Bliss
Photo-appropriation through pixel transcription
For my project I worked with the most recognised picture in the world of our time, Bliss by Charles O'Rear. This picture’s success and recognition started only a little more than a decade ago, and it became with unparalleled ease and speed the most widespread and most seen picture of our time. This picture is held in the visual memory of most of today’s population. Bliss has become this widely known thanks to a number of characteristic features of our age such as capitalism, globalization, and digital technology. The picture’s rise to fame was ensured when it was chosen by Microsoft as the default background image for its computer operating system XP, which turned out to be an exceptional success in the IT world. At its peak XP was used by more than 80 percent of computer users, and it remained the most widely used operating system until August 2012. This meant that Bliss had been seen by billions from Anchorage to the Galápagos Islands, from Paris to Antananarivo, from Auckland to Pyongyang. The digital format of the photograph made it possible for it to go this viral, but on 8 April 2014 Windows ended support for XP, which meant that the system’s days were numbered. Thus both XP and Bliss are bound to disappear quite soon. This also means that Bliss will disappear from the common visual knowledge of the generations born sometime after 2000 (although it will still be remembered by the older generations, thus creating a difference between these two population groups). Let us imagine, how strange it would be if other well-known – though non-digital – images were to have the same fate: if, for example, for the coming generations the Mona Lisa were no longer the painting which has been seen many times by everyone in several mediums, like books, television, postcards, mugs, etc.). My idea was to take O'Rear’s Bliss out of its context, namely the digital world, in which the image existed until now (albeit the original work was in analogue form), and which is ultimately responsible for the image’s fall into oblivion. I have certainly seen Bliss more times than I can remember, for instance whenever my computer froze for minutes and the only thing I could do is to wait and of course in my boredom stare at this PC wallpaper.
Yet in these cases this image was always in digital form, and I am not sure whether I approached it as a photograph. I saw it, but I did not really contemplate it.
Now, by having the opportunity to see the printed-out picture, we are actually more able to look at it as a picture than ever before. Looking at it gives us an interesting and new experience although we have already ’seen’ this picture many times. It also brings up the question, how do our considerations alter when seeing something we have seen before, but in a different context, in which we did not ’observe’.
So my aim is to try to encourage us not to ’lose’ this picture, which has been for a long time basically a part of our everyday lives, and to preserve it and help its survival. This can be regarded as an experiment as well. Of course, I was also very interested to finally see it outside of and beyond a screen. My work may be seen as a gesture or a tribute to Charles O'Rear, but I have to confess, Bliss is not my favourite piece of photography.
Because I found the terms art forgery, copying, replica, pastiche, authentication, aura, appropriation, distinction very exciting, I decided to re-create Bliss, by copying each digital pixel, one-by-one to a blank file in an image editing software.
Due the huge number of pixels, I knew it was going to be a wearisome and meticulous task, which I welcomed, as I sought to discover parallels between this process and art forging as practised for instance by the forgers in the Chinese city of Dafen. The art forgers might work very hard and with high painting skills, but at the end of each copying process, they they can probably no longer claim the product as their “own”. Although the pictures are created to be genuine copies of artworks, and they mostly are, it is questionable whether the forgers can be considered as artists in what is in effect an industrial-size copying process. If they cannot, does that mean that the creator of an artwork – in this context– does not necessarily have to be an artist? Art without artist – is that a contradiction? Ad absurdum, can the copy, which might not be any different from the original, be of greater artistic value than the original? For example in the case of my work it definitely took a lot more time to make Bliss (because of the technique I chose), than for O'Rear to make his, who probably took the photograph within no more than a few dozen minutes. Can this time/work-factor make the picture or what it depicts more mine than his? Or is it clearly his, simply because he did it first? Or that he did it the proper way? And anyway, can there be one picture, but two artworks? And am I stealing something by doing that? Or while creating a new image, abusing his?
Ps. Due to the tight deadline (or maybe more due to the plethora of pixels) I realised that I would not be ready with my Bliss in time. For this reason I sought some help: I asked some children from a Hungarian village to help me with the copying for some pocket money. Then I finally put all the pixels together.
Sebestyén Fiumei
2014
© Sebestyén Fiumei
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