Office Landscape
In 2001, Microsoft introduced “Bliss,” the default wallpaper for Windows XP, a 1996 photo by Charles O’Rear, who happened across the scene while driving to through Sonoma, California, en route to his then-girlfriend, with whom he was making a photography book about California’s Wine Country. Not thinking the image was right for the book, O’Rear made it available as a stock photo on Corbis, which was owned by co-founder Bill Gates. Windows XP’s development team, perhaps more loyal to Corbis than likely competitors, for good reason, didn’t just buy the licensing fee, but the entire rights to the photo, in what O’Rear claims was the second-largest payment ever made to a photographer for a single image. Arguably the most seen hill in the world is now effaced by vineyards, but wasn’t on that fateful afternoon, as they had been pulled the preceding harvest due to a bug infestation. The pristine hill, this omnipresent pastoral, should not have been.
If fate is a coward’s sense of entitlement, my fate was to be a great artist without actually becoming one. One tends to do this when they’re young. I drowned careless watercolors in my dorm room at night, its sparse arrangement of furniture beginning to look like Van Gogh’s room in Arles—the virginal twin bed a soft prophetic coffin in which this deluded loser would ultimately find peace. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or Musée d’Orsay, I imagined my descendants walking past some of my lesser-known framed gems on paper, on their way to my more formidable work. I gave unnerving monologues about art’s process to an imagined Terry Gross, or Charlie Rose, in my thick head. My practiced autograph, in loose cursive, resembled a worm. This story rightfully ends, immediately upon graduation, at a dead end job.
The default orientation for printing documents is “portrait,” as if we might somehow collectively see ourselves in these blank pages, each curled and heated in a printer, words and other bits of information as face tattoos on bland epidermis. The appropriation of painting in computer operating systems is both pragmatic and a little creepy, as if one’s better art were a budget report, minutes to a meeting, or sparse memo. A painter’s less ambitious and idle works will often contain, in the corners of their studios, some abandoned self-portraits. The genre was a way to kill time, the built-in companionship of one’s own eyes. This very essay is in portrait mode.
Occasionally, due to tiresome logistics we shan’t get into, when setting the orientation to “landscape” before printing, I am reminded of Wheatfield with Crows (1890), Van Gogh’s likewise orientated final work, whose completion may have been precluded by a self-administered loathed gunshot to the chest, from which the painter, once an aspiring minister, died a painful twenty-nine hours later.
Kneeling down before the shitty printer, there is a lesser pain, a knot in my gut, a general queasiness born somewhere between chronic boredom and sudden anxiety. In print’s growing obsolescence, printing may be corporate diarrhea. It’s usually an emergency. I say “shitty,” not because of such unfortunate imagery, but—in place of Dell, or HP, their logos either branded by and embedded in cheap plastic—because deep in the bureaucratic cavern of my heart, in the prison cell of monthly calendar boxes of years past, these printers seem to summon jams in correlation to the perceived importance of the documents in question; in other words, they are assholes.
The incestuous patronage of his brother, Theo, is both sad and beautiful. The exhausted whores he drew in charcoal, crushing the carbon into paper fibers, seem to leave marks on our fingers. When we joke about his ear, we cruelly just want to be listened to. Where Van Gogh gave his life for art, Charles O’Rear built one out of its commercial travesty. I’m not saying the latter’s a fraud, or that “Bliss” doesn’t have its own pleasant merits—but that we have collectively made the choice of rather seeing clear blue skies than crows as exclamation marks of the torment inside a madman who bled black lines as a lasso around this world. We chose what existed outside us over what resounded in us.
Sometimes when I’m at the office, stuffed with a slice of someone’s retirement cake, on thin office carpet I sometimes joke is “carpet diem,” I wish I were outside. At the foot of a hill that transported me to another man’s life, or better yet, his royalties; the heaps of cumulus clouds hallucinated by a dead man in front of an endless azure. I wouldn’t print this out, if I were you. In Portrait of Giving up (2014), in these penultimate moments of before my surrender, may you see this tiny repose. I’d rather be fallen asleep next to than ever remembered. Perhaps my self-portrait is that of prefering to lie down, in landscape. My supposed raise, then retirement, then elegy, are radiant specks far off in a dim future. A shameless lineage of not wanting more. Sorry I chewed off your ear.
