Where We Work
The fascination with the personal spaces of creative individuals is established, even familiar: Many people clearly want to see the artist’s studio, the writer’s desk. Projects like From Your Desks and Windows of The World respond to that desire, and aim to connect us to space and place in a way that possibly reveals something about a creator: The objects around her, the view from his window. I understand this, at least in the abstract. (And for what it’s worth I actually participated in From Your Desks.)So: Nothing against these efforts, or people who love them. But in the non-abstract, this practice of scrutinizing the work spaces of various creators has never done much for me. I remember peering at a room where Faulkner strung together words that have affected me greatly, and feeling precisely nothing as a result. This attitude may inform my reaction to documentation of a different form of work place. But it’s a form that I think is worth consideration. Because if you think about the space where creative work actually gets done, and what writers and designers and quite a few artists are really looking at all day, the relevant framework is probably not a room, or a window. It’s probably a screen.
Daniel Keller’s desktop, from Desktop Views.
Rhizome’s Jason Huff addressed this recently with a piece comparing two projects that offer a window, as it were, on “15 years of desktop aesthetics.” For a recent effort called Desktop Views, Adam Cruces rounded up images of the computer desktops of 51 artists.
Some (like Jon Rafman) are artists I was familiar with, others I’m not. But as I clicked around, I realized this didn’t make any difference to my interest in what I was seeing. In fact, I suspect that it allowed me to look at many of these images as images, rather than as little virtual tourist attractions concerning someone specific.
Aaron Graham’s desktop, from Desktop Views.
Huff’s piece explains that Desktop Views references “Alexei Shulgin’s legendary Desktop Is project, created 15 years earlier in 1997, at the dawn of ‘net.art,’” and it makes worthwhile observations about broader aesthetic changes in screen aesthetics since that time.
He also notes that The Guardian has more recently run a series collecting images of various writers’ desktops, accompanied by interviews. This, turns out, left me cold, even when it involved writers I admire. (“Tom McCarthy explains how technology is woven into his creative life.” Ho hum.) I guess that’s no surprise. I’m basically skeptical about revelations gleaned from peeking at a creator’s place, physical or virtual. (Metafilter recently pointed out a feature on Apartment Therapy with the irritating headline, “Literary Style: 15 Writers’ Bedrooms,” that underscores how silly this line of thought can get. As if it weren’t meaningless enough to peer at writers’ bedrooms — wow, so maybe Truman Capote had sex there? Or didn’t? — our assumed curiosity is rationalized by the vauous invocation of “style.” Screw the art, and for that matter screw the screwing: Maybe there are some actionable home décor takeaways here!)
What these visual objects made me think about isn’t the singular writer, artist, designer. Instead I ended up thinking about the way a desktop’s look is shaped: a result of decisions that involve productivity (organized or messy?) and aesthetics (custom backdrop or default?) or both (is the custom backdrop expressive, or a waste of time that could be spent doing something more important?).
Parker Ito’s desktop, from Desktop Views.
The variety of the results surprised me — particularly given the considerable constraints involved. (The rooms are all shaped the same; many of the objects within them (icons, that is) share visual similarities; etc.) As I thought it over, I remembered that as a category of work space, this is one that’s hardly unique to the subset of people I’ve been calling “creators,” but is also inhabited by customer service reps and logistics managers, software engineers and bond traders.
Imagine some collection of desktop images that weren’t singularlized, but anonymyzed. Instead of serving as clues or suggestions of indivduality, they’d become objects of speculation and projection. Instead of pretending to seek insight about a particular person, we could peer at this space like a stranger’s room, and only wonder: Who works here?
Timur Si-Qin’s desktop, from Desktop Views.
A Century at the Ballpark
Fenway during the 1912 World Series. Note the fans in front of the ad-shrouded left-field wall, not yet the Green Monster. Boston lost this game, but won the series.
Georgi Zelma, Fitness Parade on Red Square, 1935, Gift of Janice Tuckwood in memory of Donald A. Tuckwood.
Artists in the early days of Soviet rule redefined their role in society. No longer creators of paintings, drawings, and sculptures for the elite, many artists embraced photography as an art for the masses. They advanced the cause of the October Revolution of 1917 by experimenting with avant-garde processes and points of view.
With the founding of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) only five years later, photographic experimentation was abandoned and the realism inherent to the medium was embraced to promote party goals. This exhibition explores the contradictions between the idealistic images of a new social order and the reality of the Soviet state.
These photographs, created between the late 1920s and mid-1980s, reinforce Soviet ideology and are closely related to Socialist Realist paintings. They are propagandistic, extolling socialist virtues and picturing a model order that never came to fruition. The approximately 35 images in the exhibition collectively characterize exemplary communist workers and their perceived role in the creation of a new society. Four general themes emerge: agriculture and rural areas, industry, the military, and Soviet youth.
Industrial development was key to authoritarian Premier Joseph Stalin, who, with the first of his Five-Year Plans from 1928 to 1932, prioritized the creation of heavy industry and the electrification of the entire country. Farmers in rural areas, which represented most of the USSR, produced food for those who lived in the city. To portray happy, productive farmers and industrious workers maintained the illusion of bountiful resources for the Soviet Union.
Military photographs from World War II picture Soviet soldiers as the USSR prepared to expand its territory and influence. Finally, images of children at school or in state-sponsored parades capture the next generation finding their place in the new society.
Photographers represented include Alexander Ustinov, Max Alpert, Emanuel Evzerikhin, and Georgi Zelma, among others. All were war correspondents and photojournalists, but their images can also have an artistic dimension. Both Alpert’s and Zelma’s photographs were occasionally part of photomontages in the state-sponsored magazine, USSR in Construction, published in five languages between 1930 and 1941. The photographs and the journal were designed to advance communism worldwide. Ustinov was a photographer for the newspaper and the party organ Pravda and the official photographer for the Kremlin beginning in 1945.
The photographs in this exhibition are selections from recent donations by Howard Schickler and Janice Tuckwood of more than 200 Soviet photographs. To Soviet photographers of this period, their images were tools to inform the public. Many were discarded after their message was disseminated.
These images, the first of their kind to enter the collection, illuminate history and explore the manifold uses of photography. They encourage us to question the photographer’s point of view and to look more critically at all images. At the same time, these photographs can be admired for their power, composition, and technical accomplishment. They are a rare and important addition to the Museum’s photography holdings.
Los Angeles looks to revive mythic past with streetcars in four-mile Broadway-to-Figueroa loop In this undated file photo, passengers in a public transportation tram, right, look out the windows as they are stalled in a traffic jam in downtown Los Angeles. Half a century after the last of the lost Pacific Electric Red Cars rumbled through Los Angeles, a move has begun to return streetcars to downtown LA.
“Screenshots of Despair”
“No one currently likes this,” via Nevver and Screenshots of Despair.
“No Friends,” by Apple’s Game Center, via Screenshots of Despair.
| — | Kurt Vonnegut |
