Wednesday 16 June 2010

Friday 14 May 2010

Tuesday 13 April 2010

Saturday 10 April 2010

Austria / Exhibition / Antalya

I don't have much to say, just random little posts. In 2 weeks I'll be going to Austria, so will have a lot to say when I get back. Also my exhibition is coming up in May and then a trip to Antalya/Turkey in July. For now I'll leave you with these images to think over:

Joel-Peter Witkin is an American photographer who often deals with such themes as death and uses various outsiders such as dwarfs, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, and physically deformed people. He had found deformity a beauty and had been influenced by a horrific incident as a child:

"It happened on a Sunday when my mother was escorting my twin brother and me down the steps of the tenement where we lived. We were going to church. While walking down the hallway to the entrance of the building, we heard an incredible crash mixed with screaming and cries for help. The accident involved three cars, all with families in them. Somehow, in the confusion, I was no longer holding my mother's hand. At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars. It stopped at the curb where I stood. It was the head of a little girl. I bent down to touch the face, to speak to it -- but before I could touch it someone carried me away"





Source: Wiki

Lady Gaga - The Fame Monster



Check out more from The Fame Monster promo shoot at: http://gagadaily.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=280

Daisy Youngblood - Artist


Lykke Li - Youth Novels



Li Lykke Timotej Zachrisson is a Swedish indie singer! Buy her album "Youth Novels", an album mixed with poetic lyrics and catchy choruses sung with her hypnotic/sensual voice.

Lykke Li - Youth Novels

Tuesday 9 February 2010

Doris Salcedo's "Shibboleth"



Shibboleth:

"It represents borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred. It is the experience of a Third World person coming into the heart of Europe. For example, the space which illegal immigrants occupy is a negative space. And so this piece is a negative space." - Doris Salcedo



I found this work of art to be one of my favorites from The Unilever Series at the Tate Modern. Salcedo breaks through the very foundation of this major art institute by creating this crack which runs through the Turbine Hall. The separation of culture and religion is also evident in the piece through the interaction of the audience. Viewers standing on both sides peering down into the depths of the earth. Two worlds, a division, a separation of our society. I find the inner part of the crack to be the most beautiful, an infinity, a lost space which man cannot reach. The wired mesh within the concrete hold an importance to the ideas in which Doris discusses. The piece represents borders, the wired mesh represents caging, fencing, segregation, a separation of two sides, domesticated spaces. The piece is now filled yet scars the Turbine Hall and sets a reminder for those you step into the space. I respect the way in which Salcedo works and admire her a lot for the extensive research that is put into her work and always comes out with strong, meaningful work that on the surface is a beautiful exploration of ideas that hold deeper meanings.

Saturday 6 February 2010

☨ T H E P L A S M A T I C S ☨



R.I.P Wendy O' Williams

Buddha/Adrian/Exhibition



Working with iconic imagery from Cambodian culture; here i've started work on the head of a "Buddha" statue, yet to be completed. (Work in progress)

With the Elective program finished, I have gained a lot of understanding and knowledge in the criticism and interpretation area of art and would like to give a big thank you to Adrian Holmes who had lead the Elective and had been a pleasure to work with him. (This blog started through the Elective and I will continue to use it to talk about my artistic interests and the art that i'm currently....working on!)

Having an exhibition coming up on Tuesday 9th February, the private view (lots to plan for that). Plus starting to work on my FINAL year show in May (2nd year uni) at "The Biscuit Factory", that should be exciting. Aiming to make a huge piece for this show, at the moment the ideas are not flowing so will take a break for a bit and return with something wow!

Thursday 14 January 2010

Homage - Hélio Oiticica (1937–80)

He was one of the most innovative Brazilian artists of his generation and has come to be acknowledged as a significant figure in the development of contemporary art. Among his achievements was the original and uncompromising use of colour that was central to his practice.

Oiticica produced a remarkable body of work throughout his career, from abstract compositions to early environmental installations, in which he continually sought to challenge the way in which art could be experienced. This exhibition features works from Oiticica’s early career which show an obvious affinity with masters of modernism such as Paul Klee, Kasimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, and yet already reveal a highly individual approach. Gradually colour is liberated from the picture plane and given spatial form in further series of works, which include suspended paintings and reliefs, sculptural objects, penetrable environments and ‘habitable paintings’ - capes, tents and banners designed to be worn or inhabited while moving to the rhythm of samba.

Tate.org.uk

Metaesquema II, 1958
Guache s/ cartão
55 x 63,9 cm
Doação Projeto Hélio Oiticica



A performance piece I did in homage to the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, footage not available yet but heres a still. One of my all time favourite artist, truely inspiring.

Wednesday 13 January 2010

Bara no sôretsu

Funeral Parade of Roses




Title: Funeral Parade of Roses
Director: Toshio Matsumoto
Year: 1969
Runtime: 107min
Country: Japan

Funeral Parade of Roses is set in the underground gay counterculture of the 60s in Tokyo, Japan. It is a loose adaptation of Oedipus Rex; a Athenian tragedy by Sophocles which was first performed c. 429 BC. Eddie is a transvestite hostess at one of Tokyo's clubs. He/she spends her time working, being in the films of a friend, taking drugs and trying to find love.

Brilliant work of art, one of my all time favourite films. The way the camera captures Eddie's emotions throughout the film and the artistic angles and shots make each scene a beautiful surreal moment. The film builds up dramatically towards the end with a shocking surprise, and the characters (who are played by real people in a real world) become a likeable asset to the movie and help create the surreal suspense that is brought in certain scenes with excellent acting. I hightly recommend this movie.

Monday 11 January 2010

Allegory

Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy. Thus an allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.

We was taken in groups around the National Gallery and were asked to look at certain paintings from the late mediaeval and early renaissance periods and explore the Allegorical meanings behind them, and examining the way that space and time are represented in the paintings (this consisted of two seperate visits). This was a great exercise as it helped me explore these paintings in a whole new manner and to interpret them in a more analytical and evaluative approach. I learned that certain details can help interpret the meaning behind a painting and that certain critical judgements can help with exploring whole new areas within the pieces.
Exploring space within certain paintings helped me notice the un-even proportions of bodies in some works yet others had perfect symmetrical proportions. This had me curious as to how they had achieved some of the areas.

In the Mediaeval world, space did not exist in the way we understand it today - as dimension in which bodies can be located.

'Just as post-Copernican theoretic space and the aesthetic space of the perspective painting are perfectly matched, so were medieval conceptions of space and medieval conventions of representation. The medievals, like the Greeks, "experienced the spatial," as Heidegger says, "on the basis not of extension, but... as chora, which signifies... that which is occupied by what stands there" (Heidegger, 54).'
Bordo (1987) p68.

Ucello - Battle of San Romano


Ucello had used a perspectival grid to help with the composition of the painting, it is reflected clearly at the bottom created by the lances. This painting was cut down to size by the Medici's and was originally a tryptych which is now found at different museums.

The National Gallery

Against Interpretation

Against Interpretation - Susan Sontag



Here i'll be writing down the important points in which Susan discuses and what i found most interesting; also my own feedback on the ideas of Interpretation.

Susan starts of by describing that the earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical and an instrument of ritual. The Greek philosophers had proposed that art was mimesis and an imitation of reality. Plato, who proposed the theory that art was mimetic seems to have done so in order to rule that the value of art is dubious. Since he considered ordinary material things as themselves mimetic objects, imitations of transcendent forms or structures, even the best paintings of a bed would be only an "imitation of an imitation." For him, art is neither particularly useful nor, in the strict sense, true.
Aristotle argues in defense that art is a form of therapy and that it's useful in terms of arousing and purging those dangerous emotions.

Definition: interpretation

• noun 1 the action of explaining the meaning of something. 2 an explanation or way of explaining. 3 a performer’s representation of a creative work. - askoxford.com

Interpretation is the act of explaining something, subjectively we look at a piece of artwork and form a meaning in which what we percieve the work to be about. "It is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art." Susan describes interpretation as a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain "rules" of interpretation. It's plucking certain elements from a piece a way of translating the work.

The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. He claims to be only making it intelligible by disclosing its true meaning. The meaning will always be different. The old style of interpretation was insistant, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs "behind" the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.

To understand is to interpret.

Interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities and is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to depelete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings." In some sense we are playing with the artwork, "taming" the work, breaking it down and reducing it. Susan describes that real art has the capacity to make us nervous. But what is real art? Can we determine whats real art through ones own interpretation, for one this might be real art but for another there interpretation might not class it as real art.

It is said that it doesn't matter whether artists intend, or don't intend, for their works to be interpreted. As artists we can not control the subjective nature of ones thoughts, we make art for our own purposes, others make it to highlight issues and to show certain problems. As much as one trys to make the work all about a certain "thing" it will still end up being interpreted in another fashion a way in which the artist didn't intend it to become, this is something we can not control. This is the beauty of art and the human mind, it allows us to open up and explore worlds in which the everyday does not allow us to explore. To challenge the norm.

LA CABINA



Film viewing for my presentation for the Criticism and Interpretation Elective.

Film: La Cabina
Director: Antonio Mercero
Year: 1972
Running time: 35min
Language: Spanish (English Subtitles)
Country: Spain

A man gets trapped inside a telephone box. Onlookers unsuccessfully try to free him. Then the men from the telephone company arrive, but relief turns into puzzlement, then horror, as it transpires what they have in store for him.

An allegory for the isolation of the individual in modern society. The confrontation of the human and the machine, the way the human exists within the rectilinear modernism, relationships to the Holocaust? The visual relationships between the phone booth, the glass walled coffin, the glass walled skyscrapers. -

http://criticism-and-interpretation.wikispaces.com/Week+7+La+Cabina%2C+Hirst%2C+Flat+Time+House



Notes:

The victims isolation turns into a tool for entertainment. He becomes the centre of attention yet while the crowd that gathers and laughs at the trapped man like a caged circus freak left to entertain the audience, he notices societys flaws and notices things the others wouldn't in real life.

The color of the telephone box and positioning:
- inviting
- tool for danger
- a warning
- stands out (center)
- surreal in the way it is placed yet appears to look ordinary.

Soundtrack is playful at the start but becomes dramatic towards the end when the victim meets his fate.

Lots of symbolism with the objects in the movie:
- Football
- Bottled ship (held by the circus clowns, only few that don't laugh at his pain and can relate to him)
- Funeral Coffin (see his own fate)
- Buildings/construction site (everything starts to fade away and become simple)

The Movie can be found on Youtube!

Criticizing Art - Understanding the Contemporary

Criticizing Art - Understanding the Contemporary - Terry Barrett (The Ohio State University)



A.D. Coleman defines criticism as "the intersecting of images and words," adding that "I merely look closely at and into all sort of photographic images and attempt to pinpoint in words what they provoke me to feel and think and understand."

Donald Kuspit sees the critic's task to try and articulate the effects that the work of art induces in us, the very complicated subjective states.

Criticism is seen as the storm cloud over art, the critic decides whats "good" or "bad" yet for most critics its about describing and being open-minded and a chance to write about new works; as Roberta Smith describes: "you get to write about things that haven't been written about yet." A chance to record what one is thinking or feeling.



CRITICIZING CRITICISM (AND CRITICS)

Critics never seem to get along with eachother, theres this act of being superior with one another and feeling superior when looking at art works. Mark Stevens tries to avoid "nastiness" when criticizing art and regrets the times he has been sarcastic in print. He thinks critics should be "honest in their judgment, clear in their writing, straightforward in their argument, and unpretentious in their manner." For him, good criticism is like good conversation - "fresh, direct, personal, incomplete."

The process of writing criticism helps appreciate the artwork more, words are an instrument of thinking. A chance to help view and interpret the art work in different ways. So to wrap up, the critic is seen and described from all points of view. Some feel it is their duty to point out the errors in artworks and to label them good or bad. Others feel that by criticising a piece it helps them experience the artworks in a different way, sometimes the critic has to imgaine being in the shoes of the artist. So there is no definitve definition of what Criticism is, it's a more subjective approach and the process of doing criticism is beneficial to the one who does it.

Description

Analysis

Interpretation
(meaning)

Evaluation
(Judgement)

Maya Deren - Meshes of the Afternoon (Experimental film)

Scene's from Deren's - Meshes of the Afternoon.


Title: Meshes of the Afternoon
Directors: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid.
Year: 1943
Genre: Experimental film
Run time: 14min
color: Black and white

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036154/

A solitary flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a phone off the hook: discordant images a woman sees as she comes home. She naps and, perhaps, dreams. She sees a hooded figure going down the driveway. The knife is on the stair, then in her bed. The hooded figure puts the flower on her bed then disappears. The woman sees it all happen again. Downstairs, she naps, this time in a chair. She awakes to see a man going upstairs with the flower. He puts it on the bed. The knife is handy. Can these dream-like sequences end happily? A mirror breaks, the man enters the house again. Will he find her?

Video - Meshes of the Afternoon

Psychogeography - Landscape & Urbanism 13/11/09



Photo of an area using google earth maps.

W.J.T Mitchell - Landscape is a natural scene meditated by culture. Represented and presented space.

The Landscape is not merely the world we see. The Landscape is a huge theatre, a perfect symmetrical form - a controlled space.

Space becomes used in different ways, and mostly a juxtoposition between buildings. Corporate buildings overshadow the real spaces. This was apparent in Turkey when I went to visit in August 2009 (few posts down), huge commercial turk bankasi (banks) wedged between appartment blocks and abandoned houses from the Ottoman period (See photo below).
Walking is the best way to exploit a city, it's built in layers and is constructed to fit social classes.




Readings:

John Stow - A Survey od London.
Hurlo Thrumbo (1732) - The merry thought or the glass window and bog house miscellary.
Dan Cruikshank - Building blocks.

The Medium is the Massage - Marshall McLuhan



Marshall McLuhan argues in "The Medium is the Massage" that the dominant communication media of our time will shape the way humans think, act, and ultimately perceive the world around them.

Heres a few personal notes/thoughts and passages i've taken from "The Medium is the Massage".

The title is a play on McLuhan's oft-quoted saying "The medium is the message". McLuhan adopted the term "massage" to denote the effect each medium has on the human sensorium, taking inventory of the "effects" of numerous media in terms of how they "massage" the sensorium. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_is_the_Massage

"They wreck our societies" - A.N. Whitehead

Electric technology is reshaping and restructing patterns of social interdependence and every day aspect of our personal life. Some can argue that there has become a loss of privacy and identity and we have become the unwitting work force for social change. We would be a more civilised society without this vexacious electrical media controlling and shaping the minds of young ones.
Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, neither of them inclines him to grow up. Youth understands the present environment - the electric drama. This is the reason for alienation between generations.

"When this circuit learns your job, what are you going to do?

'Age of Anxiety' - trying to do todays job with yesterdays tools, with yesterdays concepts.

Some argue that technology has helped re-shape and make our lives easier; printing was the first assembly line in mass production. It created the portable book, which man could read in privacy and in isolation from others. Man could now inspire - and conspire. But where is the boundries of technology? Does techonogy have boundries? And how far will technology go till it becomes a threat or a danger to our lives.

"The Wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye. Clothing, an extension of the skin...electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system."

The Alphabet is a technology that is absorbed by the very young child in a completely unconscious manner. The phonetic alphabet forced the magic world of the ear to yield to the neutral world of the eye. Man was given an eye for an ear.

Saturday 2 January 2010

2010



We're now in 2010, and I have high hopes for this year. A lot to achieve, mostly in my practice and other things i'd like to tacle; Travelling most importantly. Also to start exploring my culture in depth, i've been organising a tour around Cyprus this year and hopfully start working with some galleries out there also.