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| RTomens, 2023 |
It's been a long time since I rock and rolled...and made a collage, meaning a photocollage as opposed to a text-based one. So the other day I dusted off the books bought specifically for cutting up and set about constructing a collection of cut-out images because...that's what a collage (photomontage) is, isn't it?
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In this small, dusty corner of the digital universe someone still writes a blog...
Meanwhile, out there, TikTok vids and Instagram images drift like a multitude of stars, some bright, others dimmed and distant in time...
The real universe (out there) is vast, but matched by the mass of visual info accessed by the click of a mouse (old school) or more likely the touch of a button...
But the vastness of space is impossible to grasp so we fix our eyes on the small screen in our hands, very often, it seems, in favour of even noticing the immediate world around us, such as the architecture of the city...the now invisible city, rendered so by online addiction...hundreds of years worth of artistic vision and practical application...Victorian splendour, modernist refinement and brutalist expression...invisible, irrelevant...
If we are now visually imprisoned, one might think that the idea of looking at art is also irrelevant. Looking, that is, in the old-fashioned sense of going to galleries. There, however, people still seem keen to attend. It is a place to go and look at art. It is not the street, that other place where art abounds yet remains mostly unseen. So go there and take photos with your phone.
The internet, that gallery without walls, is where most people now see art. So, diminished though it may be amid frantic scrolling activity (and by reduced size), there, at least, art is part of everyday life for many. On the one hand, it feels like a lesser experience even partaking in it, but as I've said before, more people can see my work than would ever be possible, or likely, were it hanging in a gallery.
Art is now a quick fix whereas once it was only either lingered over on a page or, yes, even seen in reality, as an actual physical presence. A whole artworld response was created to suit the screen experience. It was thoroughly post-modern. It played with the idea of information. It was clever. It was never beautiful. It demanded to be read and hoped to be understood. Perhaps, though, only other students and their teachers actually understood it properly.
The temptation when thinking of how a piece of art looks is to become conscious of it's competition, which could be anything from witty texts to news items online. Does it need a wham-bam factor to halt the scrolling action? Should it be simple, bold, direct, brightly coloured? Perhaps some form of figuration will do the job. We respond to images of ourselves, naturally.
No, in the end, for me, it's about making something, the thing that will emerge regardless. An artist who panders to perceived demands is lost. That last one you posted go a lot more 'likes'...so does that mean you should do more of the same to court public opinion? What do you think?
Now I must go and lie down. I need to rest my eyes. They tire from staring at the screen for hours.
TTFN
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