The mode of practice I have chosen to explore is the process of destruction. I briefly did something similar during college and learnt about Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning piece to which he asked Willem de Kooning for an original piece of his work. Rauschenberg was successful and destroyed the art work by completely ‘erasing’ it, leaving just a blank page. He did this by literally rubbing out the ink, the pencil and the paint marks. Thus, creating a whole new piece of art from the destruction of a previous piece.
I could also link Gerhard Richter’s work to this, although he’s not actually ‘destroying’ anything, I think his individual practice and the outcomes are very interesting, particularly, Richter’s portraits. The way he uses his own photos of people, he ruins the idea of a typical photo by spreading paint across them or painting into them to create a blurry decayed image, in some cases.
I want to do something similar with my own photographs that I have taken of different people, however to push the idea further I may destroy them in other ways such as soaking parts of the photo in different liquids such as bleach, water, oil etc and examine the different outcomes. I could also cover them in thick glue or use simple, ordinary mediums found in my cupboard, i could also tear them or cut them up. I could link this to my own personal project by destroying only the faces or the people in the photos. The photos I could use will be specific to my project.