They built a big office building in downtown LA, and being the sort of
corporate citizens they were, they commissioned all kinds of art works to
adorn the place. Every LA artist who could be bought had an installation.
Right at the entry to the cafeteria was a near life-size figure wearing a
peculiar outfit — sort of a culotte-skirt thing, and sort of a sweater-vest
thing, and a close-fitting, helmet-like hat, all of it from no identifiable
time or culture, just clothes displaying a kind of pure deconstructed
fashionless non-ethnicity.
The figure was of indeterminate gender — and beyond that, not of any
determinable orientation, not transgendered, not gay, not lesbian, not
bisexual, not straight — just a figure. It was of indeterminate race. Maybe
it was light-skinned African, maybe brown-skinned Asian, maybe Hispanic or
well-tanned white, maybe Amerindian. Its hair was all drawn up under its
hat. It had painted, almond-shaped eyes that stared vacantly like those on
Egyptian statues, and it was playing a kind of multiethnic bongo drum with
its hands. It was in a big glass vitrine, probably filled with inert gas,
and even if its hands could move, you knew you’d never be able to hear the
drum.
It was the perfect corporate employee as envisioned by the Human Resources
committee that commissioned the sculpture: noncontroversial, caponized,
acultural, non-racial, vacant, programmable, and feckless. It gazed placidly
out over the employees heading for the cafeteria line to get their low-carb,
high-fiber, heart-friendly breakfasts, lunches, and healthy snacks. What I
could never understand was that if this was someone’s dream-vision of the
perfect employee, it was also the perfect employee to be replaced by a
computer. Maybe, in light of what eventually happened to a lot of the LA
employees, that was what they had in mind.