The Art Group will be showing new work at the Gafney Library during the month of February. This is good. I have a definite deadline for the work in progress. That said, I have spent the day so far exploring tangents, one in particular.
I wanted to title this post: "A Collage Artist and Former Librarian Considers ETEWAF (Everything That Ever Was--Available Forever)" but it was too long. I credit the blog Retrospace for starting me off in this direction. The idea of having access to every book ever written is a librarian's dream. And what collage artist wouldn't like to have access to every image that ever was, printed with indelible ink on acid-free paper?
But, reading further in Wired Magazine and Inhabitatio Dei, I began to ask myself if this ETEWAF phenomenon is really such a good thing. The comments on the Inhabitatio Dei post were instructive, leading me to consider the book Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the chapter titled "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" in particular.
And if all of that didn't give me enough to think about, I also stumbled upon a summary of Walter Benjamin's essay titled "The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Does making use of found images in collage result in the loss of "aura" that Benjamin discusses?
Time will tell. Bottom line is I have four works in progress for the February show and damn little progress has been made so far today!
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You are not alone.
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