Identity- Folkert de Jong

Folkert de Jong is one of my favourite artists at the moment. He explores ideas relating to national identity, war and culture. He was born in the Netherlands and studied at Amsterdam Art School. De Jong uses childlike colours and materials. he works with styrofoam, wax and plastics to create playful and lolly-like textures. He makes everything in his installations from scratch i.e. he would never use any ready-mades. De Jong creates scenes consisting of life-sized characters in a sort of fantasy world but world which the viewer can relate to. I saw an exhibition last year in Melbourne of ballet dancers he'd made and they were amazing.

First image derived from- http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.dailyserving.com/art/Folkert-Dejong-12-11-06.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.dailyserving.com/2006/12/folkert_de_jong.php&usg=__FOguXaVQpa_YMoTdHBcVS7uZq3Q=&h=375&w=500&sz=79&hl=en&start=3&sig2=Gpyj0cmJTQ-8k4CbHiCOuw&um=1&tbnid=b5pgnFEeqkf1XM:&tbnh=98&tbnw=130&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dfolkert%2Bde%2Bjong%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den-us%26sa%3DX%26um%3D1&ei=XJubSuaZKI-MkAXUj8CrAg

Second image derived from-http://media.photobucket.com/image/folkert%20de%20jong%20dancer/witchyhoy3/myspace/the-dance.jpg

Collaboration- Jake and Dinos Chapman

Jake and Dinos Chapman are brothers from Britain who work together in Collaborative Installations. Their works are very controversial and confronting and a lot of people don't approve of them. Touching on ideas relating to pedophilia, incest and sexuality these quite realistic works should have caused much more of an uproar than Bill Henson. Jake and Dinos worked as assistants to Gilbert and George and were part of the YBA movement. I find their work very interesting.

Image derived from: http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://scrapbook.citizen-citizen.com/photos/uncategorized/chapman.jpg&imgrefurl=http://scrapbook.citizen-citizen.com/subjectivity/jake_and_dinos_chapman/&h=800&w=600&sz=157&tbnid=Nb5ecjd9iWHU0M:&tbnh=143&tbnw=107&prev=/images%3Fq%3Djake%2Band%2Bdinos%2Bchapman&usg=__Zk6MdvAfJogpzN4APuX66w9sbTk=&ei=F5abStbEJJGCkAX996mrAg&sa=X&oi=image_result&resnum=4&ct=image

Art + Identity - Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document

“… ‘femininity’ can be understood not as a natural essence but as a complicated edifice which patriarchy demands in order to give ‘masculinity’ meaning and strength.”

Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document is a sensuous, Lacanian influenced documentation of the mother-child relationship; ensuing the consequential re-formation and development of the mother and the child’s respective identities. PPD is Kelly’s most renowned work; a large scale installation consisting of 135 pieces, divided into 6 subcategories, progressively mapping the separation between mother and baby – specifically; Kelly and her own son. Identity is referenced by the work extrinsically within the artist-audience relationship; Kelly’s identity as a feminist artist, and intrinsically within the artist-artwork framework; Kelly’s negative identity, determined by the progressive independence of her son.

Drawing from Lacan’s neo-Freudian ideas concerning psychoanalysis in relation to unconscious development, Kelly accompanies series of meticulously recorded fragments of her son’s early development with “pseudo-scientific language … to counter the assumption that childcare is based on women’s natural and instinctive understanding of the role of mothering” . Included within her recordings of her son; Kelly exhibits feeding charts, faecal stains, first and/or significant speech utterances, first drawings, plaster casts and a jarring array of both objective and subjective journalistic entries made by the artist herself.

PPD recounts to its viewers the progressive stages of Kelly’s consecutive identity roles in relation to her son’s growth. During the ante-partum (pregnancy) and breastfeeding stages respectively, Lacanian thought suggests the symbolic role of the mother is temporarily heightened to that of a self-fulfilled, narcissistic being, within an inherently symbiotic relationship with her child; the child effectively becoming the phallus. However, as time progresses and the child becomes more independent, the mother “… experiences a sense of loss that … Kelly describes as reliving her own Oedipal drama, undergoing castration for the second time and re-learning the fact of her negative place in the symbolic order.”

It is at this point in the mother-child relationship that review critic Laura Mulvey suggests the mother has two possible options; “recognition … of her place or rebellion against it … her rebellion takes the form of fetishisation of the child (as substitute phallus), clinging to the couple relationship”. This fetishisation of the child is actively taken up by Kelly within the context of the artwork, thus, enabling the transgression of her intrinsic identity to that of her extrinsic identity. By channeling the compulsive energies of mapping her son’s progress into her artwork, Kelly effectively relinquishes any sense of attachment to the symbiosis between herself and her son, simultaneously upholding two separate identities.

References

Mulvey, L. “Post-Partum Document Review” in Post-Partum Document, Mary Kelly. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

Kelly, M. Preface to Post-Partum Document, by Mary Kelly. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

Kelly, M. Post Partum Document. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

Isaak, J. “Our Mother Tongue: The Post-Partum Document” in Post-Partum Document, Mary Kelly. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

Iverson, M. “The bride stripped bare by her own desire: reading Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document” in Post-Partum Document, Mary Kelly. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

Kelly, M. Imaging Desire. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.

Nasio, J. Five Lessons of the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan, trans. David Pettigrew and Francois Raffoul. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.

Image References

Kelly, M. Post-Partum Document: Documentation I, 1974. Analysed faecal stains and feeding charts (prototype), (detail). Perspex unit, white card, diaper linings, plastic sheeting, paper, ink. 1 of the 7 units, 28 x 35,5cm. Collection Generali Foundation, Vienna. Reproduced from Postmasters, http://www.postmastersart.com/archive/MK/PPDDocI.html# (accessed August 28th, 2009).

Kelly, M. Post-Partum Document. 1976. Transitional Objects, Diary and Diagram (detail), Perspex unit, white card, body/hand imprint in clay, Plaster of Paris, cotton fabric, string. 1 of the 8 units, 28 x 35.5 cm each. Collection, Zurich Museum. Reproduced from Postmasters, http://www.postmastersart.com/archive/MK/PPDDocIV.html# (accessed August 28th, 2009).

Kelly, M. Post-Partum Document: Introduction, 1973, (detail). Perspex unit, white card, wool vests, pencil, ink. 1 of the 4 units, 20 x 25.5 cm each. Collection Peter Norton Family Foundation. Reproduced from Postmasters, http://www.postmastersart.com/archive/MK/PPDIntro.html# (accessed August 28th, 2009).

Art and Identity- Sebastião Salgado

Sebastio Salgado presented through photography, the greatest artistic influence of my limited artistic history and from an exhibition I never actually saw. But after a hard night out, the image I got from the bus stop where it was advertised leaped at me, praying for compassion, or maybe I was just hallucinating. He is renowned for a widely differing subject range, and acclaimed for journalistic consistency in Geopolitical matters, like documenting a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands.

The idea of artists, like some portrait of Moses, enslaving people to move a dune of sand forty feet- leftwards, in the sixties may have a concreted context- it may even echo the haunted battlefronts of the Somme in the painful orchestration, but for identity- Salgado's sheer blood, sweat and tears proclaim an identity through the practice of reinforcing ideals and morals. Poverty costs a persons identity. Salgado will not limit himself to being richer nor poorer from it.

I "stopped" Painting after Salgado, I went through a number of worst case scenarios- I wondered who was making my cobalt paint etc...I think getting an assumed child to go Mining is excessive. (I hate the killing of Kolinsky Red Sables, as they are personify ably dogs, more than rodents, and what makes them so legendary is a barbarism like Whaling. I eat Duck, Venison, truffles- however...)

If the mad artist can ring up his brother the next time when his bottle of Absinthe runs out ala` van Gogh, does he suffer, really at all? There are children with guns, or maybe swarms of flies, to consider... Consider, the innocent child! At all times, absolutely and understand correctly, the gift of every person's potential, and cease the falsehoods and transgression against the valid universal adequacy thereof. Why? Because it will make art better.

Also, Buy something, dare you. You will find it passed through fifty hands before the finger sweat of any little anticipation, and only some of the hands were painless or free of sickness and none were free from death. The Artist privilege to "Make" and not "Buy" is a gift. It is equality which is operative and must be shared freely.

The Photography featured in the "Workers" suite, exhibited in Sydney, circa 1996, describes in painfully plaintive detail, the extort of philosophy over endevour. The angels that mine, could get a mention, lots of charming narratives about money, kids and gold, and what ever else you have to bleed for- the story about Ping. This lives today, some people don't have a clue about who they are or indeed where, what they live in, or what all about what they've purchased. The truth remains, only very rarely is something immaculate and free from someone's, eternal, loss. It also becomes difficult to live without thinking that parts of life are not in someway contrived, bought, passed down through thousands of hands.

I once mentioned the invention of the word Sabotage- A SABOT is a clog, the children, who were forced to labour for the industrial revolution, used to assert their limited human rights over their "employer", by ceasing the gears with them, (Parents would sell children to factories. Charles Dickens is an answer to many 19 century concerns) it possibly spawned a number of phrases; "clogging up the system" etc, any way how clever, their drawings were probably better than mine as well.

Art & Identity

I feel that in my art I am constantly addressing the issue of identity. For an assignment last semester, I created a puppet that represented what a patient of Kirkbride would have been like when it was a hospital. I made it move around to a sound track of noises, which were of my own voice. I cried, I screamed, I mumbled and eventually I became crazy.

For this piece I was trying to portray a loss of identity; the patent that had differing ideas to the rest of the world at the time and had to be put away and shut up. At the start they fought, and eventually gave up who they were and became empty and void of all identity.

Information about ARI exhibitions

This website lists ARI (Artist Run Initiative) galleries from all over Australia...

http://crawl.net.au/

Art and Collaboration-Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler

Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler collaboration lasted between 1985-1995. Although their collaboration ended almost 20 years ago due to Ericson's premature death the work they produced is said to have been "some of the most profound conceptual art projects of the time" and they are said to be the pioneers of public art. their works ranged from "public projects and sit-specific installations to drawings and mixed media sculptures". Their work explores culture and history in relation to economy, institution and concept of home.

In the book 'America Starts Here' Ziegler explains in an interview how the notion of collaboration not only includes other artists. They were creating works such as "Camouflaged History" (1991) in which they painted the exterior of a private home all 72 commercial paint colours approved by the Charleston Board of Architectural Review for homes within that district, in a camouflage pattern. Ziegler refers to the owners of the homes used in such projects as very much apart of their collaboration.

• Kate Ericson and others, America starts here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler (Michigan: Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, 2005)

from ART & Collaboration to ART & Identity

A BIG THANK YOU TO EVERYONE FOR TODAY - I hope you enjoyed the exhibition!

Thank you also for the posts on ART & the BODY and Art & COLLABORATION we will discuss at the very beginning of next Tuesdays class then move on to the comments for ART & IDENTITY.

Collaboration - Soda_Jerk

Sydney-based artists Soda_Jerk are Dan and Dominique Angeloro. Soda_Jerk work with found material - audio, video, and still images - which they then recombine and recontextualise. For Soda_Jerk, video "conveys the sense of a fragment of time teleported into the now". Picnic at Wolf Creek, for example, is a ten minute video work that remixes video footage and sound clips from iconic Australian films. Soda_Jerk, collaborate not just with each other but also force a collaboration between themselves and the authors of their sampled material.

I don't want to pull pics off their website, but here's the link.

Soda_Jerk

Lousia Bufardeci & Zon Ito + 2 new ONLINE ART MAGAZINES to read

Check out:

ART Daily ONLINE
http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=32113&int_modo=1
+
ART Culture ONLINE
http://artculture.com/contemporary-art/louisa-bufardeci-and-zon-ito-at-mca-sydney

I will add the websites to our links list!

REMEMBER to use the LABELS

Hi all,

A reminder that you need to LABEL ALL POSTS. I do not have time to go through all posts and label so can you all please check your individual posts and LABEL if you have not done so.

See you this afternoon!

A.

Collaborative Art - NU-CA

NU-CA is a title that encompasses "a network of uncollectable artists" and their characteristically unobtainable, poorly documented, large scale and sometimes illegal works. Ironically, I found their site seconds after having googled "sydney collaborative artists".

The website is something of a directory listing collaborative artists around Australia; their respective blog sites, dissertaions, discussions and the cultural events within which they are involved (radio shows, etc).

Unfortunately, as I trawled through the various links, I noticed the website seems to have been inactive for about two years :( I don't know whether this means they are no longer operating .. or they just don't update their blog.

Solidifying the group's status as a collaboration rather than mere directory, in 2004 at the Next Wave Festival in Melbourne, the group launched a series of collector cards (see the one featured above; , featuring the uncollectable NU-CA artists themselves :).

Check out their website: http://squatspace.com/uncollectable/index.php

Images + Data sourced from: NU-CA, NU-CA Network of Uncollectable Artists (2007) http://squatspace.com/uncollectable/index.php (accessed August 25th, 2009).

Jessica Olivieri & Hayley Forward with the Parachutes for Ladies

Jessica Olivieri & Hayley Forward with the Parachutes For Ladies (PFL)

Last week we were all fortunate to see Olivieri and Forward’s latest work Small States at Art Space and also to hear Olivieri speak about it.
“The video uses the historically contested site of Berlin as a place of postwar legacy, once marked by the division of the Berlin Wall. Set in a public thoroughfare on the corner of Frankfurter Allee and Karl Marx Allee, this space is bookened by private entrances to architecturally grand post-war apartment blocks. Several men inhabit and map out the space, as they click their fingers to an inaudible tack - a reference to opening scene in West Side Story, where opposing street gangs mark territory through choreographed movement. Bodies move through space, in states of animated suspension and trapped in a loop where the repetitive finger clicking and swinging arm movement might erupt into dance at any moment.”
- excerpt from small states (dancellations) catalogue essay by Daniel Mudie Cunningham, 2008.
The two girls work collaboratively together to create interdisciplinary works incorporating performance, video, sound, and installation. Forward has done the sound engineering for this video while Olivieri was on set with the un-trained (PFL) actors who were another collaborative link. Olivieri said that The PFL’s made the video with their vulnerability and courage to perform what was asked of them. She said their performances were an integral aspect and that they ‘made’ the film.
I think these two girls work well together and have synced their ideas to create an outstanding piece of work, which I enjoyed immensely. I also like how they highlighted the PFL’s importance and role in the piece since this enabled the project to come about. Collaborative work is worth trying if it produces this standard of work.

Collaborating Artists- Fischli and Weiss/ Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan

Fischli and Weiss " The First Blush of the Morning" from Equilibres 1999

From the 2008 Bienale, comes the enigmatic relationship of Fischli and Weiss. It is evident of the images the role balance plays in the often humourous arrangement of spaces. It is not coincidental that differing persons can form a similar, or similarly absurd or complimentary idea from the same subject or opinion of object, and utilize the concept of a universal mind between the contributors. The quotidian is exploited as are the ideas of chains of reactions and natural order.



Briefly, the denizens of popular culture saw fit to add tribulation to the double suicide of acclaimed artist couple, and Game designers, Jeremy Blake and Therese Duncan.

Painter and film artist Blake, met and formed a working relationship with Film Maker Duncan, and together produced a Whitney Biennial winning work, The History of Glamour (a URL to the video is contained....) Their relationship developed and suffered through increasing depression and paranoia, which became quite combustive and uncontrollable, especially on the half of Therese... The story is long and intense, and involves Scientologists and drugs, and the best version of the events can be found in Vanity Fair.

The Art world is reeling from the amount of Papparazzi spin the couple posthumously collected. Blake's work of folksie larynx wrangler Beck is seen above.

Here is the vid- (although wireless connections make it tough work)....

www.vanityfair.com/culture/.../historyofglamour_video200801

Here is the article-
www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/01/suicides200801
(My Hyperlinks are duffed so please copy and paste...)

Art + the Body - Gina Pane

Gina Pane is renowned for using her body as a point of reference to the environment and the impact upon which humans have upon it.

In her performance work Azione Sentimentale in 1973, Pane deliberately self-harmed in order to illustrate the control and the ability to corrupt the environment that humans posess and often dismiss.

"Survivor"- Art and the Body

On Saturday August 15th I went to the opening of an exhibition by Dadang Christanto called "Survivor". The exhibition focused on the "man-made mud catastrophe" which occurred three years ago in East Java. 11 villages in were wiped out and thousands killed from mud erupting from a mining company's gas exploration well. 

Volunteers along with Dadang coated themselves in mud from neck to toe and participated in a silent activistic performance piece. The bodies in this piece are the "canvas" and our attention is drawn to the meditative and contemplative aura that surrounds the people in the work. The silence represents the silence of government and mining company in recognising the disaster and the thousands of lives lost. The body is a key aspect of the exhibition: the poisonous mud has caused people to suffer from numerous illnesses, polluted the water, destroyed towns and destroyed lives. 

Amanda, sorry this is late as I have been ill.

collaboration Moffatt and Hillberg

Tracey Moffatt
Born 1960 in Brisbane, Australia. 
Lives and works in Sydney and Brisbane, Australia and New York City, USA



Gary Hillberg
Born 1982 in Perth, Australia. 
Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia

 

For the 2008 Sydney Biennale Tracey Moffat collaborated with fellow Australian artist Gary Hillberg to produce ‘Revolution’ (2008), the end result was a visual study into the stereotypes attached to revolution, and its aftermath, in cinema. The film is a ‘mash-up’ of popular dramatic scenes juxtaposed with excerpts from b-grade movies and held together through powerful visual dynamism and a melodramatic soundtrack.

 

This isn’t the first time these two have paired up to create dynamic new footage, in 2003 they made their own 21 minute love story (LOVE 2003) taken from pre-existing classics films to the more dazzling scenes of the 1960’s and 70’s and amalgamated them into an energetic montage of the ‘sugary’ moments of cinema.

 

(Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg have made numerous other movies in the past decade including; Lip - 1999, 10 min. Color and Artist - 1999, 10 min. Color.

 

A film collaboration between Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg 2003, 21 min., Color/BW

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/deepend/features/gallery/gallery2005/img/artworks/moffatt1_big.jpg

(sorry I couldn’t find a picture of REVOLUTION)

 

I think what is so useful or complementary about working in collaboration with another person is that the project is immediately taken from the insula arena of the mind and displayed, reconfigured and discussed in the open air of  minds – one is forced to look both objectively and subjectively at their own workings and ideas. 

Outside ideas generate new perspectives.