WAYS OF DECEIVING

by Zainab Siddiqui at Rohtas2, Lahore, 7^th – 16^th feb, 2013.

I walk into the gallery and encounter an empty space or rather, a space unoccupied by objects, “strange” I thought to myself! And without any conscious attempt, I noticed, my ‘self’, drawn towards the farthest end of the gallery, housing ‘objects’. Objects that are both, more conscious of their presence as Art, such as; bricks of resin, on top of objects that are more conscious of their customary usage as a ‘base’ or ‘stand’, such as; gallery plinths. Enclosed in the bricks of resin, are more objects or rather ‘images’ of objects, but “image when printed ‘on’ a material is itself an object”, I thought to myself.  These images, “are these relics from the past?” I asked, “to simulate loss or the desire to encapsulate time with/in objects”, I supposed. “Is it, ‘the’ dressing table, ‘the’ lamp, ‘the’ page from ‘the’ book, ‘the’ corridor,……….?” I wondered. But the banality of the tiltes; ‘corridor I’, ‘corridor II’,…….‘object I’, ‘object II’….., suggested otherwise. Also, these images, printed on transparency sheet are fragmented into planes; broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled as abstracted forms, removing a coherent sense of depth, a thing from all sides at once, yet 2 dimensional, like a cubist painting, reducing volumes into planes, yet sculptural, gathering planes, back into volumes. A shift from perceptual to conceptual or the opposite, perhaps. Or somewhere in-between ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’, only if they were not so small, or placed not so low and approachable from all sides instead of the front alone. “Did the back side of the dressing table actually have the image of the backside of the dressing table?”, I try to remember. “I want to pick them up, hold them, feel them, look at it from various vantage points”, I desired. “Its placement, its making, its scale, its demand for a more active engagement, its materials, its form, needed a lot more finesse and attention”, I concluded. “Do we see 2 or 3 or 4 dimensionally?”, I asked.

            I turn around and notice that the two full-length windows in the gallery are layered with a full-length image of the window, printed on transparent sheet, pressed in-between sheets of glass and mounted-against/blocking the original windows. These ‘re-presentations’ of ‘the windows’, titled ‘Window I’ and ‘Window II’ respectively, embody the very space but from a different time. Why? Because the glass panes of this window reflect not what ‘is’ in the gallery but what ‘was’ in the gallery when the image was captured, such as; a tripod and some paintings on the walls, referring to the ‘eye’ and ‘I’ of the camera. “perhaps an awareness of the ephemeral nature of all material form or the material nature of ephemeral form and thus of our physical body in physical space, ceaselessly renewing itself”, I nodded. And so I contemplated the relationship of my body to the work in the context of the space that I have inhabited countless times, on my visits to the gallery. The physical object constituting a small yet an important part of perceptual experience, “but how much of tangibility is needed to comprehend the ‘concept of a perception’?”, I questioned. Why? Because the overwhelming materiality of the thick and grandiose glass sheets used to press the image, is in conflict with the incorporeal quality of the subject, focusing its efforts primarily on the physical object. Where as, a subtler iteration or a rather ghostly presence, could have helped create a fine balance between the laws of spirit and matter.

            Think it was Quddus Mirza, who once reviewing some exhibition, wrote about the fact that artists are like magicians. What is extraordinary about ‘art activity’ is; that it gives a new character to otherwise very common occurences or rather, it's the unique combination of otherwise ordinary phenomena, where the power of the spectacle lies. Perhaps like Art the only difference between successful magic and unsuccessful magic is, the flawlessness in performing the task without revealing the trick in one continuous motion.

           

Intimate Pictures

Memory is indeed a funny thing….I remember spending hours going through drawers after drawers filled with torn, cut, scribbled, written over photographs of my/my-family’s past, accompanied by my father’s (in fact my entire family’s) favorite pass-time activity; telling and retelling countless often contradictory stories about each one. Often there is no agreement on the ‘truth’ about the photograph amongst its various narrators, perhaps reversing their function as; an object of evidence. Family photos do not preserve meaning in themselves, it is the narrator of the photograph that helps us understand what lies beyond the physical object. The narrator lends an ‘I/eye’, making one wonder, whether it is the past that shapes the present or the present that influences the past.

From using the family album imagery as references for the drawings, highlighting the posing, the smiling, the performing of the photos, to using actual photographs (of her mother perhaps) morphed into her own, and everything in-between, Nusra Latif’s ‘Desires of Memory’ makes rather direct comparisons with family albums on various levels, perhaps a little too direct and a little too varied, by compromising the metaphoric quality and in-depth scrutiny of the analogy.

Since I’m working from memory, penning down ‘my’ experience/selective perspective of the exhibition, I cannot help draw the comparison with inventing/reinventing stories around family pictures. At times the photograph doesn’t match our memory and other times our memory defies explanations because our stories around those photographs have more to do with present than the past. Similarly the events leading to the exhibition and the time in-between experiencing it and writing about it adds to the subjectivity of my perception. My account might have nothing to do with the works or I might have overlooked other ways of accessing them. I feel there is a close affiliation between ‘experience’ and ‘document’, they both become themselves only by disappearing and have a troubled relationship with ‘reality’. Similarly, in this process of representing the represented, Latif’s memoir is interwoven with the present more than the past, appropriating, disturbing and manipulating images that look simple, naive and sacred, resulting in distortion, disorder and disintegration.

            A necessary condition for remembrance is distance, both physical and temporal, for (re)negotiating a sense of self. This search for an image of one’s self or validity or a sense-of/longing-for belonging usually originates from an overwhelming sense of self-consciousness in a foreign land. Although, we are all perhaps equally displaced in one way or another, living in-between selves, marking differences while our boundaries under continuous negotiations leave us in a state of domestic exile. But this search for a logical sense of identity is crucial in today’s ‘global’ world, particularly for diasporic artists. Living abroad did facilitate a vaguely similar situation for me to have experienced alienation and integration simultaneously. Before living in Chicago (that too only for two years) I had not thought much about what it meant to be a ‘Pakistani’ ‘Muslim’ ‘Woman’. My identity defined as ‘what I am not’ rather than ‘what I am’. Perhaps, identities are constructed through difference alone.

Despite the similarity with her earlier works on both; formal and conceptual level, Latif’s latest body of work is a step towards a rather personalized/self-directed exploration as opposed to the neo-miniaturists over generalized narrowing representations that reinforce that exotic (collective) otherness, of course executed in the name of critiquing/challenging those prescribed categories of identities BUT with the use of veil, guns, oppressed female bodies, arabesque patterns, beards, claustrophobic spaces, Mughal references e.t.c that instead proved supplementary in reinforcing cliché’s.

Sensuous Dimesions was a work, whose presence continues to trouble me and in spite of all effort I fail to conjure up any relevance with the rest of the work, asking myself whether all the works in a show need to be in conversation with each other? But regardless of its relevance the work was the least convincing in both its execution and display.  This digital print is a narrow strip of images of eyes (over life size, hanging at eye-level), caught in the act of applying kohl overlaid with references of eyes from Moghul miniatures, and runs along the length of two walls that make a corner at the farthest end of the gallery.

 Despite the very obvious clues, such as; the birds that symbolize migration and “belong nowhere”, the drawings of the flora and fauna that (perhaps) are the inhabitants of Lahore, the medium of gouache on wasli as an integral part of Latif’s artistic identity (or perhaps it is my personal desire to give some relevance to the medium), the mother as a metaphor for ‘home’, e.t.c, the work lacks what Barthes calls the punctum. That thing which ‘touches’ one, without submitting itself to mere meaning or aesthetic. Latif shares everything else besides the punctum, unlike Barthes who is particularly discreet about that one photo that he is touched by and which embodies the true essence/‘air’ of his mother (or the mother who ‘he knew’ that he was trying so hard to locate in photos of her), and decides to never show that particular picture to us. He writes, “It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ordinary.”[1] Perhaps it is true that, “in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes”[2].

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[1] Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, Pg73, Farrar Straus and Giroux, NY, 1981.

[2] Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, Pg53, Farrar Straus and Giroux, NY, 1981.

On Collaboration

Aristotle said “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, “it is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) that those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed” said Darwin and “I believe that collaboration is the solution and may bring us the harmony which would liberate art from its boundless confusion”, added Hans Arp.

            Collaboration (between individuals in particular as opposed to collaboration between artist and audience) is increasingly becoming a popular way of operating in the contemporary art world, perhaps challenging the image of the artist as; ‘heroic’ ‘not dependent’ ‘solitary figure’ in a continuous ‘inner struggle’ or perhaps asking for a redefinition of artistic practice which in turn asks for a redefinition of art and culture, pointing out the necessity of going ‘beyond the making of exhibitions’ or perhaps it's a natural need/necessary consequence of hybridization of cultures associated with globalization. Whatever the case may be, such practice raises questions about authorship, authenticity and most importantly the artists’ relationship to each other, their work and their audience.

            One such example is a recent collaboration between Damon Kowarsky and Atif Khan (both strictly print makers), titled ‘Hybrid’, exhibited at Rohtas2, from Nov 20th to dec 1st, 2012. Kowarsky, who hails from Austrailia is not a stranger to this country, he has visited Pakistan three or four times before, has displayed his work in Lahore and Islamabad and has conducted print making workshops at art schools in Lahore and Karachi. Khan on the other hand has been trained as a printmaker at National college of Arts and has taught at his alma mater since, while taking a few years off to work in UK.

            The work itself wasn’t any different from what we are normally used to encountering at galleries, most of which is sheer repetition and unconsidered political and cultural mysticism that tiers one’s eyes and brain with its uninspiring symbolism. Fortunately this body of work spared me the enervating monotony of beards, burqas and flags but did present itself with guns, drones, geometric patterns and the Mughal kings. But of course, art is not created in a vacuum, and is undoubtedly a product of the socio-political environment in which artists work. As I try to deal with my lack of response to the works in the show, I have (for a change) decided to not brood over the unsettling debates about looking, seeing, experiencing, pleasure, beauty, judgements, subjectivity, universality and function, but direct my attention towards the notion of ‘collaboration’ which is a rare instance in our part of the world.

            The need for constructivist and dialogical methods of production has become ever more important in times of deep felt uncertainities like today’s. The blurring of the boundaries between artistic disciplines and various vocations associated with arts (such as; curator, critic, historian, e.t.c), and Walter Benjamin’s idea of the ‘author as producer’, among other postmodern discussions, is a call for active engagement with social politics rather than responding from a removed, observational vantage point. Although ‘author’ and ‘producer’ both ‘make’, ‘create’, ‘give birth to’, e.t.c but perhaps Benjamin like Nato Thompson (American curator) finds some conditions by which the two differ considerably from each other. Thompson is of the opinion that part of being a producer means, letting go of individual conceit, which is perhaps unthinkable for an author/artist. A producer’s responsibilities are perhaps more managerial and the widely accepted belief in art as self-expression, makes the idea of such an artist sound suspicious. To Thompson, strategies of resistance require a forgoing of individual genius, when revolutionary power lies in the autonomy of the collective idea, not in the autonomy of an individual. And this empowerment perhaps comes from the notion of responsibility and accountability (to one another).

            In the light of Thompson’s views, the history of collaborative art practice and my own 6 years long collaboration with Hurmat ul Ain, and other project based collaborations with artists, writers and curators, the questions of subjectivity, originality and authorship are not so relevant anymore but why and how this method of production is employed, is certainly a question worth asking, the answer to which, is slightly absent in the work itself. Besides a corporatist ideology that promotes networking, the ‘need’ to collaborate as a method of generating, mediating and reflecting experience and knowledge, should be more genuine. What it needs to operate on is; common goals and a common vision that guides their work through negotiations, as stakeholders per se. What letting go of ‘me’ and ‘mine’, brings forth is only the strengths of both the individuals in a singular voice as ‘us’. But despite the fact that these personal narratives, though portrayed as autobiographical are not actually solipsistic, but neither are they in ‘unison’. The individuality of both the artists, within a singular work, is kept intact. The documentary like entries of khan’s very local landscape often identified by Kowarsky’s very foreign vantage point, in the form of titles, is worth mentioning. However, questions about style and technique remain more relevant than anything else, which perhaps is an evidence of naivety. 

Art that breathes!

In Pakistan, the invitation to witness a work of ‘Performance Art’ or ‘Live Art’ at a local art gallery, is a rare one. Art that involves elements of time, space, the performer's body and a relationship between performer and audience, outside of the “performing arts” practices, such as; theater, music and dance, is being increasingly employed by many artists and art students in the country, but perhaps the unavailability of spaces for artists and viewers to engage with this kind of art has restricted the use of performative practice to photography and video. Color, a gallery that launched itself only last month in Lahore, very bravely opened its doors to host Ferwa Ibrahim’s performance ‘Hiding under water’ along with a video titled, ‘orientation’. Brave; because firstly it's a medium which after 50 or so years since its introduction is still new in our part of the world and may take some more time to trickle down into the public consciousness as ‘Art’, let alone ‘high art’ and secondly it is very unusual for a gallery to showcase only two works. Usually the exhibition spaces are not ‘curated’ but walls are simply used to hang works on.

As I give you an account of my selective perspective on  ‘an’ enactment of art that I witnessed in flesh, Peggy Phelan’s (following) words knock in my head:

“Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance”.

Since I’m working from memory, the events leading to the performance and the time in-between watching it and writing about it (which i have tried to minimize as much as I could) adds up to the subjectivity of my account, which may have nothing to do with the actual performance or I might have overlooked other ways of seeing it. I wonder if the same idea  can be applied when reviewing works of art in other mediums, such as; paint, print or objects?

Upon entering the main gate of Color gallery, housed in a residential building, I’m greeted by the doorkeeper who directs me to enter from the courtyard (at the back) instead of the gallery enterance (where the performance was to be held). In the courtyard, people chatted against the backdrop of a video, projected on the wall (approx 2’ x 3’), surrounded by a monotonous rhythmical humming that fades in and out of the hum of conversations in the outdoor space. The projection displays a hand mapping a black line, drawn with a thick black marker on the grey chips floor. I use the word mapping, because there is no clear distinction between drawing, feeling/running her fingers over or erasing of the line by rubbing. Perhaps the action signals the permeability/impermeability of boundaries or perhaps a method of self hypnosis, a sort of a meditative exercise that aims to synchronize the mind, the body and the soul in order to escape that partial/compromised self-awareness towards wholeness or a free flow of energy.  This may sound like what your yoga instructor tells you, but when he/she verbalizes it, it sounds unoriginal and stereotypical but when physically practiced, it usually makes sense. That may not be a very flattering example but I certainly felt that Ibrahim’s work reflects a similar inability of language to communicate, thus making speech almost futile and presenting us with a visual qua sensory experience. However, the positioning, the framing and the scale of the projection were a bit unsettling, why it was so small in comparison to the wall? why was it not in the center? why was it at the extreme end of the wall, almost cropped by the sharp edge? why was it not on the floor? The floor might have provided me with a more accurate experience or a more interactive encounter.

The announcement for the performance was made and this one was the third and the last of the three performances that were carried out almost every 45 mins for the opening night. A bunch of us walked into the gallery; an intimate (small) rectangular space. We waited, noticing the little details of the space, such as; the halo on the laminated floor, made by the two spot lights above, the camera (to document the performance), the silence – Ibrahim walks into the space wearing blue jeans and a black top, holding a large black cloth ruffled next to her body – she goes to the center of the room and starts to lay the cloth on the floor, she sits squatted cross-legged upon the cloth and invites everyone else to join her, only a couple do, she asks again, in fact makes eye contact with each one of her audiences, insisting/demanding that they sit down. Whether one actively participated or not, the piece articulates the dividing line between observance and engagement, challenging the traditional divisions between art and audience, exploring what art is/can do for the fulfillment of the artist’s impulse to express/communicate. Here the role of the viewer changes from a removed observer to an engaged participant. I, who wanted to be an observer rather than a participant, had to surrender. She begins chanting a low humming sound almost like a meditative breathing exercise that I also silently practiced while sitting there, noticing that it was increasingly difficult to catch up with Ibrahim’s notes, as she would take in only half a breath for an even exhalation and the droning sound lingered on for a while.  With each breath the humming gets louder and louder, changing the peaceful into more agitated, and then upon covering her mouth with her hands (that were gradually drawing nearer with every note during the course of the performance) the sound morphs itself into convulsive sobs, and then wailing moans and then low whimpering that gradually faded away and she gasps for air, pulling her hands away, while also pulling the cloth away from beneath our bottoms. I think the timing was perfect, that is particularly the moment when I started to feel a little claustrophobic myself. All performance-based art deals with aspects of control, the acquisition of an audience and subjecting them to the artist's "control" which involves another aspect of body art - endurance; both hers and mine, so a part of me wanted the performance to linger on, just a bit longer. Perhaps it is the precision that made me a little uneasy. I wished some of it was undecided, a little more spontaneous - like pushing the work so you find yourself in a territory beyond the one you know.

As I sat there afterwards, the transitory nature of the form her body held for us to watch and experience and vanished, I nodded at the thought of Phelan’s words “performance becomes itself only through disappearance”. The performance lingered on and echoed in the humming sound of the video outside.

This kind of expression which aims to understand and interpret subjective experience through representational acts is perhaps an investigation of the subject of embodiment and the embodiment of subjectivity, that is more compelling than theater, it’s visceral nature puts one in direct contact with thought and feeling. Interrogating this subjective dimension of ‘being’ through materializing the intersections between (Kantian) inner-self and the outer-self, Ibrahim indulges herself in a self-scrutiny for the sake of authenticating experience and existence as a means towards self awareness or rather an attempt to liberate the self from traditionally bound situations. Expanding on modes of self representation where autobiography and social conditions are inextricably bound together in an unending reformulation of identity, she continually questions and re-identifies her self.

welcome to Lahore

A feast for the eyes:

The Allegory of Painting, painted in the 17^th Century, is one of Vermeer’s most intriguing works of art, and is also the title of Sussane Husemann’s exhibition, at Rohtas 2 (June 2^nd - ). Vermeer’s women, engaged in their routine tasks, enclosed in household environs, are the subject of Husemann’s paintings, embodying Barthes theories of appropriation or perhaps I should say, embodying the practice of Painting itself. It makes one think about the practice of appropriation and simulation which occurs within the production of all art and production of ‘newness’ under the weight/power of pre-existing masterpieces. As Barthes writes that no author creates something new and unique. Instead, every produced thing is a recycled regurgitation of that which preceded it. Some of her paintings also make use of verbal means of expression in the form of hand-written text (borrowed or original), forcing the viewer to construct meaning of their own, thereby actively participating in the process of appropriation.

Husemann’s images don’t speak of Vermeer as much as they address his models, and relies heavily on the stories narrated throughout history and brings to mind the films (particularly ‘Girl with the pearl Earring’) and books that have provided us with the history/story of Vermeer’s models and speaks of the relationship between the fictionalized representation of art/artists versus the art historical context - the relationship between documentary and drama.

Her unruly application of paint is a fascinating component of the work and successful in capturing maximum amount of information with minimum brushwork, conveying emotion, enthusiasm and force. This immediacy and movement introduced by her bold brushwork and varied use of color, sort of animates these otherwise motionless women and very subtly asserts Vermeer’s (and her own) interest in the play of light. Such application, more than anything else, makes me think of the artist’s encounter with the medium of painting, the evidence of which hangs on the gallery walls before me. The evidence of a dialogue/encounter with Vermeer, with paint and canvas, with beauty, with the noble goal of fulfillment, and most of all a dialogue about ‘the art of painting’. These spatterings of vibrant colors and forms, onto the surface of pre-used cartons (with peculiar shapes and folds) is almost accidental in appearance or composed rather naturally, reflect the reality of that experience/encounter, in a way which enables me to recognize it as extremely ‘genuine’. And that is rare; it is not too often when one experiences such moments; the pleasure of enjoying a painting (both; the object and the act of painting), of enjoying looking/viewing. The work (perhaps) comprises not an idea but a commitment, so fundamental, without which this body of work is unimaginable.

 A simple and beautiful display of love and passion, and that is all what art sometimes needs!

‘to do’ and ‘to be’:

To become an artist, one doesn’t necessarily have to go to an art school, in fact the untrained artists work with purer, more raw and more authentic creative impulses, driven by passion alone. Nevertheless, there is the confidence and validation you gain from holding a degree that proclaims you an artist, but does art need that testimony? Iqbal Geoffrey certainly doesn’t. To come across a noncommercial self-taught artist, particularly in Pakistan, who hasn’t had any formal art training, is a rare encounter. Traditionally such neuve innovators are located ‘outside’ the periphery of the art-circle but unlike other outsider artists, Geoffrey enjoys a great deal of appreciation and remuneration from the western art world, if not at home, and is recognized as an unparalleled phenomenon in the modern art world by British and American art critics. Though, his work is not entirely uninfluenced by artistic norms.

Geoffrey, a lawyer by profession as well as an artist, is quite a unique character, whose off-canvas activities are perhaps far more interesting than his on-canvas performance. Famous for suing people left and right and burning his finalized pieces without ever exhibiting them, to name only two examples of his uncompromising nature.

Punctuated with question marks, his antics and his work, both, are acts of rejection; of traditional ideas about beautiful and appropriate, of institutional framework within which art is received and by which it is mediated, of conventional distinctions regarding what is and is not art, of accepted views about art and artists, of sanctity of genre conventions, of boundaries, of logic, of viewers’ expectations, of authorities and hierarchies, of definite meaning, of. . . . This total destruction of ideas that have any discipline, both intellectually and physically resembles the Dadaist sensibility, which naturally makes him an artistic rebel. His vision of art, both affirms and denies Art simultaneously, in a provocative yet playful manner and poses the question; “What is art?” without necessarily attempting to answer it.

Geoffrey, an avid collector of objects and mass media imagery, uses these trivial details from his everyday life and transforms these ordinary things into private possessions, into precious memorials, into surviving traces, into witnesses, that don’t particularly reveal anything extraordinary yet tell stories about their maker/collector. Or perhaps these non-original popular images represent ‘no-thing’, perhaps they are the essence of ‘no-thing-ness’, just as a white on white painting, from his exhibition, reads ‘Emptiness’. Perhaps questioning; the meaninglessness of modern existence, or the need for meaning in Art, or what it means to empty content out of painting. This simultaneous presence and absence (or presence through absence) depicting both nothingness and limitlessness, is an exciting union of opposites that is either producing a new kind of meaning or obliterating the need for meaning altogether.

His obscure landscapes pieced together with objects/images, freed from their original context and reassembled within anomalous compositions, represent the fragmented nature of the contemporary culture, or perhaps it demonstrates that they can never be truly freed from their original context. In one moment the very banality of the everyday qualifies as Art, while in the next moment this assortment of visuals is rendered insignificant, useless or dysfunctional, asking the viewer to shift back and forth between just looking and experiencing or understanding the process of interpretation. But for most part it draws the viewer’s attention towards the playful undecided process of making rather than the subject of the work. In this union of simplicity and ambiguity, these surrealist assemblages have more of a psychoanalytic rather than aesthetic function, redefining the concepts of authorship and ownership and (following the footsteps of Duchamp, who is said to have been an admirer of Geoffrey’s) re-contextualizing existing "readymade" objects/images as Art, bypassing literal perceptions, breaking narrative expectations, surprising the viewers and asking them to fill in the gaps.

What is most remarkable is his ability to speak his heart with a rather shameless confidence, when narrating the self. The gallery space, adorned with buntings arranged from wall to wall, reading ‘I am a fan of Iqbal Geoffrey and so was Leonardo da Vinci’ together with the paintings, drawings and collages (some dating as far back as the 60s), is an exhibition of unapologetic (masturbatory) narcissism, the kind that perhaps politicians practice during election campaigns, that is sort of like a self conscious performance. Richard Avedon in an essay ‘borrowed dogs’ has expanded on this link between performance and self-portraiture, expressing that autobiographical tellings, such as self-portraiture, are ‘extreme stylized behaviors complete with theatrical conventions while performing in a very self-conscious way -filled with flattery and lies, yet truthful - lies about who they were and truths about who they wanted to be’. Employing this performative nature of autobiography Geoffrey performs a portrait of himself that is preoccupied with questions of identity; art’s, artists’ and his own (and the blurring distinctions between the three). Ironically masked with innocence and laced with tongue in cheek humor, there is a dismissal of seriousness in the work yet a severity coupled with self-righteousness towards it aswell.

But whether this self-proclaimed fame refers to the ephemerality of fame in this age of information or if it is an inquiry into artistic empowerment or if it questions the myths about the artistic genius or if it suggests that the contemporary artist no longer has to make anything, he has become his own myth or if these are simply evidences of his awesomeness, in them, one can distinguish a man who believes in what he does. Such unquestionable belief that is beyond doubt doesn’t even need to be verified (even a lie told often enough becomes the truth). Isn’t this what all Art demands; a certain sense of unquestionable belief, devotion and submission.