In the writing of Berlin Childhood around 1900, Walter Benjamin worked within the Velasquez model. He said: I’d like to write something that comes from things the way wine comes from grapes.
In France, in 1794, Jacques-Louis David stripped his painting of physical context and insisted that it be unveiled in the streets as part of a procession. He was interested in mass choreography, in creating the work by naming the place in which it would materialize.
He also relinquishes control.
I am inspired by David’s method of deployment. By casting his painting out into space, he claims an active audience.
He then deployed the painting in space, sending it through the streets as part of a procession. Encountered collectively, the object was intuited personally.
Why not just leave it open ended? TJ Clarke postulates that he deliberately left half of his canvas black, hoping the absence of site would compel citizens to project their own context onto the symbol.
He hoped Marat could represent the France that each individual desired. He worried: maybe people don’t really have that much in common after all. How would they relate to Marat’s context?
In his portrait of Marat, Jacques-Louis David removes site to make room for symbol. He wanted to make something that could mean different things to different people in different places. He wanted to make space for individual investment in the image.
He merely offers the book as a place in which various meetings might occur. It is up to the reader to make meaning from these points of convergence.
He does not know where this will happen within the book.
He said we wanted to make them readers of themselves. When in describing his personal memories he strikes upon those of his readers, he involves them in the making of meaning.
He was writing for Berliners of his generation of the Berlin of their childhood. He sited himself within the space of the reader. He articulated a perimeter within which existed a complicit audience. Those within view became collaborators in realizing the image.
Oliver Laric strung these youtube videos together to show how the vernacular of hip hop creates a community within the much much larger world of youtube. He then put the video back on youtube as a sort of ethnographic record.
In Spain, in 1656, Diego Velasquez sited his work within the space of the viewer. He positioned the subject beyond the picture plane, recasting the viewer as subject and making the space of the viewer an extension of the space within the painting. The picture is realized by the act of looking at it. The viewer completes the painting by being in it.
In Switzerland, in 1444, Konrad Witz painted Jesus walking on Lake Geneva. Instead of imagining the Sea of Tiberias, where the story took place, he sited the story in familiar territory. He inserted Jesus in the middle of his lake, inviting locals to make meaning from the story.
With entrusted power and control, does creating chance makes a difference on a much bigger platform. Can an act of intervention make a profound graphic statements of our generation, like George Lois’s covers of Esquire in which he used a mainstream men’s style magazine with covers that skewered Richard Nixon, racism, and the Vietnam War. Can an act of graphic intervention save the world?
Intervention for the common good What is the use of intervention without a purpose? Our interventionist powers are limited but not unimportant. I am interested in how I can redress designer’s role in the age of conflicting political views with new sensibility. Intervention with a voice, the streets are the main stage for oppositional activity.
Simon Heijdens Another formal study using the rug as a protaganist. Heijdens claims the public space with temporary erasures that ‘fade’ back to grime over time. He appoints the dwindling greenery as an agent of distruption with positive effect.
The poet Novalis spoke about the potential for disparate forms to interact when he wrote: “If the most unrelated things share a place, time, or odd similarity, there develops wonderful unities and peculiar relationships. And one thing reminds us of everything.” This map represents a snapshot of objects that happen to sit on a hotel room table at a particular moment. Through chance encounters, the objects begin to relate to each other in particular ways.
David Hammons recontextualizes the Stars and Stripes by altering the colors to those of the Pan-African flag. In doing so, he opens up an ugly American truth of divergent racial realities and focuses attention to black liberation.
My fascination with this piece stems from it becoming an inclusive icon for many African Americans who have been marginalized by society.
Jari Silomäki’s “My Weather Diary” pairs a photograph with an important event from the day the photograph was taken. By doing so, he hopes to create a large continuum where personal events, world events, and weather repeat themselves.
It could be as simple as pulling back the frame. With this image of an assembly line worker taken with one of the phones she put together, the buyer is confronted with a glimpse of the full implication of the object he holds in his hands. In exposing him to the system and in this case the individual that sustains his lifestyle, he’s forced to acknowledge what he takes for granted. He can no longer feign ignorance.
We are constantly trading in brands, symbols, and icons. Design is the facilitator of our over-processed world, it is the hermetic process that edits, pares down, and streamlines these experiences. Consequently, the recipient is seldom party to the full story, and that’s how he likes it.
In Lessons of Darkness, Werner Herzog transforms the burning Kuwaiti oil fields into a science-fiction landscape of death and destruction. He blurs the boundaries between real and imaginary to create an other-worldly, transcendental experience, shaking the audience out of their usual state of indifference.
Lincoln Number Six says, “Lincoln brings out the best in me. He challenges me to love and understand my wife and children. His example encourages me to trust my savior Jesus, when I can’t see how anything good can come out of a seemingly impossible situation.”
Chil-doh Mee-air-uh-les silkscreened political messages on Coca-Cola bottles before returning them to the bottling plant for recirculation. He used white ink to match the Coke logo so that few noticed the altered bottle until they began to drink.
Frederic Bor-dan has been arrested multiple times for impersonating actual teenage boys who have gone missing. He is able to pass because those around him want to believe the vulnerable characters he portrays, even when they know his eye color, hair color or accent is wrong.
We are all familiar with Sa-sha Barr-on Co-wen’s character Bor-at, the supposed Kah-zok journalist who travels around the US interviewing people about American culture. In posing as an outsider, he gains access to social groups in order to reveal biases and stereotypes within our own culture.
These things become unbearable to him because he senses that these objects, which all have eyes,
are looking at him. The criterion of similarity becomes more personal.
Sometimes the criteria of similarity can be abstract, or invisible. The Dutch artist Marjolijn Dijkman has explored how people organize and design their daily environment. He collects images that relate to his own verbal categories. Like ‘camouflage’ or the phrase ‘cheer up’. In this work, collections of images are classified mimetically according to a more metaphorical interpretation.
Douglas Huebler’s photographs of Berndt Becher were taken at the instant after he had been asked to mimic a priest, criminal, lover, old man, police man, artist, “Berndt Becher”, philosopher, spy and “nice guy”.
Perhaps the most fitting example of the conflict between logic and personal response is Jacques Tati’s bumbling, flummoxed M. Hulot. In Play Time, he confronts modern Paris, a flawed man in a rigid, cold reality. Unlike my breakfast at Laguardia, Hulot lives in a time before the normative order swallowed itself and became its own parody, when one was more likely to be shaken by the unfamiliar than the familiar. One way to work within our current situation, to avoid immunity to the strangeness of the normal, might be found in Hulot’s wide-eyed alienation, forever seeing the bizarre within the ordinary anew.
When Christian Marclay wheat-pastes blank sheet music, he ruptures the idea of composition as a solitary, private activity and creates a space for public action.
He follows a simple alphabetical method, but not one which we’re accustomed to seeing in film titles.
Bierstadt and Ruscha deliver the idea of The West as an archetypal landscape. The Marlboro Man is the imagined individual who lives in that land. Tough and masculine, he is presented as the ideal American man. These ads deploy a sophisticated but brutally simple argument: smoking is as American as a cowboy. In his
WALL-E himself is made of parts, detritus that he collects, catalogs and uses parts to replace himself. What is being assembled? To what end? Collections themselves can be created from parts that combine to create an effect over time. When the earth is destroyed, WALL-E is a sign of hope; through his love and charm he shows that it’s still possible to regenerate. Rem Koolhaus said recently: “Globalization is based on connectivity – through transport, agreements, standards, consumer goods and cultures, information and media.” its about connecting and reconnecting everything to everything else.”