Self directed work

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

Andrew Mackenzie's "Broken Homes"

I found Mackenzie's article very interesting and well written. He explores the very essence of Morton's Valhalla and more broadly 'home' as a symbol of this change in society where the ideas of the public and private are changing.
Mackenzie mentions some of Morton's other architectural works such as 'Mies van der Rohe' and I was interested in comparing them with 'Valhalla'. I found another article by Mackenzie in Broadsheet vol 32 no 3 which is a review of Callum Morton's 'HABITAT EXHIBITED' at the NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA' 2003 and 'MORE TALK ABOUT BUILDINGS AND MOOD' at MCA. Its interesting to compare the two articles and Morton's works focus on in each. Valhalla seems to be an intense manifestation of ideas an emotions that have been appearing throughout his work over the years. However as Mackenzie suggests his works, in particular 'Valhalla', show Morton works evolving to become more complex and deeply meaningfull, seeming to focus on human emotions as opposed to the human condition.

http://www.cacsa.org.au/publications/broadsheet/BS_v32no3/bs_24.pdf

Art & its Institutions- Janet Cardiff

Janet Cardiff, Chiaroscuro, 1997. Audio walk, 12 min. Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco.

Above: Janet Cardiff, MoMa Walk, 1999. Audio walk, 12:50 min. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Below: Janet Cardiff, Villa Medici Walk, 1998. Audio walk, 16:22 min. Villa Medici, Rome.

Behind the illusions of the art world lies business and the institutions of art. These range from the critics that analyse art to the collectors who buy art to the galleries that display art. Greenberg describes it as the “umbilical cord of gold” that keeps the art system together. [1]
Artists in the early 1990s begun to explore this symbiotic relationship between artists and art institutions through their work.
Canadian Janet Cardiff is one such artist. Born in 1957 she is known for her film and sound works. She examines the role of the gallery institution in our perception of art by redefining a gallery space and how we assume art should be presented.
Cardiff’s first major artwork consisted of a series of walks. These started in the early 1990s and continue up until quiet recently. In these works she reinvents the audio walks often offered at museums that explain the current exhibitions. However in Cardiff’s walks she focuses little on the exhibitions, creating instead a fictional narrative. Most of these walks begin in an intuitional space then either diverge outdoors into the streets or inwards to classified parts within the institution. The viewer is given a headset, and a MP3 and follows the instructions of the voice through the earphones. Cardiff uses binaural technology creating a 3D audio experience. The audio is a mixture of recorded everyday sounds, random fragments of stories and orders given from the alluring voice. A fictional plot begins to play out in an imagined reality surrounding the viewer as they move through the space.
The “white cube” has been thought as the ideal uncontaminated environment to have a ‘pure’ experience of art.[2] It acts like a theatre set. White walls little to no windows, and no architectural adornment. Artworks are careful placed and lit just as actors are.
In one walk Cardiff created for the Museum of Modern Art in New York the participant is taken on a tour of the gallery. Aspects of the pre-recorded audio begin to merge into reality as the viewer is guided to the disregarded stairwells and hidden, prohibited doors. The viewer is taken behind the museum curtain to a “conceptual space of imagined fictions”.[3]
Cardiff recalls:
“I was visiting the new MoMA recently and I tried to find traces of where my walk once existed. But most of the places where I did the walk are now just spaces floating in the air.” [4]
By using unfamiliar voices, inaccessible moments in time and changing locations the work very much lives in the psyche of the viewer. The viewer is the artwork’s keeper as well as it’s actor and audience.
In her works she approaches the subject of the gallery institution in two difference manners. She either changes our perception of it by taking us behind the scenes and treating it as the stage for an illusory narrative or ignores it entirely by creating a fantastical world that transports us deep inside our imaginations. She makes us question the importance of the gallery in the viewing and understanding of art. In her works she merges reality with fiction making the audience question what is true and what is just an act. She pronpts us to ask the same question of all things in the art world, asking what is natural and what is contrived and if it changes the meaning and impact of an artwork.

[1] Clement Greenberg. "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Partisan Review. 6:5 (1939), 34.
[2] Brian O'Doherty , Inside the white cube : the ideology of the gallery space.(London : University of California Press, 1999), 15.
[3] Bartomeu Mari, "Janet Cardiff, George Bures Miller, and other stories." In Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller: the killing machine and other stories 1995-2007, ed. Ralf Beil and Bartomeu Mari (Ostfildern : Hatje Cantz, 2007), 18.
[4] Cardiff, Janet. “JANET CARDIFF GEORGE BURES MILLER.” Official website of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (2009), http://www.cardiffmiller.com/index.html (accessed September 20, 2009).

Bibliography

• Heartney, Eleanor. Art & Today. London: Phaidon Press Inc., 2008.
• O'Doherty, Brian. Inside the white cube : the ideology of the gallery space. London : University of California Press, 1999.
• Beil, Ralf and Bartomeu Mari. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller: the killing machine and other stories 1995-2007. Ostfildern : Hatje Cantz, 2007.
• McShine, Kynaston. The museum as muse : artists reflect. New York : Museum of Modern Art, 1999.
• Möntmann, Art and its institutions : current conflicts, critique and collaborations. London : Black Dog Pub., 2006.
• Greenberg, Clement. "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Partisan Review. 6:5 (1939): 34.
• Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class and How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York, NY : Basic Books, 2002.
• Cardiff, Janet and George Bures Miller. “JANET CARDIFF GEORGE BURES MILLER.” Official website of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (2009), http://www.cardiffmiller.com/index.html (accessed September 20, 2009).

All images sources from:
Cardiff, Janet and George Bures Miller. “JANET CARDIFF GEORGE BURES MILLER.” Official website of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (2009), http://www.cardiffmiller.com/index.html (accessed September 20, 2009).

Spirituality- John Feodorov

Featured in a Art 21 episode of art and spirituality Feodorov questions Western culture's tendency to "castrate the powerful" as we fear that which we can't control. He explains his opinions on spirituality and contemporary society in an interview in the episode.

"..during the renaissance they [Western culture] turned these frightening powerful angels into these cute chubby cherubs; born again Christianity has turned the frightening, judging Jesus into a best friend.."

(Art 21 and John Feodorov, "Forest at night". http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/feodorov/clip2.html [accessed 21st September 2009])

"I think religion is the explanation of spirituality, and i think the mistake is that it's not necessarily something that needs to be explained. t think it's just sort of this hamper that you kind of throw things into."

White Rabbit Gallery

I went to the White Rabbit Gallery last week and was surprised how good it was. It's four floors of Chinese contemporary art, a large amount of which is sculpture and installation. For those who haven't been there yet it's worth a visit.

Gallery Location
30 Balfour St Chippendale

http://www.whiterabbitcollection.org/modules/about/

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

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)

Art and the Body- Ah Xian

The Chinese-born artist migrated to Australia and mainly produces these life size busts and complete figures. They are made from porcelain and intricately hand-painted in traditional Chinese styles and symbols.

"Xian believes that Asian faces, with their features generally less pronounced than those of Europeans, are more sympathetic to porcelain and more relative to the material, which originated in China during the T'ang dynasty".1

Although his works reference immigration and sense of culture identity, I also feel they reference our sense of physical self and beauty. He uses the faces that are familiar to him, drenching them in cultural symbolism to the point that they become almost unrecognisable as human let alone Chinese. The long process that is undergone to fire and decorate and even the casting straight from actual people, all investigate our exploration of the human form and its endurance.

1.ArtMolds Sculpture Studio. "Ah Xian." http://www.artmolds.com/ali/halloffame/ah_xian.htm.

Critical Literature Review: Installation Art

Nicholas Zurbrugg begins the chapter Installation Art – Essence and Existence by tackling the difficult concept of installation art. He gives a very broad, loose definition of what classifies certain art as installation art. Installation art, by Zurbrugg’s definition tends to “extend beyond the picture frame” therefore “asserting a more complex spatial impact”. Thus installation works are redefined if not formed within the “institutional, commercial, domestic or public.. exhibition space” and the space becomes part of the work’s existence and essence, whereas forms of conventional art may be seen to proceed the exhibition space. Zurbrugg states that the “installation artist is their own curator” as they take control or yield to the exhibition area as they redefine the space.

Zurbrugg resists the common tendency to discuss the origins of installation art by redefining ancient art as examples of “primitive installations”. Instead he takes a refreshingly different view discussing installation art’s origin in terms of contemporary work’s reference to early twentieth- century avant-garde movements. Zurbrugg embarks on detailed comparisons of avant-garde movements and their prominent theorists and artists and the impact these movements had and still have on the development and conceptualisation of contemporary installation works. Interesting points are raised regarding certain art styles and their function. For example John Cage’s installations and performances function, in Zurbrugg’s opinion to widen critical concepts, by incorporating a large selection of sources and materials in specifically, his sound performances. His works are unpredictable and give a “sense of indeterminacy and unrepeatability”. This results in infinite interpretations as audience witness unique performances. Cage employs for example, the dadaist passion for “chance compositions” and the futurist’s “enthusiasm for technological creativity”.

Zurbrugg includes a range of theoretical opinions including artist Kurt Schwitters’s opinions on artistic value and Joseph Beuys ideas relating to “Duchamp’s indifference to aesthetic values”. Zurbrugg comes to the conclusion that a valid form of installation or installation-action relates to it’s relationship with the viewer. He suggests the most rewarding and successful installations “enact some sort of movement” from the viewer, whether it be physically walking around the work or a more “mental exertion”.

Zurbrugg takes a long winding journey through the twentieth century into the present. Not only does his investigation explore what characterises art as installation art in order to define the term, but also what makes an installation successful and engaging to an audience.

Zurbrugg, Nicholas. “Installation Art – Essence and Existence.” In What is Installation Art? An Anthology of writings on Australian Installation art, edited by Adam Geczy and Benjamin Genocchio, 25-31. Sydney: Power Publications, 2001.

Art and Deformation: Magdalena Abakanowicz

2002

1990

I found the work of Magdalena Abakanowicz who is included in the chapter in art and today fascinating, especially how over the years her figures have evolved to become more human like and familiar. Heartney says "their apparent inhumanity has become leavened with a sense of vulnerablility". I just thought it was interesting how as the figures have gradually become more human-like the audience has begun to feel sorry for them and recognise vulnerablitlty instead of dislike and fear. i guess its the old "fear of the unknown".

http://www.abakanowicz.art.pl/