User:Lbattich/Project proposal v4

Introduction (Abstract)

My practice-based research is concerned with the related notions of appropriation, influence and identity. The project will present a wide collection of reworked and re-examined cultural and historical artefacts, more specifically texts and artworks from the narrative of Western art that tackle questions relating to the history of art, to imitation and influence, and to the practices of citation and quotation. While engaging with these artefacts I will inevitably devour them, change and transform them into something that, speculatively, becomes part of my own personal history, where my identity becomes a character in the work: A Partial History of Lucas Battich. In short, through my practice I seek to embody an act of compulsive appropriation as a manner of relating with art historical canons.

Description of project

This project involves the presentation of a collection of books, papers, artworks and a variety of ephemera, assembled together and included within a larger mixed-media installation. The collection is made by adopting existing historical artefacts and texts, and altering all proper names they contain, by replacing them with my own name. Furthermore, the collection contains reworkings and reiterations of key artworks in the Western art narrative, particularly seminal works from the avant-garde and conceptual art. Thus the collection is presented both as a bizarre reliquary and a speculative partial history of Lucas Battich.

Among items in the collection there are:

• A small reinterpreted selection of books and texts in which all proper names referring to persons have been replaced with my name. The resulting modified texts are made available in the form of Xeroxed facsimiles. The sources will include influential art historical works from, among others, Ernst Gombrich, Rosalind Krauss, T.J. Clark, Thierry de Duve; and various artists’ writings, critical reviews.
• Reinterpreted manifestoes from different avant-garde movements.
• Video and algorithm-based works: The installation will contain screenings of altered existing films, new video works and computer reworkings in which proper names as well as internal elements from the original films are altered.

Key Themes

Compulsive reappropriation is here interpreted as a primary strategy to experience and relate with the world. Among the proliferation of information, or rather the urge to constantly consume cultural creations and information, I find that in order to engage meaningfully with a cultural piece – literature, art, etc – I must somehow reclaim it, copy it, devour it and traverse it. This project is about the act of copying as a way to engage with the world.

One could assert that the drive to reappropriate and pastiche a work is a manner to digest such work, as in a cannibalistic drive. As a manner of relating to the world, this kind of appropriation is not just out to subvert and critique what it devours. For all its violence, it is also a manner of honouring others, by making them part of one's own.

In this manner of experiencing artistic objects and figures, what is appropriated are the historical identities in previous works. In this sense, my work will create a character out of my own artistic persona, performing different identities and trading masks. Texts, manifestoes, documents, become an index of identities, and it is within these identities that my name will be situated.

By using my own name the project will highlight a paradoxical movement in play. On the one hand, it is an egoistic action, in which it may seem that I intend to inscribe myself within the powers of the canon, and to be included in history’s records. On the other hand, my persona’s identity is at stake, as the proliferation and spreading of my proper name provokes the disappearance any real identity associated with it. This double movement is central to my concern of how identity is mediated and constructed through historical artefacts.

Relation to larger context

Whereas appropriative methods had a subversive force during periods of the twentieth century (exemplified with the Situationist practice of détournement, but also to some extent present in the works of Picture Generation artists), today this critical element has been lost within the cultural shift to an information and networked culture prompted by new technologies. On the contemporary practices of image-making, from high art to commercial products to social media expressions, the quotation and repurposing of existing material is so pervasive, as facilitated (and prescribed) by digital media, in a manner that is driven more by nostalgic approaches and intentions of homage, than by a critical subversion of original material.

In light of this background. my practice is concerned to address this shift: from critical appropriation to nostalgic reprisal, particularly within historical narratives. My own strategy to tackle this key question is performative, in the sense that my work will attempt to enact the very notions that it aims to critique. My works are conceived as specific interventions to highlight tensions, complexities and dilemmas in a particular cultural issue, in the hope of engaging the audience into further dialogue.

Relation to previous practice

My artistic strategy usually involved the production of process-led works in different artistic mediums. In broad terms, the main areas addressed through my artistic investigation have been our engagement with artistic history and aesthetic experience as affected by the digital technologies we take for granted today. This interest is manifest in practices of quotation, re-appropriation and citation of past cultural works, mainly taken from the institutional canon of Western art.

The practices of what is now called conceptual writing has influenced my artistic development since 2011, although I arrived to these issues not from practitioners such as Kenneth Goldsmith, but from considering the history of conceptual art, and particularly the instruction-based works of Yoko Ono, and the language works of Joseph Kosuth, John Baldessari and others, as well as the Oulipo literary movement.

For example, the publication series 'Retrograde Chapbooks' present existing texts from the history of modernism and the avant-garde, where all sentences have been re-arranged in the inverse order. The immediate meaning and readability of each sentence is maintained, but the overall sense is displaced within the text as a whole.

'Retrograde Chapbooks', for instance, proposes a literal “going-back” movement to the power of early avant-garde manifestoes. The intention here is neither to criticise the original texts, nor to question their authorship, but rather to present a concept or desire by means of a metaphor. The resulting altered manifestoes are presented as metaphors for a nostalgic desire.

Retrograde Chapbooks

References

Cornelis, J. (1968) Documenta 4, TV broadcast on August 1968.

Cornelis, J. (1972) Documenta V, TV broadcast on July 1972.

Crimp, D. (1979) ‘Pictures’. October, Vol. 8. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. 75-88.

Crimp, D. (1982) 'Appropriating Appropriation', in Evans, D. (ed.) (2009) Appropriation. Documents of Contemporary Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 189-193.

Debord, G. et al (1959) ‘Détournement as Negation and Prelude’, in Knabb, K. (ed.) (2006) Situationist International Anthology. 2nd ed. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets.

De Duve, Thierry. (1996) Kant After Duchamp. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Dell'Aria‎, Annie. (2010) ‘Appropriate Appropriation: a comparison of the reuse of images across the terms postmodern, post-communist, and postproduction.’ Re-Visions: The journal of international postgraduate students' art & design research. Vol. 1. December 2010.

Dolar, Mladen. (2014) What’s in a Name?. Ljubljana: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art.

Foster, H. (1996) The Return of the Real. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Foster, H. (2002) ‘Archives of Modern Art’. October, Vol. 99, Winter. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Freud, Sigmund. (1901) ‘The Forgetting of Proper Names’, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. tr. Alan Tyson. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 6. London: Vintage. 2001.

Goldsmith, K. (2011) Uncreative Writing : Managing Language in The Digital Age. New York: Columbia University Press.

Goldsmith, K. (2005) ‘Sentences on Conceptual Writing’. Available: http://www.ubu.com/papers/kg_ol_goldsmith.html. Accessed 3 June 2015.

Harrison, N. (2010) ‘The Pictures Generation, the Copyright Act of 1976, and the Reassertion of Authorship in Postmodernity', Art & Education. Available: http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/the-pictures-generation-the-copyright-act-of-1976-and-the-reassertion-of-authorship-in-postmodernity/. Accessed 3 June 2015.

Krauss, Rosalind. (1999) Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. London: Thames and Hudson.

Krauss, Rosalind. (2011) Under Blue Cup. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Kosuth, J. (1991) Art After Philosophy And After: Collected Writings, 1966-1990. Edited by Gabriele Guercio and Jean-François Lyotard. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Lobel, Michael. (2007) ‘Sturtevant: Inappropriate Appropriation’. Parkett, Vol. 75. Zürich: Parkett. 142-153.

Lütticken, Sven. (2002) 'The Art of Theft'. New Left Review, Vol. 13. Jan-Feb 2002.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1874) ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Untimely Meditations, tr. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1993.

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