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.”

The Family of Man: The Photography Exhibition that Everybody Loves to Hate

“The greatest photographic exhibition of all time—503 pictures from 68 countries—created by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art,” says the cover of the photo-book accompanying exhibition The Family of Man. The exhibition took place at the Museum of Modern art (MoMA), New York, from January 24 to May 8, 1955. It was highly popular—the press claimed that more than a quarter of million people saw it in New York. But it gained its central role in the twentieth century photography history largely because of its international exposure. The U.S. Information Agency popularized The Family of Man as an achievement of American culture by presenting ten different versions of the show in 91 cities in 38 countries between 1955 and 1962, seen by estimated nine million people But, contrary to the popular reception, scholarly criticism of the exhibition was—and continues to be—scathing. 

Read more

The Peasant Woman Leads the Dance: Some Ambiguities Presented by Vera Mukhina’s Sculpture

“The Peasant Woman Leads the Dance: Some Ambiguities Presented by Vera Mukhina’s Sculpture,” Russian Art & Culture 1 , no. 1 (2012): 7-15. Winner of the First Prize in Russian Art & Culture Postgraduate Writing Competition 2012. View the full issue of the journal for free here on Issu.

Russian sculptor Vera Mukhina (1889-1953) is most widely known as the artist of the grandiose stainless-steel sculpture Worker and Collective Farm Woman (1937), which crowned the Soviet pavilion in the Paris International Exposition of 1937, strategically located opposite the German pavilion. 

However, this sculpture does not exhaust Mukhina’s oeuvre. Another challenging topic for an art historian is her Peasant Woman (1927), recently discussed at length by Bettina Jungen (“Vera Mukhina: Art between Modernism and Socialist Realism,” Third Text 23, no. 1 (2009): 35-43).

In this article, I am addressing some of the issues raised by Jungen, especially the opposition between the formalistic and politicized readings of the Peasant Woman. In addition, this article views Mukhina’s sculpture in terms of gender and class notions of the ideological background from which it emerged. Finally, I also discuss the artist’s relationship with the official art establishment in these terms as well, considering Mukhina’s upbringing in a pre-Revolution bourgeois family and her career as one of few female artists in the theoretically emancipated but in reality largely patriarchal Soviet official art institutions. By identifying some ambiguities in the current criticism and interpretations of Soviet official art, I hope to propose some perspectives for further inquiry that would lead to a thorough understanding of the contradictory and multilayered history of the official art in the Soviet Union.

Exhibition review: Ostalgia at the New Museum, New York (ARTMargins)

“Ostalgia at the New Museum (Review Article),” ARTMargins, March 5, 2012.

Download the article as pdf. 

Read the article on ARTMargins website for free: https://artmargins.com/ostalgia-the-new-museum/

Check out also my other review of Ostalgia, published in Studija 81, no. 6 (2011) — pdf available here!

Excerpt from the review:

Conceived as “a survey devoted to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics,” this exhibition represents a politicized, exoticized, and marginalized view of art from the former Soviet empire, making the Communist past, or, more precisely, the Western notion of it, the central axis of the show.

Deliberately blurred notions of geography and chronology complicate the rational coherence of the show, suggesting that diverse individual artistic practices and cultural backgrounds (from Central, Eastern, Southern, Northern European and Asian countries) belong to the same cultural milieu. Arguably the dialogue of art with a totalitarian regime creates the otherness that the Western audiences most often expect from the art of the former Communist bloc. Emphasizing this dialogue conveys the same simplified identity of the Other that has been continuously constructed in the West since the late 1960s by such seemingly contradictory players as leftist intellectuals and the capitalist art market, according to Éva Forgács.

Ostalgia encourages the canonization of works that reflect the tastes and formal preferences of a narrow circle of mainly Western collectors, and narratives by mainly Russian critics and theoreticians. Art from a large part of Europe therefore seems doomed to be viewed only as a heroic gesture of political resistance that can easily “fit into either the Western or the Russian narrative,” without individual artists, trends, or schools having a distinct, singular voice outside these two grand narratives.

View selected works from the exhibition on the New Museum's website.

Read full article for free on the ARTMargins website or download a pdf!

Five Sentences about Soviet Art

“Five Sentences about Soviet Art,” Dizaina Studija 29, no.2 (2011): 68-70.

Because Latvian art from the Soviet era is at the center of my academic research, I regularly encounter questions which are yet to be explained and solved. To what extent do the artworks from this era display a “Soviet” influence, how much is there of “Latvian” art, and how much is there simply “art”? Should the fact that photography at this time was included in the field of “amateur art” be the defining factor to continue interpreting it as "amateur" from today's perspective? Is it necessary to have a broader insight into the institutional structure of Soviet art and into (no doubt ideological) texts about Soviet art published in the press of that time? Or, alternatively, is it better to have a distanced outsider’s view concentrating only on the artworks themselves, rather than the circumstances of their making? Should we call the era in question the “Soviet period”, or perhaps it is enough to simply mention the decade in which the work was made? But isn’t it also important to remember that it was made under Soviet rule, which resulted in self-censorship and the inhibition of information exchange, personal movement and other restrictions?

The Language and Value of Things under Communism and Capitalism

“The Language and Value of Things under Communism and Capitalism,” Dizaina Studija 16, No. 6 (2008): 66-74; 86-88.

Photographs published in the postwar Soviet era magazines and newspapers eloquently describe for the next generation the grain and sugar beet harvests in collective farms; the increase in production in significant manufacturing facilities: the huge volume of milk gained from cows and the accomplishment of the five-year plan over a period of three or four years in factories; the triumph of the will of the people over the elements of nature and the continually increasing prosperity of the proletariat. Examining the visual material in chronological order, a gradual change in emphasis can be observed.

There are gradual changes in the choice of scenery and in the formal structure of photographs. The depiction of growth was often politicized in the Stalin era. That later turned into the final tiredness of the period of stagnation which is exemplified by the inexpressive portraits of members of the politbureau and other officials frequently appearing in the press in the 1980s. This tiredness, in turn, soon was shaken up by the unrest of perestroika and glasnost.

Meanwhile, a sort of “golden age” existed among these extremes in the 1970s. That was a time when for many Soviet citizens a certain level of comfort and well-being in everyday life became accessible. When examining photographs that speak of this golden age, it is not possible to overlook the surprising similarities with the ways how Latvia’s current version of capitalism is expressed in press and advertising photographs.

Art Belongs to the People! Socialist Realism in Photography

“Art Belongs to the People! Socialist Realism in Photography,” Foto Kvartals 10, No. 2 (2008): 50-67; 95.

Although the term Socialist Realism traditionally is used in relation to painting, sculpture, literature, and cinema, photography of the Soviet era was also supposed to follow this ideology. This article offers a glimpse into the principles of Socialist Realism in the images from the photographic chronicle "Republic in Photographs" that was distributed to Latvian newspapers by TASS / Information agency LATINFORM of the Council of Ministers of Soviet Socialist Republic of Latvia from 1974 to 1978.