Office Space

Panopticon Punks

 

May 1, 2021 - June 30, 2021

 

Office Space is pleased to announce a virtual and unauthorized collaborative exhibition between the Office Space Collective and Barstool BYU. Barstool BYU (https://www.instagram.com/byubarstool/) is an Instagram feed based on photo or video submissions from the student body of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. BYU is a private, Mormon affiliated university which is predominatly conservative and Caucasian in its political and ethnic makeup. Due to the close ties between religion and a parochial environment, the contradiction between the wholesomeness projected by the late stage capitalist marketing of the university and the hidden underbelly of white privileged and even white supremacist culture embedded within the student body itself becomes the focus of this anthropological show.

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Here the Office Space Collective showcases a series of found digital images that highlight both the seductive and crudely ugly nature of white culture, involving things such as gun ownership and college parties. The only membership to these people and places, which exclude people of color as side characters or outsiders, is for white people only. White culture diverges in experience as one of intimacy and familiarity for white people and one of alienation and exclusion for the people of color. White culture of Utah, which is centered around college campuses and the suburbs, is different from the white culture of New York, which is much more cosmopolitan and approachable yet simultaneously exerts white dominance in areas such as tech and the arts. It's hard to say which white culture is more exclusionary or oppressive. In Utah, the exclusivity and group identity of white culture are much more pronounced and aggressive, while the counterpart in New York is much more nuanced and open, yet simultaneously exerts dominance in all areas of society and economy. It might be fair to say that Utah's white culture simple and homogenous, while New York's white culture is more complex and diverse. From looking at the found images, the viewer who is a person of color might decide that s/he wants to be a part of this seductive cultural phenomenon, or s/he may decide to be against it and try to find his or her own subculture. Maybe s/he has no choice but to be a part of the dominant white culture. Whatever the decision, white culture may be a fading memory within the US history as the populations grow more brown, it may merge with other subcultures in a cosmopolitan manner, or it may stay exclusive and dominant over the other subcultures, for the chosen few.

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From an unattributed audio transcript, one of the collective’s researchers said, “Utah County, the land of mini vans and roundabouts, is a county very different from Salt Lake County, despite the fact that they neighbor one another and hold the two largest populations of Utah accounting for roughly 2/3 of the state. When traveling down to Utah County it’s very interesting because it seems as if no one is working or going to school, every time I go down there and it’s the middle of the day on a weekday there are tons of kids being drove around by their mothers, going to the recreational pools, hiking, and other things, and this was before the pandemic. It seems as if most kids are homeschooled and there are hardly any males around during the day, so many of them, I would guess travel to work, most likely in Salt Lake City. Because of this homeschooling and absence of the fathers during the day, the women and kids are out and about, and this makes Provo and Orem very busy. With covid that only made it worse as many people just don’t believe covid is real or they just don’t care about wearing masks so they still went out just as much. Many events took place during covid without thought or care to the consequences, and this is why they had a very bad spike in numbers and actually beat out Salt Lake’s covid numbers. From this collective work we can see that partying at BYU and UVU led to a bad increase in cases, but I suspect that the causational spread of the virus went beyond just from parties and was a result of even everyday tasks of going out, or leaving home more than they should because they didn’t care.”

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Another of the collective’s researcher’s intercepted a local satellite transmission, which reads: “These images from a public facing social media account indicate something that white Utah prefers to believe does not exist. That is, the absolute social despondency of Mormon youth trapped in a circular prison of rape culture, alcohol abuse, toxic masculinity, misogyny, meaningless desire. These stills document an ongoing culture of interlocking supremacies which nurture a festering ground for homicidal fantasies. They manifest in the world as violence against women, racially marginalized populations, young boys, trans folk, older generations, animals, foreigners —any and every Other which does not subscribe to its central code of dehumanization at all costs. This base aligns with an agonizing, hopeless form of dominant masculinity that would rather devour the world than watch its nihilistic reign of cruelty and brutalization come to an end.”

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Joanna Brooks argues within her brilliant essay Mormons and White Supremacy: American Religion and The Problem of Racial Innocence that “the possessive investment in whiteness and the possessive investment in rightness have put Mormons in opposition to efforts by minority peoples worldwide for dignity, autonomy, soverignty, land, and well-being. They have allied the Mormon people with dominant power structures that allocate life chances by race. They have stood in the way of engagement, productive conflict, and truth seeking.” Even though one could dismiss this exhibition as a series of trifling memes or mere trolling, the deep seated anti-blackness, fetishization of white male privilege, and the abundantly puerile and grand oversimplified sexual humor that explicitly demonstrate the status quo counter to the Me Too movement cannot be ignored by the viewers. To look at these images implies an undercurrent of complicity with a system within Utah County which has fueled the rapid rise of white supremacist militia groups such as the Utah Citizens’ Alarm as well as a corporation of self-destructive anti-maskers mixed with right-wing Trumpism such as The Tribe Utah, LLC. As BYU is supposed to represent an academic institution rooted in good civic practices, Panopicon Punks shows that Foucault’s panopticon can be suspended completely and reveal the latent banality of evil that crossbreeds the celebration of whiteness with complete disregard for responsibility for community building.

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The collective’s researchers examine how post-Fordist capitalism with BYU as a case study has not only impacted the growth of emptiness within the unexamined life but also fueled the explosive rise of white supremacy and the alt-right within most of Utah culture. The group’s sociopolitical critique of the BYU environment can be extended to other higher level educational institutions which do not serve interests of the scholar but behave as the cogs of a capitalist machine which produces students as superficial and uncultured workers for future generations of more capitalist machines.

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This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

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—Bryce Chatwin and Office Space Collective

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The Office Space Collective consists of Clee Ferris, Chunbum Park, Patrick Winfield Vogel, Albert Abdul-Barr Wang, Sajeda (Saj) Issa, Melissa Prosser, qi peng, and other artists as a conceptual artist group. Their projects represent the realizations of an unstable and rotating forward-thinking posse focused on various site-specific projects for the gallery itself.