User:Lbattich/Project proposal v2

What is it?

This is what it is:

Sit down, let me tell you:

Description of project

This project involves a collection of books, papers, artworks and a variety of ephemera, assembled together and presented into 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 narrative of Western 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:

• The Lucas Battich library: a small reinterpreted collection of books in which all proper names refering to persons have been replaced with my name. The resulting modified texts are made available in the form of Xeroxed facsimiles.
• Reinterpreted manifestoes from different avant-garde movements.
• video works: The installation will contain screenings of altered existing films and new video works in which proper names as well as internal elements from the original films are altered.

Context

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 meaningfuly with a cultural piece – literature, art, etc – I must somehow reclaim it, copy it, detour 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. Anthropophagous adoption has been advanced as a cultural stance by the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade in his 1928 manifesto.

As a manner of relating to the world, anthropophagous 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, I will engage with a range of cultural and historical artefacts, more specifically texts and artworks 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 artefact I will inevitably devour them, change and transform them into something that, speculatively, becomes part of my own personal history: A Partial History of Lucas Battich

Some themes

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.

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...

what i need to do: achivable aims for future sessions and questions to consider

• Ok, well, you mention a collection of appropriated text, but what text do you have in mind?

• And, pray, tell me how is your autobiography going? I'll have my childhood done by then, yep.

• Also, what films? what you say is kinda vague... what will you really do with moving-image works? – eh...

• So it's kinda like an exhibition about yourself. – I suppose. Well not about myself, but about my desire to hoard cultural material and change it, and that, you know. To be honest, rather than talking now about what it is about (in one word!) I'd say that what I want to provoke is a sense of repetitive, compulsive reworking on existing stuff. But yea, if from my description you are able to imagine an installation made of stuff that, all together, looks like an "exhibition about myself", as you say, than yea, that's good, at least you are imagining something concrete. (which is a plus, I suppose).

• Ok then, let's imagine is some some of "exhibition" or "archive" or whatever you want to callit. My quesiton is: how do you present it, how is it contextualised, and made available to the public? I mean, do you put labels like in a museum, do you have index cards, do you have a database with all the collection's contents? (does it matter to have a database?)

• And will you have something like a title in the front, like Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the fabulous, one and only – NO, I won't.

• Ok then, so what will you do, like physically, tangibly do for next week? I'll work on which objects will be reworked and how ...

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