Sunset over Manhattan, 2003, cigarette packets, tin cans , wooden bench, air gun pellets, light projector. 75 x 110 x 31 cm. 
Kiss of Death, 2003, taxidermy animals, various bones, light projector, metal stand, 180 x 80 x 50 cm
illusion.scene360.com/.../
Please take a look at this website - I am sure it will help you with your collaboration postings for the coming week.
http://collabarts.org/
In the last 10 years or so collaborative art practices have moved in to the mainstream of cultural production, and collaboration is now largely taken for granted as one of the numerous ways that artists can choose to operate. Despite this, artistic collaboration still raises some interesting and crucial questions about the nature of authorship, authenticity and the artists’ relationships to their works & audiences that inevitably disrupts the persistent and popular image of the artist as a ‘heroic’ solitary figure. While some collaborations have come from a reaction against political and cultural regimes, there are numerous other artists who have chosen to work together as a positive choice for collaboration. Common to most if not all collaborative practices though, is an implicit critique of the idea of the artist as a figure that stands outside of society engaged in an internal singular dialogue.
www.whitecube.com/artists/chapman/
If bodies are objects or things, they are like no others, for they are the centres of perspective, insight, reflection, desire, agency. - Elizabeth Grosz
Figure 1: Robert Gober , Untitled Leg, 1989, beeswax, cotton, wood, leather, human hair
In 1989, Gober began what would become a series of disembodied partial limbs with Untitled Leg (Figure 1). The wax “amputation” is a cast of the artist's own leg, embedded with human hairs and dressed with a man's shoe, sock, and partial trouser. The body fragment speaks of absence, of detachment, of loss; the object is loaded with all that is not there. Gober did not place the limb on a pedestal; rather it was installed as if emerging from the gallery wall, describing an uneasy balance between interior and exterior states. Gober's disembodied limbs and appendages imply a psychological fracture. Julia Kristeva writes that in a state of abjection, borders between object and subject cannot be maintained.3 Rooted within the tradition of Freud's uncanny, Untitled Leg is difficult and unsettling because it provokes a reaction in which there is a hesitation in recognising the object as animate or inanimate.4
Figure 2: Robert Gober, Untitled (Candle), 1991, beeswax, human hair, yarn
Gober has spoken of his work as it is informed both by his catholic upbringing and by his homosexuality. In Untitled (Candle) (Figure 2), human hairs embedded in a wax base, provide an ordinary candle with overt phallic connotations. Gober's use of wax in the construction of his body fragments mirrors the transience and impermenance of the human body, with Smithson noting that Gober's objects are imbued with a vulnerability that defines real bodies. The sense of vulnerability is heightened in Untitled (Candle), a work in which a symbol of masculinity and virility is reduced to that which is destined to disintegrate. Gober has written of the impact of the AIDS epidemic, and the struggle that artists faced in expressing that impact within their work.5 Here the hybrid object of the candle/phallus suggests a painful memorial, while simultaneously referring to the corporeality of the symbolism of the Catholic faith, and Gober's uneasy place as a homosexual raised within the Church.
Figure 3: Robert Gober, Untitled, 1991-1993, wood, beeswax, human hair, fabric, paint and shoes
Untitled (Figure 3) takes the form of a lower half of a male body, violently protruding from the gallery wall to impose itself within the space. Arranged facedown, the partial figure evokes a disquieting sense of powerlessness and unease. The surface of the wax figure is punctured with a number of ulcer-like drains. The drain motif is recurring in much of Gober's practice. In this instance it serves to suggest a body that is leaking, the separation between inner and outer broken down, and emphasises the dual nature of the body as both private and public.
1 Roberta Smith, Against Delusion: Robert Gober's Nuts-and-Bolts Americana, The New York Times, August 23 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/arts/design/23gobe.html?_r=1, (accessed August 10 2009)
4 Ruth Ronen, Aesthetics of Anxiety, 42, New York: SUNY Press, 2009
5 Neal Benezra, “Plumbing Robert Gober” in Distemper: Dissonant Themes in the art of the 1990s, 46, Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1996
‘At the beginning, setting the terms: if I specialize in a medium, I would be fixing a ground for myself, a ground I would have to be digging myself out of, constantly, as one medium was substituted for another – so, then, instead of turning toward “ground” I would shift my attention and turn to “instrument”, I would focus on myself as the instrument that acted on what ever ground was, from time to time, available.’
Body as instrument.
Instrument for “art doing” as opposed to “art experiencing”
“Art experiencing” is an assumption - a mere by-product of the completed form.
Vito Acconci, Step Piece, 1970.
102 Christopher Street; four months (February–April–July–November), 1970; 8AM each day.
Daily training makes for daily improvement.
The activity is left open; it is, in principle, a public performance.
Vito Acconci Steps into Performance (and Out) (1979)
1. Into Action
Excerpts taken from Theories and documents of Contemporary Art, Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz.
Nicholas Zurbrugg article Installation Art – Essence and Existence examines the different elements that constitute a work with artistic merit or the innovative qualities ‘that widen the languages of creativity. Zurbrugg suggests Installations art’s position of autonomous ‘real-time’, as something that has the ability to co-exist through orchestrated time (duration), techno-time (data recording) or virtually outside of time as a separate and complete entity. These qualities of constructed ‘real-time’ and each works innate three dimensionality gives the artist the freedom to explore and assess new ways to develop and manipulate spatial impact on the viewer. Much Installation Art comes into existence through the artists desire to be self-governing and redefine the gallery space, whereby very exhibition is subject to the desires of the artist and the dimensions the installation is interfacing with, therefore the work also become self-documenting and self-conscious – its unique existence determines its essence. Zurbrugg emphasises that Installation Art has the potential to work on multiple levels of perception, participation, construction and idea/aesthetic essence, suggesting that we look towards the preceding modern movements of futurism, the Bauhaus experiments, dada, surrealism and constructivism in order to decipher the complex nature of the practice and stating that ‘many forms of contemporary Installation Art make historical sense as the systematic and technological realisation of modernist ‘dreams’’.
Zurbrugg reference to John Cage’s installation/performance-like happenings suggest the similarities between Installation Art and Performance and makes sense of the idea that because the audience is seen to be an active participant the work is always art-in progress and, therefore, is able to ‘consciously evade both pre-classification and post-classification’. Zurbrugg attitude seems to become a little more pessimistic when comparing the principles of Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau 1924-23 and Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal 1917, suggesting that while Schwitters could be seen as the ‘precursor for the commemorative impulse in post-modern Installation Art, or those who take value seriously’ Duchamp’s initial impact have perhaps now given way to insipid and under considered ‘static’ installations. He further impresses that there is something insufficient about second-hand Duchampian shock-value installations through a statement by Joseph Beuys (Art monthly, 112 January 1988) that “the Silence of Duchamp is overrated” and that art should be “something which is related to humankinds creative structure and senses and to thought, feeling and the gaining of power”. This reference to the work of Joseph Beuys emphasises the notion that Installation art should be that of nostalgia, documentation, memorial and the artist and the audience (as one is the same). He moves on to point out that Installation Art with substance is generally in tune with current society and that kinetic works are most congruent. Perhaps again linking installation Art to performance – motion, or remarking that technology and progressive action is at the for-front of social values and must therefore be recognised as an artistic possibility. Zurbrugg poses a guideline to deciphering and recognising valid or cogent forms of installations and less valid substitutes, reinforcing that what advocates essence is Installation that actively invites the audience’s participation and contemplation.
