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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.
The book is unbound, with the images folded in half and cradled together. A red elastic holds the pages and cover together. The book contains:
- Images of Used Office Desks for Sale - folded into the book, the images get broken up with intersecting pages so that each desk is incomplete unless the book is pulled apart.
- Repurposed and unstapled (and therefor out of order) pages of Out of Order: Used Office Desks for Sale (ink book), and inserted between the folded images of the desks. Un-bound (set free, so to speak) – they create hybrid desks and puzzle-like geometric compositions within their own spreads and with those they are set against, further abstracting the ideologies they represent.
- Inserted among, and slicing through these mismatched desks are folded images of the Used Office Plants for Sale. They too become hybridized, one plant grafted onto another, creating a strange new office horticulture.
- A 8.5” x 68” text piece listing all the bank failures in the United States from 2008 – 2013 from the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation via Wikipedia wraps around the pages into an accordion at the back of the book.
- An essay by Clément Chéroux, Curator of Photography at the Centre Pompidou
Published by RVB Books
138 pages
230 x 280mm
ISBN 9791090306288
