What Are We Doing With Fragments
Posted on June 7, 2008
Filed Under What's New |
If you were to buy Susan Kaprov’s Heliconias it would set you back $900. If you were to buy Jon Coffelt’s Eye Ball Cosmos it would set you back $600. The Fragment of both of these is $63, a fraction of the original price for a fragment of the original print.
Why offer parts of an image though? One of the reasons is you get an insight into what an artist regards as significant in his or her work. It is like asking an artist which bit of the print matters to you? But you also get the chance to own a work that is distinct and conceptual at a very low price.
What we find with Fragments too is that the work is still challenging. There are affordable art projects where the emphasis is clearly on aesthetics. “Wow, great image” type of art. We have nothing against that but feel that surely an art work has to do a little more than please?
One of my favourite Fragments is Scott Kildall’s Uncertain Locations. These are part of Scott’s re-enactment of the Apollo lunar landings. Each print is a still from the video of that performance. There’s an important argument behind the work - did America or NASA manage the memory of that event properly? In a world where mass media are fragmenting who will be responsible in future for managing critical historical events?
Our next step with Fragments has to be to help some of those arguments into the public domain.
Take Nathaniel Stern’s Window, a Fragment of Cathedral. Nathaniel has been posing this visual argument for some time now - The Impressionist movement evolved as a response to photography but what is evolving as a response to perfect digital image capture, and infinite manipulation?
These struck me as important arguments when I got involved with these artists but I haven’t had a huge amount of time to follow up with them. Nor do I know a place where people are working them through. One of the consequences of a more fragmented world is we all have to try a little harder to distinguish ourselves and that means our time goes into ourselves rather than the debates that might make a difference.
Anyway upcoming is Susan Leutenegger. And today I put a new Jon Coffelt up there - Eye Bal Cosmos. And not forgetting Geraldine Kieran too.
Comments
WordPress database error: [Can't open file: 'wp_comments.MYI'. (errno: 144)]
SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = '871' AND comment_approved = '1' ORDER BY comment_date
Leave a Reply