The reductive cleanliness of a logo, stacks of business cards and stickers, meetings with potential investors, the yearly annual report, employee self-evaluations, products named using acronyms, consumer surveys. This list belongs to a language spoken primarily in skyscrapers and office parks yet is also familiar outside these ghettos of big business. Since the Fifties and Pop Art, these signifiers have been borrowed and often mangled by artists in wildly divergent ways. As suggestive of a general strategy, they have been used to both package artist projects and practices within a market friendly domain as much as they have been used to critique and expose the corruption and profit hungry opportunism that are more likely than not a part of the root problem with this country. The Lab's most recent exhibition "Corporate Art Expo '07" curated by Bay Area artist Shane Montgomery 1, encapsulates business minded projects on both sides of this political divide and several who seem to ignore the polemics all together.

At first impression, the exhibition reads like a trade-show for scrappy start-ups doing their best to shine on a tight budget. After wading through the literature, it's an even stranger array of distopian fantasies, placebo products, kitchy gangs, and living-room bureaucracies. Because of the general cacophony of the installation (both in terms of actual sound-bleed and the more expected in-your-face boldness of each installation) nothing stands out immediately. However, the thirteen installations are surprisingly well organized into the 2100 square foot main gallery space at the Lab, and as Montgomery's first curatorial endeavor, it's a laudable effort (perhaps no surprise to those familiar with his smart work as the master of install over at YBCA).

The best moments of the show are with the Anti-Advertising Agency, Death & Taxes, Slop Art, Old Glory Condom Co., and Training & Development most of which employ some form of satire. AAA involves a series of collaborative projects with Steve Lambert (who in the interest of full disclosure is a friend and collaborator on the Collective Foundation exhibition) and various Bay Area artists. Despite the troublesome but ultimately tacit contradictions in the name and practices of the Agency, it's a rich and humorous project that suffers only from a somewhat slapdash physical presentation. Death and Taxes, if you can get past the clichéd title, is something like a torture campaign to test the limits of familial love. 2 This uncomfortable project prods our latent fear that corporations will, in the not too distant future, own everything–even our personal and private freedoms. Slop Art, another annoying moniker, has made a surprisingly successful imitation newspaper insert and art-crap catalogue. Old Glory Condom Co., is an AIDS awareness project from the late 80s. As an artwork it's a bit tired, but it adds to the exhibition by introducing an historical point of reference complete with an early 90s episode of Law & Order that references the project.

Death & Taxes Installation

The use of packaging and extended duration in project-work by artists (as appropriated strategies of organizations, institutions or businesses) is notably common in the Bay Area and is therefore ripe for the close attention invited by an exhibition. However, the corporate language here is sad, alienating and often dry. This sense of dehumanizing weariness might, somewhat tenuously, be understood as a general critique of corporations. As industrial sized bureaucracies, corporations do their best to be abstract and therefore resistant to criticism, and in this show the act of critique, with few exceptions, lacks the incisive clarity necessary to take on Goliath.

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