DOI Heft:
Nr. 1
DOI Artikel:Botev, Atanas: What deconstruction is not?: (is Derrida's philosophy based upon his hashish consumption?)
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.51715#0057
StUMB
GEORGE M. PUSH COLUN McDOWELL RONALD OÜMSfELB ION CHENEY GVENDOLINA PRICE
mwci! OfiMIR MAMET uuimmmiw MK»n DINO Ut LAUEÍENCIC »c!u<í SEEVEN SILVEHBÍB6
6. Atanas Botev: Blockbuster, 2004, oiloncanvas, 130 X 97 cm. Photo:
Archive of the author.
7. Atanas Botev: mvw.marcos.com, 2005, oil on canvas, 95* 175 cm.
Photo: Archive of the author.
History both spécifie and generic. In that complex
and contradictory context, I take the audience into
a hypnotic world where the great narratives — the his-
tory of the political and the history of the aesthetic
— become immanent. This hallucinatory blow to the
building of a universal academie structure acquires
revolutionary features; and in the domains of the
poetic, it glows with a perceptive amazement and
a psychedelic shock — a game where the interested
and the active recipient finds the way out by means
of free association.
We are a society with ail kinds of turbulences
and therefore a fertile ground for committed art is
well prepared. l’m trying to make a synthesis of his-
tory, artistic streams and idéologies of the near and
distant past, and to redefine them, actualising their
meaning today, by confronting political, public and
social context.
This requires, I believe, a hyperrealistic procedure
— a simulation of a collage where I try to reinter-
pret ail my préoccupations, such as the éléments of
populär culture, the comic, film, as well as quotations
of artworks by artists from different epochs. And
then I place them in a new, organic whole, alluding
(sometimes interrogatively and sometimes ironically)
to what a certain artist and his work once meant,
and what they mean today. Being ironical in rela-
tion to reality, hyperrealism is also interesting for
its paradoxical tautological nature. The recipient is
often caught by surprise by the items displayed: “Jr
ita painting or a photographe is often the first question
that cornes to his/her mind. Another aspect is the
feeling of alienation and irreality. Painted work also
has pictorial, tactical artistic values and an aura (l’m
paraphrasing Walter Benjamin here) that in the âge of
digital technology becomes a kind of a curiosity.
Osama Bin Laden levitates in the apocalyptic
smoke clouds hanging over the twin towers in
Manhattan in their film simulacrum — a poster or
a dream.
The day when America, together with the entire
world, experienced a real destructive spectacle also
marked the end of the fictitious Hollywood spec-
tacle. The artificial cataclysms lost their meaning
because no one will ever think of trying to rouse the
audience with the démolition of the Pentagon, or
the destruction of Manhattan or the White House.
Things that hâve already happened in real life be-
51
GEORGE M. PUSH COLUN McDOWELL RONALD OÜMSfELB ION CHENEY GVENDOLINA PRICE
mwci! OfiMIR MAMET uuimmmiw MK»n DINO Ut LAUEÍENCIC »c!u<í SEEVEN SILVEHBÍB6
6. Atanas Botev: Blockbuster, 2004, oiloncanvas, 130 X 97 cm. Photo:
Archive of the author.
7. Atanas Botev: mvw.marcos.com, 2005, oil on canvas, 95* 175 cm.
Photo: Archive of the author.
History both spécifie and generic. In that complex
and contradictory context, I take the audience into
a hypnotic world where the great narratives — the his-
tory of the political and the history of the aesthetic
— become immanent. This hallucinatory blow to the
building of a universal academie structure acquires
revolutionary features; and in the domains of the
poetic, it glows with a perceptive amazement and
a psychedelic shock — a game where the interested
and the active recipient finds the way out by means
of free association.
We are a society with ail kinds of turbulences
and therefore a fertile ground for committed art is
well prepared. l’m trying to make a synthesis of his-
tory, artistic streams and idéologies of the near and
distant past, and to redefine them, actualising their
meaning today, by confronting political, public and
social context.
This requires, I believe, a hyperrealistic procedure
— a simulation of a collage where I try to reinter-
pret ail my préoccupations, such as the éléments of
populär culture, the comic, film, as well as quotations
of artworks by artists from different epochs. And
then I place them in a new, organic whole, alluding
(sometimes interrogatively and sometimes ironically)
to what a certain artist and his work once meant,
and what they mean today. Being ironical in rela-
tion to reality, hyperrealism is also interesting for
its paradoxical tautological nature. The recipient is
often caught by surprise by the items displayed: “Jr
ita painting or a photographe is often the first question
that cornes to his/her mind. Another aspect is the
feeling of alienation and irreality. Painted work also
has pictorial, tactical artistic values and an aura (l’m
paraphrasing Walter Benjamin here) that in the âge of
digital technology becomes a kind of a curiosity.
Osama Bin Laden levitates in the apocalyptic
smoke clouds hanging over the twin towers in
Manhattan in their film simulacrum — a poster or
a dream.
The day when America, together with the entire
world, experienced a real destructive spectacle also
marked the end of the fictitious Hollywood spec-
tacle. The artificial cataclysms lost their meaning
because no one will ever think of trying to rouse the
audience with the démolition of the Pentagon, or
the destruction of Manhattan or the White House.
Things that hâve already happened in real life be-
51