Abstract
This paper examines the public image installations of artists Felix Gonzalez-Torres (originally New York 1992, remade Turin 2024) and Roni Horn (Frankfurt 2014) and their presentation of decontextualised photographic images in order to ask questions about how images function at the intersection of artistic enquiry and public modes of address conditioned by advertising and its economies of attention. Informed by Peter Szendy’s study of image economies or iconomics (Szendy 2019, 2020), this research explores photography as the production of ‘sticky’ surfaces (Wooldridge 2024) which extend and contest regimes of power through a conflation of material presence (new and old technologies of image adhesion, in this instance wheat paste and the billboard) with the addiction and compulsion - so called ‘sticky’ app development - which underwrites advertising-driven social media. Introducing the personal and unfamiliar into rapid communicative environments, Gonzalez-Torres and Horn construct alternative rhythms of encounter which emphasise the accretion of memory, purposefully decontextualised and ambiguous in intent. In the case of Gonzalez-Torres, the recent re-installation of a series of works from his celebrated MoMA Projects 34 (1992) offers an additional opportunity for reflection, examining a shift away from the AIDS crisis and Culture Wars which informed his original production, towards the multiplicity of crises which take place in a moment in which the personal and public have become undifferentiated.
Presenters
Duncan WooldridgeReader in Photography, School of Digital Arts, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Installation, Attention, Stickiness, Advertising, Materialities
