The Anti-Painting Film from Jak Ritger on Vimeo.
I am an experimental artist. The term experimental gets thrown around so much that it has lost almost all meaning. It is used now to describe anything artistic that is not rooted in years of tradition. The fact of the matter is that experimentation is the core action that drives artistic practice forward. Unfortunately artist have used to idea of experimentation without realizing its true worth.
If we remember back to grade school, the first science class went into to great detail explaining the sceintific process. The reason for this was that while experiments are fun they are quite useless if one does not take careful notes and form a hypothesis. This outcome is then fed through the system again in order to further distill the information.
I have applied this same system to artmaking in hopes of creating a truly experimental piece of work.
I started with a question: How does one create the antithesis to painting
I then did research to concretely define painting:
painting is
resolute
tangible
full statement
3d with a 4d space created by viewer
I then constructed a hypothesis:
If I create that which contains the opposites of the words that define painting then I will have created an antipainting.
I then carried out an experiment to test this hypothesis:
The antipainting will be
fluid, fleeting, and ephemeral
intangible
without statement
2d with 4d created by a machine
The result is the film above.
My conclusion is that my AntiPainting works in the sense that it is what it is. But many things can be the opposite of painting and be no better or worse than mine. The work is in the mind of the viewer. How does a person react and use this idea in there own work. It is up to you to create the next experiment.
