art audience and biofeedback

This work relies on the breath of the viewers to make virtual jelly fish move on a screen. I find works that touch on the potential of biological feed back fascinating. At the moment these works seem to be in the technical sence in a kinda of infancy, however they are an incredibly potent mechanism for making the viewer aware of the body as a collection of automatic processes. The dialogue between body and space is replaced between body and virtual space or the space created in a virtual sense in the body.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=C51BC89CDE587C1F

Globalisation

I dont know if I am drawing a very long bow, but it seems since this thing they call globalisation has started to materialise. This thing that was meant to create a flat homogenious mono-cultural world, has some what done away with some of the imperialism that existed as late as the 90's in relation to indigenious and first nation artist. A good example being this years biennale and the works of both Lila Gama the contemporary (Misaso) Papua New Guinean cheiftan and artist.

Perhaps it is a shift that was always going to happen? or perhaps a flat earth can in some ways mean a level playing feild at least in the reception of are being made conteporaneously?

Politics Vs Art

Instead of talking about how an artist deals with the political situation they are presented with I wanted to breifly talk about the effect of politicians on art. We would all be pretty aware of what happend to Bill Henson in 2008, But the larger effects on the visual arts community are not as common knowledge. The way children are dipicted in are is a massive bone of contention, and since the Henson saga there has been a change to how the australia council deal with the dipiction of children and pornography in the relation to funding.What is deemed in good taste in this country is still somewhat in the hands of those "leaders" who look to the commercial network current affairs programs for a moral compass. The structure of Australia's Art scene being largly proped up by govenment investment in the Australia Council and without the philanthorpic scene of America, the UK or Europe may arguably leave Australian visual artist in the uncomfortable position of self censoring.

This is an interesting little article about the funding differnces between Opera australia and the other arts, It is another example of how politics influences the culture of this country and how much of a top down propsition the arts is, funding bodys effectivly funtion as cultural censorship but keeping the art and ideas far enough on the periphery as to not inflame any unrest from either artist or the community at large.

http://http//www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/tone-deaf-in-a-popularity-contest-20100924-15qhc.html?comments=42

Art & it's Institutions

So for some reason in the last few years all the people I know who really loved Banksy now really hate him. Starting out as a stencil artist (for the most part illegal graffiti) and then moving into more (at least for me) interesting spatial intervention work be it text based or sculptural. His work is very political and highly critical of contemporary british society and constanly seek to rupture the public private space devide. My favorite example of this is the instituional/cultural (for lack of a better term) rapes he commites in one of the iconic british institutions the Tate. By placing his own work: bastardisation of more traditional works and by not observing the gallery protocal. To those who witness the work he creates an uncanny skizm of what they expect to see in such a place, but to those who are aware of the work after the fact it questions the whole relation we have to these long established informational top down hierarchies and potetially devalues or at least in some ways balences for a time the old sacred and now somewhat esoteric cows with what is happening in the world of art today.

http://http//www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkUbYBo5xgs&feature=related

James Turrell is a Californian born artist, son of Quaker parents. The 67 year old got is pilots licence at 16 and has worked as an aerial cartographer something which has shape him and the art he makes till this day. Turrell’s work has been primarily considered installation, some critics have placed it in the realms of architectural art however, Turrell himself places the emphasis in his practice to the manipulation of light, the forming of space and creation of potential situations which allow the viewer to see themselves see. For this to happen the architecture must not be dominant and must allow the qualities of the space to become apparent.

 

Though Turrell's work looks to be at least in reproduction, a remnant of minimalist abstraction it goes far beyond this in its realisation. It is mentioned in the reader many artists whose prime concern is the depiction of spirituality often use the minimalist movement’s reductive quality to represent the metaphysical and spiritual elements of this world. Turrell does not do this. His work is primarily concerned with the acts surrounding seeing and perception. In escaping representation or the modernist search for the essence of painting or say sculpture Turrell presents the viewer with a carefully constructed sensory experience, one contingent upon his or her own facilities. He compares the role of the artist to that of the Bodhisattva, “one who comes back and entices others to take the journey… That’s when I began to appreciate an art that could be a non-vicarious act, seeing whose subject was your seeing.” In approaching art in this manner Turrell takes on the role of shaman over preacher, delivering the view to their own epiphany rather than simply recounting his.

 

 

Brown, Julia. Occluded Front. James Turrell. Los Angeles. The Lapis Press, 1985.

 

Noever, Peter and others. James Turrell. The Other Horizon. Vienna, 1999.

 

Turrell, James. Air Mass. London. The South Bank Centre.1993.

 

http://vimeo.com/5929848

(Acessed 25 August 2010)

Richard Prince

Richard Prince is an American painter and photographer who is most famour for his rephotographing of other peoples images most famously "Cowboys" a restageing of the Marlbro man cigarette advertising campaign. For the most part I have found artist who deal with personal identity directly seemingly self obsessed and really pretty boreing. In Pince we find an artist who avoids this while looking at the underlying questions at the heart of what identity is. The Marlbro man touches on the american image of it's self and questions contempory masuclinity, through recreating with quite solid fidelity these iconic images Prince holds up a mirror to America and asks "really? Is this who you are, or who you think you are?". And through inverting such well asimilated fragments of the collective american psychi questions the factors and points out the numerous layers upon which all identity is constructed.

The body

I find it interesting that most people are looking at artist who depict the body in their sculpture. As the central axis through which we experience I wanted to look at an artist who force the viewer to become aware of their own body in space in relation to the work. Many of Richard Serra's works trough either scale or sense of weight or seemingly physical impossibility trigger a sensory disconnect or overwhelming sensation. Rather than mirroring the human form to speak of the body its function and our relationship to it, these often monolithic structures act in a binary with the viewer to distort the natural movement of the body through space or impinge upon it through sheer scale.