Friday 24 October 2014

Torsten Lauschmann Artist Talk


This week's visiting artist was Torsten Lauschmann, and I was one of the students who was chairing the seminar that took place after the talk.

Here are some of my thoughts in relation to / as a result of looking at Torsten's work

- Lauschmann often exhibits a work that he thinks is unfinished, and will reshow the work in different exhibitions, sometimes it getting closer to being finished. An exhibition is an opportunity to develop the work and each exhibition marks a different stage in its development.

- His work has been described as "too fast to be photography, too slow to be film"

- Lauschmann thinks that interactive art seems too much like a game

- Interested in failure

"I didn't fail, I just found out how it doesn't work"

Having heard Lauschmann explain the setup of certain works within his artist talk, I began to question how well his website represents his work. For example, on his website, 'Dead man's switch' is a video of a candle. However, when discussed in the artist talk, Lauschmann explained that every time the candle in the video was blown out, the lights in the gallery would come on, thus illuminating the audience and surroundings. In this way, the physical space plays its part in the artwork, yet online, one would not understand how it is actually exhibited. It brought into question the nature of how to document certain works.

Likewise, some artworks work well on the computer screen, but other works may not suit this - how does an artist frame the artwork and the documentation?

For more information about Torsten Lauschmann, visit

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