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DOI Artikel:Gerát, Ivan; Zervan, Marian: Images, media and idols: (an explanation of Štefan Papčo's work "Citizens")
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.42381#0175
IMAGES, MEDIA AND IDOLS
173
images to nature still survives. However, there is an artistic strategy to
bring our attention back to the basic relationship of images to nature.
2. Stefan Papco, Andrej, detail of the sculptural group Citizens,
2015. Photo: archive of the author
The example we choose to illustrate our ideas, namely Papco’s work
Citizens (in Slovak: Obćania), is concerned with the situation of a work
that is placed in nature, but presented in the environment of a gallery.
The artist placed a set of five wooden statues of people dressed in unusu-
al ‘clothes’ (for example bivouac sacks) in various inaccessible places in
high mountains. Papco’s statues are watched by cameras powered by
natural sources. The digital images are continually transmitted into the
gallery, where they are projected onto a wall. A two-dimensional group of
light sculptures is finally created in the artificial gallery environment
from the original five three-dimensional wooden sculptures in the natu-
ral environment. If we understand each individual statue as a work, we
can call the final image, including the method and process of its origin,
a super-work. In the framework of this super-work, the depictions of stat-
ues in the gallery are freed to some degree from their connection with the
natural environment and their own physicality. The resulting depiction
can also be manipulated by cutting through their shape. In this fragmen-
tary form they still bear the traces their environment leaves and finally,
definitively, has left on the wooden statue. Each member of the group
lives its own life from the moment their creator made it, took it to the se-
lected place and pointed a camera at it.
173
images to nature still survives. However, there is an artistic strategy to
bring our attention back to the basic relationship of images to nature.
2. Stefan Papco, Andrej, detail of the sculptural group Citizens,
2015. Photo: archive of the author
The example we choose to illustrate our ideas, namely Papco’s work
Citizens (in Slovak: Obćania), is concerned with the situation of a work
that is placed in nature, but presented in the environment of a gallery.
The artist placed a set of five wooden statues of people dressed in unusu-
al ‘clothes’ (for example bivouac sacks) in various inaccessible places in
high mountains. Papco’s statues are watched by cameras powered by
natural sources. The digital images are continually transmitted into the
gallery, where they are projected onto a wall. A two-dimensional group of
light sculptures is finally created in the artificial gallery environment
from the original five three-dimensional wooden sculptures in the natu-
ral environment. If we understand each individual statue as a work, we
can call the final image, including the method and process of its origin,
a super-work. In the framework of this super-work, the depictions of stat-
ues in the gallery are freed to some degree from their connection with the
natural environment and their own physicality. The resulting depiction
can also be manipulated by cutting through their shape. In this fragmen-
tary form they still bear the traces their environment leaves and finally,
definitively, has left on the wooden statue. Each member of the group
lives its own life from the moment their creator made it, took it to the se-
lected place and pointed a camera at it.