Versions

I think ignorance of copyright and art market debate is beneficial to my health and happiness.

I don’t see any necessity in producing images myself — everything that I would need exists, it’s just about finding it.” Is the artist as creator a thing of the past?

Some of my favorite exhibitions don’t make clear distinctions between those fields, incorporating works by journalists, architects, musicians, etc. I think it is a more interesting strategy to curate works, instead of being involved in a scene or a CV

(Oliver Laric)

In the landscape of contemporary art, I find Oliver Laric’s work most compelling right now because he makes visible what  often goes unnoticed: the borrowed image or gesture. Luis Borges once claimed that translations produce new works. Oliver Laric’s work very much reflects this idea. He uses existing images to create new images, whereby the destruction of one image creates another image, just as with iconoclasm.

“If you are looking for a brilliant statement on the visual culture of the Internet age, or an in-depth analysis of its historical roots in Western culture, I couldn’t suggest anything better.” Laric’s Versions are a two-channel video, a series of sculptures, airbrushed images of missiles, a talk, a PDF, a novel, a recipe a play, a dance routine, a feature film and a merchandise.

It challenges current modes of creative production and the hierarchies of an “authentic,” or original image. It dismisses the idea of the original and suggests a new look at image making, one in which pirate copies and appropriations gradually replace the original in a digitized aged.

Laric uses found material from places like youtube, Flickr, Google, 4chan, 3Dwarehouse and fuses high and low art images with philosophy and critical theory.

http://oliverlaric.com/vvversions.htm

His work contemplates how we experience images today, how they are mediated, he states, “Some of my favorite artworks and movies have only been described to me. A description can generate new work while acting as a portrait of the person retelling the idea, plot, etc.”

http://vimeo.com/17815471

http://archive.rhizome.org/artbase/56398/timeline.html
http://oliverlaric.com/vvversions.htm

Laric takes the idea of deinstitutionalization of an artwork the whole way in his project Biennale Online 2013, which is an incomplete, partially outlined timeline of online exhibitions between the years 1991 and 2013. This, naturally,  is not an authoritative history of an online exhibition but rather Laric’s very own reiteration of ahistorical propositions. Laric consulted with artists and curators as, for instance, the New Museum’s Curator Lauren Cornell, who has herself started a research project that investigates how contemporary art projects may function beyond the traditional format of exhibition-and-catalogue, called Open Curating is concerned with new forms of interaction between publics – whether online followers or physical visitors – with artworks and their production, display and discursive context.