This is a Forgery (ZK)

The thought of forgery got me focused on counterfeit goods, and more specifically, con-artists. In most cases, forgery is an action meant to gain fame or fortune. Also, in most cases, forgery and deceit cannot be done on a massive level as easily as it used to be done before the improvements of technology. Nevertheless, I could see how forgery could begin to take over the computing sector, and transform into new types of actions that we haven?t seen before.

However, to me, there is no more interesting case of forgery than the life of Victor Lustig. He is famous for being the man who sold the Eiffel Tower, twice. Seeing an opportunity after WWI, France was booming and Lustig saw an opportunity. He created fake government stationary and begins to wine and dine clients at the most upscale locales in the city. He told them that the Tower?s cost of upkeep was so outrageous that the city was hoping to be bought out by a private owner. He succeeded twice. The pure grandeur of his plan is what appeals to me. I?m not sure that anything this tangible could ever be done again. To me, there is nothing more amazing than forging ownership of one of the world?s most famous landmarks.

I would want to see what type of forgery I could do in a similar manner. Creating documents and official seals, I wonder whether anything could be done similarly in remote countries of the world where technology and media are not as overtly prevalent as they are here. If you could find a set of circumstances with primitive communication, the ideas are endless.

This is a Forgery (MA)

Forgery

I have the ability to forge any painting in the world. It will be Madame X by John Singer Sargent. I have gone to the Met almost every day since the American Wing opened early this year and stared at this painting for hours on end. This is the type of painting I would covet for decades. A lifetime. I want to touch the canvas and imagine the care and intention of stroke that Sargent applied with his brush, as Virginie Amelie Avegno Gautreau stood close by, posing for days and months. I can imagine as he stares at her, studies her, records her, and breathes her in. I want to smell the age. I want to study the artistry, the skill, Sargent’s magnum opus. I want the painting to hang on my wall and be a part of my private collection; until death, do us part.

I will retreat into my studio and meticulously, feverishly, and relentlessly work to recreate a perfect facsimile of the masterpiece. I need to know that I too, can paint like a master. It is not good enough to create an original work of art. My desire is to fool everyone. The snobs and the critics and the rich and the conservators and the curators and the art historians. I need to replace the original with my own. If I could do this, I would be as great as Sargent. NO! I will be better than him. I will have to figure out how to make the paint appear to be from the late 19th century. The canvas. The frame. Yes, I would have to be brilliant.

Then there is the test. The real test. I must steal Madame X from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. No easy feat for sure, but, one that is not impossible. I know a couple less than honorable men who would be able to pay off a couple night guardsmen (they make shit for pay anyway) and from there it will be easy. I’ll meet them in Central Park, somewhere dark, like the North woods. I will have the copy of the artwork hidden. I will inspect the original work, before I pay, and then, a distraction (a cop that owes me a very big favor). I will only have a minute, but that’s all I’ll need to make the switch. By the time they recoup and focus back on me, I will reject payment. They will leave angry, confident that they will be able to find another buyer. Unfortunately for them, my cop friend will apprehend them less than ten minutes later. He will be the hero and owe me another favor. I won’t ever have to worry about him, you see, because I am the only person who knows where he buried his wife. He knows, that if anything happens to me, everyone will know what he did to her. I made sure of that. So, my cop is the hero and the painting is returned to the Met. My painting. My perfect painting. Yes, I will fool them all. I will have the original Madame X in my possession. I will never let her go. She will never leave me. I will have her forever…

This is a Forgery (DP)

Forgery, I hope it will be an artistic method I use to protect something, something vanishing.

It’s “QiLou”, the traditional Cantonese architecture with a long last history of the Lingnan Culture in south China. Why do I forge these old building? They are vanishing in the modernization of the city, removed by the government, in order to give space for the modern skyscrapers. But everyone knows that, they are the precious cultural legacy of our own, with memory of older and younger generations.

I will go and visit the old building, make a real size forgery, and then auction it, not really for profit, but as a part of an art project, the call the attention and protection of our traditional culture.

This is a Forgery (LK)

Object #1. Marina Abramovic’s “The Communicator” (2012) at Sean Kelly Gallery in Chelsea. Cost: 130,000 EU (approx. 170,000 USD).


I called the gallery today, again: they are still available. These sculptures, both named “The Communicator”, are just so incredibly amazing to me. I assume the name “communicator” comes from the type of crystal points she used. The specific points are called communicators because of how the points terminate, which some people believe enables communication with the “etheric” - spirits and angels, etc. My motives for wanting to have these for myself are egoic. Since I want to use the very same materials (body, wax, quarts crystal) they seem a reflection of how I might want to see myself in my work. On some level my ego thinks that if I own it or copy it, I will be imbued with their beauty, or perhaps their beauty will be imbued with a little of my energy. It’s the same reason we buy anything, isn’t it? I like that they exist as companion pieces and that they oppose and complement (In my mind they are in communication with each other in a manner similar to Rauschenberg’s Factum I and II) each other while being individual sculptures. I suppose if I were going to forge one I would feel compelled to forge the other. I have no idea how I would infiltrate Sean Kelly gallery, but I could start by bribing someone who works there to leave the back door open at night…
Someone pointed out to me that if I tried to make them (interpret them in my own voice) they would come out totally different. As an artist, would I really want something someone else made in the materials that I covet and want to interpret in my own language? Maybe not indefinitely, but I’d still love to look at them for many many hours, and then I could sell only one of them to pay off student loans.

To answer the question about whether or not the aura is diminished in a forgery, I think it changes, but is not vanished. If no one knows that it is a forgery I think it still has value if it is exactly the same to the mind of the observer and the observer(s) agree upon what that value is. If we enter time into the equation it might seem more difficult to equate similar value for something that was made last year if the viewer thinks it is centuries old, but again the importance and impact of this boils down to perception of the viewer.

My desire to forge/steal the sculpture also stems from my love of Marina’s work. I didn’t really know her until I saw her at “The Artist is Present” at MoMA and I was totally blown away that she had the mental capacity to sit like that for hours, no - weeks on end! As someone who “tries” to meditate, I know all too well how challenging it to confront the mind on such a basic (yet deep) level. The act of being still to me is a metaphor for remaining unchanged in the face the most intense emotional/physical turmoil. Her act of defiant stillness to me is the ultimate spiritual ninja boot camp, and especially that it occurred outside of any so-called “spiritual” context. By sitting still she said, I control my mind and my body, they don’t control me – (me being the one who existed before those two things were born). So to show up at the Armory and have an artist that I admire so much create a work with materials that I covet made me intensely jealous. It was also an affirmation for me to have license to make whatever I want with no excuses. I’m reminded time and again that materials don’t matter nearly as much as execution.

This is a Forgery (JOW)

I’d never consider forging the work of another artist, not even for an enormous profit, but if I had to, I know how I’d go about doing it.

O’ Forgery

By Justin Walker

Zero Canyon, a Kandinsky-inspired work by Julie Mehretu, is a beautiful piece and a great example of her unique style. It’s a piece that has haunted me for years. I can remember hopelessly sobbing as I launched into fruitless attempt after attempt to interpolate her lines, shapes, and color. “It’s all so beautiful,” I used to think to myself as I stared for hours at the Zero Canyon jpeg in Adobe Photoshop. I had watched Art 21, but it didn’t give me enough insight into her process. I was lost.

I thought if I projected images of things I liked onto canvas, I could differentiate my work from hers, maybe even surpassing hers in relevance. But nobody wanted to see a canvas covered in outlines of Xbox controllers, DVD cases, graphic novels, a bottle of Chianti (no Hannibal?), and various colors in the shape of a 2^nd generation IPod Touch. I ended up swapping the paintings at a local GameStop for a pre-owned Grand Theft Auto IV.

But I was nowhere in my practice, and grew tired of beating up innocent bystanders and stealing their cars to fulfill some silly obligation in Liberty City. I wanted more out of life than video-games victories. I grew impatient I decided to speak with the Campus Chaplain. I knew there was a good chance he’d tell me what I wanted to hear: that if I gave up swearing, alcohol, and internet porn, things would fall into place. We had a long, difficult but necessary conversation before he finally revealed to me what I had to do. He said, “You know what you have to do, right?” I said I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“You have to copy Zero Canyon.”

Suddenly, it all made sense. If I copied Zero Canyon, I wouldn’t be haunted by it anymore. I’d get my pulse back. I would no longer be the no-named victim of a post-structuralist genius. I’d get my persona!

But first I’d have to assemble a team. I recruited twenty of most talented unemployed, graduates of little regarded art schools in NYC: schools like the South Bronx School for Kids Who Can Paint Good, the West Chester School of Ice Sculpture, and Pratt. They’d have to have a mean streak somewhere inside, so I’d do background checks, and pick the kids that were bullied in high-school, but not overtly, just enough to keep them from taking anything higher than a six to the senior prom. I’d want them angry, not crazy.

Our Plan: We’d deploy a twenty member group posing as an undergraduate drawing class to The Museo De Arte Contemporaneo De Castilla y Leon in Leon, Spain; the location of Zero Canyon.

Each student would be armed with at least a nine megapixel camera and assigned to a specific quadrant of the piece. Every inch of the canvas would be documented in digital form and wirelessly forwarded across the Atlantic, back to a server in my apartment in the Upper West Side. Sixteen indoctrinated students armed with pastels and color sticks would be assigned, at predetermined intervals, to copy the exact color, seen in their assigned space, one-sixteenth of the total area of the piece, into a sketchbook--this way we’d have a digital and artist’s record of each color used. The dimensions in centimeters were already provided.

We left Spain after work had been completed. I fed, clothed, and gave shelter to my loyal team-members. Though, later they did learn that I did not in fact own Grant’s Tomb. Still, they were happy and persisted into the night until eventual triumph-- I forged Zero Canyon!

I could barely contain my emotions when I saw the finished piece. I felt like a huge burden had been lifted. I gained a persona, and eventually started my current practice (It’s hard to explain…It’s something like viewers being implicit…chaos, men with circle heads, etc.).

This story, however, has a bittersweet ending. I could’ve sold my copy of Mehretu’s work for millions in the black market, but instead I decided to give it to the campus chaplain, the one who inspired me. It turns out that he wasn’t a chaplain at all, and was just a random creepy old guy who hung around campus prowling for “young meat.” Well, he became a millionaire, and invested in Facebook when it first went public. Now he’s a multi-millionaire, and I’m still in severe debt. But it’s okay, things are really a little better now that I can paint again.

This is a Forgery (JW)

I managed to gather a ton of works from my desktop image collection in thinking about artworks that could inspire me to commit forgery, and narrowed it down to three. My initial fogery candidates included paintings by Picasso, Philip Guston, Georg Baslitz, and Gerhard Richter but when I widdled it down further I ended up selecting works that satisfied three motivations for commiting forgery and included works that were not identified by the artists hand. The first would satisfy the thrill of making the thing, the second I would make to keep —— something that I’d love to look at regularly. The third motivation being to sell, not so much for profit, but to see if I could do it. Something that I suspect is often the motivation for anyone willing to create a forgery.















MAKE
Sigmar Polke/2009 Stained glass windows
The Grossmünster (“great minster”)
Romanesque/Protestant church Zurich, Switzerland
Sliced agetes

The forgery I would keep would be Joe Bradly’s “Grin” I love the simplicity of this painting, the raw linework, happy color and dumb subjectmatter. I never get sick of it, it’s the perfect blend of graffitti, minimalism, expressionism, and restraint.


























Keep
Joe Bradly
Grin, 2009
Painting - oil crayon, pencil, soot, and paint on canvas in artists frame
210 x 190 cm (82.5 x 75 inches)

I would make Hans Haacke’s Condenstion Cube to sell. First of all it seems perfectly doable, but it’s also completely magical and pure, depending on the simple science of temperature to conjure it’s effect. Because the cube doesn’t rely on any type of linework or identifable materials like the agates in Polkes stained glass pieces, one could possibly get away with making multipules that might be difficult to trace or identify.






















Sell
Cube / Hans Haacke : Condensation Cube (1963)
A hermetically sealed clear plexiglass cube containing 900ml of water which at room temperature creates a closed system of evaporating and condensing water.

This is a Forgery (AA)

To love an idea so much as to steal it...the ultimate artist's taboo. But it would be so easy. I'd calculate the weight (that of Felix and his partner) and place my order (find the company specified in the contract). Fill my room with candy.
To take it would be to give it away. Everyone who visited me would leave with a part of it.
But I can't afford this work. I would have to let it wither. I would have to watch them die and then live my life in the wrappers. Is this a burden I could bear?
Perhaps I should just get one of these