After last week I wanted to create new images to project, as I was getting tired of using the same receipt scans. I explored a few of my ideas from last week but I didn’t find time to look at all of them. I started to read on Dada and have included some but not all of my findings because much of it has been historical and biographical. Marcel Duchamp’s Cover of New York Dada and Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber’s Untitled (Pathetic Symmetry), seemed most relevant to my digital experiments this week.
Dada
Dada was an art movement in the early 20th Century in reaction to the First World War and against bourgeois values, it was sceptical of widely accepted values in society. There was no particular style as its ideas were more important than the aesthetic. Dadaists used collage, montage, chance, ready-mades and abstraction to create works of graphics, poetry, sculpture, performance, film and photography. The movement emerged around the same time as radio broadcasting, the photo-illustrated press, the industrial assembly line and the popularisation of cinema. Their work referenced and criticised these advancements, and their everyday modern life in general.
“Today’s representative of man is only a tiny button on a giant senseless machine.” – Jean Arp
Hugo Ball wrote, “Men have been mistaken for machines.” Dadaists used a lot of mechanical imagery, they altered the human form with manufactured objects to express the relationship between man and machine, between powers like the government and the masses. Ball performed wordless poetry to audiences at the Cabaret Voltaire. He said ‘the word has become commodity [and] has lost all dignity’. This idea interests me, that language is now a commercial commodity, it suggests a loss of purity. The English language has played a major role in the current forms of capitalism and its globalisation.
Tzara’s Manifesto is absurdist, he proclaims that Dada is also anti-manifesto
Below: Ember, 2021, Oil on linen, 110 × 160 × 4 cm
Fred Sorrell
- British Painter
- Structures of colour, weaving colour
- Abstract geometric forms
- Guidance of structure
- Underlapping / overlapping
- Slow looking, serene
- Movement, rhythm
- Connected to nature – titles reference nature e.g. Long Tide
- Resembles the digitial, which is modern, fast-paced, in contrast to the slow technique of his painting
Photoshop Experiments
Receipts
David Wojnarowicz – Untitled (Hujar Head)
- Product of a particular point in history, yet still relevant
- US Dollar as the material of the artwork, money as the fabric of society
- Combines the digital language, the photographic, the money as a readymade, with the hand painted surface.
- Repetition, pattern
- Complementary colours
Photoshop experiments – US Dollar
Cropping sections of text, and repeating them in square format.
Some of my experiments became more colourful. As the original is green I liked it in its complementary, red. Some of the others, were neons, which I think could relate to punk art or to the abundance of colour we see in advertisement, which is hard to avoid in everyday life and relates also to the material used, the dollar.
Enantiomorph – Each of two crystalline or other geometrical forms which are mirror images of each other.
From Ancient Greek ἐναντίος (enantíos, “opposite”) + μορφή (morphḗ, “form”)
Projector & Acrylic sheets
Sheets of acrylic plastic let the image pass through but also reflect the image in a new direction.
Ideas following this week:
- The receipt spike… could this become a 3D work?
- Combine drawing and digital
– Digital prints and drawing over it
– Drawings put through the printer, and digital over it
– Scanned and photocopied, manipulated drawing
– Drawing becomes a repeat pattern
– Collage and drawing - Materials
– Receipts – the physical receipts and their language, numbers, codes
– US Dollar
– The microchip, microprocessor
– EMV chip
– constructed language systems, e.g. ABC…, QWERTY…
– The receipt spike