My current studio however is in the cities centre, amongst the hustle and bustle of the consumers and the temples of late capitalism.
My daily walks or Flaneuring as Baudelaire would have it, are part of my practice, as I walk, often without a goal or directions, I absorb, observe and document thanks in part to the digital technology as used by the waiter in the Café Flore, in fact my flaneuring is not now limited to physical or geographical space, the camera which once was an apparatus to capture light, now projects light and another part of my practice finds me navigating the digital highways and byways.
I pass a couple, the man is carrying a stretched canvas on which a forest scene has been printed in HD colour, saturated late autumn colours via for attention with the reds of sale signs posted in shop windows, for some reason Joseph Beuys comes to mind, it’s not the massed produced image of a forest, but rather the performative way in which the man is carrying the canvas through the city centre.
I gather raw materials to take back to the Café Flore, I disregard the Flore’s strict no music policy and as Schuberts trout quintet fades, PJ Harvey burst in on shuffle, ‘speak to me of universal law, the whores hustle and the hustlers whore….’ Neither Schubert nor Harvey can help me understand why I have bought a number of Canvasses with digital prints of forest scenes.
Mary Lynn Buchanan has thirty six thousands followers on the social media site Instagram , I’m flaneuring again , this time its digital , I’m intrigued by the lack of people in the forests and the sheer numbers on Instagram , Mary Lynn describes herself as a ‘Translator of the art world’, on her Instagram page she has posted one thousand , six hundred and thirty digital images of herself in galleries with art works , I’m tempted to scroll to find one with a work by Joseph Beuys or a landscape . Mary Lynn isn’t alone , further clicks and swipes reveal thousands of people adopting her approach to ‘translation’ all with thousands of followers and all remediating art works from museums and galleries .
I enter a search on Instagram, # forest, thirty five million results, digital images uploaded by individuals, unlike the canvass however a lot of these forests include figures, many, like the man carrying the printed canvas of the forest on the high street seem strangely incongruous with their surroundings, and although none claim to be translators of the forest, they strike similar poses to Mary Lynn in Museums and Art Galleries and some are naked.
I screen grab a selection of images of Mary Lynn in front of art works , the choices more dictated by her pose rather than by the work of art , there is something , mannered , learned , mimetic or performed here , I also screen grab a selection from #forest , similar patterns .
Using my iPhone I edit the images, print them out and pin them on the wall alongside the digital forests, there seems to be a dialogue emerging.
