Dorothy Iannone

I was told about this artist after my assessment and I’ve been obsessed with her work ever since. Her paintings are as disconcerting for their shrill blend of the naive and the hippyish, tantric art and pop, as they are for the riots of ass-wiggling exhibitionism and androgyny. The penises come in all shapes and sizes, and the fattened labia of her women are as rounded as peaches or a man’s testicles. Yet somehow, all this sex neither arouses nor titillates. It is repetitive, I suppose in the way most sex is. I don’t think she intends for her work to turn us on, with her use of childlike and innocent style.

Celebrating matriarchy and men, solitude and togetherness, and art as exercises of freedom, Iannone depicts herself as powerful and submissive, goddess and “whore”. Iannone’s feminism has always been nuanced; not for her the separatism of 1970s radicalism. And Iannone obviously likes men. “You will not be vanquished although you are a man,” reads one of many annotations. “Centuries of gazing at your fragility have augmented my love for your sex.”

I’ve used her art to create a few more shaped paintings that I believe mimic her colourfulness and playfulness, as well as holding a feminist erotic sense to them. I used parts of the body that are deemed sexual and that are often censored, either on television or in public, such as at schools. I previously had been painting carefully and by adding as much detail as I could, but after looking at her work, I concentrated on using more shapes and colour rather than the finer details. I believe this work will lead the final pieces for the next assessment.

Shaped Painting Developments – My final piece

I’m experimenting with more abstract shapes and paintings after looking into Dorothy Iannone, as she uses a childlike style and concentrates more on what the piece is saying, rather than it’s beauty or skill. I decided on playing with colour and using layers and layers of shapes, after looking through my sketchbook for inspiration from past doodles. I corresponded Frida Kahlo and Dorothy Iannone in these pieces, form Kahlo’s use of nature to Iannone’s use of abstract women and their purpose in the piece.

 

This piece has turned out larger and busier than any other shaped painting that I’ve done, even though I haven’t taken as much time on the finer details, rather spending that time on the different shapes and colours. I used parts of the body that are deemed too ‘sexy’ for places such as schools (shoulders, legs) as well as breasts that are sexualised when they exist to feed babies. I combined them with nature, once again, to take the girl/woman’s body back from this, especially by the use of roses, as they are often used in poetry and films (American Beauty being one, where a sexually frustrated father has a mid-life crisis after becoming infatuated with his daughter’s best friend), thus was used almost ironically. I feel that the use of nature in my pieces work really well, as they are often dramatic and, at first, look like something from a William Blake poem. However, the aim is that they show how femininity and women’s bodies are natural and far from having to be hidden, unless chosen to be.

Francis Bacon to Doig at National Museum Cardiff

Today, I visited the Bacon to Doig collection. The collection features work by many of the very best British artists of the 20th century including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Barbara Hepworth and David Hockney.

The pieces I enjoyed the most were from Francis Bacon, as this was the first time I had seen his work. His painting of Henrietta Moraes, 1966 especially caught my eye. In the portrait, he has perfected the subject’s body, carrying it out with a prodigious use of rapid, impulsive brush marks. Standing out proudly from a vivid green ground, Henrietta lies undressed in all her voluptuous glory on a simple ticking mattress, unflinching and brazenly exposed like an odalisque. For Bacon, this visceral quality and the sheer physicality of his model’s body was a source of constant rapture—despite his lack of personal erotic interest in women. I feel that this portrait of hyperfemininity that lacks the feeling of being objectified really relates to my work, as it’s what I’m trying to aim to do. I’ll be looking into using very plain, mundane colours and pair them with bright backgrounds, and see what sort of effect this will give my paintings, as well as using similar brush strokes in the process. This should also help with looking into Dorothy Iannone, as she uses expression in her work, as well as abstract looking figures, which I’ll be experimenting with in my next pieces.

Chapter Gallery; These Rotten Words

Encompassing photography, painting, sculpture, sound and moving image works, ‘These Rotten Words’ focuses on the physicality of textual, gestural and vocal forms of communication. Rottenness is defined as both bad and decayed and, in a world where public discourse has become increasingly dominated by divisive polemics, the exhibition embraces language that is more contingent and intimate. The artists call attention to the physical properties of communication: the mouth and the hand are inextricably linked and while the hand enables us to shape materials, the voice — and our use of language — offers a further tool to manipulate the world around us.

Words become disentangled from the author’s intention. Limbs float freely. Bodies are scaled up and down. The familiar and at hand becomes estranged and unknown. To rot is to decompose, offering an opportunity for reassembly. The artists in the exhibition suggest a form of renewal, probing the possibilities and limits of the body and its voice. Text can be a vehicle for melody as much as meaning. We may talk before we know exactly what we want to say. Speech is slippery, and intention is as much about inflection as content — all languages carry inefficiencies and lacuna.

Anna Barham presents a new, single-screen video exploring the cicada (examples are above)— an insect with tongue shaped wings that is primarily heard rather than seen, its distinctive rasp acting as a kind of sonic camouflage for other sounds. Marie-Michelle Deschamps and Anneke Kampman produced a series of new sculptures and audio works that examine the sonic and acoustic properties of the voice. Kampman’s work, a kind of alternative audio guide, provides a narrative through the exhibition. Devlin Shea, Rebecca Ackroyd and Joanna Piotrowska recall John Bulwer’s assertion that “gesture is the only language natural to the body,” each focusing on bodily gesture. David Austen presents a text painting alongside a series of figurative watercolours. Johann Arens’ sculptures promote tactile engagement, framing the spectator’s gestures alongside the other work on display.

 

Prague Art Findings

HORNY/BORN

As I wondered around Prague, I found this art exhibition the most exciting and it linked with my work very well. The information was only available in Czech, so I decided to look at it just by making links to my project and how it could help me with my final pieces.

It seemed like they played with the idea of actual horns and the slang word for being sexually aroused, being “horny”. The first piece the public could see were the horns, and then the exhibition continued by showing many plaster breasts on a wall, indicating developments in the use of the word ‘horny’. There were then a collection of pieces that resembled very abstract vaginas; some contained hundreds of teeth, some contained what looked like nests.

This exhibition definitely caught my attention with the use of humour by using a collection of horns to begin it, which is something I’d like to look into with my own work. Using politics is a good way to do this, as it’s a very serious subject, but is joked about all over the media and television. I’ll have to look into particular artists who use humour in their work and begin from there.

I also enjoyed the abstract spiked vagina, which could possibly be about vagina dentata, a folk tale that women’s genitalia contain teeth. There is also a film named “Teeth” (2007) that is based around this folk tale, and is known for it’s dark humour and feminist undertones.

I also found there famous art pieces here:

‘The Memorial of the Victims of Communism’

At the base of Petřín hill, on Újezd Street, stands a group of bronze statues portraying seven broken, decaying men descending a flight of stairs. This disturbing procession is the work of sculptor Olbram Zoubek and architects Jan Kerel and Zdeněk Holzel. The sculptures are a memorial to the victims of communism in the Czech Republic. The memorial contains seven phases of a man living in a totalitarian state – from the first statue being a full man, up to the last statue where only a part of him remains. This evaporation represents the gradual physical and psychological destruction of humanity under a totalitarian regime. A bronze strip that runs along the center of the memorial tells the terrible truth: during the years between 1948 and 1989, 205,486 people in the former Czechoslovakia were found guilty for political crimes, 248 were executed, 4,500 died in prison, 327 died when trying to escape the country and 170,938 people fled or emigrated.

‘Man Hanging out’

First created in 1996, the work known as “Zavěšený muž” (“Man Hanging Out”) is the vision of Czech sculptor David Cerny, who chose to depict the psychoanalyst in his constant struggle with this trepidation. Many of Cerny’s works are seen as somewhat deliberately provocative, and this one is no different. This unique sculpture, situated in Prague’s Old Town, is not easily noticeable, as it requires passers-by to look up to the tops of the houses around them. It depicts the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud hanging by a hand, pondering whether to hold on or to let go. It is an unexpected and eye-catching sight, though quite disturbing at the same time. ‘Man Hanging Out’ has often been mistaken for a real suicide attempt and has prompted calls to the Czech fire station and police. Sigmund Freud was born in Freiberg, which is now part of the Czech Republic. During his life Freud suffered from a number of phobias, including the fear of his own death. The sculpture can be seen at the intersection between Husova and Skorepka streets.