Copying defects – the real vs the unreal

I am now marching (or being marched, it feels like) swiftly towards the Degree Show in the Fine Art department here in Wolverhampton. There is just one month to go. The studios are buzzing with ain air of creative stress and frenzied activity. I love this time of year. The results of ten months work are starting to appear and there is a lot to be inspired by.

The theme of my work over the last ten months has been repetition. I have been obsessed with repetition. I have lived and breathed repetition. I have been drawing, painting, making, writing, posting, blogging and obsessing about repetition for months.

There are two main pieces I am hoping to exhibit. One is two plinths covered in drawings, which I will write a separate blog about. The other ‘piece’ is recreated defects in the exhibition space and elsewhere in the building. I’m hoping that it will be a sort of subtle, mostly unseen, but not wholly unseen, anti-Platonic guerrilla art.

Blue tack

I won’t be able to create any of my defect replicas until just before the Degree Show, so I feel strangely relaxed, but I have been practising today. Since the studios here are in quite a state after nearly a year of artistic activity by me and my fellow students, there are a lot of opportunities for me to leave my mark here.

Some random holes

The aim is partly to see if people will spot my artworks while they are looking for ‘real’ art. Despite the fact that these pieces are, in my eyes, genuine artworks, they aren’t expected.

Bigger holes

I want to challenge the notion that the copy is inferior to the original (and that the copy has a bond with the original). I have (will) deliberately place the copies next to the originals to see if people are able to dissassociate the former from the latter, which is what I want them to do.

For my research on repetition, I have read a lot of what Gilles Deleuze had to say on the subject. He is well-known for turning the Platonic relationship between the model and the copy on its head by looking just at the copy itself and divorcing it completely from the original. He talks of two types of repetition: mechanical and dynamic. The latter creates originality. He wanted us to value the copy in of itself and to value the process of repetition, not for the copies themselves but the differences between the copies, or the vibrations.

I want to tease something interesting out of this process of copying. There is something unsettling, or uncanny, about seeing a fake a hole or defect. It doesn’t quite look right. It isn’t the original, but it resembles the original, yet it has a quality separate from the original. It couldn’t possibly be the same as the original. It isn’t the same so we don’t need to refer to the original. My question is: does the copy here have value in itself? I hope so.

This entry was posted in Blog and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply