Dan Bourke, Keywords, AVA

by Francis Russell.

When we come to say ‘we just don’t speak the same language’ we mean something more general: that we have different immediate values or different kinds of valuation, or that we are aware, often intangibly, of different formations and distributions of energy and interest. 

A quick review of the strategic human resource management literature on organisational values will reveal that a clear values statement is necessary in order to attract employees who will align with an organisation’s mission, attract customers who want to purchase an ethos as much as a product or service, to successfully guide the behaviour of employees, and to increase an organisation’s chances of successfully achieving its overall strategic goals.
        Underpinning this literature is the assumption that organisations owe a duty of service to society as a whole and not just to owners, shareholders, or a select group of stakeholders; in other words, discussions of organisational values must be understood within the broader discourse of corporate citizenship and the related notion that organisational culture can play a key role in the development and achievement of progressive political goals. As such, organisational values should not be reduced to simple branding or marketing exercises.[1] Instead, the development of an organisation’s values is part of subject formation—the production of modes of conduct that make an employee’s fidelity to their employer paradigmatic for evincing one’s trustworthiness and value in society. Indeed, the very name “strategic human resource management” is not just an example of terminological inflation, but creates a distinction between an older human resource management that functioned to ensure industrial compliance, reactively provided services related to team functionality and wellbeing, and ensured the smooth operation of key services like payroll, and a new kind of human resource management that concerns itself with proactively moulding an organisation and its employees in order to ensure that both live up to the expectations of a dutiful corporate citizen.
        However, and as has been shown by recent texts like Working for the Brand: How Corporations are Destroying Free Speech by labour relations lawyer Josh Bornstein, the reality of such interventions into worker subjectivity are much more disquieting. Putting to one side the lofty and abstract goals of corporations and large not-for-profits like universities and art galleries and museums, codes of conduct and organisational value charters are more tangibly used to silence and terminate staff for challenging managerial prerogative, contacting the media about corporate actions that would seem to violate an organisation’s commitment to good citizenship, and even for daring to express political opinions in one’s private life (and especially on social media). Bizarrely, and despite adopting organisational values that should make bad behaviour rare, Australian organisations regularly get into the press and the courts and tribunals for illegally sacking workers, committing hundreds of millions of dollars of wage theft, sham contracting, and exposing workers to life threatening conditions. As such, the development of and commitment to organisational values have become, at best, a sign of conformity and compliance with neoliberal capitalism and, at worst, a symptom of an over-identification with symbols that mask a fundamental absence of values, if not a kind of nihilism. In this way, the contemporary corporation or not-for-profit acts like the political conservative who becomes increasingly obsessed with symbols like flags and national anthems as the very democracy and nation state they claim to valorise is reduced to a handmaiden for the market.
        Keywords, a new exhibition by Dan Bourke at the recently rebranded AVA Gallery (formerly Sweet Pea) explores this aforementioned subject formation primarily through a series of suspended assemblage works combining second-hand soft toys and laser cut acrylic text. Somewhere between a butcher shop’s display of hanging meat and the bunting you might find at a child’s birthday party, each work displays stuffed toys shackled to vertically aligned text that spells out key values taken from leading Australian art organisations: integrity, diversity, ambitious, experimental, challenging, critical, responsive, collaborative, sustainable. In many ways, Keywords is an extension of Bourke’s sustained examination of the contradictions and perversities inherent to the professionalisation and commodification of the counterculture and the becoming-counter-cultural of the corporation and major institution—interrelated concerns that have underpinned well over a decade of compelling work. While Keywords could be seen as another example of contemporary art that explores the failure of art institutions to live up to their progressive values, Keywords is refreshingly generative in its attention to the specific libidinal and aesthetic dimensions of the subject formation I’ve discussed earlier in this review. Beyond mere condemnation, the materiality of the works in Keywords goes beyond the usual accusations of hypocrisy, elitism, or complicity to explore cuteness and flatness as central to the specific kind of alienation and reification one encounters in today’s knowledge economy. Indeed, as Tara Heffernan writes in the show’s catalogue essay,

Bourke’s use of toys also speaks to the infantilisation of the white-collar worker in contemporary managerial practices. As well as the excessive focus on team-building activities, think of the well-worn cliché of bosses treating their team like family—a cliché reinforced by sitcoms that focus on the social dynamics that develop between office mates. The fuzzy veneer of safety and care—and performative concerns with the environment, respect and diversity—conceal the malevolence of bureaucracies that, in reality, are primarily concerned with protecting their own interests.

This is perhaps where Bourke’s intervention is more thought provoking than conventional critiques of the corporatised art institution that focus only on its bureaucratic and elitist features. Rather than merely offering the contemporary worker an opportunity to perform the role of an aggregated and sanitised worker drone, the knowledge economy demands that one bring their full self to work, that they embody their work through a set of values that are lived day-to-day, and that they understand their place within the organisation as being part of a politically and socially powerful mission. All of which has been well-understood by artists and critics for some time—and has been argued compellingly, if not definitively, in texts like Luc Boltanski’s and Eve Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism and Richard Sennett’s The Culture of the New Capitalism—but what is less remarked upon is how cartoonish and flattened one’s self must become in order to be accepted at work. It is here, by way of identifying the contemporary knowledge economy worker with the figure of the Care Bear or Beanie Baby, that Keywords helps to reveal the combined aesthetics of cuteness and flatness that have come to form one of the key vectors of today’s power relations. As Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic, authors of Cute Accelerationism, note

the dehumanizing vector in culture is no longer Terminator. Right now, it’s dollification [...] We are gradually coming to perceive even ourselves through the filters, algorithms, and two-dimensional space through which we relate to the rest of the world. All of the qualities that involves—flatness, plasticity, virality—find an acute locus within the culture of cuteness.[2]

We should not let this drive to infantilization, this injunction for the contemporary knowledge worker to consent to being squished and squeezed into a cute and flat form, fool us into believing that, beyond the subordinated status of the employee, there exists an opposed or adult world of management. Such a distinction does not operate at the level of a spatial hierarchy between those at the top and at the bottom of the greasy pole, but, instead, functions temporally. For most of our working lives we are forced to negotiate dynamisms and complexities inherent to the labour process, pluralistic situations that requires us to confront a multitude of correct and incorrect ways to respond and be responsible. At any moment, however, the contradictions, ambivalences, and double binds of industrial and political life can become flattened by management into a cartoonish world of heroes and villains, integrity and dishonesty, and excellence and mediocrity. Indeed, part of what can make corporate value statements almost totalitarian is the impossibility of fulfilling them; the quasi-utopian moral world imagined by corporate values requires one to be unobservant as a matter of practical necessity, which entails that, on judgement day, everyone becomes a sinner undeserving of redemption. As such, the contemporary knowledge worker increasingly witnesses, if not experiences directly, the nightmarish surreality of vague-to-the-point-of-empty values such as courage or respect becoming weaponised to crush worker opposition to managerial power or to eliminate an individual who has fallen out of favour with their superiors.
        Just like a children’s television programme that appears surprisingly sinister and unsettling when rewatched as an adult, what organisational theorist Robert Cooper called “organisational kitsch” functions, like all kitsch, to render those aspects of work that are disturbing ‘into something that is pleasing and pacifying.’[3] As Cooper argued, kitsch ‘oozes its way through those ‘theories’ of man-management we call the Human Relations school’. In particular, Cooper outlines three forms of human relations kitsch: firstly, the notion that industrialisation has separated humanity from an organic community it needs to be reunited with (with human resources playing a key role); secondly, that workplaces regularly fall into antagonisms that could be avoided with the right kind of intervention (as opposed to being the product of the class stratifications of capitalism as such); and, lastly, that a properly functioning organisation can assist to build a properly functioning society—or, that a properly functioning society is nothing other than properly functioning organisations—which, as Cooper states, is ‘kitschic because a management problem is kitschified into (and thus made more acceptable) a human and social problem.’
        Rather than being a phase we can hope to grow out of, the cute but increasingly frayed sculptural elements that comprise Keywords challenge us to take cuteness, flatness, and banality seriously as entrenched logics of power. As anyone who has paid attention to the dismal political failure of the Democrats in the United States will know, the libidinal economy of organisational kitsch cannot be successfully opposed by calls to finally take things seriously; as if a new-new sincerity could marshal a coalition of the alienated against the ascendant alliance of banality and terror. Indeed, and as Keywords helps to show, the unrelenting demand to take things seriously—especially our signature values—is fundamental to organisational kitsch. Moreover, before lambasting others for being childish and unserious we must first interrogate what a serious political project opposed to capitalism and fascism would look like, and consider to what extent this aforementioned flattening is in part a symptom of a crisis of confidence; a kind of defensive maneuverer in which an organisation or individual makes themselves into a small target for fear of being attacked. Nevertheless, and in the wake of a decade of corporate Memphis cloaked immiseration and far-right Studio Ghiblified AI slop, shouldn’t we also be suspicious of the notion, promulgated by influential contemporary theorists like McKenzie Wark, that cuteness might be ‘what the fascist revivalists fear most’?[4]

---

Footnotes:

1. This is not to say that there is no relationship between value statements and branding, and, indeed, while the homogeneity and repetitiveness of organisational values—integrity, respect, transparency, excellence, inclusion, etc.—might lead one to think that such value charters have only made organisations indistinguishable from one another this to potentially miss the point—particularly for medium sized organisations, the adoption of seemingly generic values presents a reassuring brand identity to stakeholders: “trust us to conform!” 

2. https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-amy-ireland-maya-b-kronic-cute-accelerationism

3. https://ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/2024-04/23.3%20Cooper%20Organisational%20Kitsch.pdf

4. https://www.frieze.com/article/mckenzie-wark-politics-cuteness-246

---

Photography by Lyle Branson. Courtesy the artist and AVA, Boorloo/Perth.