Ivars Gravlejs – My newspaper
Ivars Gravlejs ist Fotograf und hat einige seiner Bilder manipuliert, bevor er sie an seine Zeitung zum Druck geschickt hat. Großartig. Wenn auch gelegentlich Grenzen überschreitend. Auch bei seinen restlichen Arbeiten ist von banal über verstörend hin zu genial alles dabei. Anschauen lohnt.
Before sending photographs to the newspaper’s Photobank I quickly manipulated them in Photoshop. Originally idea was to change some little, unimportant details where the manipulation wouldn’t change much the content of the photograph, for example, adding some more buttons on writer’s Zdenek Mahler T-shirt or painting inscription – „Cunt“ on the brick wall. Although during the process it happened to make some more radical ones, for example, creating a traffic jam on the highway or cutting of singer’s José Carreras finger. The aim of this project was to make an absurd, nonsense manipulation over the media manipulations.
Gravlejs project is a typical example of so called „Subversive Art“. Art which is parasitic on the concrete subject and affects this subject (in this case media society), undermines and criticizes it. On the one hand Ivars Gravlejs deconstructs authority of medial business, deconstructs authenticity and objectivity of information (in any way medialized and interpreted), but on the other hand Gravlejs contemplates about circumstances of contemporary artist, who often has to suspend his/her creative process in order to earn money for living. Gravlejs carefully „smuggled“ his art in his everyday „Non-Art“ activity.
