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- Sascha Pohle
REFRAMING THE ARTIST deals with the stereotypical representations of visual artists in movies. The role of the artist both in fictional films and in biopics, classics of the twentieth century or recent popular films, is focused on the artist’s idiosyncratic behavior, his love affairs, his self-destruction associated with a mystification of his creative production or on encounters with other protagonists of the art world such as the collector, the art dealer, the model or the art student. Artists are almost solely painters, which reconfirms a predominant inadequate representation of visual artists in movies.
In the video REFRAMING THE ARTIST fragments from approximately 50 different movies such as ‚Pollock', ‚Surviving Picasso’ or ‚The Moderns’ are reset in the Dafen Oil Painting Village. Dafen, situated in Shenzhen, China, is the world's largest producer of mass-produced handmade oil-on-canvas copy paintings supplying a global market mainly sourced from Western art.
In REFRAMING THE ARTIST copy painters take over the role of amateur actors by re-enacting fragments of various artist movie scenes. All reenactments took place in unmodified settings of the painters' own homes, studios, shops or galleries in Dafen Oil Painting Village.
Mass production of oil painting copies from Dafen and the recurrent use of artist stereotypes in the mass media film converge to a new narrative overlapping fiction and documentary. REFRAMING THE ARTIST raises questions about the context of cultural export, reinforcement of fiction and the internalization of antecedent media images. The video challenges the view of the “exotic” other, both the visual artist and the Chinese copy painter.
REFRAMING THE ARTIST is a loop installation. Its repetitive character allows the viewer anytime to step in an out of the screening. The video is structured into five chapters: Artist and Authenticity, Artist and Market, Artist and Crisis, Artist and Student, Artist and Model.
Besides the re-enacted text fragments furthermore copied oil painting props taken from the same original movies appear in REFRAMING THE ARTIST too.
Reframing the Artist
Dafen Oil Painting Village