About a month ago I was having a discussion with a gallery owner regarding pop culture in art. I for one am just tired of Star Wars references in everything it seems. There are more than just 5 subjects, Star Wars being one of them, people can draw from I believe but they keep recycling the same subjects over and over. There are some aspects of pop culture references I like when done well. But it has gotten to the point that it has become brain candy; it's safe, people recognize it and it's easily consumed. People looking at the work are not being challenged or encouraged to think about the work in front of them. The other comparison I used was it's made for the people that order chicken when they go out to eat because..... it's safe and they know what they are getting.
Artist Alan Campbell does not take that approach with his work. From his Picasso Versus Matisse series last year and his other work he takes on a whole new challenge by approaching subjects no one has yet. With his new print Description of a Struggle he takes on the short story by Franz Kafka.
"Description of a Struggle" is one of Kafka's longer minor works and is divided into three chapters. The first chapter is narrated by a young man attending a party and tells of his "acquaintance" (as he is referred to in the story) that he meets there. The second chapter is the longest and is itself split into several sections. The narrator leaps onto his acquaintance's back and rides him like a horse and imagines a landscape that responds to his every whim. He then meets an extraordinarily fat man carried on a litter who tells him the story of a "supplicant" who prays by smashing his head into the ground. In the third chapter, the narrator returns to reality, so to speak, and continues his walk up the Laurenziberg (Big Hill in Prague) in winter with his acquaintance. Along the way Kafka inverts the landscape of Prague to his own means.
The print will be released at 5pm GMT on the 17th of January
3 Color screenprint on GF Smith Imperial blue 270gsm paper
Edition of 25 signed and numbered
On Sale from http://alancampbell.
Thanks for posting this. I went and bought a copy. He also did a good job for the Brothers Karamazov. I would say the quality of much of the poster art I've watched for the past 5 years has degraded to pure silliness and the recycling of common tropes and hackneyed ideas. Campbell's print a refreshing alternative.
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