In the spring of 2020, I joined the so-called home relief, through small home art or a kind of flashmob in isolation. Different online initiatives from different parts of the world have called for different implementations or set rules and restrictions such as:

1. Choose a favorite work of art from an old master,
2. Use three household items only from home or handy tools from home only here and from now, 3. “Play” the work in a photo with you and / or your loved ones in a composition,
3. Photoshop is prohibited,
4. Photographs taken from stills from films, animations, photographs, comics, covers and cards will not be published, but photographs taken from posters, engravings and other works of great masters, medieval miniatures, posters and advertisements from the sunrise of marketing,
5. Each participant shall communicate the name of the original of the painting, its author and the year in which the work was created,

and other written and unwritten instructions on how to have fun with ourselves in solitude.

Some photo winners achieved an amazing resemblance and effect “like two drops of water”. Others creatively improvised on the theme of the painting or sculpture. Others introduced imitation or parody into the game. By the name of my project you can guess which group I belong to. The goals, of course, are several. In addition to the cognitive, more important is the entertaining, the feeling of experiencing yourself as an artist, of penetrating the skin and spirit of the author, of becoming the author of the artist, a new artist. I perceive it as a 3D realization of a 2D art product. A voluminous reality in the present time of an author’s idea from ever. Something like home reality. Touching time points. Giving a new vision saturates with new meaning. Here imitation is not a form, but an occasion. Choosing someone’s work for personal processing is a demonstration of mission, taste and bias. This is followed by the courtship of the work itself to the full self-expression through the eyes of others, but through yourself, especially if you get involved as an “artistic” actor. Or a similar visual reference of the used object to the painted subject.

Everyone puts in the best they can. How can it not be fun? Photo-installation in volume based on two-dimensional pictures. They were noted in the media as “living pictures”. You imperceptibly learn about a lot of forgotten or unknown works, you involve yourself in your own exhibition, even if only from one painting. When I was young, I was stubbornly enslaved to the phrase of Johann von Goethe: “Every day you have to listen to at least one song, to look at a good picture, to read a wise sentence.”

Now you are the sentence, you are the wise sentence. You are the “momentary crowd” or the “sudden crowd”, pre-planned and organized in a “mass” action with yourself (at home), “suddenly” appeared in a “public” place (at home) and for a few minutes you recreate the picture -sculptural (self) action, after which you disperse (at home) also suddenly, as if nothing had happened. This, dear, is exactly flash mob or flashmob – to create sudden, sometimes absurd, sometimes funny situations, but to fulfill your role seriously and responsibly with the conviction that what you do is completely right and natural, for which you do not even pay , nor are you paid.

Some call this cultural jamming, a form of mass communication or, figuratively speaking, the “verbal-acoustic equivalent of a mustache on a portrait of the Mona Lisa.” An attempt to carefully outgrow the shortcomings of mass culture with good taste, refined measure and aesthetic sense in the foreground.

Is this initiative cultural hacking, information art struggle, intrusive art or guerrilla semiotics combined? Allowed art banditry, pirated images and stolen ideas, deceptive and distorting images, boring meanings and impressive concepts – is this the result of these cute, funny, new-found, curious photos? Or are there in-depth insights into “what the author wanted to say”, further developed and updated suggestions with a current sweep and a new idea? Without triumphing as an unchanging diagnostician of this type of imitation, I approve of their appearance as real photo-facts and their hypothetical projection into fiction.

Taste, as a component of jamming, is a very slippery problem in the context of the massification of culture in general and could become the so-called. “Cultural terrorism” – a clash of the notion of good and bad mass culture, on the one hand, and high and ultra-high, pretentious and elite culture, on the other. There are many examples of sensational mystifications aimed at “information neurosis”.

I suggest that we keep the “golden mean” and stick to entertainment diversification. The pleasure and joy of the challenge in personal creativity are hopefully passed on to the viewer.

Enjoy!

M.K.

Formed on 17.08.2021