WHERE'S THE ART AT No 1..
Photo Montage after Jacques Louis David 'Napoleon Crossing The Alps' 1805.
Modified by TELECASTUS November 2019.
Notes: I have been making photo montage (which I more often term photo collage) since the late 1970's. Influenced by Punk Fanzines and Jamie Reid's collage work for the Sex Pistols. Later, I found the Situationists et al and through them DaDa, Surrealism and Futurism. The work of John Heartfield, Hannah Hoch, Kurt Schwitters, Rodchenko etc. I was also influenced by Terry Gilliam's animations and Peter Kennard.
Pretty much all the artists named above we could call 'Leftists' and it was the left that dominated the culture wars through the late 20th century. The pioneers like Man Ray were superseded by the advertising industry which co opted the techniques of Surrealism and thus 'Recuperated' what had been a radical and revolutionary technique.
The Situationists came up with the term 'Detournement' to describe the 'inversion' of meaning created by processes like montage. It fitted well into their idea of the 'Spectacle' which in a nut shell is life mediated through and by media.
'Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it..' So said the 19th century radical underground mystic 'Lautremont.' This phrase became quite a rallying call for the Surrealist movement and the Avant Garde groups it spawned.
But the Revolution failed, failed to live up to its own expectations. Contemporary Art drifted into a kind of radical conformism and eventually a conceptual cul de sac. Those little subversive publications of the Situationists and before them DaDaists saw their last fruition during the Xerox stapled fanzines of the Punks.
The Left drifted in PC and identity politics and lost its creative edge in the process.
Meme's became the new currency of the digital spectacle. The meme artists have created the kind of havoc the old revolutionaries would really have appreciated, even though the meme wars come from a different perspective. The point is that the techniques developed throughout the 20th century are still viable.
For me, it is time to do something with more weight. For me meme's are not my thing, good though they are, rather I feel it's time to get my scissors out and start to re imagine, re arrange and re order the spectacle around me so as to make some sense out of it.
I miss the glue, the scalpel and the photo copier, I don't intend to blend things so they appear to be reality (a trap too many fall into with photo shop). It is the line between things that's important, but having said that the images must work as a whole.
Meaning has been lost to art. It has degenerated into what appear to be snappy one liners for the cognoscenti. The everyday person can no longer find joy or pleasure or knowledge in the art of today. This must be rectified!
A new decade should have a new radical and deep symbolic art.
An art that salutes its forbears but which is not afraid to liberate meaning from the prison in which it has become caged.
I can only do what I can do. I claim no ability for being original. But I do notice a lack of credible artists coming out of the culture wars raging around us. POP art sure, video art yes, and that's important, but where are todays masters? Where are the static paintings and pictures we can stare at in wonder and which cause us to daydream, to take us to different worlds, to the possible and the impossible?
So, I offer a start, at least for myself, and a humble bugle call in the dull bland night, the vacuum of fine art in the west..
Telecastus November 2019
