Out of Order: Used Office Desks and Used Office Plants for Sale
Penelope Umbrico
RVB Books
French, English
The book is unbound, with the images folded in half and cradled together
138 pages
230 x 280mm
2014
ISBN 9791090306288
In the midst of the global financial crisis that began in 2008, Penelope Umbrico started noticing large quantities of used office desks for sale online. In the pictures advertising them, these desks, once the definitive site of organization and productivity, sat empty, dusty, and cumbersome – as awkward in their photographic frames as they were in the spaces in which they were pictured. Uncomfortably occupying the constraints of their office spaces, these giant surfaces don’t fit nicely. The desk’s value – its reason for being – is hinged on its potential for facilitating productivity, and its form is a testament to ideologies of a clean, elegant modern aesthetic. But in these pictures all efficiency, productivity and elegance is in question – the mere fact that the desk is out of commission, being sold, points to an attendant deflation of its value.
Out of Order is a collection of images Umbrico found between 2008 and 2013 on office liquidations websites that buy the entire stock of furniture from offices going out of business. Among the offerings of used office desks for sale are the office plants whose job it was to make office plants whose job it was to make office employees feel more human – to give them something to care for in these synthetic modular spaces. The objects pictured in these images are the aftermath and by-products of a Modernism infused with a disparity between free market optimism and its dystopic result.
(source: https://www.thelibraryproject.ie/products/out-of-order-penelope-umbrico)
About the Artist
Penelope Umbrico’s installations, video, and digital media works utilize photo-sharing and consumer-to-consumer websites as an expansive archive to explore the production and consumption of images. Her work navigates between producer and consumer, local and global, the individual and the collective, with attention to the technologies that are produced by (and produce) these forces. Umbrico’s work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; MassMoCA, MA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; Art Museum Gosta, Finland; Foto Colectania, Barcelona, Spain; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; Daegu Photography Biennale, Korea; Pingyao International Photography Festival, China; Kunstverein Ludwigshafen, Germany; Rencontres d’Arles, France; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Australia; among many others, and is represented in museum collections around the world. She has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship; Sharpe-Walentas Studio Grant; Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship; New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship; Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Her monographs have been published by Aperture NYC and RVB Books Paris.
http://www.penelopeumbrico.net/
(source: http://www.penelopeumbrico.net/index.php/info/bio–cv/)
About the Publisher
RVB Books is both an independent publisher dedicated to designing and printing unique fine arts books and a gallery featuring exhibitions on new editorial practices.
https://rvb-books.com/
(source: https://rvb-books.com/pages/infos)
