OLIVER LARIC : VERSIONS
CRAZY CURATORS BIENNALE III, GERMAN SECTION, PRAGUE
FEBRUARY 12 - MARCH 12, 2011
Oliver Laric’s practice brings the viewer uncomfortably close to familiar images, objects and ideas in a manner that defamiliarizes them and, in the process, us. Using materials such as user-generated content, the matrix of the digital image and the self-replicating rhizome of the web, his work exemplifies the age of technology we are living within by identifying strains of what’s bubbling underneath everyone’s cursor or flatscreen. By employing these virtual mediums and contents that surround us or to whatever degree even come from us, Laric breaks apart the structures that we normally take for granted and turns these different media on their head through anthropological concerns or pure subversion.
The ongoing video Version, with its first incarnation in 2009 and now here a version of the original entitled Versions from 2010, is a liberal collaging of ideas past and present, sewn together in a way that intoxicates any notion of authenticity. The nature of the word “version” is itself a vortex that reproduces asexually whilst consuming anything around it. The dialtone monotony of the narrator makes plagiarism feel like merely a natural symptom of assimilation like digestion. The video’s rhetoric, which through its looping becomes a self-oiling machine, poignantly appropriates a language of deconstruction mixed with familiar ad jingles and epiphanies of self-realization. Recalling Robert Morris’s playfully iconic work from 1961, Box with the sound of its own making, Version rationalizes its own logic, origin, meaning, actions and consequences in a way that is an onomatopoeic courtship between form and function.
Versions forces the viewer to question how image and icon production has reached this point of complete disorder against the previous sequences of realization and consumption. The results are parallel, simulated or even parasite realities each possessing their own version or mash-up. The copy of the copy cross-pollinates with referencing the reference of a reference to produce some uncut simulacric compound. In doing so, the video sets up a Sisyphean battle royale between analog and digital where truth suddenly becomes truths.
