MEDI 323: Critical Evaluation

Critical Evaluation:

The brief was very open on this project but stated that we had to explore and experiment with themes, ideas and different mediums of art. It was to be a self directed study culminating in an exhibition.

At the very beginning I wanted to focus on developing my ‘Dreamscapes’ project that I produced for the Experiment module in year 2. It was an enjoyable project that I felt had a lot of territory unexplored and a huge amount of scope. I started to research refining my ideas and the actual physicality of making the image, through practice it became smoother and more organic to actually produce the images. I wanted to try and paint a more complete image of thoughts and feelings and realised very quickly that a large portion of my life belonged to things that were not ‘real’ such as video games and cartoons or fantasy stories etc. this lead me to the notion of the term Unrealestate, a term which I have defined and made my own in a very concrete way throughout this project. The downside to the fact that my work has to incorporate the unreal is that more often than not the images are copyright. I am not sure whether or not my usage of the images falls under fair use or not and frankly in the interest of free speech in art I do not feel that I am obliged to care. I personally feel that copyright has gotten to be less about art integrity and more about fat cats turning a profit with artists that believe they are upper crust turning on artists that are ‘beneath’ them as evidenced in the case of Damien Hurst’s actions towards a graffiti artist known as Cartrain.

“Damien Hurst threatened to sue breach of copyright when a piece of his art was parodied. Walker comments ‘This legalistic response by a contemporary artist to an instance of plagiarism (or homage) was rather preposterous, given the number of times artists have borrowed imagery from the mass media without obtaining permission or paying for the privilege.” (Walker, 1999, p.185)

I therefore do not mind joining the rising tide of Appropriation Artists that are lashing back at copyright. That being said I do not feel that my art fits that definition rigidly since I am not trying to make a political comment but more of a social and psychological point with my images. I do however understand the need for copyright; people deserve to make money off of their ideas and their work and also to not have this stolen. I would want to have the royalties of my own art and have my ideas protected.

“Ursula Smart defines copyright as ‘ Copyright essentially prevents one person from benefiting from another’s skill and labour or directly copying or passing off another’s work.’” (Hill & Paris, 2001, p.295)

This I feel however has been warped, it has become much to stringent and I would argue that if something is changed in some way then it is no longer exactly the original. I think it is very hard to actually totally plagiarize something in terms of art, even a group of artists referring to themselves as the ‘new plagiarists’ altered the images and thus made comment on the original.

“In practice, pure plagiarism rarely took place because in most cases transformations of the originals occurred.” (Walker, 2001, p. 132)

I had a lot more ideas besides working on taking the Dreamscapes to a new level and blending Unrealestate into them. One of my main Ideas was to produce a series of mixed media collages that focused on copyright, censorship and consumerism as I have studied these topics extensively over the course of my degree and feel that they are very relevant and current issues that can always be addressed in an artistic manner. The main Idea that I started to refine and even did a trial image for was the mixed-media collage of consumerism that I wanted to produce on a huge board, I was going to collect things I had consumed, cut things out from magazines and newspapers but have it based solidly on what I personally consume, I was then going to add pictures of printed money both British and American with some of the printed notes burnt. To finish this image I was going to, in red paint, add in my finger and hand prints. This is an idea I still want to do as I feel that it can be impacting but due to time restraints because of my ill health and also because I feared the image would be viewed as childish I dropped the idea for this current piece of work. Likewise with the censorship image which I wanted a black canvas or board with the word ‘censored’ in the middle of in a white stamp effect. I wanted to do this because of my research and also even more because of the recent legal debates over censorship of the Internet such as SOPA and PIPA. I dislike the idea of censorship intently, I think free speech is a very good thing and even if I dislike someone’s viewpoint I will still defend his or her right to be able to voice it. That being said my latest point of contention does revolve around the Internet, something that I very much think of as mine, the Internet should always be free and open because that is what makes it the entity that it is. Again given more time and better health I would have liked to explore this to a much greater extent. I also had an idea to study the psychology of Child Art and see if I could make Dreamscapes from a child's perspective.

I was interested in Child Art because I have studied child psychology in the past and also I think that finger-painting is a very underrated medium, an opinion that has only amplified with research. It is very expressive and freeing and also I think intrinsic. It relates to our ancient ancestors that painted with their hands on cave walls, in the sand, on stones etc. because I feel that we all have an inherent need of and appreciation for art and also, high art critique aside, have the ability to produce art. I understand that at first glance this avenue of study may appear completely tangential on my part and in some ways this can be considered true. I was worried that focusing on just myself would make the project a little one-dimensional so I wanted to expand my scope by collaborating with a child. I do regret that this idea was only half complete, however due to time restraints caused by illness it would have been impossible to follow my tangent to its full conclusion. So this Idea may seem quite unrelated but I planned to make Dreamscapes using the Unrealestate accumulated by a child. I’d have liked to gone further with this but there would always have been the danger that it would not have been received well because of its evident childish nature.       

In the end I chose to stick with combining Dreamscapes and Unreal estate and taking both of my home-grown concepts to new artistic levels. I have drawn heavily on my own experiences, feelings, emotions and influences, as my reality is the one I know best. I understand that other people will have different perspectives to me and may interpret things in my images I had not originally thought of or intended but that I feel is a huge part of what art as a whole is about and if people add new layers of meaning then my images have new layers of meaning and I am happy to embrace that. I hope that some things will be obviously conveyed and that my reality is not so different from other peoples as to render the contexts void. I have opted to make a somewhat risky move and include my faith as a Pagan in this project. It is not always viewed correctly and often portrayed in a horrible light and I wanted to dispel that. I have played into certain widely held notions but I have done so respectfully and not compromised the integrity of what I believe. I have tried in my final series to include a wide range of topics that I feel my life revolves around and the elements feature heavily in this both in terms of faith and gaming, again a large part of my life, so elements have a triptych in their own right. I have also covered time, faith, a season, an actual dream and chosen my room and how I view it with my thoughts and feelings as the center because that is where most of my reality happens and where all the images were made.    

This project has naturally been hugely influenced by the things I do. Video games have played a huge role in my life so naturally they influence my idea of art and also my art in general. I have been gaming for as long as I can remember so most video games are like old friends to me. This odd relationship I have with video games was one of the starting points of my theories of Unrealestate.

This project has been fairly hard to achieve, as I have been limited massively with time due my ill health. I have had massive troubles with back pain and then as a result very strong medication which has made it hard to stay awake, let alone focus. It has limited the amount of what I could do both in terms of focus and mobility so a few ideas have had to be shelved. It has also made sticking to my schedule a nightmare owing to falling asleep because of the medication when I had work to be doing. There have been some bonuses to being on the medication however, not least of all the pain relief, but due to the fact that my back problems are so bad I am taking opiate based medication, which has been helpful in boosting creativity. I know that several of my inspirations, in terms of literature, in life were using opium at the time of writing their great works. I find this quite ironic really that I am unintentionally following in the footsteps of Poe all be it to a much lesser degree. I feel that re-working the images has been easier and a lot more fluid because of this, I have been able look at my images in a different way and in some ways see more clearly what needed to be altered in my images in order to achieve my desired effect. However the pain-killers have made writing anything extremely difficult as they tend to leave me drowsy and quite confused which seems to happen in waves, this means I have had very limited time where I have been completely lucid and focused.

Despite these massive setbacks I am happy with the direction the project went in and the actual end result, I feel I have worked very hard to ensure that the setbacks I faced didn't sway my project too much off course and that the end result still is in line with the goals I had in mind both at the start and as the project developed. In a funny way this has very passively altered the project because art comes from life thus life experience can only serve to enrich art.

To conclude, initially in this project I wanted to take a very psychological stand point to my art because of my previous interest in the subject of psychology. I feel that I have achieved this through extensive research into the fields of art psychology in terms of the project as a whole. I have paid particular attention to colour and its meanings and connotations so that I could have more control over how my images would be viewed and thus manipulating the psychological tonalities of my images. I wanted to explore children’s art from a psychological standpoint and although I ultimately did not opt to incorporate any of the child collaborated images into the final exhibition run of images it was a very valid practise as well as a very interesting experiment.

From the outset of developing this from the ideas formed in my second year I wanted the finished images to convey a sense of liminality, blurring the lines between the ‘real’ and ‘un-real’ to paint a more rounded picture of what I consider true reality. I feel that I have achieved this with the final direction I have taken the project in and the final exhibited images I have produced. I personally feel that I have taken my original concepts and pushed and refined them to the limits. I would have liked to play with more mediums and maybe have combined a lot more mediums but that is an avenue I can still explore in the future. I do feel that I experimented a lot with both concepts and mediums and through extensive research have produced something that I am very happy with.