Oliver Laric’s Not So Original Footage
Oliver Laric is an artist who
rarely has anything new to say. His work frames the creative potential
of repetition, championing the idea of “the copy” as denser in meaning
and, in this day and age, somehow more genuine, than any notion of a
true “original.” A copy has simply lived more: it contains within it not
just the image or idea at hand, but also the imprint of time, place or
identity linked with that moment as well as the motive of duplication.
“Versions,” Laric’s video treatise on this subject, features an animated
slide show of contemporary copies (the infamously Photoshopped 2008
image of missile tests in Iran, in which the missiles were cloned for
heightened visual impact; Internet memes like the Zidane head butt,
remixed and disseminated by users around the world); and historical
antecedents (recycled character animations from early Disney movies;
figurative archetypes taken from classical sculpture) that trace its
relevance back to far before copy and paste was a way of life. Laric
updates the piece regularly, and now a handful of versions of “Versions”
are circulating online with many of his other works, causing
discrepancies and redundancies that surface as a digitally savvy form of
authenticity.
Invited to create a site-specific project for this year’s
Frieze Art Fair,
Laric chose the fair itself as his subject. With a super-high-res
camera recording in slow motion, the Austrian-born artist roamed
Regent’s Park, gathering audio-visual samples to distribute as open
source stock footage. It’s unclear whether the gossamer fabric falling
across the frame was found in a windy installation or in the garb of a
collector; if the screw driven into a two-by-four is a last-minute fix
or some kind of performance. Laric playfully undermines the obsessions
that fuel the existence of an art fair — context, value, ownership — by
obliterating any frame of reference for these clips and allowing anybody
to reappoint them for new readings and for telling new stories.
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