graphite & putty eraser/20x30cm
original source: 'The Guardian' 14/11/08
Another newspaper reproduction chosen for the specific ‘photographic’ quality of its tension between focussed & blurred elements, the capturing of a split-second of the movement of a body across the picture plane. Note too the grid-like arrangement of the background (that again), a display of postcard-sized artworks that, through the drawing process (& the subsequent scanning & blogging-of), become representations of representations, reproductions of reproductions, taken to another level (& beyond).
At a superficial level, the blurring references, again, the photographically-derived ‘un-paintings’ of Gerhard Richter, currently haunting this resource on a regular basis.
Returning to the recently-posited notion of ‘de-photography’, ‘dis-photography’, & the various processes of ‘de-photographication’ or ‘de-photographization’, Richter suggests himself as an exemplar of such not only through his painting from photographic sources, & the painterly results of such, but also with his series of overpainted photographs, itself a significant, discrete body of work, where oil paint is applied to the physical photographs themselves, transforming them into another more formally & aesthetically complex, multi-media, ‘painterly’, material object altogether, coloured & textured - & altered in terms of ostensible subject matter & image content - by the application of the paint upon their surface, thus ‘de-photographized’.
Another example that might illustrate the nascent concept is that work of Matt Bryans, as previously mentioned, whereby the artist alters the appearance of selected newspaper reproductions of photographic images by the physical process of erasure of particular areas, creating another, different image in so doing.
Matt Bryans
installation view of erased newspaper photographs
As might be observed, the resulting image retains pale traces of that content which has been erased - the process of which can only be of a partial nature & never physically complete given the fragile nature of the newsprint itself, its surface & substance rendered more so by the action of erasure, making the ephemeral source object more ephemeral still, as the image itself appears – giving a ghostly, haunting quality to the new artwork, the ‘de-photographized’ image-object, that, given an eraser’s role as a drawing tool, could be said, perhaps, to exist as a form of drawing, ‘re-worked’ from printed source (on paper, traditionally the base material of drawing).
Soundtrack:
Lambchop 'OH(Ohio)'
Cabaret Voltaire 'Living Legends'
Divine Comedy 'Victory for the Comic Muse'
Galaxie 500 'Today', 'On Fire' & 'This is Our Music'
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