The « office-form »

Personal

When, five centuries after its conception, young contemporary artists transpose the three-dimensional studiolo of St. Jerome it is his rational organization – that of a gentleman”of the Renaissance – that arises at the time of the dematerialization of the work. The space itself – that of intellectual speculation – has become an open space where the office of the computer screen is the unsurpassable mark.

Corporate

With his series «This Was Corporate America»” realized at the Standard Oil Company of California, Chauncey Hare mapped a virtual mental space”prison,”one in which the American middle class saw its decades 1960, 1970 and 1980. Each time, standardization of tastes and uses.

Intimate

Vertical or horizontal, each activity creates its own architecture, and, in turn, its hierarchy and value system. Again in California, Andrea Zittel renews the studiolo of St. Jerome by recreating a room of his own.

Imaginary

The artists took over the “office-form” to propose models and counter-models, utopias and denunciations. When Atelier Van Lieshout designed the «Sleep Work Unit» from their own Slave City, Tatiana Trouvé invents her Bureau d’Activités Implicites. At the time of the all-corporate, the office happens to be a space of projection, winning acclaim in the order of representations.

(This article was published in Stream 02 in 2012.)