Maria Finn
Visual artist educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen 1991 – 97. Currently Ph.D. fellow in Fine Arts at the Doctoral School of Copenhagen, Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, and Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen.
She is doing the practice based Ph.D. in Copenhagen and her work will be divided between practical work and theoretical studies. She has a focus in her work on the relationship between film and the written word, literature and screenplays.
- Formally am I mainly working with drawing and photography.
Contextualizing the unseen
I will present the project for my Ph.D studies “Images between the word and the film” and will focus on my work with Michelangelo Antonioni’s screnplay “Tecnically Sweet”. Antonioni wrote the script in 1970 and had done all the preparations for the film and was ready to start filming when the producer decided not to fund the film. The film was never realized but the script was published in 1975. I am at the moment, together with Yvette Brackman, organizing a show titled “Technically Sweet”, which is due to open in New York in December 2007. We have sent all the participating artists a copy of the screenplay and asked them to produce a new work of art from this material. The project is a way of redefining the frames for a group show, using a material open to all participating artist. I would like to talk about the process of working with the show and how this kind of curating affects the artistic practice.
Furthermore will I discuss my own project for “Technically Sweet”, drawings of unseen film stills. In relation to this work will I present some theoretical notions that have been part of my considerations while working on the project. I have studied Barthes essay “The Third Memory”, concerning some stills from films by Eisenstein. Barthes talks about the third meaning as the obtuse meaning, situated outside language, beyond the obvious meaning. It cannot be found in all films, but it appears in films by certain authors. In relationship to this I find it appropriate to look closer to Cindy Shermans film-stills. Rosalind Krauss writes about Sherman in “Bachelors” where she calls her a de-myth-ifier. Here Krauss also points out that Shermans stills are copies without an original, and refers to Barthes and his writings on myth in “Mythologies”. I will also look at Chris Marker’s work “La Jetée” where he works with stills as film, and compare his method with Sherman’s since she stops the film, while he sets the still in motion.
