CARTOON

Stephen Andrews
curated by Doina Popescu

February 6 – March 7, 2009
!! open Feb 6 – 15, daily 11 – 19
after Feb 15 Tue – Sat, 12 – 18 !!

Vernissage: Friday, February 6th, 2009, 18h

--> zur deutschen Version

Interview between exhibition curator Doina Popescu and Stephen Andrews, February 2009.

DP Your work creates a rich and subtle dialogue between your own very layered and carefully constructed artistic processes on the one hand and the emotionally charged patterns of image production in much of current public media on the other. Let us talk for a moment about your animation piece titled Cartoon. By first deconstructing and then reassembling a highly aggressive car commercial into ca. 400 four colour hand drawn images and breaking each moment of the sequence down into a single pixelated screen, you seem to slow down and stretch both space and time, affording us the opportunity for differentiated reflection on a sequence that would otherwise simply overwhelm us with its core message of raw power and ubiquitous violence. By further introducing the deer as road-kill or collateral damage and a young man of soldiering age whose deer-like eyes are filled with fear, you confront us with the contradictions of our society that condones violence in cartoons and sends its young to the killing fields. The car runs over the deer caught in the glaring headlights and over us, exposing to us its military hardware, as we come to realise that we are both driver and victim caught in endless loops of deeply ambiguous notions of desire and freedom.

Stephen Andrews | Cell from Cartoon crayon on mylar | part of animation sequence | 2007

Similarly in The Quick and the Dead the harrowing images of the indistinguishable fires of war and the callous degradation of individual human life are retouched frame by frame with dedicated care by your hand and thus infused with a new perspective and vision that gives them longevity, allowing these scenes to become part of our own emotional and intellectual memory work. By manually reworking this subject matter you lend the found images an aura of human reflection and tragic dignity that would otherwise be obscured. In how far do you view your work as a critique of contemporary media practices and how is this directly contrasted with and related to the evolution of your artistic practice, which employs a wide range of largely traditional, manual techniques?

SA Generally, I don't start working with a particular critique in mind. Intuition is my Seeing Eye dog. I don't really know where I am going I wait to find out when I get there. I work from life and since everything today is mediated I use appropriated source material culled from different sources. Current events and even our own memories are streamed through various filters. What I try to do is represent the means by which we receive information as well as the imagery itself and its meanings. This can take the form of pixilation or the dot matrix rendered by hand using different materials. Both the form and the materials used are important and speak to the content of the imagery. I started using the dot matrix in 2002 when I found very little reporting in the print media of the political situation. It was a way to represent this lack. Internet searches of soldiers' blogs and alternative information sites supplied me with material to work from. In some ways I think of this as a kind of curatorial project, making sense of the millions of images and videos available on line by selecting, ordering and re-editing. This source material was then rendered as drawings using a homemade colour separation technique using window screening and crayons that imitated the look of newspaper photographs. 'Cartoon' is stitched from three different sources not unlike Frankenstein's monster. The sheer number of images requires a certain archaeology of the Internet to exhume images from the trash. Footage of soldiers playing out an age-old struggle of life and death need to be remembered and translated into a less disposable format.

Stephen Andrews | Cell from Cartoon crayon on mylar | part of animation sequence | 2007

DP Many years ago you were a student of photography at Ryerson University. From there you branched out to other related media. I am interested in your fascination with the relationships between the photographic image, cinematic sequences, television, and Internet images. As your work has moved from the early use of grainy transfer techniques reminiscent of both lithography and experimental cinema (for example in The 1st Part of the 2nd Half), to the conscious inclusion of the dot matrix patterns of newsprint and the pixelation of Internet sequences, I would like to ask you to elucidate the development of your work with regards to the wide range of media that has inspired you. And more specifically, as your current exhibition is part of Forum Expanded at the Berlinale 2009, I would like to invite you to discuss your artistic history with regards to the interplay between the still image, film and video.

SA Being first generation born and raised with television I learned its vocabulary early. It, as much as cinema, has informed my worldview and my understanding of the construction of various fictions. I was always one of those people that talked back to the television with a running commentary. For the most part my artistic voice was expressed with drawing. I fell into animation not of my own volition but was invited to produce a short animation for a film festival complete with tech support and much handholding. The car commercial is at the apex of visual culture at this point in time. More money is spent on a 30 second spot than almost anything else and therefore seems to me an interesting subject. It is the site of all our contradictions, the war for oil, poor urban planning, the environment, class and our unselfconscious love of the automobile. "Cartoon" is my response. It is a companion piece to "The quick and the dead" which is based on war footage. I wanted to take this crucial minute in these lives and valorise it. For me it is the parable of Cain and Abel. It reminds us of the cost of war. In tandem both works address North American network television, where the news is always neatly sandwiched in between the ads.

DP Last year you were part of an exhibition called Documentary Uncertainty at the Images Festival of Independent Media in Toronto. The title of that show was taken from an article of the same name by Berlin artist and cultural theorist Hito Steyerl, who was concerned with the fact that the closer to reality we get, the less intelligible it becomes. She called this the 'uncertainty principle of modern documentarism,' and maintained that finding a critical position with respect to these images implies much more than simply taking this into account or exposing it. It means replacing the set of affects, which is connected to this uncertainty namely stress, exposure, threat and a general sense of loss and confusion with another one. In Toronto you exhibited among other works a series of portraits entitled Dramatis Personae, made up of reworked Internet images of atrocities committed on human beings in Iraq, some of which were real and some of which turned out upon further investigation to be fake. What is your view on the tension between our tendency to take the document at face value, as uncontested reality, and the phenomenon of the emotionally harrowing yet often critically un-intelligible experience of what we see in the media today?

Stephen Andrews | Cell from Cartoon crayon on mylar | part of animation sequence | 2007

SA The media is the great purveyor of ideology. Never was this clearer than in the period following 9/11. It fanned the flames of fear, which enabled the great swindle that is the Iraq debacle and aided and abetted the retraction of various liberties. What was real or fake? Conspiracy theorists run wild with this stuff. I was interested in doing a series of portraits of the pawns in the game. Ipso facto, us in the case of the drawing of the 'fake', the original photo appeared a couple of days before the Abu Ghraib story broke in the Daily Mirror. Apparently it was staged but it is remarkable how little it differs from the 'real' photos that appeared in the New Yorker. Trophy photographs had been in circulation on soldiers' blogs for sometime prior. The security breach was promptly plugged and access to the blogs was blacked out. The line between abstraction and figuration is an interesting one. A photo rendered in a dot matrix disintegrates into abstraction the more it is magnified. Legibility in the image is a game I have played in my work for a while now. Abstraction troubles the document by multiplying the number of possible interpretations.

DP One of the themes that accompany us throughout your work is that of light. I am thinking for example of the foreboding red and white flashes or flares at the beginning of Cartoon, ever present fire in the Quick and the Dead, explosions in much of your war imagery, or simply the reflection of light in a puddle of debris. Your use of light is at once magical and ominously linked to death and destruction, while alluding to the various forms of media that make up an integral part of your own artistic dialogue. Could you elaborate on your fascination with the phenomenon of light and its symbolism?

SA Tragedy, as a narrative device, has always held sway over the imagination. It is a way to find value in the human predicament. Light has been used as a metaphor for the transformative nature of the sublime. Its terrible beauty is a crucible through which one can pass somehow changed or redeemed. Its illumination threatens to obliterate the visual object. Both the sublime and the tragic contain contradictory notions, light and dark, pleasure and pain understood through an aesthetic experience. My attempts at representing light are a way to describe nothingness, the cusp of being and not being, if you will.

DP In conclusion I would like to take a moment to talk about your latest artistic projects. You are presently working on large-scale oil paintings and on a public art installation for downtown Toronto that will be rendered as a mosaic. Could you please tell us a bit more about the themes and the artistic forms that lie at the core of your current creative activities and how these have grown out of your previous body of work.

SA A lot of my work has been about the view of the world from the vantage point of the armchair; looking at the world through TV or the Internet. Certainly as much about the viewer is revealed as the view itself. Still, I want to be more specific about my own POV so the new work is concerned with representations of home and the contradictions of its privilege. The mosaic I am working on is titled 'a small part of something larger' which I think pretty much sums up my entire project. Everything is just a part of some greater scheme.

In collaboration and with support from Forum Expanded Berlinale 59 Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin, Ryerson Photography Gallery and Research Centre, Toronto and Canadian Embassy in Berlin

opening
Friday, February 6th, 2009, 18h

exhibition
February 6 – March 7, 2009

opening hours
Feb 6 – 15 | daily | 11 – 19
after Feb 15 | Tue – Sat | 12 – 18

location
WILDE GALLERY
Chausseestrasse 7
D-10115 Berlin
info@wilde-gallery.com
www.wilde-gallery.com