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Capturing the Ephemeral: On JAŠA’s Intermedia Paintings
This new intermedia painting series is part of his larger, multimedia, long term site-specific and performance piece, The Monuments. The Monuments is a multiyear project that takes the form of a series of 17 immersive spatial interventions and performances held at the Kulhaus in Berlin, each one linked to an NFT–a Fragment–that is also made tangible as part of this intermedia painting series. It’s complex conceptually but can be broken down in a straightforward way. 17 Chapters, each linked to one NFT, from which intermedia paintings are made.
I was particularly drawn to these intermedia paintings, because it seems to me to plant a flag by establishing a new artistic technique, or rather collage of techniques. Just as The Monuments, as far as I am aware, is the first NFT series with a conceptual structure that links all elements into one cohesive, massive project, as well as the first NFT series to link up to form a single larger work, The Monuments Mother Image, which comes into being when all 17 fragments are sold (or rather, 16, as the artist retains the 17th)--then the eventual sale of The Monuments Mother Image will see its profit divided equally among the holders of all 17 fragments. JAŠA thinks outside the box, pulling twists out of existing technology and approaches, making them new, and his own.
“Intermedia” is already a thing, of course. As an art theory, its first use is attributed to Dick Higgins, a co-founder of the Fluxus community of creatives during the 1960s who promoted interdisciplinary, multimedia approaches to art. He established his concept of “intermedia” in a 1965 edition of Leonardo magazine (volume 34, no. 1, p.49), citing Marcel Duchamp as enduring as an artist more so than Picasso (a debatable point, but I know what he means) thanks to his creation of works that “are truly between media, between sculpture and something else.” He goes on to praise the German artist, John Heartfield, for “invading the land between collage and photography.” Three years later, in 1968, German artist Hans Breder established the first university program to offer an MFA in “intermedia,” making University of Iowa a pioneer. Others followed much later, and now a handful of universities offer degrees in Intermedia or Intermedia Arts, but by this they mean very broadly artistic creations that combine or crossover various traditional media.
An online search for “intermedia painting” comes up with almost nothing, and this is where JAŠA’s work comes in. He has found an ideal description for one aspect of his work, and that is what is featured at this special, private event.
These intermedia paintings are created with the approach of a painter, even if I tend to think of JAŠA more as a conceptual artist. “I started as a painter,” he says, “and that’s how I approach the creative process. I always start with a blank page, even if I change the media. The creative process is rooted in what it means to paint.”
In practical terms, it may serve as useful to consider an example. Take his At Nights I Stand Tall to Sing Morning Songs, which incorporates an image of a deer’s skull, pink flowers, and a dolphin superimposed between the eyes of the skull, all on a gray ground with some difficult-to-identify lines beneath it. The skull was a found object (one I actually found and brought to him–my small contribution to the cause!), which JAŠA reconstructed, adding plaster elements to the parts of the skull that had broken off, and sanding it. A digital image of that skull was manipulated using software to become the centerpiece of this intermedia painting. JAŠA made a habit of gathering flowers that had fallen from balconies onto the streets of Berlin, then scanning them in their variably crushed or decomposing states. These scans were integrated into the image. The dolphin shape, which looks like a tattoo between the eyes of the skull, is a reference to an ecological theme. And the assembly of lines beneath the skull is actually a bird’s eye view of a sculptural installation from Chapter 2 performance. At this point, the work is solely digital, and is preserved as an NFT, one-sixteenth of The Monuments series. The NFT is not a static jpeg or png file, however, but a gif that cycles through sixteen variations of the image. One variation of them is chosen to be printed and made manifest IRL (in real life, for those, like me, who need translations of new-fangled techy terms).
This work is then printed out with fine art inks on high-quality, archival paper and touched up by hand with paints, colored pencils, oil pastels (anything JAŠA gets his hands on in his studio) to create a unique finished work. In the process of being printed, this work in particular ran into a technical error that resulted in a series of striations marking the center of the paper. This mistake turned out to be an effect that JAŠA loved, the sort of kismet of creation that one can never predict or plan. The final layer is made on the paper itself, further blurring the borders between techniques and layers in the work. Thus this intermedia painting becomes a new work that contains relics of JAŠA’s past experiences, performances and wanderings, while turning those relics into a way to bring to life something brand new, this fleeting image within his mind that he, as an artist, can make real.
“I begin by creating images that I would like to see. Through use of multimedia I create these ephemeral realities. By making an intermedia painting I render those ephemeral realities no longer ephemeral, but permanent.” And so it is. The intermedia painting is the permanent encapsulation of a brief, euphoric, visionary moment in the artist’s mind.
Of this technique, JAŠA says: “These images are meant to embody what happens when you close your eyes in the middle of a bright day. Trying to imprint in your memory what is happening. These images are my utmost enthusiastic moment of pure creative bliss and euphoria. When I close my eyes in the midst of creating, and a blend of glorious images filter through my mind. This is what The Monuments is all about: capturing the ephemeral.”
-Dr Noah Charney
