MODERN TIMES
Based on a 1960’s photograph of a daydreaming cafeteria worker, Modern Time (L) presents a double image of two very different dreams. On the right a worker is momentarily lost in a reverie, yet caught in the modern dream of a socialist utopia, whose pantheon of theorists and politicians (Marx, Engles, Lenin, and Stalin) hangs above her on a wall of Chinese red. On the left, that same worker – now taking on the musings of the artist – dreams of a different modernity, one less rational, more fluid and expressionistic, than political ideology might allow. The portraits above her are by – and in one case, of – Vincent Van Gogh, whose tragic alienation from modern society suggests individual nightmares as much as collective dreaming. Meanwhile, the Mao-clocks on the shelves around the painting tick away as modern time unwinds its revolutionary inevitability.
Based on a 1960’s photograph of a daydreaming cafeteria worker, Modern Time (L) presents a double image of two very different dreams. On the right a worker is momentarily lost in a reverie, yet caught in the modern dream of a socialist utopia, whose pantheon of theorists and politicians (Marx, Engles, Lenin, and Stalin) hangs above her on a wall of Chinese red. On the left, that same worker – now taking on the musings of the artist – dreams of a different modernity, one less rational, more fluid and expressionistic, than political ideology might allow. The portraits above her are by – and in one case, of – Vincent Van Gogh, whose tragic alienation from modern society suggests individual nightmares as much as collective dreaming. Meanwhile, the Mao-clocks on the shelves around the painting tick away as modern time unwinds its revolutionary inevitability.
