WK 9 Nature & Technology

Hi ALL,

Hope you had a great break.

We will be discussing ideas relating to the thematic area Nature & Technology this week - if you want to get a head start, read one of the articles posted for WK 9: Marshall McLuhan - 'Predicting Communication via the Internet' (1966) / Tony Oursler - 'Post-punk Phantasmagoria'.

See you on Tuesday.

A.

Who Does She Think She Is?

This is the trailer for the movie I was talking about in class the other day. I think it brings up some interesting points related to art and it's institutions, particularly relating to the work of the Guerrilla Girls

Who Does She Think She Is?

Abstraction

Art and abstraction seems to very heavily involve the exploration of colour, line, texture and shape, not concerning ones self with creating an object that actually is something. It's all about an objects materiality and what an audience might bring to the object or the exhibition, what they turn the object into, what they think it resembles and how it makes them feel.

Abstract artists such as Donald Judd, i personally find particularly hard to engage with as his works are very geometric and are based purely on colour, shape and the material itself.

His series of untiled works such as:

Untitled (1965)

cause the audience to refer to ordinary, everyday objects in which they can relate to. In this work for instance my first personal response was to relate the work to a series of shelving or even a cd rack.

Other abstract artists, such as Charles Ray, who work in a more organic field of abstraction, resonates better with me personally. Ray is known for playing with the audiences perceptions in a very nerdy, playful way. He works a lot in illusion and creating an atmosphere in the gallery space, particularly in his series of ink works.

Maurizio Cattelan - contemporary art...

maurizio cattelan’s art often combines sculpture and
performance. cattelan has a subtle sense of the paradoxes
of transgression, the limits of tolerance.
since the early 90's, his work has provoked and challenged
the limits of contemporary value systems through its use
of irony and humor.
he teases the art world without ever falling into the naive
trap of thinking he can subvert a system of which he is part.
the characters and personas inhabiting maurizio cattelan’s
world are ghostly appearances in a personal theatre of
the absurd: policemen flipped upside down, stuffed animals
hanging from the ceiling, a swami who buried himself in sand
for hours at a time ...
suspended between reality and fiction, maurizio cattelan’s
work simulates and subverts the rules of culture and society
in a continuous game of detournement, acts of insubordination
and symbolical theft.
constantly exploring different materials, contexts and
strategies, he refuses to take any moral or ideological position,
concentrating instead on reproducing reality in all its
complexities. while he does not offer solutions, he shows that
one can survive and use the system without being consumed
by it.

Santiago Sierra

This is a link to one of his works at the Tate Modern where he paid homeless women, with a nights accommodation, to stand facing a blank wall in the gallery.

It poses questions of exploitation and true artistic conceptualisation when the subjects' inclusion is paid for rather than voluntary.

CLICK HERE

Stuckism and Hughes vs Conceptual Art

There is an international art movement called Stuckism that is against conceptual art and promotes new figurative art with ideas. In August 1999 there was a manifesto written and one sentence claimed "Artists who don't paint aren't artists". What a douche. Other manifestos include "Anti-anti-art" and one criticising Damien Hirst, in particular his artwork 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living' (a.k.a the one with the Shark). I personally think that Stuckist art is a bit crap but I understand that they are attempting to revive traditional art practice and that artists need artistic talent possibly more than artistic concepts. Robert Hughes (Australian art critic/historian) is iffy about what is considered today as contemporary art, where he said in a speech in 2004: 'the string of brush marks in a lace collar in a Velasquez painting could be more radical than a shark "murkily disintegrating in its tank on the other side of the Thames'" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/jun/03/arts.artnews) I agree that just nothing can be art and something obviously extreme that makes controversy may not necessarily be good art. What IS good art, however, is having a concept and successfully transforming it into a physical form via any format. Sol Lewitt puts forward that any idea can be an artwork in itself, but I think it is art when the concept is able to communicate or at least have an impact on the audience. In conclusion, Robert Hughes has a point but Stuckism is balls.

Art & its Institutions - Bibliography

'Zero and Not' (1986)

Joseph Kosuth

Leo Castelli Gallery

Heartney, Eleanor. Art & Today. London: Phaidon, 2008.

Art & Today provided a thorough analysis of art and its institutions and the artists who shaped the shift in artistic thinking. The text was very timeline based, looking at how the institutional systems, and the way artists reacted to them, changed over the centuries, namely the 20th. The way in which artists satirised and resisted the traditions and implications of the institutional aspect of the art world was a large focus, namely the way in which art is being seen as a comodity for social leverage

Liukkonen, Petri. Leon Battista Alberti (1401-1472). 2008. http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/alberti.htm (accessed April 18, 2011).

This website, kirjasto, provided an in depth look at who Leon Battista Alberti was and what he accomplished in the art world. This allowed me to expand further on the information briefly mentioned in the reading regarding his notion of art and one-point perspective.

Sean Kelly Gallery. Joseph Kosuth. http://www.skny.com/artists/joseph-kosuth/bio/ (accessed April 18, 2011).

The sean Kelly Gallery website provided me with a brief biography of Joseph Kosuth, which informed me of his basic artistic practice. The biography also included an informative list of some of his most significant exhibitins, which was a good laaunching pad into further research. although the website did include a few selected works, it really was not sufficient int hat aspect of my research.

Guggenheim. Collection Online. 2011. http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/bio/?artist_name=Joseph%20Kosuth (accessed April 18, 2011)

The Guggenheim websitw again provided a detailed biography of Joseph Kosuth, yet unlike the Sean Kelly website, provided much more detail on his successful works and artistic achievements, rather than focusing on his life experiences. This provided me with a much better research basis into his artworks and conceptual practices.

Dillon, Brian. Fort / Da. 19 October 2010. http://fort-da.tumblr.com/post/1352644615/brian-dillon-on-erasure (accessed April 18, 2011).

This online essay on erasure, although only including a small section on Joseph Kosuth's piece 'Zero and Not', proves to be a very insightful analysis of his work. Looking deeply into Kosuth's selection of Freudian text and the powerful authority naturally attached to those words.

preformance art Venessa beecroft

Vanessa Beecroft, an Italian artist who lives and works in New York has created a series of performance works which explore issues of nudity and conformity and ultimately hope to invoke an emotional reaction from their audience. In most of her works, groups of women are positioned in a space, dressed scantily or nude. They stand motionless and serious, emotionally detached from their audience. Unable to relate to the women, viewers inherently subject them to an entirely aesthetic based judgement. Thus, the audience are made voyeurs, an uncomfortable realisation which makes them unsure how they are supposed to react and relate to the work. Being that they are other humans within the space, viewers also become a part of the work.
Beecroft has utilised the form of performance art to create provocative artwork. She plays on a human beings natural inclination to relate to other human beings, confusing this instinct with the developed nature in which we view and experience art. What is so original about her performance works is that essentially, her models do not ‘perform’. Their passiveness and lack of motion creates a significant tension within the space they share with the viewer, a climate that could only be founded within the conventions of performance art.

Art and Popular Culture Bibliography

Heartney, Eleanor. ART & TODAY. London: Phaidon, 2008.
Art and Today provided an in depth look at various artists who work with the subject matter of popular culture and how they have contributed to the destruction of the lines between 'high art' and 'low art'. The term kitsch, its connotations and connections to the subject of art and popular culture were discussed thoroughly. Clement Greenburg's comments on the use of popular culture in art were very helpful in deacribing the attitudes of many in the early 20th century. The artists looked at ranged from Warhol in the 60s and 70s to the YBAs in the 90s and Tom Sachs who has been very active the past 5 years. This showed how the field and the audiences acceptance of the field has progressed in the past half century.

Edelsztein, S. Hoffmann, J. Lagnado, L. Matsui, M. Momin, S.M. Li, P. Sutton, S. Turkina, O. Vergne, P. The Wrong Gallery. ICE CREAM. London: Phaidon, 2007.

Ice Cream provided a look at many contemporary artists working with popular culture in the past century. The authors are curators from around the world who each choose ten of their favorite artists to feature in the book. This provided interesting insights into how art and popular culture is viewed around the world. Pi Li wrote about Gilbert and George and how they changed his view of art. He was a classically trained art student in conservative China. Gilbert and George held an exhibition which was the first time many had seen western contemporary art in the flesh. This book gave me insight into how popular culture works have impacted on the world and what curators (very important player in the art world) think of them.
Poli, Francesco. POSTMODERN ART 1945-NOW. New York: Collins Design, 2008.
Gilbert and Georges back-story was described in this book so it was very helpful when researching and writing about them. It described both their early work and their more recent work, their purpose as artists and gave dates of significant works in their extensive repertoire.

Van de Walle, Mark. BIOGRAPHY. http://www.tomsachs.org. 2011
This website is Tom Sachs' official site. I mainly looked at the biography to get an idea of his back-story but it also has a very detailed catalouge of his work, information about his exhibitions and an online store. The biography includes a lot of information of his artist practice and concepts behind his works.The biography and catalouge are probably the most useful for the purpose of research.