Self Directed Project....

In what is shaping up to be an especially florid period, I am half way there in producing a fetishistic shrine or pulpit looking thing, from the slate of the SCA roof and old chair legs. Above, an image: Friday 23.10.09

unable to label old posts

Amanda,

I am unable to label two of my old posts; art and the collaborative and art and the body. I have emailed you, but I suspect the address is wrong.

I have tried many different ways for over 45 minutes to no avail.

What would you like me to do?

self directed project

Self Directed Project

My inspiration for this sculpture came from researching an American photographer called Mellanie Pullen. Her artwork is comprised of stylised photographs taken from 1950's homicide scenes to include funny twists and strategic, intricate details.

My materials are rubik cubes and photos. I've taken photos of stylised murder scenes and photoshoped them to colour coordinate with the rubik cubes, once applied to the cubes it will be up to the audience to solve the pictures.

Art and Globalism

Jessica Moon Bernstein makes provoking and humorous sculptures using bicycle tubes and plastic bags, creating unique sculptures that protest against globalism and its negative effect on the environment and ethnic cultures.

Living in Mongolia Bernstein has witnessed first hand the destructive invasion of globalism as consumer goods over power a persons need for the land, landscapes become land fills accompanied by huge modern cities ruled by consumerism.

In "Land Fill"(2007) Bernstein has taken the inner tubing of bike wheels and black plastic bags to make a statement about the numerous amount of waste caused by mass production and consumerism.

Art and Politics –Guerrilla Girls

The Guerrilla Girls are a group of feminist artists, known for their posters promoting woman and people of colour in art. The group are established in New York and formed in 1985, after the exhibition “An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture” was held in the Museum of Modern Art, which revealed that only 13 of the 169 featured artists were women, and the ratio of artists of colour was even smaller. The Guerrilla Girls create works which combine text, content and snappy graphics, which exposes feminist notions in a humorous manner. Their intention is to change the minds of audiences, who initially disagree with their views. Their first works involved putting up posters along the streets of New York which discredit the gender and racial imbalance of artists represented in galleries and museums. However over they expanded their boundaries to examine Hollywood’s film industry, popular culture and gender stereotypes. The Guerrilla Girls have also pointed out that more than a third of their works have addressed larger social issues, such as violence against women, racial inequality, war, reproductive choice and what they consider to be misguided political policies. The members of the original group always wear gorilla masks when appearing in public as the Guerrilla Girls, assuming the names of deceased female artists.One of their most famous works was the poster with the headline “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” This poster was run as an advertisement in the public buses of New York City. This work was done in response to a count they did of naked males and naked females in the artworks, and the number of female artists in the collection. It revealed that less than 5% of the artists in the museums Modern Art section were women, but 85% of the nudes were female.

Art and Politics: Ottmar Hoerl

I found an article in the Sydney Morning Herald on friday the 16th about the German artist Ottmar Hörl, and after researching found many more. There has been controversy surrounding his lastest work consisting of 1,250 black and gold garden gnomes with their right arms raised in a Hitler salute. Prosecutors in Nuremberg launched an inquiry into the gnomes as it is illegal to display Hitler salutes and Nazi symbols in Germany however they dropped the inquiry once they understood the artist wasn't promoting Hitler. Interestingly the project is funded by The Social Democratic Party of Straubing.
Hörl explains:
"The gnome reminds us that the mentality he symbolises is still part of our society. We should not turn our eyes away from the fascistic, dictatorial constant, the Fuhrer-principal: striving to oppress or control people is as dangerous now as it has ever been."
http://www.ottmarhoerl.de/sites/english/sites/projekte/projekt_31.php?link=31&pro=pro

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/07/17/2628375.htm

Art & Audience - Martin Creed

Martin Creed has a series of installations titled ' Half the air in a given space' in which he fills the entrances to gallery spaces with a sea of balloons. The viewers must wade through them in order to enter other gallery spaces, the bodies of the audience creating movement and sound, in essence creating the artwork. The work would evoke a number of different psychological and physical experiences for each member of the audience ranging from suffocating to joyful. This work forces the audience to interact and take part in the artwork, and it clearly fits into this topic of art and audience.

images from http://www.martincreed.com/

Lin Emery 'Protest' 2008

Lin Emery's sleek and delicately poised metal sculptures reflect the lush organic forms of the natural world. After Lin Emery was among the many to experience hurricane Katrina in New Orleans her work has changed. She says, “Katrina has made a huge influence on my work it’s a little more pessimistic now.” The tree like sculptures have changed there leaves bearing flags, banners and signs. In 2008 she made the work ‘Protest’ as a protest against the violence currently taking place in so many places around the world.

Art and Architecture-Jan Voorman, James May and LEGO

Jan Voorman is a contemporary Eurpean who became involved with a the practice of the representation of architectural construction. Using randomly coloured LEGO, he installs the bricks in the cracks, the wear and the degraded and damaged areas in historically profound sites manipulating their combination to create an aesthetically structural fit. The Artist recently practiced in Boccignano in Italy.

LEGO is translated from the Danish for Play Well and was attributed to Ole Kirk Christiansen in 1949 after seeking to expand on the limitations of the normal building blocks his company made out of the relatively new material of plastic in 1940.

Top Gear's engineering boffin, James May has contributed works of LEGO to a BBC project that was recently demolished, A House (a folly) worth 3.3 million Pounds was removed with a successor planned. James May's other projects include a tulip garden of plasticine.

(note: a taste of postmodern identity is recognizable with the advent of LEGO, {however personally linked to a violent image},LEGO responds overwhelmingly to the toymakers constraints and archetypes through its ability to self animate/ automate, it teaches self criticism.It projects toward the uncanny with its supreme powers of representation. It thanklessly enables the creativity of a global audience, even its price has remained consistent, it is still a private company, which is an exclusive merit)

Vanessa Beecroft- Art and Audience

“No talking. No eye contact. No expression. Nothing too fast or too slow……look, but don’t touch. Don’t get too close. To ogle or stare, or look longingly.¹”

Evidently, Vanessa Beecroft is very strict with her models, giving specific rules to which they have to abide by during their 3-hour performances. However, these rules are not just for the models, but for the audience as well, and as a result, the interactions of the “participants” become apart of the artwork itself².

Vanessa Beecroft is a provocative contemporary performance and installation artist. Her performances involve large groups of naked or near naked models in large formations within the institutional space. The models have been described as “ her tools, her materials and powerful catalysts for the activation of social relations between her art and its viewers.³” This can be seen in her work V46, 2001, a performance piece involving a model, whose pubic hair is died red circling a large group of nude models⁴. All these women possess pale makeup and dyed white hair. It is through this aesthetic homogeneity of the model congregation that Beecroft is able to manipulate her audience. That is, the audience watch this work from the sidelines unable to avoid being involved in the piece. As the models “occupy the same territory that we do, but not the same space⁵”. Also, the work Vb53, 2003 involves a large diverse group of women standing nude on top of a mound of soil within a greenhouse. Ultimately, for the participant, as Heartney states, a “sense of personal inadequacy in the face of the performers physical and behavioural perfection⁶” is created from these works. It is through the manipulation of such psychological effects that Beecroft’s work is so powerful⁷.

Vanessa Beecroft’s connection with her audience within her work can be seen in her recent exhibition of the work Vb64, 2009. The gallery space featured a long line of women’s figures spread out on the gallery floor and on funeral looking platforms ⁸. These bodies are a mixture of real and cast figures covered in white, an effect referred to by one reviewer as “blanched sameness”⁹. The models move around the space, the white from the models rubs off onto the cast figures and the gallery floor. It is the “theatrically titillating¹⁰” live performance of these models and the space used by Beecroft that makes the audience an instrumental part of her work.

It is therefore clear that Vanessa Beecroft’s art makes an immense impact on the role of the audience in contemporary art.

This is the link to the exhibition review of her recent work:

http://www.artreview.com/forum/topic/show?id=1474022%3ATopic%3A765235

1 Jan Avgikos, “Let the picture do the talking”. Parkett, No.56 (1999): 108.

2 Eleanor Heartney, Art and today. (phaidon press limited,2008), p. 392

3 Jan Avgikos, op.cit., 107.

4 Eleanor Heartney, op.cit., 399

5 Vanessa Beecroft, Dave Hickey. VB 08-36: Vanessa Beecroft performances. Ostfildern : Hatje Cantz, 2000: 6.

6 Ibid., p. 399.

7 Jan Avgikos, op.cit.,107.

8 David Everitt Howe, “Vanessa Beecroft:Vb64.” Art Review 32, (May 2009): 114.

9 David Everitt, Howe. Op.cit.,114.

10 Ibid., p.114.

Resources

Cianchi, Lapo; Frisa, Maria Lusia,;Bonami, Francessco; Rosevinge, Line. VB53: Vanessa Beecroft. Milano: Charta, 2005.
Beecroft, Vanessa; Dave Hickey. VB 08-36: Vanessa Beecroft performances. Ostfildern : Hatje Cantz, 2000.
Beecroft, Vanessa. “Vanessa Beecroft” http://www.vanessabeecroft.com/frameset.html (accessed October 15, 2009)
Heartney, Eleanor. Art and Today. phaidon press limited, 2008.
Seward, Keith; Tazzi, Pier Luigi; Avgikos, Jan. “Vanessa Beecroft” Parkett, no.56 (1999): 76-119
Howe, David Everitt. “Vanessa Beecroft:Vb64.” Art Review 32, (May 2009): 114. Located from art index http://ovidsp.tx.ovid.com.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au (accessed October 15, 2009)


Images (top to bottom)

Vanessa Beecroft, Vb64, 2009, , photographic documentation of a performance, Deitch Projects New York. Reproduced from http://images.google.com.au(accessed 18 October, 2009)
Vanessa Beecroft, VB 53, 2003. Photographic documentation of a performance. Firenze, Italy. Reproduced from http://images.google.com.au(accessed 18 October, 2009
Vanessa Beecroft, VB 46, 2001. Photographic documentation of a performance. Los Angeles. Reproduced from http://iages.google.com.au(accessed October 18, 2009).

Jenny Holzer. Art and politics

Jenny Holzer is an American artist famous for her use of pure text artwork. Her practice has been going since 1977 when she first began using text in a series that continues to influence her work today called Truisms.  Truisms is a List of sayings creates by Holzer. These short punchy lines are brief comments on the world that are put together to evoke thought from both sides of the argument. The audience must come to their own conclusions about what to choose to believe and what not to believe.

 “I think they are a representative sampling of opinion.  I didn’t want to make a didactic or dogmatic piece. . . I wanted to highlight those thoughts and topics that polarize people, but not choose sides.  I was trying to present a fairly accurate survey and not have it break down into left, right, center, or religious versus anarchist, or what have you.” Jenny Holzer.

 to begin with truisms were pasted on public areas such as bus stops and telephone booths. Until Holzer became more established and began to post her work on LED billboards. Giving her work a larger public audience.

 Holzer work Lustmord 1993-94. Was influenced by the violence against Muslim woman by Serbian soldiers in Bosnia. Holzer utilizes an anonymous voice to send her message across and makes no direct stance instead hoping that without a figure head the audience will come to the correct conclusion about the information they are given.  Three voices are allowed to speak, The victim of rape, the perpetrator and an observer. The words of all three people is played around the room in no particular order. It is here that the audience is faced with the pure, uncensored reality.

 Holzer’s Public work is taken to new levels with her Projections series an ongoing project that has been going around the world since its conception in 1996. In this work Holzer Projects phrases onto the side of public buildings such as gallery’s and churches often political in nature these phrases engulf the building turning it into a symbol of consideration for thought. Holzer’s name is again absent from the work and the anonymous truth spoken by the building takes on an authority of its own.

References

-John Minkowsky, “jenny holzer,avant garde shows Massachusetts”, Art house journal. 2008.p71

-Art & today, Elenor heartly "Art and Politics : the rhetoric of dissent"Phaidon press 2008.  366-389

-http://www.jennyholzer.com/

Broken homes

In the article 'Broken Homes' Andrew Mackenzie looks at the work 'Valhalla' by artist Cullum Morton, which was exhibited at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Mackenzie discusses Valhalla in relation to its visual appearance of ruins and something lost. Describing the work, along with Babylonia and Tomorrows Land as fertile with meaning and 'increasingly non-linear’, suggesting an evolving maturity in Morton’s practice. He also remarks that Morton’s works have grown spatially, discussing what that has done to the way in which the audience is able to digest the work and the new possibilities of working directly with the concepts of interior/exterior, public/private and the 'framing of experience'.

Mackenzie talks of Morton’s Valhalla as an exploration of ‘the battlefield’, he points out however that it is not one of the ‘obvious kind’. Making apparent his caution of falling into the contemporary predisposition to ‘mythologize today’s destruction’ and remarks that any association of this kind is liable to only take away from the work something that is otherwise very poignant. He also suggests that any implication of a historical model associated with ‘terror’ and the ‘climate of fear’ fractures the calamitous continuity of history. Where as he states that Morton’s ancient title ‘Valhalla’ (Hall of the Slain) does not ask for this disruption, instead it subtly asks for a state of conscious recognition.

By steering away from the limitations of an association to terror and destruction he is able to explore the more deeply subtle aspects of the work.

Mackenzie suggest the consideration of Valhalla as ‘the story of a broken home… where the everyday drama of thwarted domesticity plays out’ and its relation, as a subject, to the domains of public/private life.

The house itself (as it’s original) is tied to a particular time in Morton’s childhood, which has since been torn down. So from this came the beginning of a work about the politics of the home and the public/private. Morton engages the audience through the uses of sound design, filmic references, advertising and the like in order to bring together a familiarity of post-modern conditions. The sheer size of Valhalla is also a reference of its own fiction and helps resist the romantic notion of biography. Mackenzie mentions that for Morton public and private life are inextricable from ‘the question of habitation’. You can see this questioning of the gap or erosion of public and private space in Morton’s exaggerated contrast between the ‘cool spotless white’ interior and the decaying walls of the exterior. Mackenzie also bring up Mary Jane Jacob’s ‘The death and life of Great American Cities’ 1961 to further shed light on these notions of the public and the private and the ‘impoverishment of public space’.

Mackenzie pronounces Morton’s Valhalla as an exemplification of both the tendencies of history's continuing relation to decay/destruction, while also referencing contemporary conditions of ownership, development and the internalization and wearing of public/private life.

art and audience

Wurm, Erwin. Confessional, 2003. Installation view. Museum of Contemporary Art.

Wurm, Erwin. Idiot, 2003. Installation view. Museum of Contemporary Art.

Austrian artist Erwin Wurm creates fictional spaces and sculptural objects, by manipulating and directing the audience/person to become a part of the artwork.

In the work Confessional Wurm places a small wooden house with two large holes cut from its opposite walls in the middle of the gallery and invites spectators put their head inside the house. The spectator is then meant to expose something about himself or herself to the other person. Where as, works like Idiot 2003 use inscriptions and text to direct the audience through the creation and form of the work. In Idiot Wurm places an ordinary chair in the middle of the gallery floor and by a tiny directional drawing in the top left hand corner of the wooden backrest asks the viewer to help create his final piece.

Wurm, through simple instruction, creates new and intimate environments that are completely dependent on the audience’s inhabitation for their essence. These works rely strongly on the audience's response and reactions to the proposed 'model/plan' for them to become ‘total’, whereby the author becomes transparent as the audience begins to create the invented situations.

1.Wurm, Erwin. Confessional, 2003. Installation view. Reproduced from Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. http://www.mca.com.au/default.asp?page_id=10&content_id=1479

2. Wurm, Erwin. Idiot, 2003. Installation view. Reproduced from Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. http://www.mca.com.au/default.asp?page_id=10&content_id=1479