THE SOUTH AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTE FOR THE PHOTOCOPIED ARTS
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Exhibit 1: "So Muss dein Hertze vor zu einem Oelberg werden."
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An introduction to the South Australian Institute for the Photocopied Arts
A while ago I was looking at these photos someone had taken of some band or other. And I was getting real cranky. One of the things I've noticed about photos of bands playing live lately is that the people who take them consistently fall prey to approach which results in them trying to make their photos look exactly like everyone else's photos. They get stuck up in this idea they're working in an artistic genre and thus abide by the rules of that genre. If I had a dollar for every band photo where they blur the colours and make things go all swirly, or do it all in back and white I wouldn't be half as broke as I am. I was making snide remarks about how Camus (ever since I read Fanon my tolerance for Camus has greatly decreased) reading w.a.s.p pricks can't do nothing right, when it occurred to me I should stop being such an elitist little prick for once and give the issue some more than passing thought. It was naturally hard to break from a behaviour pattern I am so at home with. But it became apparent to me that my irate ramble on this subject was, in fact, merely an extension on a wider irate ramble I routinely partake of.
This wider irate ramble relates to aesthetics and art. People treat art like its this discourse entirely separate from everything else. They don't just make something for the fun of it, they make "art." People enter into this 'art' way of looking at and representing the world around them. Which ultimately boils down to following someone else's rules, looking at someone else's canon and generally doing something that looks for the most part like someone else's work. People are still talking about the Dadaists and how they were revolutionary, and they happily rip them off whilst seeming blissfully unaware that a school of art that is 80 years old and contained in major galleries and taught in every public school art department isn't actually all that revolutionary. People keep pumping out their nudes like we're meant to be shocked and amazed. Next to religious painting, the nude is the oldest subject in Western art. In short people get stuck into a genre of thinking, and this seems to place big dampeners on the possibility for originality, let alone the possibility to actually enjoy what you're doing.
You'd think with all the talk that goes on about being original within the art world, someone would finally stumble on something that was original. But no. We just get the same slightly altered copies of the canon over and over again.
When I started thinking about this it seemed increasingly complex. The conventional art discourse has you every what which way you turn. If you say you're not making art as a statement on art, which seems about the last available original option, then you're just doing some sort of post modern art wankery which turns out to not be that original at all. It's just a different take on that whole painting canvas' black to make people realise they're just looking at paint and canvas, and not something all that meaningful at all. Which, in turn, didn't work because people took it as a big, meaningful statement on art.
What ever happened to fucking around for the fun of it? Why is it we believe we have to constantly fit the genre, rather than making the genre work for us? The art discourse perpetuates itself, pushing people into repetitions of the same old movements and generally boring me into a state of intense cantankerousness.
Well I figure that if art as a discourse is prone to making people copy things, then at least we can do it consciously and in the most literal sense possible. And we can include plenty of snide remarks and poorly researched sarcasm. Thus I have begun the South Australian Institute for the Photocopied Arts; A school of art entirely interested in photocopying stuff; the most literal method of copying I could come up with whilst bored in my office at work.
yours,
Ianto Ware
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