fish

It's amazing the amount of videos on youtube claiming completely crazy and stupid things. Who knows how many people actually believe them, i know of one about 2012, and this planet 'Nibiru' which is apparently hurtling towards earth, which if you didn't know, is bollocks. Well, one yesterday i saw put Barrack Obama on a par with Hitler. He put his point across in a little youtube video, no citations, no facts or even quotes (no matter how out of context they were).. just rhetoric. Using the language of advertising, saying as much as you can in 3 minutes, beautiful Samuel Barber music over the top, and images... that was it! That was the extent of his argument! And he had something like 60,000 views. Now, i'm not saying that anybody changed their mind because of that video, but it's quite amazing how infectious beauty is. You sort of liken beauty to truth, as if by creating something beautiful it must be true, which isn't neccessarily the case. Anyway, i made the above video as a parody. It only took a few hours, so i don't care if nobody likes it.

Have been reading a book on Conceptual Art, a history, and how someone responded to Duchamp's Fountain with this -

'a lovely form has been revealed, freed from its functional purpoise, therefore a man has clearly made an aesthetic contribution. Mr Mutt has taken an ordinary object, placed it so that its useful significance disappears, and thus has created a new approach to the subject.'

Now, i don't believe this was Duchamp's intention, i don't think he was much of an aesthete. But it's irrelevant anyway, because this describes something i've been trying to do, but not quite the same, yet i can't quite describe it. It reminds me of Baselitz, let's put it like that, freeing the paint from the image by turning all his paintings upside down, yet obviously its not just about paint, otherwise he'd be an abstract artist.. But it's not quite that either.

I remember in the last year of uni, i was trying to liberate ideas, liberate motifs. To take the satyrs that Rubens painted, or the Religious paintings, things which don't have as much relevance today, and free up the forms from the story. As if the story was mud, and i was dragging the bodies out. I thought it would cause some sort of dissonance. It's not a new idea, i suppose the Surrealists are the obvious group that did this sort of thing, take two unrelated objects and push them together so we see something new. But that feels different.

This isn't just about form, nor is it Conceptual, it's somewhere in between, where an object is given new life, seen from a new perspective, through a painterly eye. But i'm running out of money, and i'm running out of canvas, and i don't know what to do to get my work noticed... hell, even my blog only has one follower.