Remixed - A project by Stefan Schuster

The Berlin-based artist Stefan Schuster has invited the artists to rework his original drawings. Schuster's drawings are based on an abstract and reduced use of line, which leaves lots of room for interpretation. All of the invited artists were requested to select three to four drawings to use as their original and to rework them without any additional instructions. This form of artistic teamwork taps familiar strategies of artistic production: both the idea of cooperation i.e., the joint creation of a work of art, and processes that use given artworks to readdress and reconsider contexts or issues that have already been negotiated. However, remixed actually subverts the idea of cooperation, since it is not about a joint working process‹in the sense of working at the same time or agreeing on content. Instead, it reveals a sequential working process, in which the original work is in danger of being painted over, distorted or made unrecognizable. The project also calls to mind modes of production implemented by artists who have inspired the notions of the appropriation and transformation of a work of art by painting over it. Stefan Schuster's remixed takes this process a step further, because the artist invites others to continue or rework the original. The results range from a careful extension of the given abstract structure to a juxtaposition and montage of additional visual components or figural ensembles that merely use the dimensions of the given form as a starting point. Schuster's strategy raises question as to the destruction or modification of an already existing work; it calls for a reexamination of terms such as "original," "creator" or "author." remixed is thus the latest of a series of projects, in which Schuster draws on his artist network. Over the past few years he has engaged in this kind of exchange through book projects, and in 2007 he began to take it into the third dimension.