Dawn posted this video:
Dawn asks some interesting questions about art based off this video, in regards to reverse images and temporality/ephemeralness. However, I’m reminded of a question that sprang into my head when I first started reading garfield minus garfield, the hilarious comic that removes Garfield, both the image and his thoughts/dialogue, from old Garfield strips and leaves Jon Arbuckle there, alone, suddenly re-coded as more depressed, more lonely, more Nietzschean. What garfield minus garfield does, what Paul “Moose” Curtis does, is the opposite (the reverse) of what we normally view art-making and composition: it is taking away. In garfield minus garfield, the centrality of the strip, Garfield himself, is removed. In Curtis’s art, the abundance of dirt is taken away. There are two different effects: one move exaggerates what is still present (Jon’s instability/quirkiness); the other move exaggerates both what has been removed and what still remains: the dirt.
What is the potential for art and compositions that “take away” — that escape our traditional collaging work of add, add, add, and instead remove, remove, remove? How does something become less simple with less stuff — less dirt, less Garfield, less…
