On Friday, November 22, the Friday lecture was focused on failure. In the lecture, we heard stories of ‘failure’ from the tutors–which in discussion we discovered is a relative term of appraisal. Before the lecture, we had been tasked to bring in the work of another practitioner that we considered a failure as well as one of our own ‘failed’ pieces.
The work that I chose to speak about was the 2003 film ‘The Room’ directed by Tommy Wiseau. It is considered to be one of the worst films of all time. His work strikes me as an extra hard failure because he largely thought it to be a success. His unawareness to the quality of the work that he produced makes him seem as if he is someone who is unable to appraise his own work, which is a critical component of competency. But as a result, there has developed a culture that loves to bask in his failure. The film now has quite a cult following.
The afternoon part of the lecture involved modifying one of our pieces from the previous project, and I chose to revisit the linear version of the Guernica Parody that I completed for the Artifact project. I considered this to be a failure because the parody didn’t feel wholly justified. Picasso’s Guernica is revered to be one of the most powerful anti-war pieces of all time.
I took the piece and created a juxtaposition of the original composition with American iconography, but it felt a little in poor taste, or perhaps not entirely thought through. Picasso/me, Guernica/America, the Spanish Civil War & WWII/US political conflict. It felt as if I needed to reckon with it somehow.
So, I set out to fail harder at the parody by obscuring the imagery and using garish colors, but I found myself to be failing at failing because I wanted to keep some of the imagery. Over the images, I then wrote my key concerns of the piece: I am not Picasso, America is not Guernica.
I wrote this in acrylic paint, directly using the tube. Eventually my handwriting obscured the entire image.
Because the image was so dense with ink/paint, it was going to take a long time to dry. In order to remove some of the excess ink. The results created these interesting negatives of the words. It is still clear that the ink indicates letters, and they have a similar aesthetic to some street art tags. I liked the removal ink pieces because in a way, they were an anti-parody. The original piece was based on an image by another. However, these prints are purely what I have constructed on top of the existing image.
I failed to create a parody because I created something entirely original with these blots. They took on a new life of their own.
RCA Graduate Diploma 