Author is the Artwork

Authorship is always fascinating, but only sometimes trivial for gaining a complete unerstanding of the work. 

That stood true until about 2 years ago, when I began diving into deeper personal topics and started to lear to understand myself in a whole different way. I noticed how much of all of my own, and other artists' inspirations came from entanglements of their identities. Particular awareness of these entanglements rose from seeing so many of my favourite artist turn to NFTs and shift to producing content that paid well, rather than told a good story. Meaningful narratives turned to aesthetics for Instagram followings, appealing to the market before appealing to the artist's own identity. Yes, these are rather accusatory, but I am quite dissapointed with how much empty aesthetics are replacing good stories. 

My favourite artists are now those who have a fascinating story to tell, and tell it through examining their own identities. To me, the artist is more interesting than the work itself, the latter only being a shard of themselves, a way to channel the immateriality of self into the real. I prefer interviews about the work to the work. When it comes to my own art, the most rewarding projects are those where I examined myself most in-depth. The result can be clunky and incomplete, but if the process was solid, I am more than happy. 

One passage made my brain tingle:

"For him, on the contrary, the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin - or which, at least, hap no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins."

Let's take a look at it through this image:

To me, the quote calls into quetion the importance of language as a mark of authorship. By taking the hand of the artist out of the painting (which to me, is the opposite of impressionism, which was all about the movements of the hand), the only thing that's left is the language. To me, language can be the narrative of the image, not just literal symbols. If that is the definition of language, then my image is imbued with it, however slightly. 

There are very little traces of origin in the image above. There is no mark on the reality as it would appear to anyone else except for those few color edits, again. Devoid of language, and framed in a fairly loose way, this image could be a commentary on so many things. In a way, I took this image while imagining an extension of reality, which is illustrated below. This image on its own captures my fascination with early morning colours of the sky, the living corpses that are socialist architecture from past century, and the verticality left unclaimed in such urban spaces. 

Also, here's a snip of turning the photo above into a scene for the project:

a photo-based Blender mock-up for my Animation