Working the Labor-Leisure Machine: Proposal for a Photography Museum Without Images

Alise Tifentale, "Working the Labor-Leisure Machine: Proposal for a Photography Museum Without Images," Riga Technoculture Research Unit (RTRU), Season 1 (February 1, 2023), https://www.rtru.org/under-the-hood/participants/alise-tifentale

Read my article on the RTRU platform here: https://www.rtru.org/under-the-hood/participants/alise-tifentale

or download a pdf here.

RTRU - www.rtru.org - is curated by Elizaveta Shneyderman and Zane Onckule, designed and coded by Becca Abbe. 

Abstract:

Almost seventy years ago, André Malraux introduced the concept of a museum without walls (the “musée imaginaire”) containing photographic reproductions of artworks; he furthermore developed a detailed analysis of the shortcomings and benefits of such a “museum.” I am using Malraux as a starting point for thinking about photography through the lens of a museum without images. Central to my museum is the understanding of photography as a practice, an apparatus, and a form of social interaction. The museum examines photography as a complex mechanism where labor and leisure overlap; photography can simultaneously be a means of production, a source of entertainment, and a commodity for consumption. My method suggests a subversion of the patriarchal and Euro-centric concept of a museum as a collection of valuable masterpieces. Instead, this museum exhibits ideas as works in progress. No doubt, there are also images in this museum, but they play the role of footnotes. Even more importantly, at the time of their making, these images exist(ed) outside, or on the margins of, the mainstream art world.

Central to this proposed museum is the understanding of photography as a practice, an apparatus, and a form of social interaction. The museum examines photography as a complex mechanism where labor and leisure overlap. Photography can simultaneously serve as a means of production, a source of entertainment, and a commodity for consumption. This essay introduces five rooms of the museum. These rooms offer ways of viewing photography as part of contemporary technological culture, with a focus on concepts like the labor-leisure machine, the networked camera, photography without images, obsolescence/prescience, and human-machine relationships.

From the publishers about the concept of RTRU - www.rtru.org:

“Part research journal, part art and writing publisher, part hub for developments in emerging media, RTRU brings an interdisciplinary and technicity-centered approach to the status quo of contemporary art programming. Season one, Under The Hood, looks at the technical processes and economic and social structures of production that profoundly shape visual culture. Our first season considers the museum without images; the effusive “student body”; labor history; “the factory of phenomena,” the paradigmatic worksite of contemporary media culture; and much more.

In order to understand how imaging strategies produce the aesthetic effects that we frequently and unconsciously observe in the world, we must first understand the infrastructure for how these images are made, or go “under the hood.” The way visual culture comes to be constructed is at the center of these investigations: the real-time simulations and the skeletal rigs that form the underwire of thrashing corpses, the labor laws which structure capitalist workflows, the technologically dependent student body, the visible signature of video art tropes and their affective contours, many of which have become increasingly prevalent. All of these examples belie their beginning as metrics, inputs, algorithms, and other coding languages assigned by animators, programmers, and policymakers. The images produced by these original technical apparatuses thus introduce a new level of estrangement wherein the major referent is no longer the physical world, but the technical culture behind the curtain.”

Entering the Elusive Estate of Photographer Zenta Dzividzinska

Tifentale, Alise. “Entering the Elusive Estate of Photographer Zenta Dzividzinska.” MoMA Post, March 24, 2021. https://post.moma.org/entering-the-elusive-estate-of-photographer-zenta-dzividzinska/

New article in the Museum of Modern Art’s online research publication Post. Notes on Art in Global Context, listed in sections Central & Eastern Europe and Art and Gender.

UPDATE: in 2024, this article was included in the anthology Central Eastern European & Diasporic Feminisms (London: Cell, 2024). Find out more about this publication here: https://www.alisetifentale.net/research-blog-at/ceed-feminisms-bibliography

Read the article on MoMA Post website: https://post.moma.org/entering-the-elusive-estate-of-photographer-zenta-dzividzinska/ or download the article PDF here: download article pdf

To learn more about the Latvian artist and photographer Zenta Dzividzinska (1944-2011), please visit the website of her archive and estate, Art Days Forever.

Zenta Dzividzinska. Page from a contact print book. 1965. Latvian National Museum of Art.

Zenta Dzividzinska. Untitled (Self-portrait). From the series House Near the River. 1968.

Abstract:

Art historian Alise Tifentale considers the difficulties of preserving and interpreting the legacy of Latvian artist and photographer Zenta Dzividzinska (1944–2011). In the 1960s, Dzividzinska was one of the few women photographers in Riga whose work was highly regarded in the local and international photo club culture. Her most significant contribution is a collection of images capturing the daily life of three generations of women living in a small house in the country. These photographs have remained largely unknown until recently. This essay highlights the sociopolitical and cultural motives for such neglect and suggests avenues of further research of the artist’s estate.

This essay introduces the life and career of Zenta Dzividzinska or ZDZ (the artist, annoyed by having to spell out her long, Polish-sounding last name, which was rather unusual in Latvia, liked to sign with this abbreviation), focusing on her artistic output of the 1960s and early 1970s. At the center of this body of work is a vast collection of images that she later titled House Near the River, which were made in and around her parents’ home on the outskirts of Iecava, a village less than an hour’s drive south of Riga. During the 1960s, while studying art in Riga and working, ZDZ often visited her parents and extended family there. Later, she returned to the house to live in it permanently with her husband, whom she married in 1969.

House Near the River comprises hundreds of negatives and prints depicting the daily life of three generations of women as it unfolded in and around their small house in the Latvian countryside. Today these images can be viewed perhaps as para-feminist (to use Amelia Jones’s term) because explicitly feminist critique did not emerge in Latvian art until the 1980s.

Zenta Dzividzinska. Page from a contact print book. 1965. Latvian National Museum of Art.

Zenta Dzividzinska. Page from a contact print book. 1965. Latvian National Museum of Art.

Zenta Dzividzinska. Page from a contact print book. 1966. Latvian National Museum of Art.