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Physical and Digital in Conflict, Ethics and Aesthetics. Developing a Body of Works

Updated: Sep 20

It seems to me that this is probably the stage that was expected of me at the beginning of the previous part of the course. When was the beginning of the research and the exploration for material and formulation of the questions. But even now I change my opinion with every article I read and with every artwork I make. The main thing that happened during this part of the course was that I decided on the area of research but not with the research questions. It has changed many times already. Here are some examples of my thoughts, as they appear and become relevant.


Conflict as a method of cognition.

Catharsis as the meaning of existence.

Incomprehension as a driving force of cognition.

Deadly imposed reality.

CONFLICT and its role in shaping modern ETHICS and AESTHETICS.

Conflict in modern catharsis. In search of contemporary ethics

Conflict between the viewer and contemporary art

Today's relationship between conflict and ethics and aesthetics

Relationship between mass media and death

 

And the latest current version remains –


Physical and Digital in Conflict, Ethics and Aesthetics

 

The materials chosen for work mean a lot to me. They didn't show up overnight. Boards, debris, old objects and building materials, as I have already noted (more info: https://www.marinawittemann.com/post/beyond-failure), are connected with my past. At the same time, such a non-standard choice of materials provokes the viewer. Positive or negative - the most important thing for me is that there is a strong reaction, which means the material is interacting with the viewer. The newspaper colour field is my purely personal statement about the beauty of colour-emotions (synaesthesia). All of these materials are extremely physical and tactile. At the same time, my way of working with them, careful selection, and aesthetics of composition, also demonstrate my presence. Human presence.

This approach is the opposite of the radically different digital world. I see the media, including the most popular form - news on the Internet, as one of the most powerful sources of shaping our visual culture and our mindset.

One of the powerful examples of shaping our opinion is the “Goebbels marketing company” in 1930.




At 9:55 minutes begins an explanation of how the American product advertising structure was applied to promote the National Socialist Party in Germany.

 

John Berger’s radical TV series in 1972 explained even more what influences the formation of what we like.


«These paintings, he told his audience, might look beautiful or eternal, but they were actually produced for the wealthy and well born, to celebrate and solemnise their status.» Тhe Guardian, Ways of Seeing at 50: how John Berger’s radical TV series changed our view of art, Olivia Laing Mon 17 Jan 2022 [online] At: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/17/ways-of-seeing-at-50-how-john-bergers-radical-tv-series-changed-our-view-of-art (Accessed 20.12.2023)

 

And now I want to go sharply to 2010 to the artist Artie Vierkant.


“Even if an image or object is able to be traced back to a source, the substance (substance in the sense of both its materiality and its importance) of the source object can no longer be regarded as inherently greater than any of its copies. … However the nature of mass media is now profoundly different, in that we are both its subject and the engine behindit. …  ” Artie Vierkant, The Image Object Post-Internet 2010 [online] At: https://jstchillin.org/artie/pdf/The_Image_Object_Post-Internet_us.pdf (Accessed 20.12.2023)

 

Thus, they explained to us how propaganda works, how we “independently” choose this or that juice in the store, and at the same time, we are now the creators of this content, where there is no requirement for a physical original.


And now I have a question - to what extent is the physical original unimportant?  When we focus only on the digital world and the art world, it is indeed possible that a copy will have equal value with the original. But when we talk about real life instead of the digital world, it is important to understand that the original is the basis. What about the physical death of people in Ukraine from Russian bombing? As a result of the extensive practice of distorting the digital world, the real physical world is being called into question.


As a result, I got parents who explained to me how in the video from Bucha the corpses of brutally murdered civilians were moving. Without understanding the truth or lies, all the events taking place in Ukraine and calling into question the prowess of the Russian army were called fakes.




Digital illiteracy, lack of understanding of how to work and select information, check sources, lack of understanding of the limitations of the media space have led my country to where it is now.

And again, it remains incomprehensible to me, despite all this, if my family and I had the same values and ethics, then how did it happen that we ended up on different sides of the barricades?


So I started thinking with a staged experiment.


Creative experiment No 1 An irrational view of war. According to the "Dada" method.


“From 1916 until the mid-1920s, artists in Zurich, New York, Cologne, Hanover, and Paris declared an all-out assault against not only on conventional definitions of art, but on rational thought itself. … as expressed by French artist Jean (Hans) Arp, “to destroy the hoaxes of reason and to discover an unreasoned order. … Dadaists both embraced and critiqued modernity, imbuing their works with references to the technologies, newspapers, films, and advertisements that increasingly defined contemporary life.” MOMA, A catalyst for creativity [online] At: https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/dada/a-catalyst-for-creativity (Accessed 20.12.2023)


And then the Second World War happened, which took the lives of even more people. Keeping all in mind, and still, I needed to start somewhere, so I started here. I turned off logic and brought something illogical and irrational.


I tried to unfold the chair...




Present it in a non-standard form. But the idea didn’t go any further, it seemed to me a bit mundane and a lot of narrative, everyone would start comparing the chair with Joseph Kosuth’s chairs.




I compared a simple line drawing and a material object. On the plane, they exist separately. In its pure form, without artistic treatment, they are not connected. In this case, the black line belongs more to a flat surface than a wooden board.





Is it possible to see the difference between the two opposites? Conflict?


conflict - If beliefs, needs, or facts, etc. conflict, they are very different and cannot easily exist together or both be true. Cambridge Dictionary [online] At: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/conflict (Accessed 20.12.2023)


or in understanding the theory of conflict from Marx:


“Conflict theories assume that all societies have structural power divisions and resource inequalities that lead to groups having conflicting interests (Wells, 1979).” Conflict Theory In Sociology By Charlotte Nickerson Updated on October 10, 2023 [online] At: https://www.simplypsychology.org/conflict-theory.html (Accessed 20.12.2023)


One object is three-dimensional, and the line is flat; at the moment they are in the same environment, although they are not connected with each other. Through such an example, can one understand the difference between conflicting objects - a drawing of a black line and a stick, as part of a three-dimensional sculpture.  These two elements are very opposite to each other, and they also do not combine at the moment. If we consider social conflict, then two elements claim to exist on this plane.




Now the elements are more in balance. What happened? Someone outside intervened and settled it. I need to test The Theory of the Third.


What happened with the addition of the digital line?



The very originality of the work is called into question. Interesting observation. I didn’t think about the fact that the first obvious manipulation of a real image gives a natural reaction of suspicion. I doubted the existence of this work.


There are several ways to bring this image into reality: print this line in this drawing with a black line and paint it on a stick, or print this photo, but the wooden stick will lose its physical presence.


It turns out that flat is not in conflict with flat. The conflict arises in three-dimensional space. It turns out that there are entities that come into conflict depending on the representation. Physical world or digital. Or one needs to transfer a piece of wood (the physical world to the digital world) or a black digital line to the physical world.


This suggests that the physical and digital in this case cannot exist together. Then how can I believe in the existing three-line image? This is probably what my mother is talking about - that the photos from Bucha are fake. Is there only hope for education, knowledge of checking information sources and empathy?


I did a few more tests of combining drawing, painting and sculpture.



Regarding drawing and sculpture, as well as the connection between digital and physical, I remembered OCA Tutor’s recommendation about Ian Kiaer.


As art historian Fabrice Hergott writes in Kiaer’s 2020 monograph, Endnote, tooth: ‘He makes us experience the presence of death in existence, and the presence of life in what no longer exists.’ [online] At: https://alisonjacques.com/artists/ian-kiae (Accessed 20.12.2023)

Kiaer uses the “gesture” in relation to the placement of materials in order to shape the audience’s interaction with the environments.  Ian Kiaer “Tooth House” at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea 01.09.2014 [online] At: https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/ian-kiaer-focal-point-2014/ (Accessed 20.12.2023)


In the next tests, I will try to apply his developments in relation to paintings and sculptures and the space between them.

Using the example of Ian Kaer's works, I realized that it was important for me to work on aesthetics.


Will Beauty or the Ugly Truth improve a person? The question of Catharsis.



I destroyed my colour field by introducing scraps of materials from my studio into it.





Inserting it into a frame, framing the work, in my opinion, should have given a greater aesthetic touch.



Spectators who saw this work live gave the following associations: pain, Chernobyl, devastation, destruction. This turned out to be an example of a negative experience.


«The word ‘catharsis’ derives from the Greek substantive kátharsis (purgation, cleansing, purifi cation) … In Aristotle’s Poetics, the term ‘catharsis’, before any aesthetic meaning, refers to purification in a literal and metaphorical sense, ranging from the everyday act of washing oneself, to its metaphorical extension to ritual ‘cleansings’ after ‘spoiling’ or ‘sacrilege’ such as ‘impermissible presence at a holy place’ (cf. Dodds 1951).» Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism, Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 259–264, Catharsis, Peter Thomas [online] At: https://inkrit.de/neuinkrit/mediadaten/en/en_archivehcdm/catharsis-hcdm.pdf (Accessed 27.11.2023)

 



A negative experience in the understanding of Catharsis leads to the purification of the viewer, which still needs to be analyzed further in the books. The question arises: how is it verified that the audience has become better? Tears? Powerful emotions? And to transform into “best self,” does one need a negative emotion, or will the world also become better from the beautiful?

If you follow the theory of broken windows - if a person is surrounded by beauty and aesthetics, then he will become better.

«Their theory further posits that the prevalence of disorder creates fear in the minds of citizens who are convinced that the area is unsafe.»  Broken Windows Theory [online] At: https://www.britannica.com/topic/broken-windows-theory (Accessed 17.11.2023)

 



But what is beauty and aesthetics - if they are different for everyone?






This thought pushed me towards a bright contrast - black and white, and my color field against the contrast of garbage from my studio.

 


This work evokes strong emotions among the viewers of my studio.



Here I need to decide further on how to measure or find an approach to beauty and aesthetics.

“[Arthur] Danto also observes that “aestheticians are not interested enough in art to pay for it,” referring to a poster he commissioned Saul Steinberg to make for an aesthetics conference, which did not sell.” (Barrett, 2017 p. 162)

Aesthetics and beauty have not been used in art as a quality indicator for a long time, so it is difficult to determine the boundaries of this issue.

But I suspect that many “peasants” from the Greenberg Avant-Garde and Kitsch are still looking for beauty in contemporary art. And again the question is - how did this huge difference appear between the search and non-search for beauty in art? The question is too big and extremely historical.

I ask myself this question, what am I looking for in art? Why do I always return to aesthetics and what does it mean to me? For example, I know that such a choice of aesthetics as Camille Henrot “The Pale Fox” not close for me. Selecting objects on eBay and putting them together into compositions and installations does not contain an element of the artist’s craft.

Maybe that’s why it’s so important for me to spend time with materials and pay attention to it. It’s as if time is imprinted, for example, on the wooden boards by the structure and texture, one can understand how much work I’ve done.


Most likely, for me, aesthetics in art, and in everything else, is a combination of qualities and aspects to evaluate a particular area. I will give an example later with such criteria.

 

 

In further reasoning and elaboration of the works, each of them changed.



Even the appearance of the sun in my studio made me think about the environment for displaying my work.


I unexpectedly added one of my sculptures to the blue work; it stood not far away and I captured it with my gaze.



Colour and materials connected with each other. But this is a very simple, straight-to-the-point combination of things - in colour and shape, and also in contrast.


This contrast between sculpture and “painting” led me to the next experiment.

 



I started with painting - I must say that I missed that kind of mixing of paint and the physical movement of my hand in creating a spot of colour.



Then I began to build up the tone and introduced a sharp conflict - elements of sculpture.



As a result, one can say that the work has become a relief, but still, the elements here are radically opposite to the canvas.




They shouldn't be here in the first place. And in relief, it is a balanced flow of material.

Jagged paint supports broken boards. The colour of the layers is also in balance and interaction.

VIdeo of the workin process: https://youtube.com/shorts/-NQW8g7BPn8




At the moment of adding different paintings and objects to this work, I began to do this with the work from the previous experiment.



So I again returned to the issue of digital and physical in artwork.



And I continued this topic...



but there will be a reflection in the next post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography and references

 

1.    Barrett, Terry Why Is That Art? Aesthetics and Criticism of Contemporary Art. Third Edition. Oxford University Press (2017)

2.    Jean-Paul Martinon - Curating As Ethics (2020) the University of Minnesota Press

3.    After Rwanda_ In Search of a New Ethics, Jean-Paul Martinon (2013) Studies in Intercultural Philosophy, BRILL

4.     Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism, Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 259–264, Catharsis, Peter Thomas [online] At: https://inkrit.de/neuinkrit/mediadaten/en/en_archivehcdm/catharsis-hcdm.pdf (Accessed 27.11.2023)

5.     Art and Culture, CRITICAL ESSAYS, Clement Greenberg, BEACON PRESS BOSTON 1989

 

 

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