collection

More Michael Paintings (2011), by Reena Spaulings

body, collection, critique, imagery, institution, network, painting, post-medium
Friday, April 5th, 2013

MaLeVoLeNcE (2012), by Donelle Woolford

black/white, collection, imagery, painting, photography, swearword, work of art, writing
Monday, December 17th, 2012

Beginning without end (from the series: Everything I wish I could be) (2012), by Kent Rogowski

begin/end, book, book title, collage, collection, imagery, layering, paper, writing
Monday, November 5th, 2012

O FLUXO ISSUE#01 (2012), by Nuno Patrício and André Moreira

book, browsing, collage, collection, copy, imagery, internet, magazine, post-internet
Friday, August 31st, 2012

Once upon a time there was an original. It was finished at the end of the 19th century by the academic painter Jean-Jacques Henner. Fabiola, the portrait of a woman with a fixed gaze to the left and a red veil is thought to have long been lost. And nevertheless, the painting and the figure it portrays still live. For more than 15 years the Belgian artist Francis Alÿs has been collecting Fabiola reproductions that he finds in flea markets and which continuously crop up in private attics. His art collection has meanwhile grown to 412 copies. They are mostly anonymous works in which the authors, sometimes with bravura, sometimes amateurishly and clumsily, attempt to reconstruct the original painting and to make a copy of an original that no longer exists. With his Fabiola collection, Francis Alÿs negotiates the continued life of an object that originally escaped from the field of art back into everyday popular culture and takes the same object back into the field of art as an idea and recollection of an object. In the long run the existence of the copy here seems to be going beyond the existence of the original.

Fabiola (since 2007), by Francis Alÿs

art history, authorship, collection, copy, imagery, originalcopy, originalcopy | fluc am praterstern, originality, painting, portrait
Thursday, July 26th, 2012

Google Books calls mistakes that crop up in the scanning and copying of books “unexpected peculiarities”. With The Art of Google Books Kristina Wilson takes this phenomenon and collects reproductions that display these peculiarities. Thus on the scanned pages, for example, one can see the hands of the staff who are overseeing the copying process or the movement of the pages that are being turned over. Other scans show marginal notes that have been scribbled as comments on the edge of the page. The fact that the books have been used is also indicated by library stamps, which, with information such as “For use in library only”, grotesquely contradict the idea of Google. In The Art of Google Books Kristina Wilson shows a selection of defective digitalisations and makes them available online as her personal art collection. “The aim of this project is twofold,” she writes on her website: “To recognize book digitization as rephotography, and to value the signs of use that accompany digitized texts as worthy of documentation and study.” In this way the artist questions the quality of digitalised books as well as the “knowledge of the world” that is saved in the books, which is apparently being made freely available and accessible by the global information broker and monopolist Google.