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.
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.
Omar Fast
In Brighton biennale I saw a film by Omar Fast, which had an interesting scenario, it did not matter what time You enter the screening because in 15 minutes I realized that it is sort of looping and I could not tell wether it already finished and I am watching it again or not.
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.
I will describe more about the latest stuff that inspired me, for example from: Laric, Banksy, Thomas Ruff, Kirby Ferguson, AES+F, Erkin Goren, Austin Kleon
Practical steps
Preparation stage
I gather together all my influences = observation, curiosity, appreciation. Take things that I appreciate and that really mean something to me.
Incubation
The process of subconsciousness, the process when ideas are generating.
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.
Artists:
Andy Warhol
Duane Michals
Thomas Ruff
Banksy
Oliver Leric
MacDonaldStrand
Ryan Mcginley
Omar Fast
Kirby Ferguson
AES+F
Erkin Goren
Austin Kleon
Movies:
Good copy, Bad copy
Press pause, play
Vvversions
Everything is a Remix
Hugo