In being ‘recorded and announced’ through the media as an ‘urban event’ (Wodiczko 1992, p.196) Wodiczko’s projections are absorbed back into the economy of images on which he draws. Yet, in remembering the ‘missing’ image, the ‘missing’ part, this media-documentation continues to ‘write over’ the city’s spaces, becoming yet another ‘repertoire of iconography’ in which its meaning are produced.
(Kaye, 2000, 217)
The projection of Wodiczko’s images onto other public buildings/statutes in order to make a statement inspired my own piece of work based on a similar theme. Much like the way in 1986 Wodiczko projected an image onto St Mark’s bell tower in Venice (image 1), I experimented with this technique by incorporating my own sketch of the ‘The Worth Room’ (image 2) straight back onto a realistic depiction, i.e, a photograph, from the site with which it was created from. This introduced the notion of conflict within the work through the use of line drawing and photography. The idea of the space behind the drawing as ‘missing’ also creates an interesting conception of layering, or lack of, much like in Wodiczko’s projections.
The second influential artist on my work was Texas-born artist Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg works with a wide range of materials and techniques, and is most famously noted for his combination of two dimensional paintings with sculpture (a series of works he calls ‘Combines’). Collage features a lot within his work; the merging of photography with raw materials is an aspect of his artwork that takes my interest in regards to how it could be applied to an installation piece.
The combination of printed image, typed text and hand-written text in Rauschenberg’s Jewish Museum is an aspect that directly influenced my own work. The text acts as a label for its surroundings – without the writing, due to the distortion of the image, it may not be possible to gather any understanding from the work. Similarly, written text also plays a huge role within the library too – perhaps from the outside, without the words ‘Great Central Library Warehouse’ painted on the front it may also be impossible to comprehend just what could be on the inside of the building. Without written instructions inside the library, it wouldn’t function as smoothly. Like the written text at the bottom of Rauschnberg’s image, the library is full of standards and rules – all that are largely communicated through the universal medium of language and text.
The overall vision for my image was to capture the clashing of materials, in a way that resembled the opposing architecture that features throughout the library, within one frame. Whilst walking around the site, it is easy to recognise the original aspects of the building’s heritage and the modern design that has been superimposed in order to change its function into a library, which is something I represented through the stark contrast in colours. The fact that the site’s ‘title’ contains the juxtaposition of the words ‘library’ and ‘warehouse’ suggests a collide in the building’s purpose that is still continuing through its current structural design, and is therefore something I believe needs further exploration when creating our piece.
Works Cited.
Kaye, N (2000) Site-Specific Art : Performance, Place, And Documentation. London/New York: Routledge.
Rauschenber, R. (1963) Jewish Museum. [online] Available from http://art.millettdesign.com/portfolio/rauschenberg-liz-osborne. [Accessed 16/01/2014].
Wodiczko, K. (1986) Public Projections.The MIT Press, 38 3-22.