A totem timeline
Auratic replication
Art has a duty to be accessible. Sharing culture, experience and heritage through objects performance or sound is the stuff that makes us human.
In creating art we seek to capture thought and place. A means of evoking something that otherwise could not have been realised. Walter Benjamin’s essay The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction considers the issues of the auratic, a property artworks possess that by their repetition is lost.
“Even the most perfect repetition of a work of art is lacking in one element; it’s presence in time and space, it’s unique place where it happens to be.”
In this new age of reproduction, filtered images of instant narcissism, can we attain an absolute form? Is this lost or celebrated in its duplication?
Firstly, somewhat of a personal aside after travelling to Leeds for Yorkshire sculpture international if anyone is going to create a purity of form it sure as shit isn’t Damien Hirst! He cannot hope to renege on his image of celebrity. The soft inauthentic wipe down surfaces of his work. Both Hymn and Anatomy of an Angel exude the very essence of the bullshit bourgeois need to shock with one hand and endear with the other. Carrot and stick sculpture for the masses made by one man and his unseen choir.
But perhaps form does not need to be true in order to have merit. The elitism of the precious icon hidden away in a gilded box. The glass cases and velvet ropes. We must now attribute value in this new world where the data surrounding an object is as if not more important than its history.
A strange weave of time and space at Site Gallery collates a series of pieces in an attempt to explore aura in the post digital world. Video, sculpture line and fabric are presented in delicious juxtaposition.
These Here Withins 02
Florian Roithmayr’s These Here Withins 02 with its abstract brutalist dimensionality dominates the space, but through the pocked cavities the strained anatomical beauty of Edouard Lanteri’s sculpture can be viewed.
Oliver Laric’s works display the beauty and beast of repetition, 3D prints of religious iconography in Lincoln Scans 3D scans of artefacts from Lincoln cathedral made freely available to rework and 3D print against a display of rotoscoping and the immediacy of animation in Versions. In sharing the data with the world is the craft of the stonemason lost to time or in a heightened state of appreciation? Has the aura been lost?
It is easy to dwell in the absolutes of our world. Binary constructs help us relax into our lives. The most enticing questions have no answer. When we consider our own place within the works the question of aura becomes more complex. Placing ourselves into the mind of the artist and the hidden worlds of creation yet to be imagined.
Perhaps this is why Birdsong by Margarita Gluzberg and Falling into space by Diana Taylor envision the best means of answering the unanswerable. Interpolated threads and abstract forms in an otherwise flat surface. A view otherwise unseen.
Perhaps we do not need truth. It is in the interstices of the sincere and facsimile that we find what is pure.