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Document généré le 10 août 2022 03:57
Ciel variable
Art, photo, médias, culture
Roy Arden
The World as Will and Representation
Numéro 71, mars 2006
Un monde d’images
Image World
URI : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/20604ac
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Éditeur(s)
Les Productions Ciel variable
ISSN
1711-7682 (imprimé)
1923-8932 (numérique)
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(2006). The World as Will and Representation. Ciel variable, (71), 24–27.
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R O Y A
The World as Will and Representation
Roy Arden's piece presents a kaleidoscopic flux of some 10,000 images
extracted from the web, depicting different manifestations of the concrete
world.
Structured around arbitrary entries, it deploys so many numerous
variations that we are left in a state of amazement and confusion. This
web project could appear to arise from an encyclopedic
will,
but rather
shows the impossibility of such an entreprise, exposing the limits and
incoherence of the virtual archive. Schopenhauer's pessimism, and its
vision of circularity and sameness, still appears of a great relevance in the
actual state of omnipresence, and accelerated circulation, of the image.
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Notes on The World as Will and Representation (Archive, 2004-)
ROYARDEN
I
have collected images since I was a child; the first were usually cut
with scissors from Life magazine. I also then began collecting images
in my mind. I remember the journalistic images of the civil-rights
marches, of Vietnam, the Beatles, and so on, that began to accumu-
late in my mental archive. In the sixties, life was still quiet enough for
a child to find the necessary boredom, the empty time, to be prompted
to browse through the Encyclopaedias Britannica. I was fascinated by
all of the different subjects and how they were ordered, but I was always
drawn more to the pictures than to the texts. Although I couldn't
understand what was written about, say, "astrophysics," I learned the
language of the images produced by that discipline. I noticed that each
subject seemed to have a different style of picture.
Later, when I became interested in visual art as such, I recognized
that many artists worked with encyclopedic or archival models.
Instead of trying to make new images, they took images from the world
as a raw material. There is a tradition that runs from the collages of Kurt
Schwitters to Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard
Richter, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Vija Celmins, Richard Prince, Sherrie
Levine, and Cady Noland. This tradition has often been characterized
as a counter-tradition that aims to destroy a traditional idea of art based on
originality. While I certainly reject that avant-gardiste claim as sopho-
moric and tiresome, it is clear that this new tradition - of artists using
received images - has expanded the vocabulary and territory of
art.
For my
own practice, Hans-Peter Feldmann is the most important artist in this
line - for being the first to step over into pure, unqualified appropriation.
I have always kept files of paper cuttings; in 1991,1 started to keep
a folder called The World as Will and Representation. This title itself is
borrowed from the major work by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.
My intention was eventually to make collages from these cuttings, but
I wanted to wait until I had a critical mass of images to work from. I
collected paper images until I discovered the Internet and image search
engines. Suddenly, a quantity of images was available that seemed infi-
nite.
After a few years of collecting online, it became apparent that the
supply was not infinite after all; I started to get a sense of the shape and
limits of the online image archive.
As I collected images, I ordered them in titled folders that were
alphabetically ordered by default. My criteria for the images were that
they be photographic and that they clearly show something that existed
in the world. The chosen images also had to be vernacular, or "non-art."
I wanted subject-oriented, rather than author-oriented, imagery. These
criteria are increasingly violated - like every system, mine is open to
corruption. When image searching, I randomly follow my interests.
For days, I might search for images of "rubber" and then move on to
"anechoic chambers" or "Charlotte Rampling." It is almost idiotic work
that can be done half-asleep, but I suppose I have a deep interest in the
nature and scope of the image world. My façade of encyclopedic objec-
tivity is always slipping, and that is where the poetry and fun enter the
project. If my archive is about the necessity of collecting and ordering
images of the world, it is also about the sheer folly of such an enterprise.
By 2004,1 had still not begun to make collages from my archive,
and I then realized that it might be interesting to return these images to
their source, the Internet. A QuickTime movie was made that is a simple
slide show of the ten thousand images in the archive. It was important
that the images appear completely surrounded by black - that the project
completely take over the computer screen. A sound loop was fashioned
from part of the intro to Timmy Thomas's 1973 hit "Why Can't We Live
Together?" I wanted something with a metronome-like, mechanical sim-
plicity. Thomas's tune also offered soul and anticipation, not to mention
the suggestion of a universal will. I like to think that Schopenhauer would
approve of the song. The archive continues to grow and I plan to update
the Web project to twenty thousand images soon. I am not a technically
minded person, and this project has taught me that the Internet is a very
unstable medium. Applications are constantly being updated and changed,
and no matter how one designs a site, it will look and behave differently
on different people's computers - universality thwarted again.
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