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.

 

 

Degree Show Review – Ffion Gardner’s ‘My body is my freedom’

These larger than life canvases scream how big of an issue revenge porn has become. Despite the bright colours, the expressive paint marks and splatters displays the artist’s anger and frustration, alongside powerful words like “I am not here to please you” in capital letters and graffiti form, stating that discussing this topic is a rebellion. This issue is a very modern one, but women have been fighting against patriarchal ideologies for many years, making it a piece that represents that the fight isn’t over yet.

The colourful and flowery background tells us that it’s alright to be feminine and that it’s in no way a weakness. Neither is taking pictures of yourself proudly and sending them to someone you trust something to be ashamed of. She speaks of revenge porn sites and how, sadly, it’s easy to get on one if you trust the wrong person. The pieces take control of this and make female bodies their own and demands respect, however women choose to display them.

The provocative poses show confidence and a freedom of sexuality, something many women don’t have the privilege of owning; even women in Western countries, although not always as severe, find themselves in violating situations. I believe that these paintings capture this fight for freedom remarkably well and with a lot of fierceness, as well as the fight to end victim-blaming.

Teeth – My second final piece

For my second final piece, I’ve been inspired by the underrated feminist film Teeth (2007). The film has a plot based around a Dawn O’Keefe, a woman with teeth in her vagina, who sets out to take vengeance on all men who have wronged her after being raped.

The film is based around Vagina dentata (Latin for toothed vagina), which is described a folk tale in which a woman’s vagina is said to contain teeth, with the associated implication that sexual intercourse might result in injury, emasculation, or castration for the man involved. The topic of “vagina dentata” may also cover a rare medical condition affecting the vagina, in which case it is more accurately termed a vaginal dermoid cyst.

Such folk stories are frequently told as cautionary tales warning of the dangers of unknown women and to discourage rape. Erich Neumann relays one such myth in which “a fish inhabits the vagina of the Terrible Mother; the hero is the man who overcomes the Terrible Mother, breaks the teeth out of her vagina, and so makes her into a woman”. The legend also appears in the mythology of the Chaco and Guiana tribes of South America. In some versions, the hero leaves one tooth.

My idea is to create a flower piece, most probably a rose, and insert teeth, or something that resembles teeth, in the middle. I’m planning on creating these out of clay or plaster, and then paint it red and try to make it resemble a vagina. I’m planning on presenting it as a sculpture and have people look into it, thus have it around waist level so people can look into it and find the teeth.

The piece will represent women metaphorically biting back against patriarchal ideologies, such as rape culture and body shaming. As the folklore states, the teeth in the vagina myth was supposed to discourage rape, which speaks a lot about our culture and society; a woman has to contain the risk of emasculation to stop getting raped.

I changed my mind on how to create this piece, as I wanted to represent the film and myth in a more ‘realistic’ way, and decided to create a sculpture of a vagina out of clay and insert ‘teeth’ in the middle, very noticeably for people to see. I also decided to put fake blood around the teeth to create an angry look to the piece.

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.

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.

Contextualisation for Field’s final piece

Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun

I was given the names of these artists and I’ve been fascinated ever since. Claude Cahun was an androgynous figure on the margins of surrealism, who considered herself “third gender” – neither male nor female – and whose small oeuvre consists entirely of carefully dramatised photographic self-portraits. Cahun is now considered one of the key artists of our age – despite the fact that she died in 1954 – a sort of patron saint of the Instagram era, when “everybody” is exploring their identity, gender and body image through uploaded self-portraits.

Here Cahun is paired with Gillian Wearing, for a show that plays with the idea of a self-portraiture as a kind of mask that conceals as much as it reveals. “Under this mask, another mask, I will never finish removing all these faces.” Both of them share a fascination with the self-portrait and use the self-image, through the medium of photography, to explore themes around identity and gender, which is often played out through masquerade and performance.

I have been playing with the theme of genderless portraits before, such as with my shaped paintings, and this couple truly fits in well with what I believe in and what I want my art to display. As well as the playing around with gender binaries, I can’t help but notice how oddly similar they are to the images from the Sex Museum in Amsterdam, where people dressed up and posed with objects and props. I found that this was incredibly interesting and had to have these photographs named for what had inspired me.

 

The Sex Museum

This museum is certainly something that has heavily inspired me. It had a mixture of the history of sexuality as well as modern symbols, such as Marilyn Monroe who is often remembered as “that sexy, curvaceous woman”, and not her talents. Looking at the vintage photographs caught my imagination, as I was shocked at how sexual and vulgar they were over a hundred years ago when I thought that pornographic material like this was a modern thing, when, actually, this material has been around for many years. This made me realise that it was naive of me to think that heavily sexualised women weren’t a new thing, as women have been sexualised for the male gaze for centuries. I decided to combine these images with the pinhole camera by using my Inside/Outside idea of women being criticised for taking images of themselves on social media, simply because they are doing it to feel empowered and proud. This will be done by taking ‘vintage’ looking pictures of myself and other women, in a heavily sexualised but empowering way to convey the message that women’s bodies aren’t obscene or unnatural and women are allowed to do what they please with them, whether the want to hide or show it.

Linder Sterling

While researching for feminist artists, I came across Sterling who’s been called a radical for confronting gender construction and its ties to capitalism and culture. Sterling found inspiration in sexualisation, desire, morbidity and non-conformity in order to free women from their social constraints. But producing art that challenged the notions of ‘what it means to be a woman’  didn’t come without its controversy. “When I made my first collages in 1976, Rank Xerox refused to photocopy them. There were only two places in Manchester that you could get photocopies made and I’d already been turned down by the other one,” Sterling said in 2012. “I had to send the collages to Jon Savage, in London, where he managed to have copies made. I wouldn’t fancy my chances walking into Prontoprint tomorrow with the new collages and that’s fine – lines have to be drawn somewhere.”This was a huge breakthrough in women in art and how they were portrayed. She used material that was fine to be used for the male gaze, but wasn’t even allowed to be printed as art. From looking at her work, I often scanned and printed my pinhole photographs to create collages in my sketchbook. Linder Sterling is who inspired me to do this with my work, as I’ve been writing an essay for constellation on the punk era and feminism, all of which influences a lot of her work. Linder Sterling is a well-known figure of the Manchester punk and post-punk scene, and is known for her montages, which often combined images taken from pornographic magazines with images from women’s fashion and domestic magazines, particularly those of domestic appliances, making a point about the cultural expectations of women and the treatment of female body as a commodity. Below are a few examples of her work:

 

Contextualisation for Light is Colour

For this collaborative project, I looked into Frank Stella’s work as I knew he worked in abstract colours and prints which worked perfectly with the brief. Stella was an early practitioner of nonrepresentational painting, rather than artwork alluding to underlying meanings, emotions, or narratives, and has remained one to this day. Working according to the principle of “line, plane, volume, and point, within space,” Stella focuses on the basic elements of an artwork – colour, shape, and composition. Over time, Stella succeeded in dismantling the devices of three-dimensional illusionism; his shaped canvases underscored the “object-like” nature of a painting, while his asymmetrical Irregular Polygons explored the tension between the arrangement of colours on the flat surface of the canvas as well as the optical effect of the advancing and receding forms.

Baroque artists such as the early-seventeenth-century Italian painter Caravaggio developed illusionistic “tricks” that convincingly suggested that their subjects emerged out of the canvas and into the space of the viewer. Several centuries later, Stella took such innovations one step further by literally extending painting into the third dimension in his painterly reliefs, which entered the viewer’s space with their incorporation of protruding materials.

I wanted to re-create his relief-styled collages myself by using the geometrical prints made with contrasting colours I created with my group by, firstly, looking into what sort of abstract forms I could create by myself and, secondly, adding whatever knowledge I gained form this to a collaborative piece. I first of all wanted to create something quite wild and abstract, which was completely opposite to the clean, geometrical shapes we had made. I cut out random pieces and began creating an almost sculptural piece from building out of a print from both sides.

I definitely think that it worked well in bringing my idea and Stella’s style into play by being as sculptural as it is. I also wanted to create some kinetic energy into the piece by hanging it up and spinning it, which again I was pleased with because it was totally different to what I’m use to doing and let me further my knowledge on what shapes and colours work together and which don’t. I translated these ideas into our collaborative piece by cutting out natural shapes, layering and putting them against opposite colours. I do think that the collaborative piece is very different to my solo piece, however, the exercise was very much needed for me to see how things worked together in order to have a successful outcome next. We decided on making a sort of mountain landscape which contrasted as well as went with the geometrical theme; the mountains resembled the geometrical triangular shapes but the natural theme went against it.

 

Contextualisation for the Panoramic Pinhole Camera

I decided to look at Nancy A. Breslin, who is a Washington, DC based photographer who specializes in photographs taken with pinhole and plastic cameras for this project. For some projects she also works with alternative photographic processes or in video.

I find it interesting that she has a whole collection called ‘pinhole meals’, which sounds basic and average, but the photographs have come out eerily blurry, which fascinates me. A seemingly normal thing we do everyday can become this ghostly image made from a simple pinhole camera. Breslin stated, “For the past ten years my main photographic tool has been a pinhole camera, and I have found it equally adept at capturing ghost-like portraits (my “Pinhole Diary” series”), landscapes (amusement parks), still lives (the bathroom interiors of my “Amenities” project) and abstractions (“Galaxies” represents artifacts of the aperture’s diffraction). Most of my work is a visual form of journaling, and the gentle distortions of pinhole exposure capture scenes unlike what I actually saw, but memory also distorts the past.”

We worked with this eerie concept by looking into skeletal bodies because we found that the images looked like x-rays when negative. We then experimented by just taking photographs of our hands, creating ghostly images of them because it was hard to keep our hands perfectly still while the image was being taken. However, this only added to the haunting photographs and let us create sharper, contrasting drawings on them while experimenting. This is what we were busy making;