Artwork

Reframing the Artist (2010)
Video
00:35:00

A lot of movies convey stereotypes about artists. The role of the artist both in fictional films and in biopic is focused on the artist’s idiosyncratic behavior, his love affairs, his self destruction associated with 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.

In the video “Reframing the Artist”, fragments from approximately 50 different movies such as “Pollock”, “Surviving Picasso” or “La belle Noiseuse” are reset in the Oil Painting Village, Dafen. Dafen, situated in Shenzhen, China, is the world’s largest producer of mass-produced handmade oil-on-canvas copy paintings supplying a global market.

In the video, copy painters take over the role of amateur actors by reenacting fragments of various artist movie scenes. All scenes take place in unmodified settings of the actors’ own homes, studios, shops or galleries except a few inserted painting props from the same reenacted movies produced in Dafen reappear in “Reframing the Artist”.

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. By a shift of context “Reframing the Artist” raises questions about the view of the other, both the visual artist as well as the Chinese copy painters. It challenges the definitions of copy and original and the implied mimetic relationships on the background of an encounter of international conceptual artist and Chinese painter, mass reproduction of oil paintings and Western canon of art.

The video is structured in five chapters: artist and authenticity, artist and market, artist and crisis, artist and student, artist and model.

“Reframing the Artist” was funded by the Netherlands Film Fund.

Courtesy of the artist

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

location: “Advance and retreat of globalization” MAIN EXHIBITION,Macao Museum of Art
16/07/2021~15/08/2021