Engaging with Asher Penn
Kate Moss has inspired countless fashion designers and artists; W Magazine even had a special issue purporting just that— the timeless and boundless nature of Moss’s influence. Moss has been a muse to so many because her ubiquity has rendered her somewhat of a blank canvas. Most of the art she’s present in really isn’t about Kate Moss, it’s about the work’s creator. In this case, it’s about Asher Penn and his 300-part artwork Kate Moss Rorschach.
In his riff on the now-unreliable psychological test designed by Hermann Rorschach in 1921, Penn literally uses Moss’s image as ground for his improvised near-Rorschachs, appropriating three Wolfgang Tillmans’ photographs of the model and overlaying them with vibrant red patterns. By using a Tillmans photograph, Penn is not only taking on the model and all of the associations that come with her, but he’s also taking on high-art. The gritty photocopy method he uses to reproduce the original photographs removes the image from its glossy, high-profile context and makes it more accessible.
The accessibility of these images is heightened by both the gritty photocopy method he uses to reproduce the original photographs and the fact that they strongly imply a viewer. Moss’s gaze, which is either framed or obscured depending on the individual pattern, serves to implicate the viewer through a direct stare that draws you in or a sideways glance that suggests your presence. Looking at the images, the viewer is forced to come to terms with their desire for meaning and for possession—possession of images, of commodities, and even of others. Moss’s status as one of high fashion’s most sought-after advertisers coupled with the interpretive nature of Rorschach patterns allows viewers to project their own meaning and desires onto Penn’s work and engage with it on a level beyond the surface.
Love & Theft is on view through this Saturday, February 13, 2010. For more details on this exhibition and other events at White Flag Projects, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.
-Lynna Borden, Intern
Dave
on Feb 11th, 2010
@ 1:59 pm:
I would question the engagement of the piece when it is presented as being a collision of the desires for meaning and possession. If you reduce that interpretation to simpler terms, the piece repetitively juxtaposes a commercial image connoting possession, with what is known to be a meaningless and unreliable psychological exercise in “meaning”. Are we to engage the piece as a serious rendering of a Rorschach test, because it surely fails to skewer or even satirize that idea. Beyond that, what does the piece offer the viewer that any more pedestrian image doesn’t already offer in terms of engaging meaning? As to the gritty methodology, has that really convinced anyone that Penn is “taking on” high art? The piece strikes one as far to facile an attempt to achieve that.
Oliver Jones
on Jul 25th, 2010
@ 5:58 am:
Kate Moss could have been very successful had she not been so addicted to drugs.*’,