I've been envious of y'all posting images to the blog, and I finally found one so ravishing that I had to put it up. Trouble is that it's a piece of clip art from a radical pro-life site that opposes the use of stem cells in medical research. The ethics of using images from sources with which you disagree is a subject for another posting. Several years ago, I made my first forays into digital studio production using an image of HIV cells to generate a translation matrix for a poem by my favorite poet, Frank O'Hara. The resulting image - Sleeping on the Wing looks like this. But it gets at something that I have been wondering about for some time...what is work?
I have been increasingly reliant on my computer as a means of studio production rather than as a preparation for work, yet I still feel a lingering sense that I'm not makeing anything sufficiently physical to embody my ideas about what art ought to be. I'm not happy with the solution that immediately comes to mind - that of disembodying the image through projection - but at the same time, it's the only way I can get things done in this post-studio period of life and society at large. In some ways, it feels more and more like society has collectively abandoned real space for virtual space (my readings lately have been a lot about cyberspace in science fiction cinema, and authors like Scott Bukatman argue convincingly for a supplement to our real world in the ether of online experience).
This post perhaps comes in response to others' fishing for ideas on the blog, and to thinking about Mike's recent writings on the studio and its evolution as a "site" in contemporary practice, but I welcome any feedback.
1 comment:
Thanks for sharing your work and thoughts Gerard. I was helping a student shoot her portfolio two weeks ago, and she relies heavily on Photoshop to tweak/ crop/ edit her paintings, which was unsettling for me to hear. But if we are ultimately making images, then however we can manipulate them for the maximum potency should be our aim, using whatever tools are available. However the object has not been improved through these actions, I do not think she is a better "painter" for it, but perhaps a better artist? There is a big difference though, between this practice and G.G.Nichols' recent advice to me, which was, buying studio bulbs equivalent to those used in shooting your slides, so that the image is as pure as possible. Further though things can be gained with computers, size and surface among other things are inevitable sacrificed. I may be able to take a tour around the galleries of the world in eighty websites, pictorially seeing everything, but a computer screen will never replace the real life experience.
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