WITNESS: From Image to Imagination.
Film-maker Mick Kaczorowski has asked me to say a few words about the “Witness” category of his engaging art collection. In particular, “Witness” is a series of documentary photographs that Mick caused to be transmuted into Art as a series of acrylic paintings.
Called “Witness,” this project started with quick, unblinking photos of televisions sets in hotel bedrooms or restaurants around the world. In every instance, Mick selected the exact moments in which stunning—or alarming or horrific—events were happening back in the states, while he was otherwise engaged in far off lands, making movies of elephants or snakes for cable TV.
Ordinarily, the pictures are the same fleeting images we are all flooded with, on every channel, every news outlet, and every newspaper, every time a massive failure takes a whack at humankind. We know these snaps well. They are the stuff of our souls and nightmares.
Still, whenever a Katrina struck, or a beloved --or mocked or reviled-- celebrity died. . . or a tiny nation was bombed and strafed. . . whenever the combination of nature’s fury and human error made some impossibly complex technology crash, as at Fukushima. . .there was Mick at the other end of the globe with his camera focused on the terrible truth. The fleeting truth, as it turns out.
Mick’s idea was to insert some longevity into the rapidly fading present by asking painters to reproduce his shaky snapshots as seriously considered paintings. As if the sharper edges and brighter colors on the canvas would confer on them a more terrible beauty and a more permanent truth.
Most of us get our current events from television coverage, which turns over so quickly it fractures History into something as simple and useless as “one damn thing after another.”
But history is not things. Nor is it mere events. History is how we feel about what went on. And only Art can do that, express the inexpressible, the ambiguity, the unease, the dread. It takes imagination.
Which is what the painted versions of Mick’s snaps do so well. Art requires imagination. So does History.
Michael Olmert 7/7/17
