Scott Short
Scott Short successively photocopies hundreds of times the image generated by an empty, monochrome sheet; he does so until the accumulation of the incidental marks of the machine build a form, a pattern on the sheet. Then he chooses the moment in which the image is ready to become a painting, namely he decides when to seal the joint action of the photocopier and chance. Finally, he projects this image onto the canvas and he paints it painstakingly with a fine brush. His method is a labour intensive, slow process which questions the meaning of painting today and proposes a possible solution.
Short’s approach cannot but take us back to Walter Benjamin, a philosopher whose thesis has been, and still is, a constant object of challenge for artists. In 1935 Benjamin wrote The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, an essay which proclaimed the end of the artwork as it had been understood until then, since the possibility of copying and representing it an infinite number of times had forever undermined its aura. According to him, painting, in particular, was deprived of its sacredness and reverential distance, the reproduction thus becoming revolutionary because of its sudden accessibility to all social classes. If for Benjamin the copy withdraws the power from the original, Short creates an original from the copy. The photocopier, with its automated process, acquires the role of creator of the image, while the painter is left with the almost mechanical task of reproducing it onto the canvas. Whereas in the creation, the machine becomes a substitute for the artist, in the execution it is the artist who aspires to the confidence and honesty of the machine.
This role reversal is matched also by the overturning of the relationship between technology and chance: by photocopying the marks left on the white sheet by the very action of the photocopier, Short revokes its intrinsic qualities of control and rigour, transforming it into a paradoxical witness of chance. Every passage of the sheet corresponds, in fact, to an unexpected result, since what is photocopied is not an image per se, but what is perceived as an error of the machine. At the same time, by deciding when the image has become such and is ready to become the subject of the painting, Short retracts the idea of the artwork as consequence of chance and claims back his role of aware creator.
Short’s work is probably closer to Conceptual Art than it is to Abstraction, yet his canvases share what seems to be the utmost dilemma of painting: when is it right for an artist to stop? Contrary to most painters, Short decides ‘when to stop’ before starting to paint. His choice in fact does not happen on the canvas but in front of the samples of self-generated forms which the photocopier proposes to him. In the artist’s work a complex tension between abstraction and figuration also emerges. Although the process at the base of his paintings calls off every possible reference to a real subject, the beholder often finds within them allusions to reality. His patterns appear like enigmatic imaginary landscapes, traces of an unconscious memory or personifications of many, fragmentary states of mind.
text by Sarah Cosulich Canarutto
Short’s approach cannot but take us back to Walter Benjamin, a philosopher whose thesis has been, and still is, a constant object of challenge for artists. In 1935 Benjamin wrote The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, an essay which proclaimed the end of the artwork as it had been understood until then, since the possibility of copying and representing it an infinite number of times had forever undermined its aura. According to him, painting, in particular, was deprived of its sacredness and reverential distance, the reproduction thus becoming revolutionary because of its sudden accessibility to all social classes. If for Benjamin the copy withdraws the power from the original, Short creates an original from the copy. The photocopier, with its automated process, acquires the role of creator of the image, while the painter is left with the almost mechanical task of reproducing it onto the canvas. Whereas in the creation, the machine becomes a substitute for the artist, in the execution it is the artist who aspires to the confidence and honesty of the machine.
This role reversal is matched also by the overturning of the relationship between technology and chance: by photocopying the marks left on the white sheet by the very action of the photocopier, Short revokes its intrinsic qualities of control and rigour, transforming it into a paradoxical witness of chance. Every passage of the sheet corresponds, in fact, to an unexpected result, since what is photocopied is not an image per se, but what is perceived as an error of the machine. At the same time, by deciding when the image has become such and is ready to become the subject of the painting, Short retracts the idea of the artwork as consequence of chance and claims back his role of aware creator.
Short’s work is probably closer to Conceptual Art than it is to Abstraction, yet his canvases share what seems to be the utmost dilemma of painting: when is it right for an artist to stop? Contrary to most painters, Short decides ‘when to stop’ before starting to paint. His choice in fact does not happen on the canvas but in front of the samples of self-generated forms which the photocopier proposes to him. In the artist’s work a complex tension between abstraction and figuration also emerges. Although the process at the base of his paintings calls off every possible reference to a real subject, the beholder often finds within them allusions to reality. His patterns appear like enigmatic imaginary landscapes, traces of an unconscious memory or personifications of many, fragmentary states of mind.
text by Sarah Cosulich Canarutto
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