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Comrades,
I Now Am on the Right, is a book about montage, as one might
say in cinema-speak. It's based on collage, pictures pasted together,
pictures, words, and phrases.
Like found footage, the images and text have been made by others,
have already been seen elsewhere, all of this before
Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa borrowed them from newspapers,
television and magazines. Now that he's on the right and making some
concessions, he's reproduced these found images with the infinite
delicacy and subtlety that water colour allows, thinning down today's
portraits, watchwords, slogans, heroes, and ideologies. No one is
spared: Jacques Chirac, Georges Bush, Nicolas Sarkozy, Spiderman,
Pinochet, Lara Croft, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Jackson, Ariel
Sharon, Jean Baudrillard, Philippe Candeloro, Jean-Luc Delarue, Bernard-Henri
Lévy, Hulk, the police and the army —all get their share
in an order that obstinately refuses to turn out as a discourse.
This is why Agirregoikoa is still a comrade, still one of us. His
art of collage is one which breaks away, an art which goes to the
edge, an art of distance, stupid also and gross: a radically disgraceful
art. As always, what counts in works of montage is not so much what
we find within, what we find in the pictures per se, but rather in
the folds, the mishaps, the impossible connexions in the margin —that
tiny space, that void which holds the pictures together and sets them
apart as well.
see
an extract |
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