David Blandy

David Blandy, Artists Lecture, Woodlane Campus, 4th February 2015

// Notes: 

Works with video, performance, installation and comics. The contemporary moving image. Contemporary collective unconscious. Self in the virtual, self in space.

‘Film: Anjin 1600: Edo Wonderpark”, 2013 - Tells story of William Adams, who it is said was the first Western man in Japan in 1600s. A film where Blandy is an anime style character himself, immersed in Hokusai-like Japanese landscape prints, bringing together past and present. 

Links between Japan, the West and cultural appropriation, Japan fuelling the Modernist aesthetic despite their cultural differences often undervalued or seen as ‘primitive’, ‘other’ – a colonial attitude. 

SHETLAND WAR RUINS PROJECT

Led to thoughts on my own work and the inspiration taken from Japanese works, last year in particular. I had been really interested in use of space in ancient Japanese works, and notions of this space being related to perceptions of time and self. As Blandy described, in Japanese, there are different versions of ‘I’ – not one single ‘I’ as with the English language as in for example ‘I think, therefore I am’. This difference can be said to be seen in the landscapes – in Japanese landscapes the viewpoint (and therefore the viewer) is not fixed to one point, unlike Western images where perspective orientates the whole scene around the fixed single vanishing point. I was interested in these differences in perception of time, space and self, and how these ideas could relate to failures of Modernism, as starting to be explored in work about the ruins at Skaw, Shetland.