The Paper Shredder

Janek Simon’s installation is the institution of an office closed in the microcosm of a few everyday objects. It is a metaphor of the excessive formalization of life and perception of society via the rigid framework of statistical data. Apart from the paper shredder mentioned in the title, the artist has also used a computer and a printer – devices which are quite indispensable for work related to the maintenance and processing of data. The fan, on the other hand, evokes associations with the stuffy and heartless atmosphere of office space. All the items gathered create an interconnected system: the computer sends information to the printer, the printer prints a document, the documents immediately land in the shredder. This constellation actually reveals the process of destruction, the final outcome of which is a heap of thin strips of paper blown about by the fan.

The installation belongs to one of the artist’s exploratory tropes where the main motif is opposition to institutions and the related system of control. Production and archiving of broadly understood information, be it in the form of office documents or different legislative acts, are immanent components of it. The Paper Shredder consistently and systemically annihilates the data entered onto the hard drive and then transferred to paper. The date is an element of supervision and control, as well as a sine qua non condition of the smooth functioning of a society subject to oversight.

The heap of paper strips, the monotonous sound of the printer and the shredder, bring to mind the subcutaneous life of the office: circulating information, piles of files, binders in neat rows. The order and the accumulation of data squeezed into orderly segregated slips of paper seem to be instrumental in trying to curb chaos, but also in oppressing the individual locked in file cabinets and described in incomprehensible administrative jargon. Simon’s work cuts up this order into even strips, blowing up the office as if from the inside, but by one of its indispensable components. The abundance of the cut up paper scattered by the fan only underlines the nonsense of bureaucracy, the absurd formalism and overproduction of documents in which individual histories become lost.

Izabela Kopania