Karen Meninno
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. 
| Gina Pane The Conditioning, first of three phrases in Self-Portrait(s) Galerie Stadler, Paris January 11, 1973 Original duration: approximately 30 minute | Marina Abramovic's Performance of Gina Pane's The Conditioning, first of three phases in Self-Portrait(s) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York November 12, 2005 Duration: 7 hours |
Marina Abramovic, Breathing in/ Breathing out with Ulay, 1977, Photograph
Abramović’s art approaches the topic of art and the body as a personal investigation of physical limits and mental potentials. Her early influences include non-western cultures such a Tibetan Buddhism, Sufism, and traditional Australian Aboriginal customs searching for processes that push the body to the physical extremes in order to eliminate fear of death, pain and physical limitations. Also through these cultures she has learnt of a deeper form of energy present in the body, allowing herself to fast, endure pain or undertake intense hours of performance.
In using the medium of performance, she believes “the process has always been more important than the result, the performance more important than the object.” Since 1969 Abramović has created extensive performance artworks involving her body and the audience, encompassing the body and soul and the consciousness surrounding it. She finds direct connections of energy throughout the body, its surroundings, the earth and the cosmos. Abramović often starts a performance before the audience enters the space, and ends it after they are gone to control the presence and durability of the act. In some of her works, she engages the audience to complete the work, inviting them to participate, such as in the most recent collection of performances at MOMA entitled “The Artist is Present.” Here she sat in the gallery space at a table across from an empty chair, in which audience members were invited to sit for however long they desired. In one of her first performances, she called on the audience for manipulation of her body using 72 tools placed in front of her.
Abramović finds the process needed to create performances extremely important, as with the sense of live-ness that inherent during the performance. In contrast the documentation and medium used to capture the live performance produces an ‘expired’ copy, that can never imitate the live aspect and cannot be true to the art form. In her more recent works, Abramović focuses on the mental and physical conditioning of the artist and audience. Her work is a fascinating and enthralling example of an artist using the body as the subject, object and medium.
The three above works can be seen as a loose summary of style of artworks, the first being very focused on the simple sustainability of the body, the second as the endurance of the mind, and the third, the captivation of the audience. In Breathing in/ Breathing out with Ulay, the performers share the one breath until no longer possible - i.e they pass out. In this performance Ulay and Marina lasted 17 minutes. This piece really focuses on the physicality of the body and its limitations. In Abramovic's performance of Gina Pane's "The Conditioning" the core element is withstanding the pain mentally, much more so than a physical limitation. And finally, the most recent performance involved the artist engaging with the audience, sharing the energy and space between them.
This is also a great performance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pno1gCrbeVk
John Coplans
Lick & Lather, 1993
Touch 2002
Saddle, 2000
Forking tongues, 1992 - assorted cutlery with dried chillies - Queensland Art Gallery Foundation
A book from the sky, 1987-91 - Woodblock print, wood, leather, ivory - The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collectiom of Contemporary Asian Art.
Monkeys, 1998 - 2001, Stainless Steel, h: 41.2 x w: 66 x d: 85.5 in / h: 104.6 x w: 167.6 x d: 217.2 cm
Mouse, 2002 - 2006, Stainless Steel, h: 6.5 x w: 9.5 x d: 17 in / h: 16.5 x w: 24.1 x d: 43.2 cm
FOX", 1998-1999, stainless steel, 37 x 9 x 14
1994
Jeff Wall deals with art and representation and also the nature of reality and illusion with art and life, fro the mundane life of suburbia to the 19th century style of historical painting. This can bee seen in his work dead troops talk (2002) where we see men from war from about the 19 century relaxing and conversing and only on closer inspection can we see that they are actually dead. His photographs are theatrical and very 'realistic' in a sense they look like they are a real war photographs but actually is just a recreated scene in a studio with actors that have all been photograph separately and then layered on the image. his style is very documentary and representational of they grizzly and grose side of the war and the violence among man and our destructiveness energy.
