Joy Garnett Lecture 2

(the reasons for not being able to attend the second lecture is the same reason I gave in the beginning of my post on Lecture 1).

Joy Garnett is a painter who paints photos that she finds on the internet. She is interested in images of war, riots, destruction, etc. and her main theme is government secrecy. She mainly uses google search engine because you can just type in a word, like riot, and tons of images will come up. She is interested in how regular news print images don't really affect us as much, because they either go "through us " or over our heads. We don't really take the time to really look at the image. She says she wants to find images and turn them into paintings because we view a painting differently than we do a news print. We study the painting, really look at it, interpret it, etc. All that is lost on a news print. She said that she chose painting because it has more "baggage" historically than any other medium, which would force the viewer to pay attention to it.
Here is a painting from her "Riot" show

She likes to retrieve "lost" media images to paint them so people will be forced to pay attention to whats going on in the painting. She believes that a lot of these "lost" images need to be shown, for people to pay attention to them. She said that she usually changes the name of the image file, which causes her to forget where the original image came from. She prefers it this way because then the image is completely open to interpretation especially if you don't know what context it originated from.

She then listed some artists (before her) that basically did the same thing that she is doing now, one artist is Andy Warhol, who took a lot of news images and silk screened them and repeated it over and over, another  is Gerhard Richter, a German artist who painted news images (like funerals, murder scenes, etc.) and Leon Golub who mainly used images from the Vietnam war. By having these artists use a separate medium than medium from the original image (news print) its more affect in having the viewer slow down and really pay attention to the work.

Garnett did get into  trouble with copyright laws for one of her paintings. This one:

The original photographer stated that its original intent was creative, Garnett got a legal letter stating that she had "stolen" and "pirated" the image and the original photographer wanted her to take it off her website. Stating it was "copyright infringement".

So she said doing this kind of work is a little dangerous because the copyright laws are not very clear, but very blurry, so if you do anything over anyone else's work it could be classified as copyright infringement.