Böcker av Glen Rubsamen

A photographic investigation of commercial street signage in Livingstone, Zambia

In a city full of recently embalmed architecture, few buildings look as un-dead as the corner shopping Plaza. Take the one at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and North Fuller Avenue in Hollywood, California. A squat rectangle of stucco and drywall, it offers everything we've come to expect in a corner 'convenience center': a pizza parlor, a doughnut shop, a cell phone store, a massage parlor, an immigration lawyer a check-cashing service and a coin Laundromat. There's the requisite oil-stained parking lot, the brick enclosed dumpster, some spindly palms and an imposing street sign with every business name in a different font, color and size. The corner Plaza has standard principles: L-shaped and usually situated at a busy intersection, driveway access from two streets, free parking but never enough, a variety of goods and services in separate concessions, but all in a single place. The anchor tenant now most commonly a Cannabis Dispensary. In this collection of 46 photographs, all shot in Hollywood in April of 2022, Glen Rubsamen documents his awe and appreciation for the "corner Plaza convenience center".

Détournement (literally, diversion or hijacking), is the act of turning the expressions, both visual and literary, of the capitalist system and its mediatized military culture against itself. In Glen Rubsamen's War Series this détournement is directed against an increasingly intrusive and instrumentalizing technocratic culture whose function is the manufacture of consent through the manipulation of symbols. In his works Rubsamen uses the visual language and rhetoric of military recruitment culture to critique that paradigm, encouraging idiosyncratic, unintended interpretations. Rubsamen's paintings warn us to beware of an invasive military media by exposing the subtle methods of its domination. His art raises our guard as we slide toward a world where young consumers will identify more with the media products they devour than with any notion of personal morality or socio-political ethics.