Art and Politics

I like the Guerilla Girls, we discussed them in class and what attracts me to them is there gender equalist attitude towards women in the artworld. When it comes to art and politics there is such a wide spectrum, because anything can be turned political, more so then others of course- maybe this a sweeping statement, but anyway the personal interacting with the social, the interpersonal expierience and your knowledge of the world, your social class your race- all this takes part in how you react or how your artwork is perceived. This is kind of relative to the Guerilla Girls, there artworks are specifically gender related. In their artworks there is a use of percentages to respond to the lack of women artists in major galleries and museums. They formed in 1984 which is a huge part of there work for it is reflective of their time, and they use poster like formatt and advertisement to highlight what they stand for; to engage the audience and to take action. No one is left out, in one piece which we dicussed in class, which highlights this, was a poster which asked "what do these artists have in common? (it lists the artists)...they allow their work to be shown in galleries that show no more than 10 percent of women artists or none at all". Whats great about their work is that they have had an impact, because of what was highlighted, institutions "scrambled" to improve their ratings. I personally like the poster "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum", 1989 which is pictured. I like it because sex sells...nah, its because of the information that comes with the work it is shocking and sad that it was a reality in 1989.

Art and Its Institutions

When it comes to art and its institutions its hilarious to see the satirical and comedic work that comes out, especially against high art and its audiences, especially for how much this has changed and how accessible art is today. This is explemfied in Thomas Struth work of his large scale photographs of people at blockbuster mainstream art exhibitions to see the masters. His "lush" imagery depicts famous museums such as the Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and other major Art tourist attractions, which amuses me that the audience is portrayed as the artwork, and indeed the wide spectrum of the audience portrayed, its your average joe blow and your john doe there, or people from the other side of the world, the old institution of art is no longer art maybe, its a tourist attraction, and the real art is something else on the other side of the spectrum, or maybe he is just poking fun at something that is portayed so serious is so accessible to everyone and that you can take a photo inside there and it is an artwork in itself. How he was able to take the photos also intersets me just because normally there is no photography allowed. The photographs also demonstrate the large scale of the artworks and how the audience is "dwarfed" by the piece, the decoration- the architecture comparitive to its audience- how beautiful the atmosphere is compared to the averageness of the audience. His work also demonstrates how institutions shape our perception, how art in the street is perceived and how museums add this air of importance to the work- he highlights this "elitism". What is pictured is the Gallery in Venice, taken in 1992, and the Louvre in Paris taken in 1989.

Art and Architecture

Bodys Isek Kingelez playful take on architecture and design is both engaging and fun to look at. Its childlike and its colourful, there is nothing bleak about it, its like he took grey out of his vocabulary and made rainbow his medium and exploded into a mass of buldings and structures. His work really sells in this way because though it could be arguably garish or kitsch, it is also happy, it makes me happy cities normally look dull and grey and his work is it trying to make as happy does he want a better world, his work is also comprised of recycled materials so he may be interested in bettering the world. His work is modern at the same time, which is what is fascinating to me for I passionately hate new buildings I think they are so uninspired compared to older victorian houses or art deco or even 50's, basically prior 70's I like, and as an artist he has attracted me to modern artichectural dreams, there is definately something old made new, some art deco related structures there but with a modern twist. I think anyone who likes lego and liked making/building lego as a kid or even now would enjoy looking/researching his work. Villa fantome, 1996 is what is pictured.

Art and Globalisation

For Art and Globalisation I have decided to discuss the work of Yinka Shonibare. What interests me about his work, in relation to his headless manniquin figures dressed in Victorian style European costumes, is the theatrical element and the aesthic element, his work linking to fashion and culture which I don't know is his intention, the initial intention is different which I will discuss, but to me I see his work as wearable and a product as well as a piece of work that is a scene and i actually would like to buy the clothing to wear myself, the idea of wearing/advertising the work. What I read in Art and Today is somewhat different to my own reading, which just adds another element, the work Gallantry and Criminal Conversation, 2002, "explores the contradictory fallout of European colonization of Africa", and I believe this is symbolised by the European style dress with the african style fabric/pattern, its a hybrid of the two into an item of clothing, one wearing the other. This idea of hybrid is also explored in the vulgarity/animalistic sexual energy that is coming from the work, all the mannequins participating in a sexual act, maybe that is suggesting that it is human nature to extract, take, make two one, to oppress, to dominate. I think this quote is quite necessary in describing the work taken from Art and Today- "In his work we glimpse both the desire of the dominators to appropriate "otherness" for themselves and the longing of the dominated to adopt the lifestyles of their oppressors"

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?

arthur ganson

Arthur Ganson (b.1955 usa): amazing kinetic sculptor i came across listening to TED.com
he's works are quite musical and gestural as if they are trying to whisper something into your ears. listen to his talk on

http://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_ganson_makes_moving_sculpture.html

art and audience

http://jumpinginartmuseums.blogspot.com/

blogspace JUMPINGINARTMUSEUMS created by Allison Reimus invites people to send in photos of themselves jumping in front of artworks and in art galleries. you should really check this blogspot up, its amazing. people from all around the world have posted their pictures, some hillariously funny some with amazing skills. in Allison Reimus's blogspot profile she writes

I am an avid Art Jumper. Sometimes, while visiting art museums and galleries, I am so excited by what I see that I have to jump for joy.

it is truly great to see people sharing such love for art. the audience role have not only heightened but these photographs have become new artworks themselves.

Art & Political

Christian Boltanski

Art and Polictics, the topic already speaks about the individuals opions, or the world's events, it's interesting how every events or moments can relate to the topic. In fact, that a lot of artist create work based on their personal experience of their childhood, or past. The art and today book, talks about how creating artworks during different periods, was about engaging with the world, and social issues. The artist that I've chosen for this topic is Christian Boltanski.

Christian Boltanski is the one of my favourite artist, because the way he present the work, the art practice speaks about the story or emotions. Boltanski is known as the sculptor, painter, and installation artist. He create works that reflects on the events from the history, such as Halocaust. It's interesting how he is French artist, but because his father is Jewish he shares those memories from the history. I think his work is making the statment that each individuals are important to this world or the Earth, without considering one being poor or famous, its just being human.

Christian Boltanski's series of installation were named with the word 'archives' and 'monument', which the definition it self speaks about the memories and remembering the past. His art practice are based on collecting materials such as, newspaper script, photo, found objects, clothes and so on. When I was reading about his works, it said that the artist himself, doesn't have any detail of the people on the photographs. This idea of making artworks that artist doesn't have any connections with, are pretty, amazing, because their just from the past, whom past away somehow. But through his works, those individuals are remembered and again holds life within the installation.

Overall, I think his sculptural works, are so amazing and beautiful, it will be very thankful if someone in the future remembers me after I die. It's that scary but shows how important we are.

art and its institution - exhibition space

continuing on from the discussion we had in class for nick's presentation on art and audience i would like to discuss about "exhibition space" in relation to week 9's topic Art and its Institution. its interesting how one topic connects to everyting else. Personally i have to admit that i come across more artists and their works online than going to galleries and reading paper. this way i can keep up with new artists rising in iraq and south america with a tap of my finger. internet is what enables the world to communicate, thus globalise. it gives big and not so big yet artists opportunities to update their profiles and portfolios, and often use it as their new medium. there are now various online art galleries and auction sites, educational materials and network. it saves people time and effort. however whether this is all entirely healthy is questionable. i remember reading something on galleries and museums slowly losing their status in society. childrens are losing interest in physical activities and adults are too tired working six days a week. this is so unfortunate because seeing artworks in real life provides a very different experience from seeing it on your computer screen, most of the times. sculpture, performance and installation, especially. and whats the point of creating body of works if its only to be viewed online?

so what i really wanted to say was that we should all go gallery hopping sometime soon.

art and globalisation - biennale

hello everybody. Im sorry ive been really slack with blogging and its already our last week of 2010! I cant believe we got through this year this quick, its scary. Well im going to get on to some serious blogging so watch out.

First ive got some thoughts on biennale, the contemporary art festival, in relation to week 8's topic art and globalisation.

We've just had our 17TH SYDNEY BIENNALE. Apart from the overloaded MCA i quite enjoyed the works. Our biennale is the fourth oldest in the world since 1973 and probably the biggest international visual art event in sydney, maybe australia. According to the official biennale website, we have so far presented works of 1355 artists from 82 countries with 436,150 visitors attending 2008 sydney biennale. I wonder how much we had this year? To me, this is globalisation. It is an amazing experience to see how artists around the world interpret and create art. And through these works i can recognise the embedded cultural elements that are so similar yet different to one another. Biennale does more than just celebrate contemporary art, it promote international artists and raise awareness about the life around the globe, and upgrade our, the artists and the public's, understanding of art and the world.

globalisation dont only mean that the we, the artists, are influenced by the truth around the world but also that we have an opportunity to communicate back to the world population.

its great.



http://www.bos17.com/page/about_us.html

oh hey

checking when our review is due.... 

also this

The other blog?

Anyone know what the address for the blog that michael made for the processed bassed show was?

Art an spirituality Paul Laffoley

This guy is intense, he paints these huge detailed architectural esoteric diagrams

"his work is usually classified as visionary art or outsider art combine words and imagery to depict a spiritual architecture of explanation, tackling concepts like dimensionality, time travel through hacking relativity, connecting conceptual threads shared by philosophers through the millennia, and theories about the cosmic origins of mankind"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Laffoley

I suppose his work is considered outsider because it is!? I guess for me this is true outsider art... art that exists outside the art world. It speaks for itself really, hes kind of like a mad scientist coming up with all these crazy theories and linking them up with budhist mantras. when you look at them you can almost hear him rambling this stuff!

Art and Audience

The artist in particular I've looked at in regards to audience is Antony Gormley.

His works, casts of his own body, shaved back to anonymity, seem to portray a feeling of venerability and disclusion. Unlike many cast human statues that we see, posing heroically or holding stoic postures, Gormley's body's stand hands by sides, crotch or shrink into fetal positions. The way in which i relate his work in relation to the audience that views it is through the way in which we are reminded of our own selves through the bodies. We are reminded of our own position in relation to space, our bodies being the only thing that we physically embody in life. Some work that emit this feeling of reminding us of our position is his recent work, 'Event Horizon'. 

"From March 26 – August 15, 2010, 31 life-size figures appeared on rooftops, setbacks, and sidewalks around Manhattan’s historic Madison Square Park.  Standing tall above the unique urban landscape of New York City, the figures were the work of celebrated British artist Antony Gormley as part of Event Horizon New York, Gormley’s long-awaited United States public art debut."

Perhaps it is through the act of looking and discovering these bodies that stand amongst the skyline the audience get an idea about their own scale in relation to the environment, such as the alienation that incorporates modern life.

Art and audience

Today i learn 't how to play an art game with an audience. it was like a test and involved memory. memory can be useful.there is a point when you get so over saturated with half formed ideas and information that it is hard to care about anything except the the immediate. a way in is sometimes through the use of fun to generate audience participation. the old fine line between active and passive participation is crucial to the way an art game is generated and how it will continue. the web is like a game which you can plug into anytime into any part (in theory) is possibly part of its popularity. but its not really even one on one- the audience just is not there in the old school sense and this must make a difference to the reactions you get .

ART & Its Audience

A great introduction to this area / introducing emerging conceptual ideas relating to pedagogy AS art:

http://fillip.ca/content/a-pedagogical-turn

Art and Audience

Been doing a little research on relational aesthetics.

From Bourriards writing (he coined the term):

http://www.creativityandcognition.com/blogs/legart/wp-content/uploads/2006/07/Borriaud.pdf

Some responses:

http://transform.eipcp.net/correspondence/1196340894#redir

Interesting stuff. I think alot of the art in Hartneys chapter is really well thought out on a conceptual level. But I like that it reaches out beyond an academic audience (unlike alot of the text based works that we have been looking at that formed part of the conceptual art movement)

Art & the Audience

Artist Vipoo Srivilasa is a ceramic sculptor who in the 2008 "Roop - Rote - Ruang" project directly engaged the audience. Roop - Rote - Ruang, or Taste - Touch - Tell, was an way to experience ceramics, wherein the guest actively participated by selecting their own plate, made a ceramic piece themselves and ate the that meal that the artist himself prepared. There were several interesting features of this performance/exhibition. It mirrored some buddhist methods, in that the food was passed clockwise, and incorporates the concept of 'ayatana' the term used to describe the six sense bases - sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and the mind. The first course plates were chosen by the guest, which had a message of fortune inscribed on the underside of the plate. Next was the Best Wishes Soup, with a symbol of fortune uncovered at the bottom of the bowl as the soup was eaten. In the sharing of a meal the interrelationship between the work of art, the artist and the participants has been 'interrupted' in a traditional sense. It is a 2 way relationship, in that the audience is helping make Srivilasa's work and he is helping them make theirs. "The artist is interesting in creating opertunities for sharing between complete strangers and creating different, social ways of exploring complex ideas of his cross cultural experience."*

*http://www.vipoo.com/Content/Images/news/2008/roob_rote_ruang.pdf

http://www.artaustralia.com/article.asp?issue_id=189&article_id=207

Art and Spirituality

For Art and Spirituality I thought I would discuss the work of Alex Grey who explores in his art the mind the body and the soul. In his work he depicts "the human body that "x-ray" the multiple layers of reality, and reveal the interplay of anatomical and spirital forces"(quoted from Alex Grey Biography on alexgrey.com). His forms are reflective on his experiences in education (his anatomical education at Harvard Medical School) and his mind expanding experiences (the trips he took with his wife in college) and his interest in the psyche. What is prevalent in all his work from the begining of his practice to now is themes of death and transcendance. As an artist he is best known for the translucent glowing bodies which have been praised by renowned healers Olga Worral and Rosalyn Bruyere, his visionary figures are placed in human expieriences such as praying, sex, birth and meditation. He is well known for his Art work for Tool, which got me interested in his work, and he has also done work for Nirvana, SCI and Beastie Boys. I highly recommend going to his website, and also go on a tour of COSM (Chapel of Sacred Mirrors) the large piece/place that he in collaboration with his wife has created, he is very visionary in his ideas so don't get confused, its not an order, its really just a promotion of expressing ones creative path.

Alex Grey's Official Website- http://www.alexgrey.com/
Chapel of Sacred Mirrors Website- http://www.cosm.org/

http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/visionary/- Also this website is notable to go to, its Artists discussion on Visionary Art, there is also Alex Grey's own discussion on the movement, very interesting.

Art and the Audience

Vuk Cosic in a net.art artist and prolific ASCII artist, which is using computer software to overlay videos with alphanumerical characters replacing colour pixels. net.art is simply art that is only broadcast over the internet, the web page is it’s context.

net.art came about in the early 90’s with the widespread adoption of internet connected desktop pc’s also the movement to graphically interfaced websites rather then text based sites that happened around 1993 pointed out by critic Rachel Greene.

Deep ASCII

Rather than showing the audience the work, in this case the film Deep Throat, Cosic is reaching deep into the recesses of code that is in the background of all digital transmissions and showing us the raw data. We know film is an illusion and we’re able to quite simply break it down to individual frames. But Video is different in that rather than being an illusion it’s a manipulation dots, and we aren’t able to break it down and understand it, a single still is made up of lines and lines of code indecipherable to all but the codec.

think this work comes out of the frustration of the net.art.ists failed dream that internet would become this all democratising bastion of knowledge and information. And it wasn’t, it was mostly used to look up porn and download pictures of cats. The choice of video then becomes obvious. We see all the work of programming code and encoding and decoding video, and all it’s used for is the smut transmission. The sad and ironic this is, is that a lot of the breakthrough in the way of file compression, video encoding and the like have come out of the supposed to need to broadcast porn over the world wide web.

Tv screen, night one

Tv screen, night one is a collection of video stills that Cosic captured while sitting in front of the television the night of the bombing of Yu during the NATO bombing of Kosovo. It shows at the time the authority of the television over the computer as a resource for gathering information. In some respects this still applies today, I’m more weary of information that has been easily posted online rather than information that has gone through a editing and publishing process.

Again Cosic has put up a layer with his medium between the content and the audience. They don’t see discernable information, they say frames, pixels. The background noise in the vast expanse of the internet.

A history of art for Airports is where Cosic comes out the digital ether and physically displays his works to the audience. However his very clever about the way he does this. Rather than displaying the work in the universal language of binary, he’s displaying it in the universal language of symbols, he is then placing the works in a complicated network like the internet in airports. By demeterialising the works he has turned into symbols, he is saying the history of art is beyond the object, beyond the output of a video screen, rather it’s in the raw code, it’s in the concept.

With all art being about concept as Cosic demonstrates, then the context of the work is imperative, meaning is lost when viewing A History of Art for Airports online, and vice versa with Deep ASCII and WAR (tv screen, night one)

Baumgärtel, Tilman, Net.art 2.0 : Neue Materialien zur Netzkunst, Nürnberg : Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2001

Vuk Cosic http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/

Interview with Vuk Cosic http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2006/02/interview-of-vu.php

net.art wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net.art