Annie Macdonell
"The images in this series are scans of found 35mm slides. I came across a box of them next to the trash a few months ago. They were unlabeled, undated, and unsourced. I’ve put together a selection of 15, which now form a slideshow you can click through on your computer monitor. Maybe you will recognize some of the images. Others you may not recognize specifically, but you will certainly be familiar with their sources – art monographs, fashion magazines, notebooks and textbooks, technical manuals." [Annie MacDonell, Interview in Either/And] on her work Split ScreenMacDonell was a former classmate of mine at Ryerson University, where she received a BA in photography. She went on to get a Master of Fine Arts in Lefresnoy, a university in France. Here is more on her statement of her work Split Screen in Either/And:
The slides were produced on a copy stand which, before the flatbed scanner, was the simplest means of reproducing images. Each one contains an interruption of the image by the spine of the book in which it originally appeared. The visibility of the spine is what attracts me to them. It marks only one of the many transformations these images have undergone since they were produced by the original photographer or artist. But in doing so, it places the histories and genealogies of these images in the foreground. The slides were shot for pedagogical purposes, to be projected large in front of a classroom and discussed as a group. Before that, they were published in books and magazines, to be purchased and leafed through by individuals. And before that they were, perhaps, images matted and framed behind glass on a wall. Now we may be browsing effortlessly through them, each on our slick backlit monitors. But the spine’s interruption of the image reminds us of where they came from in the first place, and how our ways of encountering them continue to shift along with the technology that delivers them to us.That is a lot of words for simply showing pictures from magazines which spread across two pages (split by the spine of the book).
Such is the verbose nature of contemporary "artists" who have a lot to say about their vapid works.
MacDonell's Master of Fine Arts thesis was "about representation itself, which has always seemed to me a more interesting conversation," as she explains in the Either/And interview.
What this means is that MacDonell, for all her "artistic" vision, is not an artist. When tested, she's probably not very skilled at any of these artistic fields either: Film making (taking out the camera, shooting images, editing those images, producing a coherent whole), painting, drawing, or sculpture (she's big on "installations" which to her probably constitutes sculpture). All her works are borrowed, which I term as stolen, from various sources. And of course, not from real artists, which would have given her some exposure, and eventually something to emulate, but from the photographs and films she finds in people's garbage bins.
What a macabre and nihilistic way to represent the world! And it shows in her disjointed, cut ups, collages and installations.
Art for this conceited individual is about talking about art, rather than making art. And these "found objects" have been her means of "conversation" rather than creation.
Below is a photograph I took about two years ago which is around a similar theme of displaying cultural and sexual messages through contemporary cultural signs. The original post, with my commentary is in Camera Lucida under The Sexy Escape.
Kidist P. Asrat
Here is how I see the superiority of my work:
a. My photograph shows:
- Context
- Humanity - how ordinary people look next to these iconic images
- Architecture - how images are placed in or on buildings
- Real life - the images show ordinary people juxtaposed with the images, mannequins and shop windows
- Poetry - I try to reference these views to come up with some kind of visual poetry
b. Macdonell's images show:
- Disjointed images, shapes and forms: Her cut-off hands of the mannequin, her burlesque dancer revolving in a few frames of a film, have no connection to the real world, and rotate within the image's confines
- Focused on phallic: Almost all her work, at some point, narrows in on the male or female sexual organs
- Cut off from real life: Even though she says she finds these "objects" in people's trash, she isolates them from the owners, and creates her own, insulated world out of them
- Morbid: Her objects form a collection of "found" items which have been thrown away, and which had no use for their owners. She doesn't salvage them and bring them back to their original use (building a new mannequin to of the hand, for example), or elevate them by creating something worthwhile, but uses them to further degrade them.
- Nihilistic: She says in an interview: "The work becomes about representation itself, which has always seemed to me a more interesting conversation [than talking about the work]." The objects, the images, the sculptures no longer count, which means what they represent does not matter either.
Macdonell, and the string of "artists" of her era, are clever wordmongers. They have not talent in art, but somehow decided that they wanted to work in art. This proved difficult, and their way out is to "have conversations about representation," as they spitefully malign art and creation.
Here are links to Macdonell's works and interviews:
- Commentary on film installation Time is a One trick Pony.
- Cinema and Visual Pleasure at the 2006 Viennale
- Interview at the Mercer Union: Originality and the Avant Garde (on Art and Repetition)
- Grange Prize short-list interview
- Macdonell's website
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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