An interview with Robert Dohrmann This year, 20 years will pass from Guy practise. In your opinion appropriation in art is still a "political" act? Yes it is still a valid political act. Nothing is dead under the contemporary lens which it was created. However, the gap between effective appropriation (of any form) and visual clutter can be as vast as, say?... The work of Banksy and Mr. Brainwash. I wonder how Shepard Fairey might answer this question? Appropriation – shunned by many of my colleagues in academiais also a useful iconographic practice. We all have strong symbolic and personal connections to mediated images. In the late 1980’s and early 90’s, I was self-consciously appropriating with a strong degree of social anarchy and nihilism.
Robert Dohrmann and transitions to communicate ideas effectively. Albeit linear, non-linear, or cyclical, editing is the road map. Although trained as a painter, I am a bit of a film nerd. So I closely observe cuts, shots, timing, and pace when I watch any film. This also has a strong relationship to comics, another passion of mine. But the technology and process of my work is relatively straightforward (to me at least). I start off with labor intensive Photoshop images (upwards to 50 files, many I end up not using), animate them in Adobe After Effects, render these individual clips in hi-rez QuickTime files, edit them several different ways in Final Cut Pro, rinse and repeat as needed, then I decide if it’s finished or not. The exact same strategy is used in the audio portion of my works.
But there was a true sense of power spending time (and many quarters) at a Xerox machine recombining, rerouting, and repurposing imagery. To those of us who were sociopolitically minded, those who actually gave a shit about something, this was a very irresistible thing to do. And it still is today. The French Impressionists, for example, used nature (land/cityscapes, genre, and still-life) as their vehicle to translate their images. Today, Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra and simulation has come to near full fruition. For me, appropriating – sampling, remixing, mashing, whatever the theoretical buzz word- is as natural as breathing. At times I feel like a cultural anthropologist mining and reviving these found images. Now that we have become a truly digital culture, I believe this is the “natural” landscape; a constant spattering of electronic images like no other culture before at an ever-increasing rate, only serving to distort reality more and more. So it makes sense to me to try and re-make sense out this glut and have something to say about it in return.
Like Paolo Gioli' s 16mm works, in your videos the relationships between the images are often subliminal, however through your editing technique you are able to transmit intricately and complexly layered levels of meaning, often revealing a subtle irony and humor. How did you develop your style? This style came out of my love for paper collage and hand-made books. I had accumulated nearly 15 years of making mixed media objects before
In your refined video we can recognize a masterly work of editing: what kind of technology have you used in producing it? Thank you for the editing nod. I spend an enormous amount of time working on this element. And it is definitely one of the main arteries for delivering my esoteric ideas. I try to think of it as writing; words organized into thoughtful Butcher Rules paragraphs that require structure
A still from All Systems Go, Neil Armstrong
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