Ken Feingold

In looking for media artists that have worked with their childhood as inspiration I found artist Ken Feingold. Growing up in a significantly different time and situation, Ken’s search for his childhood is much different than my own, but the concepts and ideas, as well as approach is something to be learned from, in trying to better articulate the concepts behind my work.

At the center of Feingold’s work, Childhood/Hot & Cold Wars (The Appearance of Nature), he writes: I have undertaken a search for my childhood TV memories, a kind of archaeology of those images and sounds that I remember, or see now, as having been formative in my understanding of what was going on in the world. I grew up watching television programs I saw in my first years. The thoughts of my childhood emerged amid constant references to world war, the atom bomb…and promises of endless progress in a fantastic technological future in which I would be visiting other worlds.

I spent my childhood visiting worlds of my own via cartoons and I think this is an opportunity to look deeper at what these cartoons informed me of. What were the social and political situations of the time and how were they represented in these cartoons, how can I express this to my viewer?

Another source of inspiration for a piece that I have been contemplating via the appropriation of two robotic dolls known as the Teddy Ruxpin, is Feingold’s pieces that consist of heads of his creation that question their own existence. In his work If/Then, allows identical heads in a cardboard box that talk to each other in an attempt to determine who and what they are: “I wanted them to look like replacement parts being shipped form the factory that had suddenly gotten up and begun a kind of existential dialogue right there on the assembly line.”

Collins, Judith. Sculpture Today. London: Phaidon, 2007. Print.

Druckrey, Timothy, and Charles Stainback. Iterations: the New Image. New York City: International Center of Photography, 1993. Print.

Rush, Michael. Video Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2007. Print.