Sascha Pohle
A lot of movies convey stereotypes about the artist.
The role of the artist both in fictional films and in biopics is focused on the artist’s idiosyncratic behavior, his love affairs, his self-destruction associated with a mystification of his creative production or on encounters with other protagonists of the art world such as the collector, the gallerist, the model or the art student. Artists are almost solely painters, which reconfirms the inadequate representation of visual artists in movies.
In the video ‘Reframing the Artist’ fragments from approximately 50 different movies such as ‚Pollock’, ‚Surviving Picasso’ or ‘La belle Noiseuse’ are reset in the Oil Painting Village, Dafen. Dafen, situated in Shenzhen, China, is the world’s largest producer of mass-produced handmade oil-on-canvas copy paintings supplying a global market mainly sourced from the Western canon.
In the video copy painters take over the role of amateur actors of selected movie scenes. Mass production of oil painting copies from Dafen and the recurrent use of artist stereotypes in the mass media film converge to a new narrative that lies between fiction and documentary. By a shift of context ‘Reframing the Artist’ raises questions about the view of the “exotic” other, both the visual artist as well as the Chinese copy painter.
