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Themesicon: navigation pathPhoto/Byteicon: navigation pathDocument and Abstraction
 
Who´s´Afraid of Blue, Red and Green? (Selichar, Günther), 1995
 
 
 

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landscape motif was used, which was applied to the first display side. On the third display side there was the image of a landscape almost identical to the first one, but with differences. Between the two landscapes there was a striped surface in blue, red and green, which corresponds to the enlarged surface of a color monitor and makes reference to the technical parameters of image production or the primary color system of various mass media. The direction of movement was programmed in such a way that the first landscape image was followed by the striped surface, and then the second landscape image appeared. The prisms then turned backwards to the striped surface and to the first landscape image, where the direction was again changed to the striped surface, etc. This meant that the two landscape images could never be looked at one directly after the other, but were always interrupted by the monitor surface. Unlike in magazines, the two ‹spot the differences› images could never be seen beside each other. The comparison had to be done from memory. The picture puzzle that transformed in succession thus stood for moving mass media, although in this case it was enormously slowed

 

down to five seconds per display side. The short life of the information and the resulting uncertainty are diametrically opposed to a fashionable word that is used in an inflationary way in the media discourse: the creation of ‹sustainability.›

4.2. «The picture, however, cannot represent its form of representation; it shows it forth.»

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I have been realizing works of the group «Who´s Afraid of Blue, Red and Green?» since 1989, and it has found expression in various media, amongst others in an Internet project of the same name. The point of departure of this work was the enlarged aperture grille of a color monitor based on an apparative eye. The title «Who´s Afraid of Blue, Red and Green?» is a variation on Barnett Newman’s famous «Who´s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?» (1966/70), whose four-part series of paintings made reference to the primary color system of painting in a radical and selfreflexive way at a time when painting appeared to be driven to an end in the history of Modernism by the prevailing developments in art. Due to the shifting of the primary color system within this pressing question—away from

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