Saturday, May 28, 2005

Bring Darko Maver into the Equation

Nick Salvatore writes that:

All this discussion of lies and faked photos as art immediately reminded me of the career of Darko Maver.

As discussed here, Maver was supposed to have based his work on using various sculpting materials to painstakingly re-create crime scenes and murders he'd seen in photos. The pieces were so obsessively crafted and "life"-like that they were nearly indiscernable from the actual scenes he recreated. The audience only ever saw his work in the form of photographs, so presentations of his work wound up looking like collections of forensic and medical photos.

As it turns out, that's exactly what they were. A couple of neoists had found a bunch of grim photos, re-imagined them as images of re-creations, created a compelling life story for their artist, and presented it all to the unknowing public. Not that this is going on here, necessarily.

But it's interesting to me that, years after the Maver thing, there's an artist out there who's actually put in the man-hours to make a more audience-friendly version of the same point. And I can't help but wonder whether Demand's work achieves or conveys anything that "Maver's" work did not. I suppose I should see the show.

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