house porn appropriations
2012/13
„house porn appropriations“
Jaques Deray and Fracois Ozon devoted Films to the subject, David Hockney painted them obsessively, no californian mansion goes without it, their photographic images worldwide illustrate the real estate catalogues: the swimming pool (in front of a mediterranian looking villa). Coloquially spoken, „house porn“, is a term for perfect, clean, luxurious real estates, suggesting exclusive privacy for the price of serveral millions at spots usually not accessible for the public. For me appropriation in the art context is more an individual artistic approach rather than a specific media-based technique or strategy.
The project „house porn appropriations“ was developped in 2012 during an artist-in-residence stay at the Center for Contemporary Arts CCA in Andratx, Mallorca. This iberian island is famous for its luxurious country residences money can buy.
Rectangular or drop-shaped, laguna-like or amoebic, despite of the variety of their silhouettes the pools have one thing in common: the color blue.
Blue is the water’s color as well as of the sky: blue is more short-waved than for instance red light. Therefore blue light gets more diffused than the red one – the sky looks blue. It shines more intensely, when the atmosphere is clean and dry, thus remaining only few particles and water drops. Particularly in southern countries the sky appears to be extra blue – in those countries we mostly have beach weather and the on-site pool not only raises the living standard, but also, depending on the environment, suits as a prestige object.
Yet the old Romans knew about the conveniences of fresh air and cooling water. Consciously or unwittingly, every modern pool quotes antique bathing traditions, at the same time being a strategy of representation. And in every water basin, new or old, the sky reflects in blue.
Country life’s design for millionaires appears to be quite redundant and exchangeable: there seems to be a kind of matrix how „George“ and „Linda“ would like their pool and garden and house and sky and view.
Sweet idleness at the pool tries to copy life surrounded by the sea. Luxurious outdoings stimulate design competitions which amount to the same dubious blend of seriality pretending to be individuality.
The series consists of three parts: photographed motives representing Mediterranean climate- and lifestyle-symbols, facsimile Rorschach paintings on real-estate-photographs for advertisement and digital collaged/composed artificial horizons resulting out of the „sky drippings“.
The photographed pools get fragmented and splintered by digital cuttings. Unraveling azure from the skies quasi seems to have been poured upon them. These color fields originate from immaculate firmaments, curving over architectural eyesores produced for the needs of the the rich and the beautiful.
As an interlock of water expanse and canopy new vexing horizons originate which seem to visualize mythical conceptions of a „marriage of the elements“. An alchemy of air/canopy/cosmos/water/sea which engages mankind’s ideas ever since.
The beauty of the photographic collision/montage of natural skies with cultural pools has a pictorial appeal. These pictures are forming oszillation figures at the transition point of abstraction and concretion. On the one hand the elements of the composition originate from photographic representations, then again they widely form non-representional color compositions. The blue from the sky gets confronted with the blue from the pool, the „new“ horizon outline derives from the mansion buildings cut-outs.
The downpouring of the blue skies upon the blue pools (in front of real estate villas) could be read as a warning sign emblematizing one of our most archaic and biggest fears: that the sky may come falling down on our planet earth. An unleashed nature uses falling skies as a weapon against too much non-sustainable tourism or architectural eyesores destroying original landscapes:
a beautiful „mene tekel“.
In my older project „bathers“ I have also with photographic means been creating a double-edged visual atmosphere using the „motive water“ to play and interfere with the good/desirable and the bad/undesirable qualities of this element.
„house porn appropriations“ 2012/13
PiezoPigment-prints on Hahnemühle FineArt-paper in white object frames
50 x 70 cm, 70 x 90 cm
Lambda-prints mounted on Aludibond with Diasec-Plexiglas
50 x 70 cm, 70 x 90 cm, 85 x 100 cm
editon of 5 + 1 a.e.