Office Baroque. What Men Live By. 2024

In Leo Tolstoy’s “What Men Live By”, an angel is sent to fetch the soul of a dying woman, who was just given birth to twin girls. The Angel, decides to spare her life so she can care for her babies. God takes her soul anyway and punishes the angel’s disobedience by sending him to live on earth as a human until he learns what distinguishes the life of mortals from that of angels.

Finding himself freezing and naked, the angel witnesses a poor shoemaker first ignore him but then turn back to rescue him. Bringing him home, the shoemaker persuades his reluctant wife, who knows they lack even bread for the next day, to take the wayfarer in. “We will all die”, he says, and suddenly love enters her heart. And this is the angel’s first lesson-“in man dwells love”, and the nature of human love is that it costs something and often goes against our own needs.

The angels becomes the shoemaker’s assistant. When a frightening “man of iron” orders boots to last a year, the angel, who foresees the man’s imminent death, makes funeral slippers instead. He thereby learns his second lesson, that uncertainty governs human life. Unlike angel’s, people can never be sure of God’s will or even that He exists. And because people cannot know the future, they mistake their own needs.

When the angel encounters the woman who, out of sheer compassion, adopted the orphan girls whose mother the angel tried to save, he learns his final lesson: although people imagine they live by their own efforts, they really live because of human love. Mortal ourselves, we see our mortality in others. When people truly love, the sense of death is never absent. Far from destroying life’s meaning, death creates its distinctive value of live that people live by.

website: whatmenliveby.com

Artists:

Z.B. Armstrong

Zuzanna Bartoszek

Varda Caivano

Sam Contis

Jarid del Deo

Louise Delanghe

Georgia Dickie

Georgia Elrod

Emily Furr

Elias Hansen

Marc Hundley

Terence Koh

Kinke Kooi

Sadie Laska

JP Murray

Marta Nadolle

Alexandra Noel

Jacqueline Peeters

Elle Perez

Joanna Piotrowska

Kay Rosen

Ataru sato

Pieter Slagboom

Shogo Shimizu

Reina Siguhara

Cynthia Talmadge

Clemence de la Tour du Pin

B. Wurtz