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A newfound definition on site response not forsaking luxury, while romancing with extremities of its surrounding, the space is gold (literally)!
“And yes, my expectations ruined everything”
“Everything is uncertain but you are still responsible for it on the midterm” — Film, A Serious Man
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Joseph O. Holmes - workspaces
Interview via The 99 Percent
’ I like to believe that a workspace reveals much about the person who works there, but honestly, that aspect doesn’t interest me. My main criterion is how it looks – the lighting, the colors, the repeating details. I’m drawn to the odd symmetry, to the overall shape of a space.. I don’t consider the project documentary or typology work; it’s about the strange beauty of these accidental sculptures.’
Many of these pictures highlight spaces that are the antithesis of the minimalist, everything-in-its-right-place offices that many creatives inhabit. How would you define the word “creative”?
I’ve actually found the workspaces of most creatives to be too self conscious – or too neat – for my project. But I also have mixed feelings about the term “creatives.” I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many sculptors and painters have day jobs in the manual trades as contractors, carpenters, electricians.
And like the amusing misalignment of Supreme Memorial with its workplace, the oxymoron in ordered creativity and flexible rule, life don’t just work as planned right?
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By Robert Bound
“War”, Edwin Starr’s 1970 number one hit, is the classic protest song, the quintessential anti-war musical artefact. Written a year before by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong for the Temptations, the track was given to Starr to release as a single by a savvy label keen not to break the conservative convenant with Temptations’ fans who might have thought the Vietnam War “a really good idea.” Starr made a pencil-sketch song into a masterpiece of raw, heartfelt, sweaty, rhetoric. Can you recall anything other than the pleading titular inquiry - “War. Huh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!” Exactly. The voice and the idea were all the song needed to engender the empathy of a generation and become what all great songs are -addictive, tuneful, quotable - Starr’s version became not just a pillar of the august pantheon of protest pop but a hit for a label that feared their star turns might get their fingers burned by being too close to “War.”
What were they thinking? Art both high and low needs a cause to rebel for, a problem to solve, a war to fight against and a man to challenge. Without rigged elections, falling bombs, muddy trenches and noble deaths, where would art’s outrage be? Things exist in terms of their opposites: where would soft power be without hard power? Mighty things come out of misery, art from adversity: Guernica, Lee Miller, Hemingway, Orwell and Wilfred Owen, Apocalypse Now, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, “Fuck the Police”. I’ll never forget my English teacher telling me that the best way to enjoy War and Peace was to skip the peace. “Mostly very boring”, she said.
In politics - where all the wars start, anyway - soft power is eroding the edifice of hard power to the point where we don’t know who to believe. Despite the fact that cuddly old Donald Rumsfeld famously and menacingly professed not to understand what the term “soft power” meant, politicians have been trying to head-off the challenge of counter-culture and opposition at the pass by embracing it and being groovy. Lines are blurred when politicians become PR men; world leaders are like TV presenters, potential commanders in chief are actors. When Marty McFly accidentally zooms from 1985 to 1955 in Back to the Future, he has a tough time convincing the Doc he’s from the future: “Who’s the President of the United States in 1985?” asks the Doc with a goggly stare and a sweep of his mad-professor hair. “That’s easy,” says McFly “Ronald Reagan.” The Doc’s inconsolable: “the actor? Then who’s the vice president? Jerry Lewis?!”
Less banal was Juvenal writing about his decadent empire, that “Rome is suffering from an absence of war,” cognisant that conflict is a creator. Don’t knock the dark stuff or those artist will have nothing to wear.
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