eronrauch

Spring cleaning for me is always a special time. Not only is cleaning one of the things that I do to sooth an oft-frazzled mind (with a decent beer, like Oaked Arrogant Bastard), but it also involves digging through all of my menagerie of collected proposed collage/art materials. While much of the work I've shown on this blog has been photographic, a large part of my art practice involves collage or found materials that are manipulated or re-contextualized. I find that playing with the poetics of objects is a great way to think about whatever topic is interesting me, even if I find my success rate to be significantly lower than usual with these projects. Though I'll be presenting some of the spring projects in small groups, Mel did point out, after staring at many of these hung in our work-in-progress gallery in our hall, that they might only really make sense as a big heterogeneous body. I guess the old joke about my work being something like a "one-man schizophrenic group show" holds true, even if I prefer the more dignified description of my work as being more like a sprawling research essay with many branching, converging and even contradicting ideas that explore a theme.

These four pieces are from a project loosely called "Jenny's Archive" which are small-ish works, around 12" x 20" that are collages/decollages of the fold-out posters in japanese-language anime magazines such as Animage, Newtype, and Megami.















These four are examples from what will eventually be a project that uses every single fold-out-poster from the archive of old anime magazines that were gifted to by Jenny [who often gives me curious media to turn into art] so she didn't have to move them.

Currently, these works consist of layers of fractured/torn posters, both collaged and picked back out, that reveal multiple layers of similar anime genre pin-up images. My organization process is based on the conventions of these posters. That is, one woman in the middle of the [vertical] poster. Two women posing together [horizontal]. Three women from the knees up. Etc. You may notice I said "women" - in two full boxes, there were enough posters with males in them to form a grand total of one, yet-un-produced, image...

The idea was born partially be a critique I had of the increasingly symbolic & mythological nature of Takeshi Murakami's recent larger [ever-larger] paintings. While I'm not opposed to some psuedo-mythological themes, I feel as though the works have started to be so grandiose and self-referential that they have almost ceased any critical dialog with the materiality/object-ness of otaku culture. That is, that I'm fascinated about how while we "read into" the symbols, the images and icons that make up the fetishes of otaku culture are transmitted though ephemeral, often junky, objects as well. These works are partially an attempt to emphasize what I've known and observed asthe tangible/physical nature of otaku culture, not just the textual nature of the subcultural symbols. It's a weird concrete poetry made of VHS tapes and flimsy, glossy paper, and push pins.