 |
| Roadkill (version), RTomens, 2017 |
sat outside The Renoir cafe, Kentish Town this morning -
"When I'm recycled I want to be a BICYCLE" says the drinks can on the side of the recycling lorry parked opposite, reminding me of an old Woody Allen joke about wanting to come back as Raquel Welch's soap bar - dirty rotter -
you know recycling has some form in art history, from Dada photomontage and the collage-of-rubbish master Kurt Schwitters to Robert Rauschenberg using stuff off the streets -
I love recycling old images - a collage cliche, I know - but the colours, for one thing, are so sexy, aren't they? Take this, from my copy of Techniques of Advertising Photography (1963)...
...see what I mean? More images from that book on my other blog here
aye - colours were better in thee olde days - what? So LJ reckons & I wasn't about to argue last night when we discussed it. she's a colour junky, as well as a painter...or I was going to say because she's a painter but it ain't necessarily so, is it? not all painters are enthralled by colour - in that respect, she's probably old-skool. cars today really get her goat - crap colours! she's right, except for the Fiat 500, cunningly retro, knowing that some can afford the extra few hundred quid just to look...classic.
whenever I've used (tried) modern mags for collage the colours have even put me off & I don't consider myself educated in the use/ways of colour in art (which is a kind of science). LJ's tried teaching me before but I confess it goes in one ear and out the other before you can say "Art Brut". My use of colour could be called 'instinctive'. colour schemes (concern about) are probably old hat anyhow in this post-modern world (just like drawing skills). OK.
in recycling past images it's possible to reappropriate (a la Situationiste) & utilise to reference the modern condition, but aside from doing that I feel it magical somehow, an act of time travel - to put the Past to use Now.
right
anyway
the image of mine, Roadkill, here, recycles a lump of crushed newspaper LJ found on the road when we were in the South of France a while back, which she has since turned into a sculpture but I photographed it, as is my way, knowing it could be altered/altered/altered in many ways. The above is one version.
thanks for calling in
yours,
The Unknown Artist
(tags: colour junky, rauschenberg, art tart, art print, digital art, south of france bourgeois art recycling, prole art threat)
I like the idea of recycling in art, being "an act of time travel". I'm no expert, but I like what I like (without always knowing why, despite having studied Aesthetics. Ha!). Saw a profile of Cornelia Parker on TV, where she explained her thinking behind 'Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View'. I wished she had kept quiet. I already liked what I saw, and had formed my own interpretation.
ReplyDelete