Mishka Henner's Search History by Staffordshire University Fine Art undergraduate Pritesh Patel.
There is a strong
argument for one to claim that no image is truly original. For Search
History, Mishka Henner presents work that fully embraces this
claim via appropriation. Henner specialises in pulling imagery and
data from the Internet and his work in Search History is no
exception. Although older, well known works of Henner's feature such
as No Man's Land and Coronado Feeders, the artist also
presents newer works such as, Royal Subject and Atlantis
Chaos. Both of these works follow his ongoing practice of digital
appropriation.
Royal
Subject presents familiar portraits of Queen Elizabeth II but
obscures them with denotations of focal points from the artist's
gaze. Atlantis Chaos layers the text of a Chinese map of
Britain over satellite imagery of Mars.
But it is an
older 2014 piece titled IMG_01 that I feel most effectively
addresses the nature of his work by displaying a photograph in a
traditional physical framed presentation and also in its raw form of
digital code printed in a book. Although the image is quite clearly
taken from another source rather than photographed by the artist
himself, displaying it in an untranslated format conveys that this
image is infinitely reproducible simply via the process of computers
interpreting code. This is a state of existence that runs through
each and every one of Henner's works.
The works present
in Search History range from digital imagery pulled directly
from the Internet and printed in high fidelity to an engraved granite
reproduction of a film's end title, yet all of the works tie into
this single all encompassing concept - that no image is original,
despite their various physical natures.
Although every
work conveys the modern lack of originality, their unique attributes
bring forth differing subject matters that can easily extract
discourse on a wide range of issues. Searching for the Enemy
brings forth the effects of the War on Terror on modern common
vocabulary, yet Coronado Feeders bluntly presents the
viewer with a stark reality of the full scale of the US beef
industry. Henner provides us with appropriated imagery which holds an
impact within a world filled to the brim with reproduced imagery in
Search History.
- Pritesh Patel
