The Office mewls its way out of existence

GIOJ DE MARCO’S ‘WWII: DOG FIGHTING MODE’

“At least it isn’t boring,” Chris Hoff said wryly. Just a week ago, Hoff delighted me with his curation of pre-post-feminists at Cypress College; now two guest curators had delivered a wan “re-Perspective” at Hoff’s The Office: An Art Space. And for the Office’s last show, too, bringing a mewling end to a jewel of a space devoted to works by a talented coterie of artists Hoff has long been grooming and boosting.

Hoff was wrong: some of it was quite boring. Exactly two works were charming and/or visually interesting. One, Gioj De Marco’s WWII: Dog Fighting Mode, was a typical commercial Gen X crowd-pleaser of Wonder Woman as seen from the bottom, with one hip and thigh pressed against Plexiglas (perhaps her invisible jet).

The other was Robert Hollister’s deadpan series of large-scale photographs from 1974 of women in the workplace called Career Opportunities for Young Women. In each, a bored-looking woman stands behind a counter, clerking or answering phones. Career opportunities for young women in 1974, it seems, may have been somewhat limited.

For the rest of it, I had absolutely no idea what curators Chloe Flores and Autumn Beck were trying to achieve. Let’s see: two tiny oils of a woman lying on an ironing board. One largish oil of soldiers or cows or something outlined in white against pale hues. An Atari hooked up to an old TV.

The hell?

Next time the Office has its last show, Chris, why don’t you show your own collection?

I was already unimpressed with the sad swansong of the often-terrific Office when Hoff eagerly turned on the projector for Audrey Chan’s Boomerang. The exploration of war and terrorism and hot soldier dudes (scored in part to Eminem’s “Soldier” for that special touch of on-the-nose) managed to be prurient, cowardly and rantingly illogical.The 23-minute piece starts with Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam War Memorial, saying whether or not one agreed with the war, the tribute was about “the people, not the policies.” We cut to an Iraqi checkpoint. Foreboding! But it does not explode. Type appears on the screen, Chan telling us about her Google searches for beheadings and we expect her to favor us with a few, but the screen goes white. Fake-out! From there we go to hot Marines, and it is masturbatory with the American exceptionalism of our virile young white men and their glistening pecs. There is a dedication at last to someone who is fallen, and I thought it ended there, with “9/11—We Remember” (a joke I stole from Gawker.com: “Knock knock?” “Who’s there?” “9/11.” “9/11 who?” “YOU SAID YOU’D NEVER FORGET!”) but Maya Lin has not yet been defamed, so it continues. First a belligerent coot rants that Lin’s design is disgraceful because it’s black, then Lin says she doesn’t want to design any more memorials, typecast as architect of death. Chan’s take? “Maybe you were being selfish when you said that.” Also, she seriously shows her giggling and bobbling her head on a loop for like five minutes.

And then Chan types something like, “I don’t understand how you could say it’s the people not the policies” and manages to ascribe the least logical/most defamatory interpretation possible, because Lin is a selfish brainless giggling whore.

And so, as I bitched and moaned my way through this mess of a film, Hoff noted my quiet murmurs. “At least it isn’t boring,” he said, like I told you, and he certainly was right about that.

“RE-PERSPECTIVE” THE OFFICE: AN ART SPACE | 5122 BOLSA AVE STE 110 |HUNTINGTON BEACH 92649 | 714.767.5861 | THEOFFICEART.COM | OPENTHROUGH OCT 12

Tags: chris hoff, maya lin, the office, wonder woman