Beauty – 26/02/18

We were introduced the different types of beauty within art, including the superficial. Kitsch, and prettiness, which all fit into the “meaningless” category. For example, Jeff Koons’ ‘Large Vase of Flowers’, 1991, bronze (below); we see this painting as beauty as a culture and society, thus making this in particular clever, since he expects the audience to be attracted to its beauty, and is an example of Kitsch beauty. They don’t have any deeper meaning; they exist to please the eye and attract.

We then looked into another side of beauty, which are used as an alibi for a hidden meaning. These include seduction, deception, and a cover for political manipulation. Ai Weiwei’s ‘Straight’, 2008-12 (below) is an example of this, as it’s a beautiful piece to look at, but is about the earthquake that hit China and acts as a memorial for all the children who died. All the pieces of concrete were found from the wrecks of the earthquake and hand straightened back to how they originally looked, making them look like they’d been produced by a machine. They’re also meant to look like the tectonic plates that caused the earthquake, as the design seems as if it’s moving away from each other. We, as an audience, would only realise this after the piece seduces us to look at it for longer; if it didn’t contain beauty, we’d easily dismiss it. This could be argued as being worse than meaningless beauty, as we consume the real meaning without realising it, making it a powerful tool, especially in politics. An example of this is Igor Babilov’s portrait of George W. Bush, 2002, which makes him look kind and intelligent, which is totally the opposite of most people’s opinions of the former president.

 

Site Venue – Ways of Exhibiting introduction 20/02/18

We, as a class, looked at different ways of exhibiting work and how to build art from the space you’re working with, be it large or small. We looked at artists, from our own students at Cardiff School of Art and Design like Melissa Mavroudis Stephens (L4) to those who decided to go beyond the planet, such as Forrest Myers in his ceramic chip piece to the moon, titled ‘Moon Museum’, 1969.

We all had a box each and planned out ideas on how to use them to exhibit our work, and then use them later on during this project for our locker exhibition. My immediate idea was to create a room in the red light district, since I visited last winter and have quite a few opinions on them. I really like the idea that the sex workers are genuinely cared for and have laws to protect them, and I also like how they make money from ‘playing’ the objectifying game, that’s usually against women, to make a living. I’ve started quite a few sketches and I’ve already painted the outside of my box black, and the inside red. I want the inside to look as comfortable as I can – almost like a home – to emphasise how much safer women are when sex work is legalised.

I started by making plans in my sketchbook of what I was planning on making for my “red room2, including curtains, a bed, photographs, etc. I also planned on using luxurious fabrics to add to the sexual feel of the room, including black lace and red velvet.

I started the box by making sure it was sturdy by taping all of the fragile areas, then proceeded to paint the outside black and the inside red with acrylic paint.

I began by making my framed photographs of various humorous images I found online, including a women with very large breasts, a man with “moobs”, a rat positioned as a phallus and an “I Love Penis” sign. I also decided on making the curtains out of lace, which plays with fetish, eroticism and teasing.

I hung all of the photographs on the back wall to enable them to be visible for all viewers, then created a bed out of cardboard and red velvet fabric, with red velvet and black lace pillows. I was also playing with where the mystery woman was going to stand, positioning her in various areas of the room and debating on giving her features of painting her entirely black, creating an ambiguous character.

I finally decided on painting her black, almost letting the viewer become her if they wished to, making her character relatable and fit well with how sex workers are dehumanised in countries that make them criminals. Below are images of the final display I made;

I tried taking pictures using a red light, which worked by making the inside look eerie and mysterious, but it didn’t show much of the room, leaving me undecided about how I want to exhibit the piece. I might invest in some red neon lights and take pictures with them inside, which should give a really intense look to the images.

We, as a class, looked at different ways of exhibiting work and how to build art from the space you’re working with, be it large or small. We looked at artists, from our own students at Cardiff School of Art and Design like Melissa Mavroudis Stephens (L4) to those who decided to go beyond the planet, such as Forrest Myers in his ceramic chip piece to the moon, titled ‘Moon Museum’, 1969.

We all had a box each and planned out ideas on how to use them to exhibit our work, and then use them later on during this project for our locker exhibition. My immediate idea was to create a room in the red light district, since I visited last winter and have quite a few opinions on them. I really like the idea that the sex workers are genuinely cared for and have laws to protect them, and I also like how they make money from ‘playing’ the objectifying game, that’s usually against women, to make a living. I’ve started quite a few sketches and I’ve already painted the outside of my box black, and the inside red. I want the inside to look as comfortable as I can – almost like a home – to emphasise how much safer women are when sex work is legalised.

I started by making plans in my sketchbook of what I was planning on making for my “red room2, including curtains, a bed, photographs, etc. I also planned on using luxurious fabrics to add to the sexual feel of the room, including black lace and red velvet.

I started the box by making sure it was sturdy by taping all of the fragile areas, then proceeded to paint the outside black and the inside red with acrylic paint.

I began by making my framed photographs of various humorous images I found online, including a women with very large breasts, a man with “moobs”, a rat positioned as a phallus and an “I Love Penis” sign. I also decided on making the curtains out of lace, which plays with fetish, eroticism and teasing.

I hung all of the photographs on the back wall to enable them to be visible for all viewers, then created a bed out of cardboard and red velvet fabric, with red velvet and black lace pillows. I was also playing with where the mystery woman was going to stand, positioning her in various areas of the room and debating on giving her features of painting her entirely black, creating an ambiguous character.

I finally decided on painting her black, almost letting the viewer become her if they wished to, making her character relatable and fit well with how sex workers are dehumanised in countries that make them criminals. Below are images of the final display I made;

I tried taking pictures using a red light, which worked by making the inside look eerie and mysterious, but it didn’t show much of the room, leaving me undecided about how I want to exhibit the piece. I might invest in some red neon lights and take pictures with them inside, which should give a really intense look to the images.

Critical Debates – Appropriation and The Everyday

A few important questions were asked in today’s debate, including examples from Richard Prince’s and Sherrie Levine’s work, concerning what effect blatantly copying someone else’s work has and what message it’s trying to convey.

Prince removed the text, no longer making it an advert for Marlboro, thus removing its function and ‘freeing’ the image. “Untitled (Cowboy)” is a high point of the artist’s ongoing deconstruction of an American archetype. Prince’s picture is a copy (the photograph) of a copy (the advertisement) of a myth (the cowboy). Perpetually disappearing into the sunset, this lone ranger is also a convincing stand-in for the artist himself, endlessly chasing the meaning behind surfaces. Created in the fade-out of a decade devoted to materialism and illusion, “Untitled (Cowboy)” is, in the largest sense, a meditation on an entire culture’s continuing attraction to spectacle over lived experience. It also begs the question of is any art original? Are we all just copying, most of the time with out even realising, thus making all artists ‘thieves’? Where do we draw the line? By making the copy so blatant, his idea could arguably be more original than any new artwork made in years.

“By generating what appears to be a ‘double’ (or ghost), it might be possible to represent what the original photograph or picture imagined”, Richard Prince, 1977.

 

 

re.act.feminism

re.act.feminism #2 is an international, multi-annual performance and exhibition project traveling through Europe since 2011 and I decided to look into it after going to an art performance lesson by Davida, with the aim of incorporating some into my own artwork. The core archive contains more than 250 videos, photographs and other documentation of gender-oriented, feminist and queer performance art, from the 1960s to the early 1980s.

The core of the project was a mobile archive and workstation with a growing collection of videos, photographs and other documents of feminist, gendercritical and queer performance art. It was a transnational and crossgenerational project featuring works by artists and artist collectives from the 1960s to the beginning of the 1980s, as well as contemporary positions from Eastern and Western Europe, the Mediterranean and Middle East, the US and in Latin America. On its journey through Europe –starting in Spain and continuing through Poland, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia and ending in Germany- this temporary archive continued to expand through local research and cooperation with art institutions, academies and universities. It was also ‘activated’ through exhibitions, screenings, performances and discussions along the way.

Narcissister, Untitled (cigarette blonde) 2012, c-print, 40 x 30 inches, edition of 2, 1AP, Courtesy of the artist and envoy enterprises. 21 June 2013 – 18 August 2013, Akademie der Künste. Berlin, Germany.

I’m really interested in the type of art exhibited at this event, especially since I can link many to my own work and ideas. I want to take photographs of myself, using my art as props somehow, thus bringing women’s issues up, most probably humorously by using myself as the object.

 

 

Current progress in my subject area

I’m currently working on a new piece based on female genitalia. My initial idea was to look further into how women feel the need to have different, more ‘perfect’ vaginas, and even result in surgery to trim down their labia. There have been huge internet trends concerning women, and even ones that focus on vaginas, such as the trend of posting a personal picture of worn underwear, and the ones that were totally clean and looked completely unused were categorised as ‘normal’ (more information here – https://mic.com/articles/147620/the-panty-challenge-is-getting-people-all-riled-up-about-healthy-vaginas#.EOocSyOdb). These bizarre and humorous, yet totally worrying, trends got me thinking about making vaginas with the real normality of vaginas, and going a step further and making excess of what’s now considered “unhealthy” or “unattractive”, making them seem as obscene. As I was making this piece with excessive labia, I noticed that it also resembled a maze, tackling another issue of how we speak about women’s sexuality, pleasure and genitalia as a whole. The vagina holds many myths, mysteries and questions. Why? I figured my personal story of not even being allowed to say the word ‘vagina’ until I didn’t actually care, and having to use ”nicer” nicknames solves a lot of the questions. We don’t speak about it because it’s a taboo, leading onto more serious problems in adulthood, from the “orgasm gap”, to women having to endure pain during sex because we think it’s normal (More information – http://theweek.com/articles/749978/female-price-male-pleasure).

I then began taking pictures of this unfinished piece from different angles, one of which is above. I realised how much it resembled a rose, which is historically very well known to be a metaphor for love, passion, beauty, purity (if white) and something of value. I could really use this angle to my advantage, and perhaps create a series of photography pieces based off of this, some might say, overused metaphor; but instead to describe an “obscene” vagina.

Davida’s ‘Failiure’ Lecture – 19/02/18

The lecture Davida brought us was about Failure Art; an art that can’t be made to fail, as that would defeat its purpose. This thus became popular in minority groups, such as the LGBT+ community, as they’re already failing society’s pressures of gender and sexuality. I found this extremely interesting, as I already deal with politics in my art, and found these artists Davida showed us intriguing, especially Vanessa Beecroft;

Vanessa Beecroft, vb45.9043.ali, 2001, performance at the Kunsthallie Wien, Vienna, image courtesy of Vanessa Beecroft.

The artist’s work is a fusion of conceptual issues and aesthetic concerns, focusing on large-scale performance art, usually involving live female models (often nude). At her performances, video recordings and photographs are made, to be exhibited as documentation of the performances, but also as separate works of art. I find this interesting because the women often start off as sort of mannequins and must stand ‘exhibiting’ for hours, and when they begin to get tired, they start sitting down which is a sort of ‘failure’, and proves our mortality and could also be seen as a feminist piece, as women aren’t made to be these perfect doll-like figures.

The work and her conceptual approach is neither performance nor documentary, but something in between, and closer to Renaissance painting. She sets up a structure for the participants in her live events to create their own ephemeral composition. The performances are existential encounters between models and audience, their shame and their expectations. Each performance is made for a specific location and often references the political, historical, or social associations of the place where it is held. Beecroft’s work is deceptively simple in its execution, provoking questions around identity politics and voyeurism in the complex relationship between viewer, model and context.

Beecroft’s performances have been described as art, fashion, brilliant, terrible, evocative, provocative, disturbing, sexist, and empowering. The primary material in her work is the live female figure, which remains ephemeral, and separate. These women, mainly unclothed, similar, unified through details like hair colour, or identical shoes, stand motionless, unapproachable and regimented in the space while viewers watch them. Neither performance nor documentary, Beecroft’s live events are recorded through photography and film, but her conceptual approach is actually closer to painting: she makes contemporary versions of the complex figurative compositions that have challenged painters from the Renaissance onwards. Beecroft’s more recent work has a slightly more theatrical approach; the uniforms are period clothing, not nudity, and some of her performances include food, while others have featured men in military attire.

(information from http://www.itsliquid.com/featured-artist-vanessa-beecroft.html)

Another artist I found interesting was Bas Jan Ader, and his piece Fall III, 1970. This image interested me so much, that I researched further into him and found that I really enjoyed his melancholy and mysterious films he makes.

 

 

 

 

 

Still image from Fall 1. Photograph: Courtesy of Simon Lee Gallery

‘Chasm’

Ader’s work rebuffed the idea that art was there to communicate. Here we see Ader’s fall represented on film, yet we can never understand how it actually felt.

‘Melancholy’

Ader knew he was entering the slapstick world of Keaton or Chaplin here; like those comics, the abiding feeling raised by his film is melancholy.

‘Tragedy’

Shown alongside four other “falling” films, it’s hard not to view these as premonitions of Ader’s tragic death: in 1975 he disappeared while sailing across the Atlantic, almost making himself his last ‘failure’ art piece.

(Information from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jun/24/anatomy-of-an-artwork-bas-jan-aders-fall-1-los-angeles-1970)

Field Assessment – 15/02/18

Blog posts for Relational Colour

Reltional Colour – 16/01/18

Relational Colour – 18/01/18

Relational Colour – 23/01/18

Relational Colour – 25/01/18

Relational Colour – 30/01/18

Relational Colour – 1/02/18

Relational Colour – sketchbook work

Relational Colour – 06/02/18

Relational Colour – 07/02/18

Relational Colour – 08/02/18

Relational Colour – 13/02/18

Relational Colour – 14/02/18

Project Summary

Project summary

Project summary

I believe that this project has been hugely successful and I really enjoyed the entire process. We’ve successfully completed a ‘Bryan Wynter’ box and over twenty different slides together, as well as a variety of different hanging pieces. I was initially unsure about working very precisely and having to measure and plan things out because I’m never inclined to do so with my own work. However, I found that I did enjoy the process and that the finishing outcome of what we made looked very professional. I started my thought process to get ideas by looking at artists, mostly Howard Hodgkin and his work “After Visiting David Hockney” (First Version), 1991, because his work is totally expressionistic and relational. I was really interested in how he created depth in his work, while only using flat surfaces, therefore I decided to play on this idea during this project. I also wanted to use colour in an interesting way, therefore I also researched into Frank Stella, and his piece ‘Hyena Stomp’, 1962. He’s used contrasting colours that aren’t completely aligned, further contrasting using the lines and pattern, something I enjoyed experimenting with during this project.

This project also unexpectedly made me realise what I really enjoyed about working with colour and shapes, which was the optical illusion aspect of it. I further researched into artists who made work around this, such as Oleg Shupliak, whom I’ve never come across before, although could really help me in my subject work, as I like working around metaphors and political issues. Using illusions could definitely help me convey my ideas interestingly, and help it be not quite as obvious as I had previously been working. I printed on fabric and made prints to convey all of these ideas in a workshop, and I decided to make as much work possible to be able to have a huge variety of pieces to use for the slides in the box.

All three of us had been working independently at this point which was great because we all created a large amount of work that were all very different to one another. This meant that we had to figure out how to make our work ‘work’ together, which lead to narrowing a lot of our work down. This worked really well because we all had an equal amount of work put into the slides and they were all efficiently working alongside each other, proving how efficiently we were communicating and working together, making the entire project work smoothly. I also believe that I’ve never had such a successful outcome while working as a group, and I’ve initially always tried my best working independently because of previous failures. However, working with this group has made me want to carry on working with others, and perhaps even work collaboratively in my subject area with people who work similarly and differently to me, as group work seems a lot less challenging after this project.

I will definitely carry on with working with colour and bring many ideas that I’ve gathered from this project to my own work. The use of colour was never important to me before this project, therefore being able to use it primarily to create the overall effect has really opened my eyes to using it carefully. This will further add to using a more abstract approach to my future work, such as the optical illusion aspect that I really enjoyed.

Overall, I had an amazing time during this project and I learned a lot of new skills, for example, the fabric printing and lazer cutting, as well as develop old ones that will be very useful to my future work, such as working collaboratively to create exciting pieces of work.

 

 

Relational Colour – 14/02/18

This was our final day of working, and we spent it finalising and planning our compositions. We made a few compromises, such as not including a few hanging pieces that I made (which are below) because they didn’t fit in well with the slides we’ve created, and decided to use only circles to hang instead, tying in the work extremely well;

We then went on to planning and noting our compositions, working out which ones we liked best and what we’d like to include in our final ten. This took a while because we really liked so many, making this a tough decision, however we were able to discuss it and got a great variety of compositions. These were some of the photos we took to document;

Here are pictures of our sketchbook planning and choosing;

We also took a few videos, which capture the shadows and optical effect our compositions created and we wanted to be able to show this because the photographs couldn’t quite capture how interesting some of them turned out;

However, we narrowed the compositions down to these;

Relational Colour – 13/02/18

We’re heading to the final stages of our box now and have completed the slides. We only need to figure out the ten different compositions and take pictures of them in the dark room, using different coloured lights from a variety of angles.

I also had a chance to make final prints on a mesh fabric because we decided to have more slides that we could place at the front of the box. They actually turned out to look brighter than I thought they would, but still remain transparent, making it a great last success.

This is one composition we’re thinking of including because we felt that the different shapes and colours from the circles really went well together and created a very interesting illusion of blending in together, despite being different sizes and colours.