Revised Semester Dates Posted

We still have an 'official' gallery visit planned. If you are interested in reviewing an alternate exhibition please consult with me first. If I am not made aware of alternate exhibition choices the review cannot be assessed.

Art and deformation ketchup-Sarah Lucas

Sarah Lucas is a part of that whole young British artists group. Her work is essentially feminist,
visually hard hitting and symbolic. She seems to like to use food items to replace vagina's, penises, boobs in a kind of unabashed sexual context. To embodies what i take deformation art to be all about mainly sexuality,stretching social confines,physical or emotional turmoil and the sublime.
What I find most interesting about Sarah Lucas's work though is the raw symbolism (and the aesthetic that comes with)also it's energy that cannot help but effect you with it's base play between female and male and use of comical materials.

Art & Identity- Nayland Blake- (forgive the tardiness!)

Nayland Blake is an artist that i came across last session and was immediatly intrigued by his work. He has an african-american father and caucasian mother and he himself looks more white than bi-racial, he is also an overweight gay man, and his works display his journeys through discovering his identity and how he is identified. 'Gorge' is an incredible work in which Blake in restrained to a chair and force fed an array of foods for an hour by a black man stripped to his waist, the work evokes a strong sense of nurturing and torture as Blake is a willing participant yet is obviously in great discomfort. But the work that really stuck out for me is a piece called 'starting over' in which Blake wears a bunny suit that is filled with beans weighing the same amount as his lover whom stands off stage and calls out directions to Blake for the bunny hop. Blake can barely move from the weight of the suit yet still feebly tries to follow his lovers instructions. Once again the lines between care and punisment are blured, and the symbolism of trying to live up to someone elses expectations are powerfully displayed by the comical yet pathetic performance.

catching up- art and the body;Marina Abramovic styles

Marina Abramovic s the queen of trance through pain or maybe pettite mort meaning small death (and probably i spelt it all wrong it's german sorry).
Her work concerns the body in it's capacity for endurance, pain, reaction.
Her performance pieces can be likened to rituals, where she performed mostly naked with a set list of tasks and time frame to uphold.

She brings up issues of sexuality,inhibition,meditation, transcendence,clarification (or ritual purification),and childhood nostalgia.
She made me contemplate performance art and it's use as this kind of ritualistic timeless act.

Wot to write?art and identity

evidently from the title i don't know what to say exactly but here i go.....Art and Identity.
I was looking at some work by Fiona Foley/ thinking about National 'pride'...'groups' of people 'us and them' and then theres specifically the 'you and me' of Identity defining. most advertising seems to use identity 'improvement' (hmmmm ooooor sex) as a marketing tool. Identity art unlike advertising shows unidealised interpretation of idenity or idealised but perhaps sarcastic?
It seems in my mind to consist around most naturally issues relating to minorities or subcultures...Artist who are compelled to be understood for the good of the 'group'?maybe like a revolution or uprising...angst....i guess from prosecution, social and so on ...anyways just a few thoughts

Exhibitions- Maley Dawson

(****Copyright??****)

Referring to the exhibition criteria I "stumbled" across Ros. Ox.9 current
exhibition, and was surprised to find SCA's very own Marley Dawson with, Box of Birds .

"Box of birds’ indicates ‘good’ but also ‘somewhat out of kilter’ as, even with the best intentions, the related worlds of work (labour) and work (art) sometimes go awry in the making......

"In his sculpture, sometimes kinetic, sometimes not, Marley Dawson renders mechanics and other aspects of fabrication transparent. Art may not need to be made but, if you are making stuff, then certain necessities, certain practicalities prevail."

Q “How you doing?”, A, “Box of birds.”1

1.Roslyn Oxley 9, "Marley Dawson: Box of Birds" Roslyn Oxley 9, 2009- http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/artists/290/Marley_Dawson/1171/

Ros. Oxley 9
8 Soudan lane- off Hampden
Paddington
Looks good check out web

Tamy Ben-Tors identities

Tamy Ben-Tor, Normal, 2006

Tamy Ben-Tor, The End of Art, 2006

Tamy ben-tor uses social identities to construct video performance works that look at the prejudices prevalent in contemporary society. Her videos are a collage of different satirized stereotypes acted out in an outrageous and conspicuous manner. Ben-tor's work on identity and stereotypes is interested in peoples psychological state, the psychological state they hold when they are apparently just being themselves. However each character is exaggerated, overtly absurd, an imitation of media and televisions simplified version of the social individual. Each character is completely self-absorbed, caught in their own ideological systems, they cling to truth (however fake that truth may be) in order to construct and experience their own identity. 

The works poses the question of how much the natural world conditions us and how much of our ideas, thoughts and ideologies today - with our continuous confrontation with media, advertising and television, are shaped by the what we see and hear on our 2 dimension screen.

The question of identity has become a big concern in contemporary society and the answers are hard to determine. What makes the individual an individual, what does it mean to be individual and who determines good and bad.. and does or should this distinction exist?

Identity is 'the fact of being who or what ones is' and how much of this is now being shaped and how much of us - ourself, unique and self-conscious, shapes who we are - our identity?

Each of Tamy Ben-Tors characters are uniquely human, even if this is unfortunately so.

The works are comparable to Cindy Shermans role playing or staged film and photography in the sense that they both play with the appearance of an individuals identity.

She also had a work at the 2008 Sydney Biennial, you can view the work on the website and also alot of her work is on youtube.com. 

Images from Art Review 

http://www.artreview.com/forum/topic/show?id=1474022%3ATopic%3A151630 

Identity is like a jacket p262

i found this week's chapter hard to understand because the topic identity is so huge. i had no idea how Heartney would summarise it.
After reading the chapter i was given a clearer idea of how it has been looked at by a lot of artists who play with race, sex, ethnicity, political correctness, multiculturalism, identity politics. And i think it will be even clearer after this weeks lesson.
I like how this type of work makes the viewer either (or have all the effects) celebrate, question and recognise identity.
This morning i was told about a girl last year who did a piece about her identity from changin from a women into a man. This would have been a big identity journey.
She felt that her identity was always a man inside and began to reconstruct the outside to fit her choosen identity.
I was completley fascniated by it and thought at once about the chapter i had read. finally i had something to talk about. i only wish Marley could have remembered more. i think i will follow up on it.
In the end identity is like a relfection in still water- it is only clearly visible until you reach out and try to graps it in your hand.p272

art and identity

Some/One 2001

stainless steel military dog tags, nickel-plated copper sheets, steel structure, glass fiber reinforced resin, rubber sheets.

Figure: 81 x 126 inches

Installation View at Korean Pavilion at Venice Biennale.

Do-ho Suh is a Korean born contemporary sculpture and installation artist. He was born in 1962 and moved from Korea to the United States in 1991. This relocation had a defining impact on his work, with identity and the notion of 'home' being at the core of most of his work. I first studied him in High School and still find the way he presents such deep complex human emotions with such sensitivity and clarity, fascinating.

In Some/One (above) Suh places thousands of dog tags all over the gallery floor that eventually rise and form a robed figure. The intensity of the work grows as the viewer moves through the installation. The sound of walking over the thousands of dog tags is an important element of the artwork. In this work Suh is exploring identity in relation to the collective in both mandatory military service in Korea and in life. The uniformity and conformity of Suh's experience in the military impacted his own sense of identity.

Each dog tag embodies one individual identity, each being a precious, unique entity but each is lost in repetition as the single becomes the many and the many function to become one unity. In this particular work Suh is exploring the point at which the individual's role in the group is at the cost of their unique identity.

Do-ho Suh on art21: http://www.pbs.org/art21/slideshow/?artist=70

Michael Ray Charles Art and Identity

“It is tempting to focus, one more time, on Michael Ray Charles' use of racial stereotypes and whether his work leads to productive discourse on social issues or perpetuates the underlying hatred and ugliness that spawns those images in the first place.”[1]
Michael Ray Charles is an African American painter whose works epitomizes identity as he reveals the insidious repercussions of European colonization on second and third world cultures that occurred in the 15th – 19th century. Charles’s paintings and installations deal with concepts of beauty, abhorrence, nostalgia, and violence which appear and expose the past that society has inevitably tried to dissociate itself from. His art reminds the viewer that the past has lead us to our present, molded who we are, who we will become and how we are depicted both as individuals and a society, for his work is not about people so much as they are about images as he is trying to obtain and produce an understanding among all races.

In his 2003 exhibition “Shiny Figures” at the D Berman Gallery in Spain, Charles attacks serious issues with deft humour, using ironic symbolism and historical references. Utilising his background in commercial design, Charles takes stereotypes created by white advertisers in the late 19th and well into the 20th century, such as racial caricatures like Sambo, Mammy, Minstrel, and the pickanninies, he modernizes them to incorporate black youth, celebrities, and athletes. Images which he sees as a constant in the American subconscious.

After slavery was abolished in America, African Americans were viewed as a source of entertainment, a race that could be exploited and laughed at, yet never escaping the shackles. These stereotypes are still subconsciously in existence as sport and entertainment are seen as the two main professions available to African Americans. Charles depicts this through his use of basketball as the main theme for his exhibition.

In “(Forever Free) Jersey #9 (Cultural Value/Black Hand), 2003”, Charles replaces basketball singlets with burlap coffee sacks, stuffed with raw cotton, he makes a palpable intimation to the past slave trade in south America. The symbolic use of a red curtain on entering the exhibition, a Minny grand piano in the middle of a basketball court, and songs by Billy Holiday resonating through the exhibition are all direct links to the theme of entertainment. “One could think about notions of blackness and how they’re linked to entertainment, athleticism, and sports…I would say that blackness continues to hover around this comfort zone of entertainment- providers of entertainment.”[2]



Michael Ray Charles deals with identity by exploring past and present stereotypes in the context of today’s society, by utilizing images that stir peoples gut emotions. The blindfold on society is being revealed through the stereotypical images and the ironic commercial punch lines which catches the viewer’s attention. “These images are very much a part of who we are as blacks, and very much a part of who we are as Americans.”[3]



[1] Rebecca S Cohen, “Michael Ray Charles”, Austin Review. Summer 2003. www.dbermangallery.com/articles/charles-artlies2.htm
[2] Michael Ray Charles, “Advertising and Art.” Art21, inc (2007),www.pbs.org/art21/artists/charles/ -
[3] Michael Ray Charles, Michael Ray Charles. (New York: Tony Shafrazi Gallery, 1998) 9.

Art and Identity – Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago is a feminist artist who is well known for her installation The Dinner Party which addresses many issues about identity such as feminism, ethnicity and sexual orientation. The installation was first exhibited in 1979, with the purpose of "end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record," (Judy Chicago). The triangular table represents 39 “guests of honour” through the placement of symbolic china-painted porcelain plates. Each place setting has a table runner with a woman’s name embroidered on it, with images or symbols drawn from their story. Each plate features an image on the butterfly or a flower-like sculpture symbolic of a vaginal central core. The Dinner Party celebrates female accomplishments and the white floor of triangular porcelain tiles has the names of 999 notable women inscribed on them.

Art and Identity - Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman deals with the big questions of life, in the words of his 1983 neon: “Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, and Pain”. Nauman's work focuses on the essential elements of the human experience including identity. His more early light series are grappled with the semiotics of body, identity, word games, neons and figurative language. My name as though it were written on the surface of the moon (1968), addresses the name in relation to identity while at the same time challenging the value placed on an artist’s signature. Nauman draws an acute analogy with the manner in which the artist's role and identity has similarly been misconstrued and romanticized.

Life Death Love Hate Pleasure Pain, 1983

My Name as though it were written accross

the surface of the moon, 1968

Art and Collaboration - Christo & Jeanne-Claude

Christo and Jeanne-Claude

Christo and Jeanne-Claude are a married couple who have been collaborating together for over fourty years. There works are large scale, temporary installations and are best known for producing enormous packaging projects such as wrapping parks, buildings, and entire outdoor landscapes. There works “momentarily intervene in the local population’s daily rhythm in order to create "gentle disturbances" intended to refocus citizens' impressions” - Christo. Most of there works take years to plan and organise with the enormous effort and teamwork required for the actual installations.

Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami,

Florida, 1980-83

Wrapped Coast, One Million Square Feet
Little Bay, Australia 1968-69

Art and the body - Lee Wen

Lee Wen
“I was manifesting by using my body as an element in sculpture, by painting myself yellow and in appearing in performance as the yellow man” – Lee Wen

Lee Wen is a Singaporean performance and installation artist. In the Journey of a Yellow Man series, he has coated his body in yellow paint symbolizing his cultural identity as a Singapore citizen. Wen also uses red chains to represent social bondage, constraints, and restrictions of freedom within many Asian counties, whilst also referring to security and continuity. Wen also performs with rice – as it is the staple food in Asia, which refers to developing countries and the basic necessities in life which are taken for granted. With the aid of these props and Wen’s interaction with them, his body becomes the documentation and material for which his performances are executed.

Journey of a yellow Man (series)

1993

SORRY THIS IS LATE

Collaborative Artists

The Wild Boys are a group of collabrotive artists that were brought to my attention least session in one of Mark Titmarsh's lectures he spoke of spending what sounded like some wild times indeed with this group of young artists. From memory, as i have not been able to find much information about them, they are 7 men working together in a warehouse in surry hills and put on a range of performances and instillations, it seems that it is a living breathing sace that their works consume. Apparently quite the spectical.

Art and Identity- Jimmie Durham

Jimmie Durham is a Cherokee, born in Arkansas in 1940. He is a visual artist, and also a politcal activist for the American Indian Movement and an essayist. In the ‘60’s and ‘70s he dedicated his time to theatre and performances, and since the ‘80s he was been creating strange objects, assemblages and installations that find their principal source in his Native culture, which he uses to deconstruct the stereotypes and prejudices of Western culture. Thus dealing with issues of identity and political correctness.
One of the most impressive works from that period is Karankawa (1983), a human skull that Durham found on a Texas beach where the Karankawa people had been massacred. He inlaid it with turquoise and adorned it with symbols and a feather necklace. (It is tempting to see a reference here to the ongoing Native struggles to reclaim ancestral remains and artifacts from national museums.)
By 1989, Durham was expressing reluctance to show the bone pieces because they were too "beautiful" and fed viewers' stereotypes about "Indian" art. In its humor and irony, however, his work is in fact very "Indian." "Humor is a good weapon against victimization," he observes. "We Indians are very funny. I'm always impressed at how silly we can be in beautiful ways that would be inappropriate in the normal world."[12] Yet even as he makes "Cherokee art," Durham resists making anything recognizably "Indian" in the Santa-Fe-Indian-market mold. His art is not decorative or lyrical and does not reference history through style. He avoids noble braves and bashful maidens, tipis and warbonnets, like the commercial plague they have become. "The |Indian' art market continues to expand," he says, "but it has never been ours. It has served to isolate |Indian' artists through commercial success in a specialized area."
This shows that no matter how unintentional, a persons culture and "identity" always shines through to reveal either what can be seen as a positive or negative thing- depending on your point of view.