ARTISTIC SIDESTEP
“But Kelberman’s project is, in addition, a visual world-building that explicitly sidesteps not only the language of antiquity and classicism but also any suggestion of “artistic” image making. Her choices are brightly colored, plasticky, almost naive, and straightforwardly vernacular, less Warburg than Walmart.” p192.
This passage is by Teju Cole, in his Known and Strange Things. It is a commentary on the work of the artist Dina Kelberman, who uses images and videos that she finds on the internet to assemble image arrays and sequences, which she calls I’m Google. The series of images that she puts together, because they are thematic in some way, inevitably accrue in your mind to something larger than any one image.
Her blog gives an interesting perspective to our goals here. First of all, understanding does not arrive from just one image. It takes multiple images for a non representational understanding to develop. You should go ahead and familiarize yourself with her methods (which you may already know about). I’ll wait.
Each of these independent images overlap in your mind to create and understanding of form and shape. Second, as each image is definitely not we traditionally categorize as art, we see it with greater clarity; it does more work.
My drawing above used one of Ms. Kelberman’s image compilations as a basis, which can be found at the link. What I find interesting is that you can combine, via either overlay, stacking or distributing, the images into one drawing. And I believe that this combination of similar forms into one drawing can really only be done transparently.
What meaning, what purpose, would it have if you tried to do this representationally? Not much.
The key here is the development of a mindset that cuts thru all of the typical historical and representational baggage that we are saddled with. Her approach is anti art and anti representation. So I guess it’s ok to call it transparent.
- Cole, Teju. Known and Strange Things. Random House. August 9, 2016. Print.
Even more mezmarizing than the static images are the videos. For effect you have to turn a “set”, not just one clip at a time.