Janis project proposal

Tentative Title

Personal judgment, finding the form: copy, transform and combine

General Introduction

“Good artists copy, great artists steal” Picasso

My work has recently been concentrated to the re-mixing, re-making processes and to the reflections of it in nowadays visual culture. Copying is one of the things how we learn. Before introducing with something new, we need to be fluent in our native language. Taking a raw material and mixing it together with other stuff we can create variations of things that can be meaningless. For to create new, meaningful work we have to look back in history and understand what has been done so far, learn how to use ready forms, combinations.

Creative leap can be made by combining different ideas, and figuring out the right combination of ingredients what will mix in a natural and successful way and ideally create a new meaning. Interpretation of things with a contemporary vision can create new work by using well known raw materials, the initial content can be combined and transformed in another level. Susan Sontag said that just about everything is photographed, Oliver Laric claims that just about everything has been photoshopped. An interpretation of an preexisting action each time will be different, because in the new version the author is not revealing the original idea, but him self. All out comes exist simultaneously but do not interfere further with each other. In every interpretation a new, parallel world is created in which it’s interpretation is true. Nicolas ‪Bourriaud‬ in his book Postproduction is giving to understand that, my work it self is to absorb the forms and understand their meaning, which is actually my artistic practice.. postproduction is this kind of methodology.. To learn how to use forms is the question how to make them Your own?

There are different methods of developing new forms, at the moment I would like to propose to start a simple copy/paste process by collecting an image map of the stuff that inspires me. I will be conscious about the things that I like and instinctively I will try to absorb the forms of these works. After examination, I will try to analyze the forms, re-enact processes, interpret and hopefully establish my method of successful personal judgment, my own sort of form.

The question is, where is the boundary of remaking things, how to define the added value? What is considered to be the raw material?

Main concerns: What ingredients do I need for to establish my own visual language and make a use out of it?

The questions could be answered through the practical process, creating the mead which has more than one platform and is floating around in different outcomes.

Relation to previous practice

In my previous practice I was obsessed with transformations of reality, visualizations of my dreams and surreal ideas, creating fictions, mocumentaries or parody. I was exploring and absorbing digital lens based media, experimenting with digital images, mixing and transforming them. I one of my experiments I was playing with the deformations of a photorealistic image. It displays another relative reality which consists of software generated forms. The project research explored boundaries of lens based medium, looking for the manipulation possibilities and finding related connections from art and history.

It is interesting to see how software is generating visual information in between, knowing two coordinates and creating the third one. It explores the boundaries of lens based medium, unfolds another way of a visual interpretation and raises a question why the post-photographical qualities are interesting in nowadays? It is yet another way of manipulating reality, another way of experiencing it by using these contemporary tools. At the moment I am questioning myself, what qualities from these experiments I can borrow and put into my visual language grammar section, what does it add to my working methodology?

Relation to a larger context

Macdonaldstrand

They reproduced a series of Most Popular of All Time photos, it is the result of a survey of the many online lists of the most popular photographs of all time. These photographs have become so ubiquitous that it is hard to see their content and they have become detached from their context. MacDonaldStrand have reduced them to a series of lines and numbered dots and turned them into dot-to-dot drawings for the audience of the exhibition to fill in.

DJ Danger Mouse?

He made The Grey Album, it is a mashup album by Danger Mouse, released in 2004. It uses an a cappella version of rapper Jay-Z's The Black Album and couples it with instrumentals created from a multitude of unauthorized samples from The Beatles' LP The Beatles (more commonly known as The White Album). The Grey Album gained notoriety due to the response by EMI in attempting to halt its distribution, despite the fact that both Jay-Z and Paul McCartney said they felt fine with the project.

Omer Fast

In Brighton biennale I saw a film by Omer Fast, it had an interesting scenario. The film Five Thousand Feet Is Best, takes its name from an excerpt of an interview between Fast and a Predator Drone aerial vehicle operator now based in Las Vegas and working as a casino security guard. The operator recalls his jobs in Afghanistan and Pakistan, activating the unmanned plane to fire at civilians and militia from the optimum height of five thousand feet. In Five Thousand Feet Is Best, we wonder what, if anything, we can trust, because it turns out that part of the interview is an re-enactment. In this project there is an investigation of authenticity and witnessing that is conducted through the context of film and its relation to trickery.

Dr Duanus

The exhibition Dr. Duanus was presented in the Nederlands Photo Museum one year ago. The exhibition was sort of a retrospective of his work. His black and white photos about different comments of life, like metaphors, were placed in rows on the wall, they were nicely printed on A5 and A4 formats each placed in a mat and classically framed in black frames with glass. The exhibition continued with staged Magritte portraits and self-portraits. Many photographs were combined with descriptive comments. All of the writings and signatures were hand written. There were series of parodies about well-known artists and their work, for example a nice large format photograph of a cucumber smirking about German large format photographer Gursky and his works, or series of himself dressed up as the american legendary photographer Cindy Sherman. In the end of the hall were hanged half circle formats, those are his recent photographs about Japanese iconography. In the book store of the Museum I found one of the nicest of his books Duane Michals' "Photo Follies" 2008. How photography lost it's virginity on the way to the bank.

Banksy and Mr Brainwash

The street artist Banksy is combining things and expressing ideas in a really appropriate, clever and humorous way. He is creating new, iconic and meaningful visuals just by combining preexisting, well known images and transforming them in to stencils, paintings or installations. In the famous documentary about street art, Exit through the gift shop, it turned out that the movie is actually not about him or the street art history but about an filmmaker Terry Guetta from L.A. Terry followed and recorded the well known street artists in action, he got inspired and decided to become an street artist by himself. He had no clue about the traditional processes but he was really passioned, he was copying everybody. In a way he succeeded in a really short period, as Banksy said, if Andy Warhol made the statement by repeating famous icons by making them meaningless, Warhol was extremely iconic by the way he did it. Terry or the Mr. Brainwash made all of it really meaningless, he nailed it really..

I will describe more about the latest stuff that inspired me, for example from: Laric, Thomas Ruff, Kirby Ferguson, AES+F, Erkin Goren, Austin Kleon

Practical steps

Preparation stage

I gather together all my influences = observation, curiosity, appreciation. Analyze and state the things/aspects/aesthetics that I appreciate in art and that really mean something to me.

Incubation

The process of subconsciousness, the process when ideas are generating. For me there are two problems, it is really hard to make quick decisions and act fast, I like to think and over think things, thinking too much. On the other hand, if I push myself, I do not enjoy the process. At the moment I am looking for an alternative and it seems that I do not progress but arrive to the process of different kind of procrastination. I must change this.

Insight

Execution, the process of creation, I need to work hard with all my muscles of creativity, switch ON my critical judgement and be honest with my decisions.

References

Theory:

‪Nicolas Bourriaud‬, ‪Postproduction 2002‬;

‪Nicolas Bourriaud‬, Relational aesthetics;

Lev Manovich, New Language of Cinema;

Lev Manovich, Remixability;

Kant after Duchamp - Thierry de Duve;

Andy Warhol, From A to B and Back Again;

Nestor Garcia Canclini, Remaking Passports; Visual thoughtin the debate on multiculturalism;

Ann Sophie Lehmann, Hidden practice; Artists working spaces, tools, and materials in the digital domain;

David Joselit, What to do with Pictures, October 138 about Digital Arts;

Csikszentmihalyi, M. Setting the stage. About creativity. 1-21

Csikzentmihalyi, M. The flow of creativity, 107-126

De Mul, J. (2009). The work of art in the age of digital recombination. Digital Material. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 95-106.

Kessler, F. (2009). What you get is what you see: Digital images and the claim on the real. Digital Material. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 187-197.

New Media, Old Art Forms: Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Department of English Studies, University of Strathclyde;

Artists:

Andy Warhol

Duane Michals

Thomas Ruff

Banksy

Oliver Leric

MacDonaldStrand

Ryan Mcginley

Omer Fast

Kirby Ferguson

AES+F

Erkin Goren

Austin Kleon

Movies:

Good copy, Bad copy

Press pause, play

Vvversions

Everything is a Remix

Exit through the gift shop

Hugo