Photograph: Tate Photography
I would really like to explore the whole concept fo the "lost work."
The trilogy of states in my mind all the time, is The represented - the representation, the representative.
The representative is the most significant to me. We are everwhere awash with imagary, through the many sources of media. They are all the unusual, the noteworthy, the freakish.
I find myself in the situation, of trying to get a handle on the contemporary, and what is the foundation of concrns of today. But there is so much, too much for one person to engage with in a lifetime. What should one be covering, reading etc. And of a particular movement, what should one see. If you just look at what is endlessly reproduced, held in collections in the same country as you live, the work of an artist that has survived, has been documented, loaned from private collections, how fair a picture do you get of an artists body of work, and the relevance within it of a particular piece.
The word that comes to mind is access, access to collections texts works reproductions. I am still struggling with accessing the key texts. What are they for a start. There never availiable in the college library, if I take them out they're not availiable to other students. How could we discuss something we hadn't all read, seen etc. All the college shows have been unlabelled, even if I've spoken to or just seen the student concerned, how am I to know who's works whose. where does in stand withing what they've done in the past, as any indication of where they might go forward. There is a cut off point,it seems with only the presentation of work done sionce September of last year to be presented.
Can all works inaccessible be considered lost ? I'd love to have seen the Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery - it's just too inaccessible. {My favourite painting is Da Vinci's ALst Supper, as much for it fragile condition, it's present, and also nearly invisibible. I can draw all sorts of analogies, how the spiritual is intangible, how art history and restoration can seek to compress or conceal the passage of time. How the blockbuster old master exhibition can make a sense of a body of work, a whole that is actually missing relevant parts through the inability to get a loan, the destruction of the work, it's 'location unknown.' etc.
Selections do have to be made, how is my view affected by what I haven't accessed - yet, not heard about, can't afford, too popular too far away, too expensive, too blinkered time consuming .too too too too too too
I have no idea where to bgin the research in this subject.
I went to a lecture last year where an art historian bemoaned the lack of documentation by artists when they visited museumns and galleries, of what they saw and when. I understand the desire but it's surely not realistic.
i was attracted to the use of performance, but for documentation, which is always restricted, one is back to dependency on equipment the assistance of others etc.
To what extent is the lost equivalent to the inaccessible ? an inaccessibility relative to an individual's circumstances.
i still ove a show at the Tate [Britain# that sought to recreate in some way the first major show by William Blake. The only large scale painting was lost, and it's place was marked by it's dimensions marked out with a different colour to the gallerys walls, and a caption explaining the presentation. It perfectly placed the work within the context of Blake's smaller and surviving work. Though I did hear with rancour from someone within the business how much financially was invested in a blank wall - thousands of pounds a day. All the same I found it a valuable thing to do.
Article here about what criteria and means were used to restore lost parts of a John Martin painting.
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