Offset
13/12/20
For this task we were asked to choose an artist from one year between 2010 – 2019. I have been following Jon Burgerman for a while now, so I was delighted to see that he had done a talk for Offset in 2014 and I was excited to learn more about his life, interests and his thought process.
Jon Burgerman, 2014
I have always loved Jon Burgerman and his work, however I hadn’t ever seen him speak for this long before, so I was actually very excited to see who he was outside of the short clips and pictures I’ve only ever seen him in.
He spent the majority of this talk getting off-topic, or at least it seemed that way in the beginning. Although each time he went off-topic, he would always manage to find a way to link it back to the one lesson that he wanted everyone to learn from him. ‘Encourage the Ferret’. At an early part of the Offset talk, he showed everyone his favourite YouTube video. It was of a ferret running around a football pitch and completely disrupting the entire game. He thought this was a perfect analogy for how he saw his artistic process. He said that technically you don’t ever really know for sure what’s going to happen.
For example when painting a mural late into the night, he learned that once it gets to a certain cold temperature that paint won’t dry on brick. And then after a rainy wet night, all the paint had dripped down rather than dry. He learned from this experience and fixed the mural. But he also decided to purposefully experiment with this technique further and created a series of paintings that resembled the drippy wet mural he had encountered.
Another thing that Jon Burgerman made very apparent, was his love for making art interactive. Time and time again he talked about how he had combined interaction with art. Instead of an exhibit of his work on the wall, he created a background and props to use and encouraged people to create with them. Another time he talked about how he had become bored in a club once, and started offering people the change to get drawings of their face onto their body just for his own amusement.
I was engaged the entire way through this Offset talk, and I loved to hear about the different ways in which he created his art. It really opened my eyes and made me realise that there really are no limitations to creating art. All it requires is an imagination.
