cube. That does not mean that it requires honesty, existing as manipulable documentation images. This creates a form of dislocation, of work whose site specificity is web-site-specific.
Since the episode of The Office aired, the painting has dislocated from the series. Various replicas are available on online marketplaces. While the affective register in The Office was open for interpretation, the status of these image-objects are clear; they exist for commerce. Web-site-specific exhbitions likewise lose ambiguity and become transactional by entering into online attention economies. Here artwork competes with any other kind of content for views, likes and comments. Any artist can feel as distraught as Beesley over minimal viewership or negative feedback. Yet dislocation into attention economies also brings the work to non-art people, whose over-enthusiasm can be pathetic and sincere enough to save an art career.
Fig. 2: Replica of a watercolor from The Office, sourced from Amazon.
(Web)Site-(Un)Specific Exhibition
