A recent essay by Artie Vierkant for Jst Chillin, “The Image Object Post-Internet” (click here for download) explores the Post-Internet status of images, as objects. It assumes that of the vast amount of artworks you will have seen in your life the majority will be images of objects, rather than the actual objects themselves. I’ve never been to see the Pyramids for example, yet I’ve seen them hundreds of times. Whether online or in magazines, these images can be seen as increasingly primary experiences. Images may approach what Vierkant suggests we formerly attributed to the status of an “object”. A reproduction of an object, if that is all you see, becomes the object. For a very literal take on this idea, see the photographic sculptures of Gwon Osang.
This dual, or mixed status is very much a part of the differing conditions for painting, whether online, offline, reproduced, actual or whatever term we have now for all at once. Does each cancel the other out so that they all become of lesser importance? Do we speak of the difference between them, or the commonality? Is the most pressing kind of art one that can exist comfortably, even natively in surviving the change of states? Of course in a similar fashion, PAINTED,ETC. uses the vehicle of painting, once upheld as a personal, original, one-off and physical medium, to measure against these kinds of mutable conditions.
Image object by V5MT
