Following the previous two blog posts, Islington Mill Art Academy members Jenny Walden and Rachel Newsome critically respond to Jared Szpakowski’s visual blog:
http://threeteabagsinanenvelope.tumblr.com
Jenny Walden, 23 August 2013 10:48 –
I know the works assembled on the blog are referencing questions of value, but I am also reminded of artists who collect things as part of what they do, such as Mark Dion, or who reflect upon their ‘stuff’ both in terms of their identity but also in terms of wider world questions about why we accumulate and why we identify with and why we value certain things/objects, like Michael Landy’s ‘destructive’ reflection.
Collecting and keeping, is a huge part of what we do as human beings. Much of this is indeed the crucial stuff informing our collective history, which then also might still form a huge part of what gets thrown away when we are no longer here. I randomly opened a book on contemporary art and memory and I found this quote which resonates somehow. Its from artist Rabih Mroue for a performance piece Make me Stop Smoking:
“I have been collecting worthless material for almost ten years now, taking good care arranging it, documenting it, indexing it, and preserving it from any possible damage…Today I possess what resembles an archive….that relates only to me; a kind of added memory that occupies different corners of my domestic space, despite the fact that I do not actually need it. It is an invented memory that is exhausting me, and which I cannot liberate myself from. For this reason I will uncover some parts of my archive, hoping that-by making it public-I can get rid of its weight. This will be my attempt to destroy a memory that doesn’t know how to erase itself.”
Rachel Newsome, 23 August 2013 12:14 –
What immediately struck me was the cleaness of the images, as if to suggest they had been removed not only from their context but from the dirt and mess of everyday life and placed in a controlled environment (the blog) in the way museum objects are placed in vitrines. And yet not. Museum objects are displayed according to (on the whole) objective classification systems. Yet the criteria for classification of these images is unclear.
The story of why these images are here in this order on these days is a hidden, inferred story, telling itself in the gaps and spaces. The second thing that struck me about the images was the way they are framed, often to present everyday objects as unusual, abstract and surreal, focussing on pattern, structure, colour and shape. Although the occasional text displays emotion, I feel the images as a whole don’t – they feel clinical to me. Or perhaps a better way of saying it is that they feel Zen – transcending emotion than perhaps evading it. Both the asethetic and the framing could be said to be autobiographical, in that they tell us something about Jared; it is not only what Jared sees but also how he sees, processes and presents his collection (as other comments have mentioned).
In response to Jenny’s comments on the collection and memory, it’s interesting to note that neurologists are beginning to claim that the more we store images online, the more our own capacity for memory is diminished. The blog, facebook page etc becomes an externalised memory bank in place of our own. We are controlling our memories and archiving them for both ourselves and others to see. This resonates with the suggestion that somehow in the process we become more godlike. It reminds me of a thought by Slavo Zizek who has suggested that the private has not so much become public, as it has hi-jacked the public for private use. The universe revolves around us and we are the masters of it.
The final post concluding the experimental text, including Jared’s response, will be posted tomorrow.
