Forensic Poster

2006 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

73 x 58 cm, 29,7 x 21 cm and 29,7 x 21 cm

Mike Cooter

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Forensic Poster was first realized in 2006 and reactivated in 2011; its making consisted of the artist visiting the London School of Criminology and corresponding with the interim director there in order to reproduce a poster by memory. This piece of work is symptomatic of Cooter’s projects which are often arduous enterprises littered with pitfalls, since they imply prospecting and collaborating with third parties whose will determine the success of the project. Forensic Poster consists of a letter, emails and a gouache which translates the artist’s attempt to recreate a poster glimpsed at in one of the study halls of the London Police Department of Forensic Medicine. Against a blood red background, the drawing simulates a manuscript note that has been pinned to the wall with a giant nail which carries the inscription: “Nail em”. At the bottom of the image, the injunction is completed by “With Good Forensics”. The dry formal rendering reinforces the smooth and aggressive message so that the spectator grasps that it caught the artist’s full attention. The rationale for the presence of the correspondence as part of the work isn’t so not much to allow the confrontation between his memory and the original, but to show his dialogue with London Forensics Police. Mike Cooter’s practice interrogates the place of the artist in society and his implication in reality, indeed in most of his projects he works with third parties et integrates them into the artistic process.

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Mike Cooter’s practice interrogates the place of the artist in society and his implication in reality, indeed in most of his projects he works with third parties et integrates them into the artistic process. Mike Cooter was born in 1978 in Epson. He lives and works in London.

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Colors:

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• collaboration.n.01
• third_party.n.01
• fallible.a.01
• police.n.01
• mistranslation.n.01
• memory.n.01