My paintings nowadays never really seem to reach a final conclusion, as most of them are painted over somewhere down the line. After i get a painting to a certain standard to which i'm happy, i take a photo and upload it to facebook. A couple of weeks goes by and i'll live with this painting and start to notice things about it which aren't quite right, so i'll work on it some more, usually altering it quite considerably, and then take another photo and upload that to facebook. And will continue altering it until i'm happy with it, ending up with an array of photographs in different stages, which to anybody looking is not one work, but 3 or 4 different works.
You see, people only really come into contact with my work via the internet, where i have 100s of photos of my paintings, hardly any of which are finished, but in reality there's only about 50 canvases that just keep on being reused. Once upon a time to see a painting you'd have to go and 'see' the painting, if you knew the artist you might get to see it in the studio, being worked on. But for the general public it would usually be in exhibitions, the works would be 'finished' and the hanging of the works would be considered. Of course printing meant that artists, like Hogarth would make prints of the paintings (or paintings from the prints) and would be able to circulate an idea of what the work was. Then photography exposed painting a little bit more, you wouldn't actually have to go to Italy to see the Sistine Chapel. Television programmes on art zoomed in to the painting, had soothing voiceovers telling you what to look for, and music to create a particular atmosphere. But the internet just took it that little bit further.
Cynthia Freeland talks about the aura that surrounds a work, that Walter Benjamin thought the 'mechanical reproduction' of a work took away this aura, distancing the viewer from the painting in a sort mimicry of Brecht's Alienation Effect, allowing us to see a work as a whole, with thought, without being sucked in emotionally. Freeland wasn't so sure about this, and you can probably see why with the television example above. With the amount of photographs that can be viewed in high definition on the internet, the examination these amount of works are placed under, the result being that instead of a distancing, the examination brings no answers. We can look at the Mona Lisa under a microscope and there will be no answers, no answers causes ambiguity, ambiguity encourages us to look at a work in a religious, almost sacred way. And... there's that damn 'aura' again.
But, what the internet does, it exposes the process of a painting. It gives the painting a sort of social life, allows us to x-ray it without us having to create those beautiful x-ray images of paintings (which according to... me! is reminiscent of the Turin Shroud, encouraging this 'sacred' idea). No, imagine Leonardo Da Vinci was on facebook, updating his status, twittering his latest inventions, wasting time on tetris, poking Michelangelo (probably wouldn't need facebook to do a bit of male poking though) And every now and then he'd upload an unfinished image of ML, someone would 'like' it, someone would comment on it, "not bad, not your best work", or "she's cute, who is she?"
Apparently he started working on it in 1503, finishing it in 1519, the year he died. And imagine, throughout those 16 years he'd occasionally upload another unfinished image, until at the end of his life there would be a whole array of images of this Mona Lisa in various stages.. What would you think, which would be the more interesting? The real, single piece of work, hanging somewhere behind a bullet proof screen and hundreds of people queuing up to see it. Or a facebook photo album filled with it in different stages, with comments of friends, patrons, Leonardo himself, the likes, the adverts at the side of the pages, the other, failed attempts at paintings that were uploaded just for the sheer hell of it...
Here is a list of paintings that no longer exist:) -
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