Appropriation

Most of my current work involves appropriating something. Whether it is someone else's artwork on the cover of a book, or an object found on the street, I like to take an object and give it a new story.

A book painting from my series "stangers" where I paint over found books

However, some people disagree with this - especially people who work in marketing or digital adverting, a world which it is prone to copying, re-tweeting and cannibalising other people's content. However, I do not believe that art and marketing are not the same thing. For me it is about intention. 

Someone crudely implied that my work was similar to this restoration disaster,

In this series, I choose to collect books that I have never read, then glue them shut and start painting over the cover. First, I will remove all text from the book, then begin blurring, adding or removing parts of the image in order to create something new.

When all the books are shown together, they create a new story. This isn't enough for some people, who proceeded to attack me on facebook.

However, a former fellow art student, Angelique Kendall, came to my rescue and defended my practice far more eloquently than I can. Here is what she said:

"Might I chime in? Jacques, I immediately viewed the work as appropriation, and also saw the analogy of books to people. I find it very interesting that the covers, which are meant to be drawing people into the book to open its pages and read it, are serving a completely different role here just by virtue of the fact that you have glued the book shut. It emphasises that the cover stands on its own merit - but only when it is not performing its function. Whilst performing its function it is anonymous, hidden behind titles and blurbs, we rarely consider it on its own merit as a work of art, but rather appreciate the overall design as a design. Through your painting you have purposefully exposed that anonymity, and although you have revealed it by inviting closer inspection, it remains anonymous (hence that I like that you dont credit the original - it would undermine that very anonymity that you are exposing). The analogy to human strangers is stronger that way. I also like it that some parts of the cover are left unpainted; the covering / revealing in the anonymous strangers is an incomplete act, ambiguous, and a continual "work in progress"... I get it, and if I do so will others (in my humble opinion). Keep going! (And thanks for sharing the images - it is inspiring me to pick up my brushes again too!) Happy painting!

She has said it all far better than I can. So I am just going to stick to expressing myself with my paintbrush, even after others try to discredit me. I write enough in my day job after all.

Strangers

"And I’ve noticed a change: where the sort of disdain that we had for the home town life has been replaced by a certain nostalgia – in some cases, even moments of doubt, late at night –about that choice we made so many years ago, to go and be strangers in a new world and try to make it our own, and wether that choice was the right one."

- Lea Thau, Strangers

This podcast by Leah Thau got me thinking about what a stranger really is. I certainly relate to her: being a foreigner in a new world and trying to make it my own, even the endless self-doubt about the choices I've made. I identify with the stories she tells, so go and listen to them, they are great. But I'd like to explore this word "stranger" a little more and delve a little deeper.

As my favourite philosopher, and adoptive name-sake Jacques Derrida points out: how can one truly ever know others, when one can never really know oneself? So are we strangers to ourselves? Does this make everyone a stranger? When is someone no longer a stranger to you and what qualifies someone as a stranger? Is it how well you know them, or think you know them?

You can know someone for years, even love someone, but then they can surprise you and do something completely unexpected, making you question if you ever really knew them at all. After this betrayal they become a kind of stranger all over again. So perhaps it has something to do with trust? After all, we were constantly told as children not to trust strangers.

Even surreal is when a person you once knew and trusted intimately, slowly fades into obscurity and out of your life, becoming a stranger all over again. This is demonstrated perfectly in Daughter's haunting song "Winter".

And we were in flames, I needed, I needed you
To run through my veins, like disease, disease
And now we are strange, strangers

I've always found it ironic how the largest cities in the world seem to be the loneliest places. Its as if the greater the concentration of strangers, the more intensely one feels the loneliness. 

I first noticed this in London's epicentre: standing in oxford circus, with a whirlpool of people swirling around me, a torrent of strangers, each wrapped up in their own lives. Closed books that I will never read, each with their own story, which I can only guess at, painting their covers with my own brush.

London is full of these stories.

Like the man in the red hoodie, who stands outside his block of flats on West End Lane, day-in, day-out, just hidden from view behind the hedge, grinning and smiling as he bops to the sound coming from his earphones that only he can hear.

Or the girl in Camden staring out of her window into the distance, ignoring the crowds beneath her while she smokes a cigarette.

Or the woman sobbing silently on the Jubilee line. Was she heart broken, hurt or grieving? I can only imagine.

We are all strangers.