Image from Either/And ExhibitionAnnie Macdonell"The images in this series are scans of found 35mm slides. I came across a box of them next to the trash a few months ago. They were unlabeled, undated, and unsourced. I’ve put together a selection of 15, which now form a slideshow you can click through on your computer monitor. Maybe you will recognize some of the images. Others you may not recognize specifically, but you will certainly be familiar with their sources – art monographs, fashion magazines, notebooks and textbooks, technical manuals." [Annie MacDonell, Interview in Either/And] on her work Split Screen
[Note: Addendum below]
MacDonell was a former classmate of mine at Ryerson University, where she received a BA in photography. She went on to get a Master of Fine Arts in Lefresnoy, a university in France. Here is more on her statement of her work Split Screen in Either/And:
The slides were produced on a copy stand which, before the flatbed scanner, was the simplest means of reproducing images. Each one contains an interruption of the image by the spine of the book in which it originally appeared. The visibility of the spine is what attracts me to them. It marks only one of the many transformations these images have undergone since they were produced by the original photographer or artist. But in doing so, it places the histories and genealogies of these images in the foreground. The slides were shot for pedagogical purposes, to be projected large in front of a classroom and discussed as a group. Before that, they were published in books and magazines, to be purchased and leafed through by individuals. And before that they were, perhaps, images matted and framed behind glass on a wall. Now we may be browsing effortlessly through them, each on our slick backlit monitors. But the spine’s interruption of the image reminds us of where they came from in the first place, and how our ways of encountering them continue to shift along with the technology that delivers them to us.
That is a lot of words for simply showing pictures from magazines which spread across two pages (split by the spine of the book).
Such is the verbose nature of contemporary "artists" who have a lot to say about their vapid works.
MacDonell's Master of Fine Arts thesis was "about representation itself, which has always seemed to me a more interesting conversation," as she explains in the Either/And interview.
What this means is that MacDonell, for all her "artistic" vision, is not an artist. When tested, she's probably not very skilled at any of these artistic fields either: Film making (taking out the camera, shooting images, editing those images, producing a coherent whole), painting, drawing, or sculpture (she's big on "installations" which to her probably constitutes sculpture). All her works are borrowed, which I term as stolen, from various sources. And of course, not from real artists, which would have given her some exposure, and eventually something to emulate, but from the photographs and films she finds in people's garbage bins.
What a macabre and nihilistic way to represent the world! And it shows in her disjointed, cut ups, collages and installations.
Art for this conceited individual is about talking about art, rather than making art. And these "found objects" have been her means of "conversation" rather than creation.
Below is a photograph I took about two years ago which is around a similar theme of displaying cultural and sexual messages through contemporary cultural signs. The original post, with my commentary is in
Camera Lucida under
The Sexy Escape.
The Sexy Escape, 2010
Kidist P. AsratHere is how I see the superiority of my work:
a. My photograph shows:
- Context
- Humanity - how ordinary people look next to these iconic images
- Architecture - how images are placed in or on buildings
- Real life - the images show ordinary people juxtaposed with the images, mannequins and shop windows
- Poetry - I try to reference these views to come up with some kind of visual poetry
b. Macdonell's images show:
- Disjointed images, shapes and forms: Her cut-off hands of the mannequin, her burlesque dancer revolving in a few frames of a film, have no connection to the real world, and rotate within the image's confines
- Focused on phallic: Almost all her work, at some point, narrows in on the male or female sexual organs
- Cut off from real life: Even though she says she finds these "objects" in people's trash, she isolates them from the owners, and creates her own, insulated world out of them
- Morbid: Her objects form a collection of "found" items which have been thrown away, and which had no use for their owners. She doesn't salvage them and bring them back to their original use (building a new mannequin to of the hand, for example), or elevate them by creating something worthwhile, but uses them to further degrade them.
- Nihilistic: She says in an
interview: "The work becomes about representation itself, which has always seemed to me a more interesting conversation [than talking about the work]." The objects, the images, the sculptures no longer count, which means what they represent does not matter either.
Macdonell, and the string of "artists" of her era, are clever wordmongers. They have not talent in art, but somehow decided that they wanted to work in art. This proved difficult, and their way out is to "have conversations about representation," as they spitefully malign art and creation.
Here are links to Macdonell's works and interviews:
-
Cinema and Visual Pleasure at the 2006
Viennale-
Interview at the Mercer Union: Originality and the Avant Garde (on Art and Repetition)
- Grange Prize
short-list- Macdonell's
website
Addendum:
Here are other strange, hard to locate, image reconstructions where MacDonell references Canadian photographer Roloff Beny:
The images are embedded in the 1967 collection of Roloff Beny's work: To Everything There is a Season: Roloff Beny in Canada, Essayd, Poems and Journals, Edited by Milton Wilson. It is not clear how much of the photographs are "collaged" additions to her work, if she retook photographs of the locations that Beny photogrpahed, or, what!
Here is
one site which tells us this about the following photograph credited to MacDonell (and which doesn't appear on her website) The photo is for sale (!) for US$2,000:
This conceptual landscape by Annie MacDonell references the 1967 book, To Everything There is a Season, Roloff Beny in Canada. Beny, a world travelling artist/socialite obsessed with natural beauty sought to mythologize the Canadian landscape in a year that marked the country's centennial anniversary of confederation. MacDonell's interventions fracture and reconstruct Beny's mystical photographs, giving the soft, poetic imagery threatening edges that redress parallel social histories that existed (and still exist) in our society. Deceptively straightforward, these prints of reconfigured photographs layer our contemporary concerns on top of perspectives and sensibilities of past eras.
"Interventions?" "fracture and reconstruct?" "redress parallel social histories?" What does this all mean? No-one so far has given me a satisfactory explanation in my email queries.
And the tiny "53" (visible in the "
original") at the bottom left hand I guess makes up for lack (absence) of information regarding this clearly appropriated work.
More to come.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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