There’s probably going to be all kinds of stuff to be messing with in this Tom McCarthy interview with Believer magazine over the next few days, but this is the first thing that i want to explore:
Look at all the people like Jeremy Deller, Rod Dickinson, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, whose work consists of staging reenactments, like a historical society, of events and showing an awareness of the kind of inauthenticity and mediation within that.
If you’re anything like me, you’re asking who the hell are these people? Again, it’s that art thing that i’m very weak in. McCarthy follows up with a project that Rod Dickinson did, but i need more.
- Jeremy Deller. “His work has a strong political aspect, in the subjects dealt with and also the devaluation of artistic ego through the involvement of other people in the creative process.” Uh huh.
- Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard. (Apparently they work as a team.) They seem kinda musically oriented in their recreations, which is an aspect of their work that i can get a handle on rather easily. I’ve always loathed tribute acts, but it seems that they are doing something more peculiar. The Cramps recreation is something i had read of previously. Hey! They did the video for “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!”
- Rod Dickinson. This one has me a little confused. Aside from the Milgram experiment recreation, he seemed to be into making crop circles and alien heads about a decade ago. He and McCarthy actually worked together in a project called Greenwich Degree Zero (a review and another.)
Remainder is beginning to make altogether too much sense to me now.
Tags: Art, books, Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard, Jeremy Deller, reenactments, Rod Dickinson, Tom McCarthy