Output details

The Santorini Biennale

For the Santorini Biennale I presented a work that positioned the persona of the artist and the social networks around him/her as a central theme. My methodology entailed requesting various people draw caricatures of me. These included friends, art world colleagues, former students and tutors of mine, as well as recent acquaintances. The results make manifest the awkward power relations within this network, the drawings ranging from the affectionately insulting to the politely flattering. The caricatures are incorporated into the design of commercially produced doormats, with paint and dirt occupying equal billing on their surface. The Doormats were arranged in a formation reminiscent of Minimalist art (such as Carl Andre) and were shown on a roof space. Key questions raised by this work are: what are the possibilities now for expanded painting within a socially networked context? Can painting remain a critical and useful tool under the conditions of social, emotional and immaterial labour? If painting can belong to a network, what are the positive and negative aspects of this and what part does the artist’s persona play within this? The methods I used to generate the work reflect our current socially networked context and problematize traditional authorial models by utilising open source or crowd-sourced methodologies. The drawings are printed onto multi-coloured doormats by an Internet based firm who use post-fordist production techniques such as personalisation and short-run orders to generate capital. Contextually my work relates to artists such as Kippenberger, Michael Krebber, Merlin Carpenter, Jana Euler, Blake Rayne and Meyer Vaisman. The Santorini piece was also intended to critically examine ideas and theories relating to transitive or expanded painting discussed by David Joselitt in Painting Beside Itself (October, 130, 2009). It also relates to Post-Net theories of Brad Troemel, practised by artists such as Seth Price and Oliver Laric.