User:Lbattich/Project proposal v1

Description of project:

The project will involve adapting historical information in authoritative and widespread platforms such as Wikipedia, the art specialist press, historical monographs and influential theoretical writings. All proper names from the collected material will be altered, by replacing them with my own name. The altered material will then serve as a base for a body of work that will take various shapes:

• Artist publication(s).
• Web-based and algorithmic-based moving-image works.

The project will thus address the proper name within the art circuit – which has the tendency of framing the artist’s identity into a centralized, unified and institutionalized subjectivity. In a sense the project is also highly personal, as it will include my own name within canonical historical narratives, and replace key historical figures with my own subjectivity. With this gesture I want to effect a proliferation of my own name, and thus to render the original material into a leveled out and homogenous whole with little informational value.

Key theme:

My practice-led project is focused on an investigation on our engagement with artistic history and canonical narratives, especially since the advent of modern art. At times this may involve a consideration on how our relation to history is affected by the digital technologies we take for granted today.

For this project I will concentrate on methods of cultural quotation and reappropriation, and particularly on the repurposing of canonical works within the history of modern and including contemporary art, and explore how today reappropriation operates as a symptom of cultural nostalgia.

The project will thus address the use of the proper name within the art circuit – which has the tendency of framing the artist’s identity into a centralized, unified and institutionalized subjectivity.

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.

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Keywords/ ephemerides etc /etc/etc toward composing this proposal:

What is at stake?

What is the friction?

I suppose that in order to relate to the world, and particulary to relate to cultural and historical artefacts (artworks, literature, etc), I need to assimilate them, recomposed, make them my own somehow.

This is what drives the urge to reappropriate something: it is as much of a homage as a manner to engage with somthing.

In 1928