And from this “nautilus shell” of his seventeenth century house “wherein time has stopped,” Arrivabene’s masterful paintings in turn have the ability to stop time and create suspended intense moments outside quotidian time. Arrivabene has written of his work as forming a “wunderkammern” or “a room of curiosities,” such as those created to display the trophies brought back by adventurers returning from foreign expeditions. This points to the painter, Arrivabene, as an explorer  returning with  bizarre and extraordinary fragments or treasures  from  strange, new visionary worlds.

Swimmer of Abysses, 2012

After his initial training at art school, in which, Arrivabene says, he learnt next to nothing, he toured around Europe and studied the paintings of old masters. He researched how to grind his own pigments, lapis lazuli, indigo, cinnabar and madder, dragon’s blood, orpiment and bistre, and almost forgotten techniques of painting like mischtechnik, a painting technique used by artists such as Albrech  Dürer and Grünewald. In mischtechnik, egg tempera is used in combination with oil-based paints to create translucent layers which, when laid over each other, refract light through the painting creating a sense of light and luminosity. This attention to the minutiae of his craft has resulted in Arrivabene’s paintings  actually embodying a process of alchemical  transformation,  in which  the physical matter of painting itself, the lead, the ground pigment, the egg, the oil,  is transmuted through the agency of his craft  into extraordinary  light-filled visions. The other notable thing about Arrivabene’s work is how densely saturated it is with the history of painting, as his works resonate with a lineage of visionary artists from the past – we can see glimpses of Francisco Goya, Leonardo da Vinci, Gustave Moreau, William Blake, Odd Nerdrum, and even in some of his pencil drawings, Mervyn Peake. And yet, despite this sense of continuity and connection with past masters, Arrivabene’s work feels fresh, contemporary, and distinctly his own.

Light with, in Arrivabene’s words, a “blue pearl color much like that of the exhumed dead” is visible in his 2011 painting Martyrium S. Dorotea, of the martyrdom of Saint Dorothy. The disturbing blue of the flesh is visible in the back of the naked woman who is turned away from us. Her body is painted in a level of detail reminiscent of the realism of Lucien Freud, who has been widely characterized as depicting his models with a forensic focus, creating a dispassionate, unsparing vision of the body. Yet from this forensic portrayal of the blue-tinged flesh of the body in this painting, Arrivabene has used the same pearl blue color to create extraordinary plants and flowers growing directly out of the flesh of the woman’s upper back and shoulders. The materiality of the paint itself underscores the inter-relationship of the matter of the woman’s flesh and these plants. In a sideways glance to the symbolic landscape backgrounds of renaissance portraits, flames are painted in the background behind the woman, representing the heat and pain of the dying flesh.

Martyrium S. Dorothea, 2011

Ultimately, the physical pain of the body is represented, and yet we see in this painting the transmutation of pain and suffering, and its metamorphosis into the fantastic. Arrivabene says that one result of his mother dying when he was very young is that it let him move beyond the taboos associated with death, and showed him new ways of considering life, and “so death became for [him] the way to amazement and wonder.” This painting on one level references the story of the martyrdom of St Dorothy, in which at her death an angel appeared bearing flowers and fruit for her persecutors, but it can also be read as an embodied metaphor about the relationship of death to life, and how life itself re-emerges in different forms through the process of the disintegration and absorption of the physical matter of the dead and dying body.

In the 2010 painting Ea Exit, the firmaments of da Vinci and H.R. Giger collide with a lateral reference to the Hans Holbein painting The Ambassadors. Ea Exit references the top third, the head and upper torso, of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa,or La Gioconda. The two paintings share a backdrop of what Arrivabene calls “a wild uninhabited space of rocks and water stretching to the horizon” placed at the height of the eyes of the central figure, suggesting an unknowable, untamable element to the subject herself.   The two paintings also both show women with strange, mesmerizing smiles. The famous, unfathomable smile of the Mona Lisa has inspired much speculation as to its origin, including one suggestion that the smile is in fact a visual representation of the Italian word ”Gioconda”, which translates as the word “happiness”, but also refers to the married name of the subject of the painting, who is believed by many to have been Lisa Gheradini, the wife of Francesco Giocondo.

Ea Exit, 2010

The girl in the Arrivabene painting is smiling too, and her smile is equally enigmatic, looking as though it is turned inwards and is part of her internal state of being. She seems almost ecstatic. The hair of the girl portrayed in the Arrivabene painting is curly and unruly, escaping its restraints, and the small tight curls on the top of her head take on the form of little skulls. The skulls gradually increase in size, and are seen floating away from her head tethered to her only by trails of light. They form a headdress of skulls of all different shapes and sizes: children’s skulls, bird’s skulls, aliens’ skulls (which reference Giger’s drawings), and coroneted skulls. At the front of the painting we see a skull that has grown so large it has become untethered from her headdress and is moving around her, leaving a trace of itself behind it as it moves. The shape of it references the anamorphic skull seen in the Hans Holbein painting The Ambassadors. Arrivabene brings all these diverse influences together to create a stunning image, an ecstatic meditation on death, and on the unknowable mystery and strangeness of being itself.

The 2013 painting The Dream of Sappho, as a depiction of a state of creative being, is extraordinary. We see the poetess, her head turned away from the viewer, her eyes closed, and from the crown of her head a headdress of corals and pearls springs. Veiled, unreachable, the poetess dreams, her creative energy pushing its way through the bone limits of her skull, bringing new thoughts, new poetry into being, and transmuting her life force into the blood-formed corals and pearls of her poetry.

The Dream of Sappho, 2013

Arrivabene is becoming increasingly prolific and there are many new and wonderful works to be seen on his website. A small sample of his artistic portfolio is featured here as part of this article. The first major retrospective of Arrivabene’s work is being shown in the Panorama Museum in Bad Frankenhausen, Germany from 29 June to 30 October2013. The exhibition presents 20 years of the artist’s work.  One hundred and thirty works will be on display including paintings, drawings and etchings as well as many of his moleskin sketchbooks. You can visit this link to find out more about the exhibition.

I interviewed Agostino Arrivabene in the process of writing this article, back in June of this year.

Lavers: I have read that you live in an old manor house near Milan, and that you have a housekeeper who looks after you – is this right?

Arrivabene: Yes, this is partly true. The ‘manor’ is in fact not a manor but rather an old rural farmhouse in the middle of fields, surrounded by nature. My housekeeper is certainly an important woman who keeps me company

Life in the city does not suit my psychological disposition. I have always loved contact with nature, contact with water which should always be near human dwellings; the flow of the aqueous element is fundamental. It is liberating and purifying for both body and spirit. Water is the elixir that nourishes my thoughts, the panacea to my anxieties.

Lavers: I would like to ask you about your rhythm of working — What time of the day do you prefer to paint?

Arrivabene: There really are no rules in my life; I have never liked them. My spirit is free, I don’t like external conditions, and so when they present themselves, I disdain or shun them categorically. I don’t like impositions from collectors, from purchasers, and especially not from curators or art critics, who for me are a kind of satellite human category or species … revolving around my flow or my vision, which must not have any distractions.

Usually, however, morning is the time when I don’t paint. Waking is slow, very slow, in fact. The hours that I prefer to work are those evenings up very late at night or those long dark hours of winter afternoons.

Lavers: Do you ever use images from your dreams in your work? Is dreaming or lucid dreaming a part of your creative source material?

Arrivabene: Yes, often the dream-world during sleep is a source of inspiration and also of speculation … As a young man at the end of the 80s, I had a dream of an astral flight, a detachment from my body in order to experience the imaginative dimension, an instant flash which imprinted itself into my memory as soon as I woke up, becoming the most persistent obsession I have ever had. A bird’s eye view of a verdant Greek valley, of eternal and impenetrable forests, an intense green never seen in nature, a valley without end where the horizon could not be distinguished from a sky without earthly dimension, but more golden. This landscape guarded a small perfectly circular lake of an intense blue, comparable to the deepest blue of the rarest lapis lazuli, a lake that survived on the edge of an abyss, a nightmarish, bottomless, icy, black darkness, into which flowed a rivulet of water, a small waterfall that overflowed from the lake and fell in the darkness. It was an immediate image, persisting over the years and still now strong and clear. Many times it has been depicted in my paintings over the years, becoming almost a canon, a leitmotif that characterized every image.

Lavers:  How do you respond to the description of your works as ‘visionary’ – are you happy with this term? I am referring to the tradition of visionary art that is represented by artists such as Goya, Fuseli, Blake, Gustave Moreau and more recently Odd Nerdrum.

Arrivabene: The “visionary” works you mention in association with eminent examples of great artistic expression are, for me, reference points along my artistic development, and among those artists you listed, there are two in particular, though far removed from each other temporally, Gustave Moreau and Odd Nerdrum, two important poles that I have… studied in order to then distil them within my idiom, a personal style which constitutes my own poetic vision.

Lavers: I have seen you describe your work as ‘wunderkammern’ or ‘rooms of curiosities.’ This metaphor implies that you are, in some ways, an explorer venturing into unknown lands and returning with trophies or images from uncharted territories, in this case, of the mind. If this is so, what is your thinking about these fragments, these images, that you return with?

Arrivabene: The excavation work of my mind into my dark inner world is comparable to the journey of Persephone in Hades, or equally Orpheus’ journey into the underworld. They are travel rituals, Orphic or Eleusinian in their urgent desire to steal from the dark world flashes of truth, the glimpses of which are the keys to a parallel realm that must reveal the interior world through an accumulation of images or a babel of languages, the very mystery, just as eagerly sought by ancient civilisations…. My dream is to steal the royal crowns of Persephone and Hades, to bring them to men back on earth to help them understand the centrifugal mystery of life in regards to death, and death that gives rise to life. It is one of my greatest desires to give to the world such royal emblems; to deprive the ancient gods of their symbolic power.

Lavers: Your images would seem to evolve out of a heightened non-quotidian state of awareness.  How do you sidestep the rational part of your brain? Do you have any techniques for achieving this?

Arrivabene: I have never tried to give weight to the origin of an image. It emerges slowly, like botanical gemmation, or instantaneously, like an archetypal image. Sometimes only by overturning the orientation of the painting do I find the solution, and what was once a clear image. By turning the painting itself upside down, either vertically or horizontally, I find the solution that brings me towards a new painting, which layers onto the previous work a new vision, thus changing the meaning of the image.

It’s not surprising then that under the skin of many of my paintings are hiding actual burials of old images, whole paintings, hidden regrets that sometimes serve as a regenerating humus for the new image, which a new observation manages to perceive, transforming it into a new vision.

Blooming Man II, 2010

The means of altered consciousness have certainly always intrigued me, having been an assiduous reader of the works of Aldous Huxley, but drugs like tetrahydrocannabinols, or opium or hallucinogens, have never been close friends to me. Occasionally some soft drugs have sporadically helped overcome gestural blocks, but not very often. I don’t need them. The real source of connection with a stage of excitement is definitely music.

Music pervades my sessions of realising a work, completely, absolutely. And it is always powerful and symphonic music like that of Brahms, Beethoven and his symphonies, Bach and his Brandenburg concerts, or my favorite artists Mahler and Wagner, or Ciurlionis, who besides being an artist was also a composer of sublime musical pieces. Nor do I exclude new contemporary composers like Arvo Part, Sbignev Preisner, Vassilis Tsabropoulos, the band Sigur Ros, or Lisa Gerrard and Michael Nyman.

Lavers: Your work is informed by the work of so many artists — how do you see your relationship with these painters who have gone before you?

Arrivabene: I believe that history is a babel of knowing that is enclosed by human memory like a Borges-esque library. Everything that precedes us is like a cache of layered wisdom which nourishes new, still unexplored veins.

The history of art has been able to sharpen the gaze and the search for the ideals of beauty, of harmony, and of the mystery linked to these values. Art has become like a religion, and in these most recent years, artists have come to understand that we are like shamans, the perfect link between man and the imperishable, since before this period, art depicted religion, but now art is itself a religion.

This awareness has …[enabled me] to draw on this layered knowledge, ..[laid down by]and confirmed by illustrious minds of geniuses who have given much to the world, and in an age so full of confusion, chaos and languages ​​which hybridize with one another or annihilate each other unproductively, there still exists an underground river that even if hidden vibrates powerfully to enhance the enigma of beauty.

Gustave Moreau was our closest answer to Leonardo, a confirmation closer to my time, who was able to take from the Renaissance master a sense of harmony of forms. Gustave Moreau was, in my early formative years, the founder of a movement that I still felt vividly in the years from 1990 to 2000, and not overtaken by the avant-garde.

Moreau is one of those artists who represents in a single life the entire journey of the history of art. He is an encyclopedic dictionary of more extreme styles and languages; he shows us levels of maturation that anticipate the abstract painting that appeared following his artistic experience …. His capacity for synthesis of form and color are true experiences of the avant-garde for an artist of that era.

Odd Nerdrum on the other hand is clearly an inscrutable and fascinating artist, with an unbridled talent for the construction and texturing of a painting. He knows how to empathise with the pictorial ductus of Rembrandt and Titian or Eugène Carrière, with a capacity and self-assurance which is unique.

Lavers: You have said that ‘The hardest part of being an artist is that period of gestation, when the images prepare to emerge and forms sublimate, then…everything flows…” Where do you find the initial stirrings or the seeds of an image generally come from?”

Arrivabene: This question could have a single and simple answer. Obviously I could tell you that it is life itself that gives every opportunity to be translated into art, and certainly not the bucolic accumulation that current-day artists produce in relation to images, detaching them from the pathos of living.

But … every image that I construct … is the product of a definitively diversified method. For every painting there exists no single procedure, at times it can be a strong suggestion originating from an urgent desire to better focus on an idea captured by a philosopher, or from a story or a mythological reference, or sometimes it can be a specific fact that happens in my life, for better or for worse.

Painting is frequently the urgent medium for sublimating life. It is the medium that translates every dormant impulse, which risks festering in unresolved internal compartments. On the other hand it is at times the magnitude of the mystical quest which is decisive, and which in me becomes the fulcrum to lever archetypal images which are born either by chance or by unconscious surfacing, but which then over time express a meaning and show clearly that through this gesture or that painting, or that particular symbolic element, I wanted to highlight a mystery, still hidden within me, still unsolved and cryptic.

Floatings, 2010

Journeys are often the necessary pathways to be able to verify my thirst for knowledge and curiosity, like those multiple occasions on Greek soil where I confirmed my theories, and taste, or performative gesture, in order to then translate it into painting.

And in exactly the same way in large cities where museums and their collections become springboards to launch into daring experimental techniques. But then almost always the trip has also been in order to realize small sketchbooks of notes of germinal ideas, … which then mature and sometimes transform themselves into works, growing into more complex images. I have a collection of moleskins, hand-bound incunabula or leather notebooks, very simple, where life translates itself in a diary through images or written words, ideas as notes. I am very possessive of these fragments of writings and drawings, they are the furrows left by my life on this earth, enclosed in paper and pages.

Lavers: To see such a mastery of the techniques of draftsmanship and painting is extraordinary in these days when the system of apprenticeship and learning from masters has broken down almost entirely. How did you go about learning about the material processes of your art?

Arrivabene: In fact, I am at the end of a journey without haven or protective shelters. In my early formative years I definitely followed paths, at times purely academic and necessary, and subsequently followed paths which have also been daring or brave in the construction and drafting of an image.

Clearly I have not had master-teachers. My formation has been solitary, everything has come from myself alone, and also through dialogue with the great masters of the past, observing at great length their painting, daring too, at first, a rhetorical process and genuine attempts at reconstruction appropriate for the outset, studying these implementations in long sessions that filled my day. I preferred from the outset to do away with instinctive and random learning processes, rather pursuing the reconstruction of a bridge that could reconnect a blocked road, namely, that from the traditional craftsmanship of the handling of raw materials used in the masters workshops, bridging the enormous gaps in the processes of contemporary drawing and painting.

Apart from this aspect, from childhood, drawing has been for me the language through which I relate to others. I have never been a talkative person; in my younger years, my conversations were private and hidden in my mind between me and Leonardo [da Vinci], in whom I placed my faith from the outset.

Leonardo is the supreme master whom I have been able to observe from my early years. He is like a father who has guided my sign, my hand, my taste and a way to intuit the harmony of forms both drawn and in nature. He has educated my gaze right from the beginning, proof of which are my first preparatory studies of some paintings such as Nix, a small drawing on wood created with pencil and silver tip, which has strong echoes of the preparatory study of the Virgin Annunciate now in the Uffizi Gabinetto in Florence.

Proserpino Wetnurse, 2010

Lavers: “Debauched monasticism” is a phrase you have used to describe your life — it is a very intriguing description, I was wondering if you could elaborate?

Arrivabene: Certainly loneliness has always marked the progress of my days. I’ve always loved to surround myself with books which plumb those mysteries, inherent in humans, linked to the spirit, to mysticism; books of poetry or anthropology, myths, alchemy, esotericism and philosophy, precisely because they are texts that investigate the hidden wisdom inside us as well as that which is external to us, that is, of the universe that surrounds us and that pierces us.

My sense of religion is absolutely crucial for my pictorial gesture, for the inspiration of the ideas which subsequently emerge. I have always aspired to discover what lies beyond death, the mystery of that threshold that obligatorily completes man. I have never been satisfied with a superficial atheism, never satisfied with a relativism that now permeates the minds and hearts of most human beings.

Man is a lump of flesh and blood and bones that surrounds an eternal core, a memory that permeates the centuries and time and that is never interrupted, which flows continuously in a continuous surge, a rising towards a sharpening, such as a mathematical and numerical increase of the Golden Ratio. … It is no accident that I’ve always loved the Golden Form, that Golden Ratio implanted like a genetic code of the entire universe. Fibonacci is my guardian angel.

Lavers: I would like to ask you about the importance of the face in your work. It interests me how in some of your most evocative works the faces are completely or partially hidden – I am thinking of the paintings of Lucifer and the paintings of cherubim. Sometimes the faces are hidden in clouds of what look like bacteria as seen under a microscope. Does the face have a particular significance to you?

Arrivabene: The denial of the face is simply my introspection into myself, but at the same time also my outward reflection on the more mysterious dimension of existence.

The denial of a face obviously often corresponds with iconographic codes relating to deities, or demons/‘daemons’, or creatures superior to humans. The denied face is the kingship of God manifested in his denial to men, and his beauty is impossible to behold by the human eye; the denial of his face is the evocative act of a reality so ideal for human cognition. Clear examples are the painting of “Endymion” of 2007 and the painting of “Lucifer” in 1997, two visions which are mirror opposites: Endymion expresses its beauty through its very elimination by the bright light that assails his face at the moment of the erotic union with either the god or goddess, depending on the version of the myth, …. In one version of the story he is visited by Diana, in another by Zeus.

On the other hand, Lucifer, the biblical angel, is the most beautiful but also the darkest, and is therefore denied his attribute of beauty – his face – which thus reveals a gaping void, total blackness, a dark hole that engulfs, [capped by] his crown of floating flowers.

Bacteria are an atavistic obsession, an obsession born of my hypochondria, my absolute terror of disease.

Luci-fer, 1997

Lavers: What are you working on at the moment? Do you have any new work in mind?

Arrivabene: At the moment, after a long process of collection and planning, I am about to inaugurate my own retrospective exhibition at the Panorama Kunst Museum in Bad-Frankenhausen, Germany.

From 29 June to 20 October, more than 120 works will be exhibited to the public, works never seen before because they have been hidden in private collections, works which bring together over twenty years of my work and which the curators Gerd Lindnr and Rosaria Fabrizio have been able to collect, [curating them around]…the concept of Pathei Mathos, that is, an ancient Greek term which represents the search for truth or understanding through pathos, or rather, through pain and suffering; essentially the disquiet of life expressed by Aeschylus in the tragic opera Agamemnon.

I’m… starting to delve into Giordano Bruno and his ‘wheels of memory’. …I’ve also been working for some time on illustrations from Dante’s Divine Comedy, illustrating the entire work, all three canticles, hell, purgatory and paradise, which up till now I have kept hidden from the public as they are still works in progress.

Lavers: Are there any living visual artists, film-makers or musicians who particularly inspire you?

Arrivabene: The musicians I have already been mentioned. Artists are for the most part sources of inspiration and mainly stem from ancient art, without any creditable contemporary reference, apart from the very few and rare, such as Francis Bacon, Balthus, Lopez Garcia and Odd Nerdrum.

Lavers: What books have influenced you – are there any writers that you love and you see as having had an impact on your thinking and your work?

Arrivabene: The first were definitely the …poets, Rimbaud and Baudelaire above all, followed by Thomas Mann, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Joris Karl Huysmans, and definitely the philosophical works of Plato, of Marsilio Ficino, or the wonderful letters of Michelangelo Buonarroti, the archaeological works of Robert Bauval and the philosophical works of Giordano Bruno, and, more recently, the diaries of Simone Weil and the contemporary philosophy of Franco Rella.

Lavers: What are you reading now?

Agostino Arrivabene: At present I’m reading the De Umbris of Giordano Bruno and the Castello Interiore of St. Teresa of Avila.

Acknowledgements

Katie Lavers’ questions were translated from English to Italian by Paola Vertechi, from the Italian Institute of Culture in Sydney.

Agostino Arrivabene’s answers were translated from Italian into English by Neville Chiavaroli. An Italian and Latin translator, Neville Chiavaroli’s translation (with C. Mews) of a medieval Latin manuscript was published in The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard (St. Martin’s Press: New York, 2009).

References

1. Arrivabene Agostino, Tekne International 2006

www.nuovo-tekne.nohup.it/dett_artista.php?id_artista=13&lang=en‎

2. Artists and Writers Who Ignited Us in 2012, Combustus, December 22, 2012

www.Combustus.net

3. Agostino Arrivabene, Oil Painter, Milan, Italy,  Combustus, May 11, 2013

www.Combustus.net

4. Interview: Agostino Arrivabene, welcome to the Wunderkammer!  Chiara Sestini, C‑Heads, February 29 2012

www.c‑heads.com/…/interview-agostino-arrivabene-welcome-to-the-wun…‎

5. Mona Lisa — Portrait of Lisa Gheradini„ wife of Francesco del Giocondo, Louvre Museum Paris

www.louvre.fr/…/mona-lisa-–-portrait-lisa-gherardini-wife-francesco-del…‎

The post The Visionary Worlds of Agostino Arrivabene appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

For the 2012 closing ceremony for the Paralympic games, Latvian-born singer Viktoria Modesta created a sensation, performing as the “Snow Queen” to the live Coldplay track, “42.” Modesta appeared with one leg that looked as though it was entirely carved out of ice and snow, visibly hollow. Here was a new vision of the “Snow Queen,” part flesh, part ice. Silver and glittering, created out of thousands of Swarovski crystals, Modesta’s extraordinary, sculptural leg captivated many and made headlines.

To create this “crystallized leg” for the Paralympian ceremony, Modesta worked in collaboration with artist Sophie de Oliveira Barata. The team has also created another leg for Modesta. In steampunk black and silver, with inbuilt stereo speakers, this limb is a celebration of a camp, hybrid aesthetic, a new cyber-burlesque.

In speaking of her experience of wearing one of these new kinds of prosthetic limbs, Modesta says, “The first time I wore a limb that was so obviously bionic, it gave me a total sense of uniqueness, [a] feeling of  [being a] mutant human in the best way possible. It was fascinating.”

Barata originally trained as an artist in special effects and then went on to work in the prosthetics industry for several years, developing her own speciality in the more unusual orders, e.g. when the client wanted a tattoo created on a prosthetic limb. She went on to found her own company, The Alternative Limb Project, which designs extraordinary prosthetic limbs that are envisioned not as replacement limbs but rather as body enhancements. You can see her website here: www.thealternativelimbproject.com/‎

Barata works in collaboration with people to create the kind of prosthetic limb that they would like to wear. She believes the process is about “claiming control and saying ‘I’m an individual and this reflects who I am.’”

The limb she created with red-haired Jo-Jo Cranfield, a paralympian triathlete, brings a playful and weird twist to the common tattoo of a snake winding itself around the forearm. In their version, an electric green, three-dimensional snake winds in and out of the realistic silicon flesh of the arm itself.  Jo-Jo Cranfield, who was born without an arm below the elbow, says, “I wanted people to have to look at me twice with amazement. I’d rather people just asked me outright how I lost my arm. This is so out there… that it makes people feel OK to ask questions.” She says that the limb makes her feel powerful and sexy.

Barata has also created a light jade-green leg covered in a floral pattern in collaboration with Kiera Roche, the chairperson for the charity Limb Power. This is a limb with an old-fashioned elegance and beauty that is jointed like a china doll. Kiera Roche says the limb is a personal statement and that she has had an incredible response to it.

Barata has not been alone in her innovative approach to augmenting the human body either. One of the first artists to take an interest in designing prosthetics as body enhancements was the designer Alexander McQueen, who contacted the paralympian sportswoman and model Aimee Mullins to suggest designing some special legs for her. McQueen designed wooden legs that were hand carved and made out of solid ash, and Mullins wore them on the catwalk for McQueen’s 1999 show. The ensemble that she wore — the brown leather corset, the skirt of cream lace and the carved rich brown wooden legs — formed part of the 2011 retrospective show Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Aimee Mullins went on to invite other artists to work with her to create some more groundbreaking visions for this new kind of prosthetic limb. One of the most astonishing was a pair of legs created with Matthew Barney for the Cremaster Cycle. These limbs were produced for Cremaster 3 in 2002, and looked as though they were made out of glass. Completely transparent with plants growing inside them, these surreal legs extend an invitation to read the body itself as ecosystem or cosmos.

Aimee Mullins’ funny and inspiring Ted Talk “12 Pairs of Legs” can be seen here. (Aimee Mullins: It’s not fair having 12 pairs of legs | Video on TED.com www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetics.html‎)

Sophie de Oliveira Barata is building on the foundation work of these artists and pioneers in the field, and is currently developing some “gadget limbs for alternative functions,” for example a Swiss-army-knife arm with “a bottle opener, a flashlight, magnifying glass, whistle, compass, watch, matches and strike pad,” and another arm which doubles as a “miniature pinball machine”

“[They] are completely off the wall,” she says, “but we want to demonstrate how far we can run with the imagination…”

These “gadget limbs for alternative functions” created by Barata bring to mind the extraordinary images generated by the Surrealists in their drawing game “exquisite corpse.”  In this game, developed by the Surrealists in 1925 to involve the collective unconscious of the group of artists present, each person in turn draws a part of a human figure in sequence (e.g. a head, a neck) and then folds the paper over so that the player coming after them will not be influenced by what had been already drawn.

In some of the exquisite corpse drawings we can see the extremities of the body replaced by tennis racquets, eyes floating away from the head attached to a curling ribbon, or a violin sitting in place of a head. Katherine Milligan in her writing on the ornamented body of the late 20^th century writes, “As strange as they are, the human figures in these exquisite corpse drawing are consistently recognizable as such…. The legibility of the drawings attests to a powerful desire for bodily coherence. At the same time, the drawings extend the Surrealists’ questioning of the limits of individuality…in physical metaphor. The boundaries of the body are anything but discrete.” The surrealist exquisite corpse drawings pose the question as to how we are to describe the interface between the body and the other elements in the image. “Are the bodies reaching out into the non-corporeal world or is the non-corporeal world reaching into the bodies? At their edges the corporeal/non-corporeal distinction breaks down, and it becomes impossible to state decisively where the transition from one to the other takes place. In particular…the borders of the body have come to represent the difficulty of determining the limits of the individual.”

In the creation of these prosthetics, Sophie de Oliveira Barata and her collaborators are taking the questions posed by the Surrealists about the nature of the body and its limits and boundaries, and moving beyond the realm of pure imaginative drawing into the realm of the actual, by transposing these issues into the real world. They are posing questions challenging our preconceptions about the nature of disability, and presenting us with playful but challenging conundrums about the boundaries of a body that is modifiable, malleable and permeable. They are pointing a way beyond the “Uncanny Valley,” into the truly weird world of unreal limbs.

References

McKenzie, S. (2013). Snake Arms and Crystal Legs: Artificial limbs push boundaries of art. CNN. http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/24/world/europe/alternative-limb-project

Metropolitan-Museum-of-Art. (2011, 5.6.2013). Alexander McQueen. http://blog.metmuseum.org/alexandermcqueen/tag/no-13

Milligan, K. J. (1998). Exquisite corpses in Amercia: Ornamented bodies of the late twentieth century. PhD, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA, USA. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/304442552

Mori, M. (1970). The Uncanny Valley (K. F. MacDorman & N. Kageki, Trans.). IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering and Science News, 2013. http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/

Ross, H. K. (2013). London Artist Creates Intricate Limbs to Fit Individual Styles, Prosthetics with Personality. Healthline. http://www.healthline.com

Photo Credits

Floral Leg: Photographer, Rosemary Williams

Snake Arm: Photographer, Rosemary Williams

Sophie in the Studio: Photographer, Rosemary Williams

Stereo Leg: Photographer, Jon Enoch

The post Uncanny Valley and the World Beyond appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Her art is full of delicacy and weird eroticism and creates a surprising new world of enchantment and strangeness, which she invites us to enter. You can see a wide range of her work on her website.

The Natural Order

Ruth Marten started out as a tattoo artist, working on the fringes of the art world in her Native New York, long before tattooing became the socially acceptable, ubiquitous phenomena it is today. She then moved to working on paper and a long and prolific period working as an illustrator for a diverse range of clients including Jean Paul Goude, the renowned French graphic designer, producing illustrations for books, magazines and album covers. She then started to make and exhibit her own, very particular, works on paper.

Although not working in collage per se, it could be said that the aesthetics of collage, especially as developed by the surrealist Max Ernst in his groundbreaking work Une Semaine de Bonté, are a strong influence in Ruth Marten’s work.

Collage, the twentieth century technique of combining together images from radically different sources, is widely agreed to have been invented by Picasso and Georges Braque somewhere between 1907 and 1914. Picasso, speaking about the origins of collage, commented that he and Braque had been seeking a form of representation that induced in the viewer

a trompe l’esprit—a kind of ontological strangeness—instead of the more familiar, painterly trompe l’oeil. As Picasso expressed it, “in collage the displaced object has entered a universe for which it was not made and where it retains, in a measure, its strangeness. And this strangeness was what we wanted to make people think about because we were quite aware that the world was becoming very strange and not exactly reassuring.”

Caged Birds

This trompe l’esprit can be experienced in many of Ruth Marten’s images e.g. in her Caged Birds,  where the familiar image of a bird in a cage is suddenly made strange. Ruth Marten’s image shows birds in intricate cages constructed to fit them exactly, like weird fashion garments. The familiar image of a caged bird now provokes a sense of ontological strangeness and gains a strong metaphysical resonance here.  The response to these images will no doubt remain a personal one, but one possible response could be to see them in terms of the close fitting cages which we create for ourselves, cages shaped by our own desires e.g. the intricate cages of demanding jobs and restrictive relationships.

Mameluck

The wonderful image of the girl with the enormous fox’s tail sticking out through the back of her bustle in Mameluck is another provocation, which gives a sense of trompe l’esprit. As well as reminding us of the animal nature present in everyone, it wittily and subversively changes the way we see the bustle, and also could perhaps provoke us to re-examine current accepted conventions of clothing. Native Girl Redux also changes forever the way we view a crinoline and makes it difficult to see a crinoline in a period drama without thinking of all the various feet emerging from underneath it.

Ruth Marten often uses illustrations and prints from old encyclopedias as starting points for her work, so the subject matter can vary widely from images of Chinese cabinets to rococo frames, hairstyles and quadrupeds. Through her détournements, her subversive interventions into these prints, which were often early scientific attempts to rationalize and categorize the natural world, she enters into the taxonomic process and through her playful additions underscores the inherent partiality of any process of categorization. She works into old illustrations from scientific books using their own visual language to subvert and destabilize the intentions of the original and introduce a sense of unease about classifying systems in general.

Native Girl Redux

Her work can be seen in the same light as the wonderful Jorge Luis Borges short story which has the English title “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” and the famous section which he ascribes to a

Chinese encyclopedia entitled “Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge” in which it is written that the animals are divided into (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, © tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

Foucault comments that he was provoked to write his book The Order of Things by reading this particular passage of Borges because of his “laughter which shattered, as he read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought–our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography–breaking all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things…. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing, that, by means of this fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

Ruth Marten’s work often shares this joyful disruption of familiar ways of thinking, and the ability to provoke laughter at the strange and exotic charm of another way of thinking, and in the process revealing to us the limitations of our own ideologies.

Her works also often have a quality that can only be described as a very childlike sense of transgressive mischief. Ruth Marten herself says she had a very “proper” mother and in some of these works there can be seen an irrepressible desire to venture into territories which have been declared out of bounds.  A mischievous delight in the transgressive can be seen in the image called Chinese Cases, which shows a display case full of ornamental sculpted phalluses or dildos which an anteater is approaching with a long flickering tongue, and in the image of a man lying on an iceberg embracing a voluptuously reclining seal in Les Phoques, and in her picture entitled Quadrupeds, Zoophilia.

Chinese Cases

Ruth Marten’s works display an irrepressible, subversive spirit, which continually discovers the strange in the familiar, challenges the tidy categorizations of familiar thought, and delights in crossing and transgressing boundaries to venture into the territory of the weird and unfamiliar.

I interviewed Ruth Marten by email during the course of writing this, and the interview follows below.

Lavers: How did you get into tattooing? You were tattooing long before it became as popular as it is now, when it was still a fringe, subculture activity. What was it that attracted you to it?

Marten: I became interested in tattooing as an extension of drawing, my great love. As I was just out of Art School and confronting the reality of paying rent, it dawned on me, in my youthful fearless ignorance, that I could perhaps make a business out of tattooing, so it was the technique and not the typical designs around at the time that interested me.

As I got involved, I looked and learned, from the few existing books and pamphlets (George Burchett’s Memoirs of a Tattooist, How to Do Good Tattooing by Miss Cindy Ray, and the Bishop Museum’s Marquesan Tattoo Booklet), that tattoo was a verb and not a noun; therefore I could propose a world of unorthodox content to a client (Don Ed Hardy, Cliff Raven and others were coming to the same conclusion in Chicago and California). I did champion so-called Tribal designs and the tattooing of Art, (Mondrian, Art Nouveau, Aztec, Japanese prints, Victorian illustration, etc.)

Piercing has never had any appeal to me; we move “forward” piece by piece. It was quite wild enough to be tattooing illegally in a society with precious little tolerance for tattooed women, a shock to the system and open season for abuse from both men and women.

Lavers: Could you describe your process with your current work on paper?

Marten: With my current work on paper using, mostly, 18th century prints (formerly illustrated book pages), I would describe my major impulse as one of opportunity, be it extra space on the page or content that is irresistible.

Along with having been a tattooist for 8 years, I was an illustrator for 30 years (I’m so old!) and these prints really were designed to inform people who were just beginning to be able to afford to buy books, which explains the enormous range of content from Botany to Birds, Greek Gods to the powerful figures of the time, Chippendale’s catalogue of furniture to Biblical tales, High fashion to every possible odd bit one can imagine–all of it replaced, rejected or digested by our time.

I get “ideas” from looking at these remarkable three hundred year old pieces of paper lying on tables at flea markets, and that can be enough; sometimes I have to wait years for the idea to coalesce, sometimes it takes an afternoon. As I am very methodical in my drawing style, I like to leave open and unstructured my reactions. I work all the time but never before noon when I need to swim. Ideas that hit like a bolt of lightning is a romantic notion which can sometimes occur, but really, work is work is work is work…

Lavers: You said you find inspiration in old prints you find at flea markets — do you often go to flea markets?

Marten: Flea markets are Church to me and I go religiously every weekend. I love everything about them and find immense inspiration there. I like the serendipity, the hunt, the history and personality impressed upon the objects, the characters who sell the stuff, the promise of a deal, in effect, everything except, perhaps, the smell (though I love the smell of old paper). All the gifts I give come from fleas and most of my wardrobe does also. My last exhibit in New York was an homage to the experience and was called “Strange Bedfellows,” meaning I had found something in the Market and responded to it so that it eventually became either a sculpture or a picture.

We are threatened here in New York with losing our last market in Chelsea. Originally there were six huge lots that buzzed with fabulous junk every weekend. Now those lots are bland high-rise co-ops that would suit Dayton, Ohio better. There’s a Sunday Flea at Columbus Avenue and 77th Street that I also attend. If I buy one more crumbling book about how to make luggage from the animals you kill, or how to make the knots in tapestries, my bookshelves will explode but, really, who could resist? It’s history, baby, and the American fleas have it all over the European ones, perhaps because the War destroyed a lot of their stuff. The amulet markets in Bangkok are amazing, too.

Lavers:  A lot of your work involves drawing and painting hair. Can you talk about this?

Marten: I got into depicting hair originally because of the sense of line and my own little cultural dust up with the Hair Gestapo, having been curly headed in the age of ironed hair. Once in, the richness and range of the theme provided me with tons of ideas for drawings, egg tempera paintings and sculptures. I spent seventeen years depicting African American styles (highly exaggerated, which is saying something!), indigenous people’s hair constructions, flows, shapes, Hirsutism, etc.)

Lavers: How would you describe your current work on paper? Adjectives that come to mind are playful, subversive and surreal. Do you agree with these adjectives?

Marten: You certainly are correct to bring up the elements of humor, subversion and surrealism. I would add propriety, perversion, banality and innocence. I was very interested, like everyone, in Jung’s ideas at one time and I have been accused of being a cheap surrealist, but that is a long story!

My work is either very complex or very simple and definitely has much to do with my very proper mother. It’s a “place” where I “live.”

Lavers: Who would you say are the artists that have influenced you most?

Marten: Is there a person alive who’s not astounded by Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de Bonte? I think it is the most important work of modern thinking, more so than even Duchamp.

You asked about influences and this calls for a list so hang in there: Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, H.C. Westerman, Durer, Rembrandt, Vija Celmans, Alfred Kubin, Otto Dix, Georg Grosz, Krazy Kat, Little Lulu, Elie Nadelman, George Bellows snow scenes, Justen Lada, Kubrick, Essiente’s A Rebours, Audobon, Jan Svankmajer, etc., etc.

Lavers: Could you tell me what you are reading at the moment?

Marten: I admit to being rather low-brow so please forgive me. These are the books on my nightstand and I have read 1/2 of each. I probably will get no farther.

1. John Sloan by John Loughery
2. Brick 90
3. Age of Iron by M. Coetzee
4. English Graphic by Tom Lubbock
5. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
6. The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, Captain Cook in the South Seas by Anne Salmond
7. Ticket Out by Max Blagg
8. Recollections of Leonard: Hair Dresser to Queen Marie Antoinette by Leonard Autie and E. Jules Meras
9. Bento’s Sketchbook by John Berger
10. Battle for Manhattan by Bruce Bliven, Jr.

I’d jump over the lot for a new Elmore Leonard!

Lavers: What are you looking at in your work at the moment, and do you have any thought about directions you are interested in exploring in future?

Marten: Presently, I am obsessed by water and rivers, maybe because my upcoming show is in Koln, on the Rhine, and New York is a biscuit floating on the sea. Maybe because Storm Sandy shook us up and reminded us of our zero sea level status. Maybe, in a Jungian sense, because water is emotion. It’s a starting point. Just finished putting a saddle on a rat, so who knows. I have to not be ideological as that creates illustration not art.  When one has worked for many years, many things are known. I therefore look for any opportunity to throw the cards into the air.

Works Cited

Pieced Together: Collage as an artist’s method for interdisciplinary research by Kathleen Vaughan, International Journal of Qualitative Research 4 (1) March 2005

Ruth Marten
 by Dominique Nahas  at www.isisgallery.com

“The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” by Jorge Luis Borges

Preface to The Order of Things by Michel Foucault

The post The Subversive, Surreal and Irrepressibly Weird World of Ruth Marten appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

In his latest project, The Deep End, this retro feel is initiated by the soundtrack of static from an old record, and then reinforced by the materiality of the images, which are all hand-drawn and painstakingly created with ink and white-out, and also coffee, which he both drinks and paints with. The painstakingly hand-drawn frames, all one thousand five hundred of them, are composited into a one-minute futurist-velocity animation with an edgy, highly caffeinated speed and feel.

Here is the link to Jake Fried’s animation The Deep End. You can find another five of his animations on his web site at www.inkwood.net.

[vimeo 56673269 w=500 h=281]

It could be said that one of the real pleasures in watching these animations lies in spotting the influences and references in this work, e.g. surrealist collage, woodcuts, graffiti, comic books, tattoos, masonic and illuminati imagery, and cartoons.

The Deep End starts with its retro sound of static and the slow introduction to the materiality of the process of creating the images, and then moves into a succession of animated drawings, or as the artist himself calls them “moving paintings.” These are so thoroughly steeped in the history of painting and drawing, and so confident in the way they move through different styles, genres and references that, in itself, the animation becomes an exploration of the psychic territory of an individual, the artist, in the process of absorbing, reflecting and refracting history, images and influences. The pacing of the animation shows an onslaught, a hyper-saturation of images, ideas, and cultures, and in this way, embodies the self-aware positioning of the work as retro-futurist, yet the feel is absolutely contemporary.

There is in this work a sense of connection with a particular history of painting that Fried is exploring and developing throughout these animations, and one of the strongest influences is that of Philip Guston’s paintings from the late 1960s onwards.

Guston, one of the most respected and admired of the Abstract Expressionist painters, and a friend and contemporary of Jackson Pollock and Wilhelm de Kooning, caused a ruckus when, in 1969 after a two year break from exhibiting, he started showing his paintings again. In these later paintings he challenged all accepted notions of good taste by breaching the boundaries between High Art and the “vulgar” by introducing his own awkward, intentionally clumsy iconography that referenced comics and cartoons, in particular the drawings of Robert Crumb and the old Krazy Kat cartoons by George Herriman. He introduced these new elements in an attempt to find a graphic language that would allow him to approach painful issues in his painting, such as his own alcoholism and the impact of the Holocaust,

These later paintings of Guston’s got a frosty reception from his contemporaries and from the media at the time, but it is this work, with its deliberate flouting of good taste and convention, which went on to influence the Neo-Expressionists in the 1980s and which is still influencing artists such as Jake Fried today.

“Painting, Smoking, Eating” Phillip Guston 1973

These later paintings of Guston’s, such as his 1973 work “Painting, Smoking, Eating,” had a very shallow depth of field, a tightly confined spatial context, and a radically reduced iconography, and these elements, when combined together, produced a sense of claustrophobia and psychic struggle. In his book on Guston’s later work, David Kaufman writes that, in these later paintings, what you see is “literalness”, where “both mental and physical stuff hangs out on the surface of Guston’s paintings, pressed up hard against the picture plane.” This is the same mental and physical space that Jake Fried chooses for his animations.

These later paintings of Guston’s opened new territory for other artists such as Carroll Denham (Lena Denham’s father), who also often uses shapes and images which reference a cartoon or comic-book aesthetic in his paintings.  Denham, in an interview from 1990, says that one of the things he is most interested in is trying to explore in his paintings and drawings their passage through time, and that he often kept a flip book with his images so that he could get a sense of them moving forwards through time.

When I started doing a lot of drawings, I wanted to be able to track them, to order the chronology and also the space and time that separated one idea from the other. Things come about in time. Time is one of the materials. I don’t plan things and then execute them. They come about by me doing them. And some notation of time seems important to their truth… There have been times when [time] became much more of a graphic element—an element of drawing. Time seems to be one of the really basic things we have to work with.

Skip forward a couple of decades and Jake Fried is working with computer technology to develop what could be seen as a fast-forward flip book with his paintings, an extended painting, or series of paintings, which grapple with the notion that Dunham is referring to, e.g. time as a graphic element — a material presence in painting or drawing. In this context, Fried is adding time as a powerful experiential element to painting for the viewer.

It is the animation’s skillful handling of the graphic element of time that gives this work its peculiar resonance –something about the structuring of the graphic elements in relation to time, which gives this animation its strong emotional and existential punch.  The Deep End has a duration of exactly one minute, and this one minute starts relatively slowly and moves into a compressed, high intensity, delineated psychic space, and then progresses towards a relatively long, fade-out to black, to a vanishing, similar to the vanishing of a consciousness.

In this sense, i.e. of a vanishing of a consciousness, the one-minute span of the animation becomes by extension one day, one life.   And in this way, this animation acts as a weird, wired and totally mesmerizing momento mori.

I interviewed Fried while writing this article, to gain a better insight into his artistic process and pursue questions related to perceptions of his work. The body of that interview follows here.

Lavers: Can you describe your process when you make your animations?

Fried: Each animation I make is on one high-grade piece of paper consecutively scanned as I add ink, white-out, and coffee. The Deep End is 1500 scanned frames into Photoshop. They’re compiled and played back at 25 fps on Final Cut Pro. Then I add sound/music last.  I complete about 10–25 frames a day (depends on what’s happening in the drawing — like adding small details or making sweeping changes), it takes about 4 months from the first drawing to the final film.

I mostly work evenings and weekends, but as a Museum Educator I have a flexible schedule and am usually done for the day before 4pm.  I find the time because I have to.  If I don’t draw or work on my art for more than a few days I feel physically uncomfortable and anxious — the need to work (or “get the drawings out of me”) is somewhere between an artistic duty and obsession/addiction.

I listen to music, podcasts, radio, movies most of the time when I work. I know artists who feel this influences their output, but for me it’s more of a distraction/stimulus during hours of slow, steady drawing — it keeps me grounded in a way, so I don’t “drift off” mentally or emotionally. For the most part I like to work to more atmospheric, experimental music like Flying Lotus or Nicolas Jaar — but I have a soft spot for singer/songwriters like Townes van Zandt and Elliott Smith (anything that’s emotionally raw and evocative).

I drink a lot of coffee, but I don’t need that much to paint with, a little bit goes a long way. Maybe 2 cups for all of The Deep End, a lot more for drinking.

Lavers: Are you comfortable with your animations being described as ‘retro’ or ‘analog’? — Is there a way of describing this feel that your animations have that you are comfortable with and if so what adjective would you use?

Fried: I’m okay with the term ‘retro.’ But I see it more of as a kind of retro-futurism — as if the work is from the distant past and future at the same time. Essentially something “timeless or universal” versus something “temporary and specific.” I often come back to the term ‘Raw’ to describe what I’m going for — and I think I’m part of the larger trend of ‘lo-fi aesthetics’ that goes back to 80s Punk. I could make the case that my work acts as an antidote or antithesis to the glut of slick, computer generated animations coming out today.  One might even describe American culture today as slick and computer generated — and my work as some sort of human, hand-made rebellion against it.

Lavers: Which visual artists do you like best  — what work moves you — interests you, inspires you, influences you?

Fried: God, that would be a long list — I was educated as an Art Historian and work for a major museum — I’m as influenced/inspired by Ancient Egyptian tombs as Contemporary Painting. Crumb’s hyper-detailed ink drawings are certainly an influence on my specific style — I would also add Philip Guston and James Ensor as major influences. And even though it seems like such a cliché today — I still learn from Picasso’s work all the time, the guy’s out of control. And although I dislike him personally, I have to mention William Kentridge as a predecessor to what I do.

Lavers: You describe your animations as moving paintings — why do you position your work in relation to painting rather than comic book artists like Robert Crumb?

Fried: I know a lot of people refer to me as an illustrator, but I’ll always see myself as a painter. My work is firmly rooted in the history of Fine Art, and my work isn’t really going for a message/narrative through images, but rather the images are the message. I see my works as “objects of contemplation” in the same way someone would approach a painting or sculpture.

Also, this body of work came out of my painting and drawing practice; I have always layered and reworked my images for weeks. Eventually I realized I was more interested in the “evolution” of the image than any “final state”. So the animations aren’t that different from what I’ve always done; I just didn’t “see them” until I began recording the process.

Lavers: Are there any animators that have inspired you?

Fried: I don’t really look at other animators for inspiration that much — but some noteworthy contemporaries would be BLU and Allison Schulnik — I think they’re doing amazing work. I have mixed reactions to Cyriak’s work, but he’s probably getting the most attention of any experimental animator out there right know and clearly works his ass off.  Folks like Julia Pott and Jordan Bruner do great stuff too — but their work is a bit too cute and twee for my tastes.

Lavers: Is there any fiction that has influenced your work, any ideas you see yourself exploring through your work, any theoretical writers you have read that have sparked ideas with you?

Fried: Again, too many to list. But for fiction, Kafka has perhaps had the most profound influence on my work — I’m a huge fan. The writings of Jung and Joseph Campbell are also very important to me. I believe in the collective unconscious and all the symbolism and imagery in my work stem from this belief. I’m not representing one culture or time in my work, but a more holistic view of the human experience.

I wouldn’t describe myself as religious, but there’s definitely a link to the Deconstructionists in this line of thought. There’s a big trend around the world toward personal spirituality over organized or dogmatic belief systems and I think is evident in my work. I think this trend is one of the major shifts in human culture that defines the era we’re living through right now.

Lavers: Do you see your work as being ideas driven? Or do you see your work as evolving through the process of doing it and more connected with process and the materials you are working with and that it kind of develops itself through doing it.

Fried: Both. The work is not really preplanned, so it does become itself through the process of making. But the “ideas” are always in the background. I think if you’re being honest as an artist, the work tells you what’s next as much as you tell it. I fundamentally believe art-making should be a “discovery” process, otherwise I have no interest. I want to learn something new or follow some unknown path, rather than just executing a plan.

Lavers: Where do you see your work going in the next few years? Or will you just let the process drive you?

Fried: I’m just going to continue on the path that I’m on and see where it takes me. I don’t plan on stopping film-making anytime soon. Just like painting or songwriting, I think the value and insights of my individual films grow as I add more to the body of work. I am exhibiting regularly, but the dream would be a solo museum show where each film is looped on large screens in small viewing rooms in proximity to each other. That way the totality of my expression can truly be witnessed.

The world of online video is developing so rapidly, I can’t really imagine what it will be like in the next few years. But I look forward to the innovations that will lead to new and better ways of distributing and viewing my work.  And I look forward to how these new technologies will lead to the greater democratization of the art world in general.

Works Cited

Telling Stories: Philip Guston’s Later Works, by David Kaufmann, University of California Press, 2010

Carroll Dunham by Betsy Sussler, BOMB 30/Winter 1990, ART (Interview, Painting) http://bombsite.com/issues/30/articles/1274

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