Wednesday, January 02, 2008

The Encyclopedia of My Death?

Also in the new issue of BC, a long and interesting interview with Dutch artist Marcel Van Eeden, whose ongoing "drawing a day" project ( 6,000 and counting) is comprised of drawings made only from source images which came into being before the artist's birth.
Film stills and news photographs figure prominently, but also details of famous works of art, cartoon characters, text paintings, pornography, still life's, and most recently, an ongoing 'story,' inhabited by multiple characters, that teeters on the edge of narrative cohesion. Van Eeden's dispassionate draughtsmanship (a three-way mash-up of Edward Hopper, Ed Ruscha and Gerhard Richter) seems less a form of direct observation than a light-hearted parody of it, a tripling of the already multiple degrees of separation at play in the artist's source images.