POSTINTERNETS

Blog post 10

 post-internet and the meta-self

"As I read, I pretend that I could be Richard Prince.

Being more specific. Specifically, I am not naively satisfied with wishing that I were Richard Prince, or play acting to myself that I am Richard Prince. Those things are a lazy teenager’s hero worship. Mine’s richer.

What I am imagining is being written about the way that Richard Prince is written about.

An Example:

In late 2014 Isabe//a Bur/den was interviewed, by the new-media critic Fred Frederikson, for The Bruce LaBruce High Quality Foundation. Their discussion, which was subsequently published by HighQuality.club, began on a retrospective note:

            Fred Fred:  Lets talk about the late 2000s.

            Isabe//a Burden:  I didn’t like the work that I did five or so years ago.

           

            FF:  What did you do with it?

            IB:  I think everything has been, you know, destroyed.

            FF:  Wow, All of it?

            IB:  I would say five hundred things.

            FF:  How did you destroy them?

            IB:  Just ripped them up.

            FF:  And put them in garbage bags?

IB:  Yes. Except the some of the best negs, I just put the prints in garbage bags. It had come down to the fact that, well, if you don't like your own pictures and you like someone else's picture better, well, take their picture.

FF:  What about the negatives you kept?

IB:  The way I think, those as belong to someone else too. Someone who's images seem a lot like mine, who is interested in some of the same things, but definitely isn’t me.

What the artist describes here is an intense disavowal, one that resulted in the 'complete' destruction of her earlier work. By the time of the interview, Isabe//a had become utterly identified with the practice of slacker art and appropriation, as indicated by her comment "if you don't like your own pictures, and you like someone else's better, take theirs."

In fact, the interview was published alongside an explored the meanings behind the new rephotographed images she had begun to produce around 2014. Note, however, by her own account the disavowal of authorship is affected through two linked moves: by borrowing images of others, and by destroying her own. Though she describes a scene of wholesale destruction, there is a subtle interruption in her account: "I think everything has been, you know, destroyed."

Might that telltale "you know," which signals a pause or hesitation, suggest some ambivalence on her part – some regret that she had destroyed such a large body of works? Or might it mark her recognition that this act of erasure may not have been quite so complete as she describes?

Isabe//a's later work bears evidence of this sort of hesitation. In the year since that interview she has repeatedly seen fit to return to the works she made prior to her move to appropriation, either by reconsidering the historical moment in which they were made or even, at times, incorporating them into her current pieces.

Although all of the images in the two adjacent articles are recent, credited and dated in 2013, indicating that they were all executed after the destruction of her portfolio and name subsequent change of names.

Nevertheless, both the front and back cover of the publication feature a image of a young 'IsabellaR' (as she was called then) from 2007, her seventeenth year, smoking a hand-rolled joint in elevator of the State Street high-rise dorms, which were donated to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, by Hugh Heffner’s estate, and had once served as the apartments for the Mid-western-based Bunnies.

But the cover image is not just a photograph; it is in fact a rephotographed image of a print made by a fellow student, San Francisco based photographer Ali Arnold, at the time published in the web-based contemporary photography magazine THE FREAKING WEEKEND (now defunct).

In the process of rephotographing, two elements were laid on top of the physical print: an empty orange packet of rolling papers and a fake cigarette made of a holly tree dowel. The addition of these elements, along with the handwritten heart-heart-heart/666 significantly modifies the meaning of the image by identifying it with a historical moment. In effect, Isabe//a used the strategy of rephotography (with which her work has come to be identified) to retrospectively revise her self-image at an earlier moment in her career."