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Oliver Laric: Productively destructive on Flux Magazine

Screenshot from Versions 2010, single channel video, work in progress. (all images are

Courtesy of Seventeen Gallery)

Whilst most people may not have heard about Oliver Laric's work, they will at least know or participate in the subject. Based in Berlin, his ongoing projects have investigated how images are used, appropriated and modified in contemporary digital experience.

Using historical events such as the Iconoclastic damage of religious icons during the Protestant Reformation as a starting point to make sense of a constantly updating and proliferating visual landscape, he produces videos, digital images and objects that document and explore the replication of culturally significant images.

This October at the Frieze Art Fair he will be showing his video work Versions 2010 along side a suite of polyurethane sculptures based on the iconoclastically defaced reliefs from Utrecht Cathedral in the Netherlands and bootlegged copies of the rare 1977 publication by Margarette Bieber Ancient Copies.

Versions 2010 Polyurethane, 29.4 x 16.5 x 10.5 cm each and below.

Versions 2010 is the latest version of Laric’s video documentary that examines the appropriation and re-mediation of cultural images in a process that - whilst defacing the original - creates new versions of a culturally recognizable image. Laric argues that any creative action of destruction, defacement, or modifications (music re-mixes for example) - always produces a new image that is separate, but a peripheral addition to its source.

This is the key idea in Versions; originals keep their initial symbolic quality whether re-used by classical artists / artisans, or today, where digital technology offers near perfect copying of files. What’s more the Internet, now allows versions and their originals to emerge and be viewed simultaneously and instantaneously.

One of Laric’s best examples of this is a series of video clips of the footballer Zinedine Zidane head-butting Italian defender Marco Materazzi in 2006. It was widely copied and updated with numerous effects and remixes that created new, often funny, versions of the footage. The original exists both in footage and collective memory, and the updated viral videos, which although altering the original, provide the possibility for any number of personal realities to co-exist.

Given Oliver Laric’s focus on the form and technology by which cultural images are disseminated, produced and mutated, showing this work at Frieze it seems, is more than appropriate.

In the early twentieth century the Russian Avant Garde made another iconoclastic attack on the image. This time it was against the art-image that they associated with the vulgar velocity and progress of twentieth century modernity. Boris Groys, an art historian well known for his work re-evaluating socialist and postmodernist art, points out (speaking in Warsaw in 2010) that their reductionist approach to painting was to make works that could transcend culture, Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1913) attempted to be contextually and historically un-recognizable. This was a direct pictorial attack to remove the status quo from the artwork. Yet, this act of reduction always produces a new image: which was of course, more art.

This provided an interesting problem for the Postmodernists who came later and whose influence weighs heavily on the work at art fairs such as Frieze. With Postmodernist like Jean Baudrillard arguing in his 1994 book Simulacra and Simulations that an image or representation was no different from the reality it wanted to describe. Art then, no longer had its authority, it would no longer be able to tell the viewer what to think. The author of art was replaced by the reader of art who gained a greater power of interpretation. Artists reacted by making anything and everything into art, it was down to interpretation to make sense of these new works, and the artwork became a lens through which any idea could be discussed.

In many ways Frieze Art Fair exists as a celebration of this simultaneous multi-verse of artworks that, after Postmodernism, claim to be the same as the cultural context they come from. Like the multiple versions of a reality Oliver Laric explores, every piece of art is a new and unique object that wants to rejects and deface art’s historical authority. Yet shown together in the art fair, you can still see this (self-appointed) authority and difference writ large.

But what is interesting about the work that Laric is showing, is that it shows that the gallery is no longer the only battle-ground of visual authorship or readership. The Internet has taken on and allowed this cultural appropriation and mutation and made it available to everyone. The viewer no longer needs to wait to look at an artwork to make their interpretation, digital technology, communication and file-sharing networks allow anyone to make a critical, productive and immediate response to add to culture and for the Laric this has positive potential; “the beautiful contradiction of iconoclastic destruction is its productive potential...the act of destruction ends up being the new mascot for the upcoming ideological position.”

To paraphrase and extend Laric, culture is now taken to be like a musical score, the original score still exists, but it is open to numerous, multiple and simultaneously different and co-existent interpretations.

Oliver Laric will be showing from the 14th to the 17h of October in Seventeen Gallery’s stall at Frieze Art Fair’s Frieze Frame. He is also co-founder of the website http://vvork.com and his work is available at http://oliverlaric.com