In college I painted myself as Caravaggio’s Bacchus. I was mad for the mad Italian painter then, and decorated my dorm room with postcards and illustrations. When my family took a trip to Rome, I hunted down all the wonderful paintings hidden in obscure churches, illuminated for brief moments by the contribution of a few lira. Later when Derek Jarman’s film Caravaggio came out I marveled at his skillful reconstructions of some of the artist’s most famous tableaus. I had awesome curly hair back then, too, a plastic grape leaf vine, and a bedsheet, so what was keeping me from trying my own? I had been busy for a few years painting squares, mired in another modernist endgame, and needed to blow off some romantic steam.
There’s an almost too simple pleasure in copying another work of art – presuming it’s a good one – but a copy is never really just that. Think of Zeno’s paradox: an arrow can never reach its target because it faces an infinity of half distances that it must first travel. In the same way, a copy never reproduces the original, remaining always at least a half step from the source of inspiration. But that’s where everything that’s cool resides anyway, in that gap between what we look at and what we see, between what we want it to be and what it is.
So I was instantly drawn to Remake – a series of homemade interpretations of famous works of art displayed on booooooom.com. These redo’s run the gamut from early medieval and renaissance paintings, to impressionist masterpieces, to iconic works of pop art and surrealism and include everyone from Leonardo to Frida Kahlo to Cindy Sherman. There are quite a few Vermeers and Van Goghs of course, but you can also find Nan Goldin and Christo in there as well. Some of the remakes are elaborate, involving set building, complicated lighting and make-up and many patient and cooperative participants. Others seem thrown together on a drunken dare but are no less effective or telling. All of them display a touching reverence to their subject and a lot of heart. I understand the impulse. The Remakes on booooooom.com include more than a few Caravaggios actually, including his Calling of Saint Matthew, where in one iteration the apostle and his companions wear Gordon Gecko dress shirts and suspenders instead of robes and sandals. The source is clearly recognizable although the remake also reminded me of that classic image of dogs playing poker. Maybe that’s the real lesson in all this: the permeability of any work of art, its limitlessness, its function to dismantle mental, emotional and spiritual boundaries and to call attention to the associative potential that it’s supposed to inspire, and to have a little fun.
Besides giving us a good laugh, the series is also a pretty revealing look at which works of art touch or obsess or even just amuse us, and how indelible they remain even when altered or presented in such variety. They also show that tradition is not a staid or static thing, that these copycats in fact are keeping it very much alive. I always like it when something takes a little hot air out of the sails of High Art, reminding us that it should be accessible, and yes, fun, and even more important that it should inspire people to go make more art, even if they are not “artists.” Nor have I ever thought of works of art as inviolable, or even as important. Art is important but works of art, like breaths, are in endless supply as long as we are alive and as long as we in turn draw life from them – or lives maybe. After all, I was just another painting student but I was also the god of wine and madness. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be an Arlsienne postman a stern looking dude with a pitchfork – either way it will be me up there, as it always is.
