The Failure I've been looking for - Frida Khalo Broken Fresco Revival

A few months ago I found myself breaking these things and reassembling them for craft (See prior post 10 steps to enlightment through destruction). It seemed an interesting way to work with previously created works by great masters without duplicating the work directly. In fact I thought that it was a statement of sorts, not just a derragatory one, but a statement about craft. I moved out of that phase in my efforts as I tried to simply control this medium before I set me sights on breaking the pieces I was making. Most of the last six months has been spent on trying to get both an artistic and a spiritual interpretation of pop culture images so that I can get back to a the literal duplication process that I am yet to completely control. Personally I hate literal duplication, which may explain why it is so hard to achieve. My impatience is my biggest enemy and in this case it has taken me back to the broken Fresco, the mosaic fresco, made from the pieces of an otherwise decent print.

As I have mentioned previously I have had the most trouble trying to get some spiritual transliteration out of Frida Khalo and Vincent van Gogh portraits. I attributed this to the original artwork that I started with which were paintings and not photographs. For some reason I cannot get the same blurry, soul enhancing properties out of these self-portraits when I convert them to black and white images and put them through the rigors of fresco photo casting. Here is a whole batch of Frida Khalo photo fresco prints that shows how I have tried. I can't seem to leave the image and I returned by using it as a print to try and make a direct copy of the screen painting of the painting that I had made. In the casting my impatience caused it to break and before I smashed the entire piece I forced it back together and let it dry. Previously I had done this with a William Burroughs piece shown here. Again it hit me that this is the interpretive process for works done by artist themselves that are not photographic in their origin.

The best explaination I can come up with is that because the images are artistic to begin with, both in color and in composition I may not be able to transfer the visual representation of the soul spirit that is contained in photographic images. The breaking and reassembly represents my failure, but in essence it is consistent with my disgust at literal interpretation to begin with. I cannot pull anything more from these images than what the artist originally intended. I cannot channel that which is controlled by it's maker. I cannot take and reinterpret something that speaks it's own truth. I have nothing to add. My destruction of the image is acceptance of this fact and the reassembly is the duplication that I am forced to do for some other reason that I cannot explain.

Moments are fleeting and my underlying rationale for working artistically is that there is a visual language that is beyong our abilities to explain, but that artistic works individually propels our cognitive senses to new heights. I grasped a sense of abstract communication through some works at the Modern in New York and have never been the same. The works themselves were DeKooning and Pollack, but even though they were old they read this was modern, this may be the last word you read that makes sense, even though the lines did not make sense. The lines had meaning of time and by seeing these works firsthand they transcended time. The art is a craft, but the dimensionality artistic works last longer in a physical state than many other fluid crafts. In order for these literal works like Frida and Van Gogh to achieve a new meaning I need to pull from them something different. My tools are limited, but this breaking and re-assembly is sort of like the dribble that I considered so meaningful. I can only accept this because I did not contrive the meaning, it just happened and it keeps happening because I have no patience.