Anahita Razmi
Untitled Youtube stills, 2012
C-print
Ten panels
80 x 60 cm each
Edition of 3 + 1 AP
The title and project relates to Cindy Sherman's famous Series 'Untitled Film Stills“, in which the artist stages different figures of women in film scenes. The project 'Untitled YouTube Stills“makes...
The title and project relates to Cindy Sherman's famous Series "Untitled Film Stills“, in which the artist stages different figures of women in film scenes. The project "Untitled YouTube Stills“makes use of Sherman's strategy, adapting it, while replacing the medium of film with the online medium of YouTube video. Since its birth in 2005, YouTube became the most popular online platform for user-generated video: people broadcasting themselves singing their favourite song, playing guitar, people providing styling advices, or cats doing funny things. The platform is also used for politically relevant eyewitness "documentation“ In 2009 the "Green Movement“ in Iran used YouTube for uploading videos taken with mobile phones, showing the ongoing protests and repressions in a country where no international media was allowed. Also during the "Arab Spring“ in 2011, YouTube played an important role spreading images from the streets. The documentation virtue of the medium continues with images from Syria and other contexts from this year. The project "Untitled YouTube Stills“ researches on this variety of user-generated videos created for YouTube and raises the question, whether certain stereotypical images, recognisable figures, settings, and aesthetics can be extracted out of them The project is constructed as an ongoing series of photographs, re-enacting selected video stills. The re-enactment is - relating to Sherman's working method - always done by the artist herself. Composed of rebuilt sets, photomontage, and collage, the photographs blur technical alterations of the image and self-staging. Within this, questions regarding the application of Sherman's strategy arise:
What happens to the performative moment (of altering the self, rather than altering the image) in Sherman's work, when misused? What happens when the "reality“ format of YouTube replaces the "myth“ format of the medium of film?
Can one at all speak of YouTube as a medium, or is it inevitable to fail, when trying to find programmatic indications and figures? The nonjudgmental juxtaposition of images within the series forms an experimental approach, testing the characteristics of shifting new accessible mass media forms and aesthetics in comparison to former exclusive forms of media like film, targeted in the cited work of Cindy Sherman.
What happens to the performative moment (of altering the self, rather than altering the image) in Sherman's work, when misused? What happens when the "reality“ format of YouTube replaces the "myth“ format of the medium of film?
Can one at all speak of YouTube as a medium, or is it inevitable to fail, when trying to find programmatic indications and figures? The nonjudgmental juxtaposition of images within the series forms an experimental approach, testing the characteristics of shifting new accessible mass media forms and aesthetics in comparison to former exclusive forms of media like film, targeted in the cited work of Cindy Sherman.
