Hey people. I saw this image that compelled me and reminded me of Matt Jones paintings of people in superhero masks. Apparently the image on the left is a painting and the image on the right is a C-Print.
These works are by "Artists Anonymous" and the show is up in Zurich at Haunch of Venison right now.
Anyone going to Switzerland any time soon?
Here's a link to the show on the website.
3 comments:
This is another reminder on why I don't think superheroes are good things to make art about.
Hm ... actually I will have to think on this more than I have. I still think heroes are too easy or too prevalent to bother giving them more attention.
Look at this image:
http://www.geekalerts.com/u/spiderman-speaker-pillow.jpg
So we all recognize this, right? It's not a person. It's an idea. Spider-man and the symbol that represents him has a specific meaning that brings up specific thoughts, ideas, emotions, etc. to various people that are more or less the same to different degrees of severity.* What's interesting to me is whether or not it's useful to employ these symbols. If people already know what a thing is and more-or-less what it means, to what end is one using it? Certainly it can't be argued that something "new" is being presented.
When I painted Spider-man (all of a few months ago) I was under the impression that I was "bringing something new" to the table by painting a well known thing in my "style" or with my "attitude" or whatever. Horse apples.
A former friend of mine also painted Spider-man and a few other super heroes and his paintings really bothered me to the point of disgust. It couldn't be the symbol (the character) or comics that I don't like in his work, I told myself. I didn't like the way it was painted, either; but, why was it OK for me to paint Spider-man and not for him? It boils down to the fact that I like my style and not his. Adding to an unliked style someone else's character/symbol that is already understood by millions of people on Earth (nothing "new") leads to something that seems superficial/bad.
bad + not new = bad.
good + not new = ??? (I'm going to guess "mediocre")
You see the problem. Now I make no claim to a universal law on what is OK and isn't OK but personally it's kind of ended up as this: comic books are amazing as they are, in comic books, as pop movies, basically as pop. Pop and art, as far as I'm concerned, aren't one in the same. Art can borrow and comment on and be inspired by pop but once it's pop it ceases to be art. This is why it's hard to make a "Batman painting" or a work with Spider-man in it. You see Batman or Spider-man first. Your mind isn't allowed the "going in" because it's just "Batman!" followed by however you feel about Batman.
It's probably a finer or blurrier line than I'm leading onto. The best thing is that none of it really matters because it is all what you want it to be, but in the spirit of a spirited discussion I'm chiming in on how it is for me. Art is deeper than pop. Even Warhol wasn't really pop (not all of the time). He was more of an influenced-by-pop artist.
When I saw the image from Brian's post I thought "cool, Spider-man" and then everything I think/feel about Spider-man. Then I read that it made Brian think about my super hero masked people paintings and I thought "yes! I have figured out why those paintings bothered me!" They are an attempt to for my style(s) and its attributes on something I think is cool that is already stylized. It's putting a glaze onto something that isn't mine. When I was a kid I believed in Santa Claus and maybe, just maybe, that Batman was real. Maybe then I could've done good Batman paintings because I was convinced of his existing in the flesh. I'm interested in how these pop-things express for us the "cool" and the "magical". Art does that, too, but in a different way that maybe I'll get into in another post.
Adding one's art or style to a comic book character ends up being superficial, a glaze, and piggy backs on the unavoidable "cool, Spider-man" reaction. Figuring this out has made my day.
*a lay person may think "Spider-man's a good guy" while a comic geek could think "Spider-man's the best comic hero ever" while I think "Spider-man's a good guy but he's kind of lame in all the ways that I consider myself lame and because of this identification I don't really like him that much".
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