Art & its Institutions - Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler

MoMA Whites (1990)

I found these artists in Art & Today, which talked about two works that really interested me. MoMA Whites (1990) and Signature Piece (1988).
for MoMA Whites the artists uncovered the various specific shades of white used in the Museum of Modern Art, which they displayed in jars labelled with the names. They found that some shades of white were chosen by curators specifically, while others were a typical industrial shade.
Signature Piece are silk-screened signatures of industrial creators, displayed near their creations. The names help re-establish that this creation was born in the mind of an individual, that it hasn't always been a part of the arhcitecture of the space.


These works both interest me because of the choice to highlight something which has become overlooked. It is often easy to ignore the skill that has gone into constructing a background. The museum space is focused on what is added to the space, despite the care that goes into creating the museum environment. These artists have made the space itself the focus of their art, and draw the audience into considering what went into creating this backdrop.
These works are also aeshetically pleasing. They are simple in construction, but represent great effort on the part of the artists to research and uncover these names.
I think these works leads on well from Art & Architecture.



An image of Signature Piece can be found in Art & Today

Art and Globilisation

Antony Gormley

Contructed from planks of wood, tables, chairs, keyboards, paintings, dartboards, a front door, toilet seat stands a high 25m man which took over four weeks to construct.

Art & Spirituality- Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Untitled (Portrait of Ross, L.A), 1991.
Untitled (Perfect lovers), 1991.

Felix Gonzalez-torres is well known for his works, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A) and Untitled (USA Today), where a large pile of wrapped pieces of candy, approximately weighting 136Kgs, is placed in the corner of the gallery where the viewer are able to take the candy. The weight is a important factor in this work, the weight is equal to the weight of Felix Gonzalez-torres and his dececed partner. The weight of the work and the ability of the viewing being able to take the candy creates a feel of loss and disaperence. Untitled (Perfect lovers), two clocks are placed side by side and are set in sync with each other, over a period of time the clocks slowly fall out of sync till the batteries die. Felix Gonzalez-torres works have a connection with spirituality because of the deep and powerful meaning, of remebrance of a loved one.

Art & Architechture- Monica Bonvicini

Minimal Romantik (2005)

400cm x 400cm x 400cm

Don't miss a sec (2003-2004).
(Outside view)

Don't miss a sec (2003-2004).
(inside view)

Monica Bonvicini was born in 1965. She is an installation artist who works with many different materials. Don't miss a sec (2003-2004) is a structure made from two-way glass that contains all the needs of a public toilet. It was placed in a well populated area public area, during a art show, this work deals with the ideas of the public and private spaces. Bonvicini's work is also making a statement on how busy major art showscan be, including the biennale, where there is a large amount to view and people to see/be seen by. Bonvicini has created this structure using two-way glass so that inside the structure the user can not be seen but can see out, so they can still use the facilities while viewing the art works and people outside.

"This work absurdly pushes at the limits of what is public and what is private and offers a performative element in which inside and outside are blurred together. " -Monica Bonvicini.

http://www.neoaztlan.com/issue-five/art/monica-bonvicini/ A short interview with the artist about some of her recent works.

Art & Architechture: Porosity Project

This is a really interesting project being undertaken by a friends phd supervisor, Richard Goodwin. From my understanding it is about mapping the 'porosity' or, the public accessibility, of 'private' space in cities. Dressed in appropriate business attire, 'researchers' enter private space, office buildings etc and measure the amount of time/level of exploration possible. This information is then mapped according to a scale of lesser to greater porosity/accessibility. How are our concepts of space and freedom of movement within space limited and controlled by social understandings of ownership? How solid are the rules which govern our movement within cities? are these rules primarily enforced by fear and the pretense of surveillance? Does this matter? Who is granted what access and how embedded in social hierarchies are these freedoms? How important is it to defend our access to space?

Most importantly: what do cities begin to look like when we remove the restrictions of access to different spaces? And what possibilites are opened up! (mmmmmm!)

Goodwin writes: "Porosity Research seeks to classify spaces which exist deep within the skin or fabric of privately owned city buildings...One of the vital needs or reasons for this work lies in finding ways of preventing cities from being shut down as a result of rampant capitalism in the ‘Age of Terror’. Porosity as a strategy attacks this trend. It seeks the dissolution of architecture through a type of mapping which dissolves existing boundaries associated with rights of access. Capitalism needs to be continually measured by mapping or defining what is public against what is private. It can be argued that the social construction of a city is as important as its physical manifestation as buildings. It can also then be argued that a city which allows public space to penetrate its private space enables a healthier social construction."

Sorry this post is so text dense, couldn't find any images.. but superbly interesting nonetheless.

Art & Architecture: Graham Hudson

"Is it Art or an Environmental Statement? That’s what this Treehugger asked the artist, Graham Hudson, who has built a studio and out-buildings in the courtyard of the Chelsea College of Art and Design. Supported by a Foundation grant, the artist has spent the last 6 months constructing his ramshackle home, living there throughout the whole process and holding arty events on the site. The central building, his studio-residence, is a construction of timber off-cuts, discarded window frames, cardboard, carpet, and old furniture. His materials come from the streets, skips, toy-shops, e-bay, and donations. A junkyard, cordoned off in the interests of Health and Safety, is Hudson's own store-- housing umbrellas, wood, plastics, and discarded children's toys. This is recycling in its simplest form: using refuse to build something new."

Material Resource Library, 2006.

His work roots back to the concept behind Duchamp's works, readymades. It makes us aware of mass production, consumeration and use of materials in our everyday lives. I feel that one of the highlights of 21st century, which would go down to history for the next generation art students, would have to be about people becoming aware of environment and recycling, and the global emphasis on them, not only in the field of art but everywhere around, at least in the western countries, where poverty isn't a major issue. But the highlight so far has only been done in the use of our everyday materials, that are in direct contact with us. His work suddenly triggers me about the use of materials in construction, the erection of new buildings, demolish of houses, spaces occupied with new buildings, congested spaces, etc.

Bibliography:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/09/is_it_art_or_an.php (Accessed Sep 14, 2010).

Art & Globalisation: Renate Schweizer

"The german artist Renate Schweizer (R e s h) is asking artists and other citizens all over the world to connect threads of collected used teabags from aII continents. This art-work becomes a master-piece of contemporary art in the 21 th century, where serious artists worldwide show responsibility & care for the human, political and ecological problems in our global world."

fig. 1
fig. 2 "Started in July 2007 the art-work in process will probably end in 2022"

Her works, especially the fig. 2, brings together global audience, which reminds me that it could be under the topic art and audience as well. The work is interactive and participatory, which engages gallery visitors in the making of the artwork. It is interesting to see how the smallest and the least notable things that we use and discard in our everyday lives, could be used as our creative materials, or attributes to give meaning or character to our artwork.

Bibliography:
http://german-contemporary-art.eu/
http://joannebkaarpaperboats.blogspot.com/2009_02_01_archive.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=DE&hl=de&v=UTQ6MxzN3qU

Art and Globalisation.

A summary of my thoughts on the above topic with an introduction to the artistic practice of Joyce Kozloff.
Art and Globalisation involves many layers of ideas including identity, their authenticity and place. Globalisation could be said to be a normative utopian ideal that can be manipulated for specific ends. This can become a source of inspiration for Art. It’s possible to think your thinking globally but it’s more difficult (impossible) to be every where at once, so you can not check your thinking. Or another way of looking at it – Who has the authority to speak for a groups identity or authenticity? What are the essential elements of and boundaries of culture?
Lest we get too tangled up with words its worth taking a look at something visual and tactile.
Targets: aerial views of 24 counties that have been bombed by US war planes since 1945.
Joyce Kozloff, Targets, 2000. Acyrlic on canvas with wood frame,
Diameter: 108 in. (approx 330 cm), p 35

The political messages are often quite clear – Kozloff calls attention atrocities like slave trade, wars, and bombings – but she also uncovers the subtle prejudices and misinformed worldviews that have shaped cartography. She invites us to navigate these issues through wry humor, rich references to literature and pop culture, and a great deal of visual appeal. Exploration of human drives and desires, along with a deliberate erasure of the division between high and low culture.
Ideas starting with more local concerns, her own children. With some feminine critique?

Joyce Kozloff, Boys’ Art #9: Iwo Jima, 2001-2. Mixed media on paper,
16.75 x 11.5 in. (approx. 50 x 34.5 cm), p36

Joyce Kozloff. is a painter commonly associated with the Pattern & Decoration movement of the 1970s. The movement was an effort to challenge the stigma that modern art had put on ornamentation. The artists of this movement drew inspiration form arts and cultures outside the mainstream of modern art: Islamic, Celtic, and Arts and Crafts . In an interview in 2000, Kozloff says of this cultural melding: "I would not enjoy a world in which cultures became homogeneous and lost their singularity. All my work is appropriated from outside sources; I create a hybrid, a fusion of diverse materials, but I don't disguise their uniqueness or stylize them beyond recognition. We are flooded with imagery from everywhere: in our museums, our libraries, our media. For years, I've been trying to put it together for myself."
The American History series are a visual extension of the ironic and whimsical layering of Boys’ Art. Kozloff seems to be aware of a human compulsion to locate and orientate ourselves in our environment and is giving us new frames from which to do this.

Joyce Kozloff, American History: Age of Discovery, 2004.Etching, collage, watercolour, pigment print, acrylic, and coloured pencil, 32.75 x 48 in. (approx. 68 x 150 cm), p 39

Pictures: The map as art: contemporary artists explore cartography,
Princeton University Press, Kathrine Harmon, 2009

AS PART OF THIS BLOG I WOULD LIKE TO SHARE WITH THE WORLD HOW MUCH I HAVE NOT ENJOYED THE PUTTING INFO. FROM A WORD DOC. ONTO A BLOG. IT SEEMS UNBELIEVABLY DIFFICULT FOR NO APPARENT REASON. THANKS GOOGLE!

Art and Architecture- Rachel Whiteread

Holocaust monument 2000

Place village 2009

untitled monument 2001

Embankment 2004

House 1993

Rachel Whiteread is a was born on April 20 1963 in the country town of Essex, England. Her mother was an artist and the death of her had a profound effect on whitereads work. Whiteread firsty trained in painting at the facutly of arts and architecture, Brighton Polytechnic, breifly at cyprus college of art and then finally studied scultptue at London's Slade school of Art. She first began to exhibit in 1987.

Whiteread's work is much to do with Space, objects, materials and presence and absense. She uses domestic object of the every day and casts the negative space; solidifying the void of the objects. Whiteread generally uses plaster, concrete and rubber however she utilises these materials on everday found objects. One of her work titled 'place village' is an entire collection of old dollhouses which she has organised to create a small community.

Whiteread is famously known for her 1993 work 'house'. This work was a concrete cast of the inside of an entire victorian terraced home that had been scehduled for demolition. The work was publicly exhibited at its original location, 193 Grove Road East London. The production of the work caused great controversy amongst the public and the locals did not like the immediate groups of people coming to see the work. It generated extreme mixed responses. For example: Whiteread's work 'House' won her both The Turner prize for best young british artists in 1993 and also the K Foundation art award for worst british aritst. 'House' was demolished on the 11th of janurary 1994 by London council, which in itself caused more publicity and controversy.

In 2004 whiteread was offered a commission to produce a piece for Tate Modern's Turbine Hall which she delayed acceptance for six months to ensure she could actually conceive a piece that could occupy the massive hall space. Titled 'Embankment' the work consists of approximately fourteen thousand white polyethylene boxes stacked in different ways. The various stacks enable any veiwers to walk around the room and around the different stacks to be overwhelmed by not only the size of the hall but the space her occupies. They represent the greif of when her mother died and the period of packing boxes of her things and moving them. Whiteread also cites the end scenes of 'The raiders of the lost arc' and 'citizens cane'.

In 2001 Whiteread became the third artist to provide a sculpture for the empty forth plinth at trafalgar square in london. She made an eleven tonne resin cast of the plinth itself which stands upsidedown making a transperant mirror image of the marble plinth 'Untitled monument'. The piece took eight attempts to make as a result of the resin cracking. The entire project cost over one hundred thousand pounds to produce and unusually for public work, Whiteread rasied the funs herself by selling small models of the piece. Whiteread descirbes this work as 'as pause...a quiet moment'. The piece conjures heaviness and lightness and as Ned Denny from new statesman explains 'She sees it not as a space to be filled, but as an absence to be acknowledged'.

For Whiteread's work, 'place village' unlike her other works, she has collected handmade english dollhouse and has configured them into a minature community. The work was presented in Forster gallery, Boston in a small dimly lit room behind a black curtin. Inside the small homes she has placed a light that reveals the emptiness of the houses and their lack of funishings. The entire room is only lit by these subtle lights inside the houses which draws the viewer in to inspect whats inside. The entire work almost has a certain sadness to it as this visually thriving little town has no sense of life or anything-once again Whiteread is approaching the idea of absence and memory.

Whiteread was commissioned 'Holocaust monument' in 2000 and it was Austria's first memorial to the sixty five thousand Jewish Austrians that were killed during the holocaust. The work essentially is a concrete cast of rows of books that have been turned so the spines are hidden and the pages are facing outwards. They are placed in the shape of a room with at the front two negatively cast doors with no handles or hinges. The piece is symbolic of the large number of victims and their untold stories of their lives.

Bibliography:

Townsend, chris. 'The Art of Rachel Whiteread'. Thames and Huson, London, 2004.

Mullins, Charlotte. 'Rachel Whiteread/ Charlotte Mullins'. Tate, London. 2004.

What is Installation? - Nicholas Zurbrugg

&

Art & Installation

A FUSION WOK OF architecture AND installation

There must become a natural end point to both art and architecture; whether or not this cessation ends in a culmination of ideals or an abrupt reaction against the present is yet to be seen.

1. Do we accept the current and near future status quo in terms of our liberal attitudes towards interdisciplinary experimentation and implementation and foresee a future where we will inhabit installations and the very nature of the installation will become irrelevant and just a part of life.

2. Separate parties seek to preserve the purity of their form and rally together to create distinction and use for their individual crafts. Installations for Art and entertainment; Architecture for habitation.

In his second paragraph Zurburgg almost destroys the very nature and necessity for installation art, he points out that installation works are those works that are done by artists, which involve:

INSIDE

OUTSIDE

LARGE

SMALL

PAINTING

VIDEO

PHOTOGRAPHY

LINOGRAPHY

SCULPTURE

PERFORMANCE

INTERACTIVE

LINEAR

MANMADE

ORGANIC

Installation works seem to have come about from a need for artists rationalise the lack of stand-alone substance in their work, therefore relying audiences engagement with space to elicit an affect. Zurburgg goes on to list the historical beginnings of installation, obviously this is done in hindsight but it seems installation is any structure or earthly change that is created with out an everyday practical use [by todays standards]. It would seem that from all the artists Zurburgg has decided to investigate: John Cage, Tracey Emin, Duchamp et al, he is trying to find contrasting attributes that would make installation a valid form and not just: what artitst make OR anything that is ever made.

Le Corbusier an architect, however the buildings he designed for the public sector were absolute failures. This leads me to believe the Le Corbusier was an installation artist [since i have succinctly proven that he wasn't an architect[. He created his own concepts around the way (should) live, he thought he could impart his own controls on the system of living through architectural choices.

ART & Globalisation

The Social Realist as Entrepreneur: Thomas Hirschhorn

BYZANTINE NETWORKS OF WAFFLE

Art & Globalisation (Globalization)

Many discussions on globalisation and it's relation to the art world seem to get bogged down in the good vs bad scenario: for example, the artist is able to find far reaching resources for reference; however he/she losses the connection to their sense of place. Following this course of enquiry is a zero sum game. We also loose focus to the real effect that globalisation has on our lives; that is, the way we think.

Today we think quick, we think with facts and we think through reference rather than empirical evaluation. With globalisation and the free market, which is the cause to the effect, we become more and more aware to the existence and creation of complicated systems. Hyper connected systems like the internet and even the way our food is created are blessed curses of the free market. Living in a complex network makes us think like complex networks, creating links that overlap, envelope and collapse [in which case the global financial crisis is the economic equivalent of a theory that tries to relate James Waldegraves first example of Game theory to the back catalogue of Sinead O'Conner, until you realise that Sinead O'Conner is bald by choice].

Now the internet is an aspect of globalisation and it came into fruition because of the free market [this can be argued], this is an example of a complex network inside a complex network, with those networks are other networks and within them are many more. Our world is far to complex to make sense of which is why we don't, we make bullet points in our mind and we search for the same type of system of knowledge allocation when we try and learn new things.

I don't know what I'm getting at, but I think it's quite safe and absolutely unreasonable to say: everything is everything and nothing really matters.

Joep van Lieshout - Annotated Bibliography

Atelier Van Lieshout, Autocrat, 1997. Reproduced from Atelier Van Lieshout, http://www.ateliervanlieshout.com/ (accessed September 8, 2010)

Joep van Lieshout (b. 1963. Ravenstein) is a working artist based in Rotterdamn, The Netherlands and is the founder of Atlier Van Leishout (AVL), a now internationally recognised organisation, well known for their objects which balance on the boundary between ar, architecture and design. Associate themes which AVL focus on include autocracy, power, politics and all things associated with life and death. AVL's workshop is situated in a large warehouse in the harbors of Rotterdam. The building is an inustraial monument, and was built in the 1920s an oirginally used to store cotton. It has today been transformed by Leishout into a manufacturing workshop with a fibreglass, sculpture, wood and metals department. AVL has 20 employees all with previous professional backgrounds and origins, designers work closely with the employees throughout the manufacturing process.

AVL-Ville (founded 2001) The early works which Leishout based around the idea of the mobile home and complete self-sufficiency developed the idea of a free state close by to AVL for past, current and future AVL employees to utilise. AVL-Ville currently has its own hospital (1998), organic farm, art school, group housing as well as workshops which produce weapons, bombs, alcohol and medicine.

Atelier Van Lieshout, Tampa Skull, 1998. Reproduced from Atelier Van Lieshout, http://www.ateliervanlieshout.com/ (accessed September 8, 2010)

Atelier Van Lieshout, BarRectum, 2005. fibreglass and mixed media, 16m x 4m. Reproduced from DesignBoom, http://www.google.com.au/imgres?imgurl=http://www.designboom.com/eng/interview/vanlieshout/yoko.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.designboom.com/eng/interview/vanlieshout.html&usg=__QPq1o64lS2BA_N7pvj5u7lfW9ko=&h=312&w=460&sz=30&hl=en&start=4&zoom=1&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=OSF_8VwHazhw7M:&tbnh=87&tbnw=128&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dbar%2Brectum%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26tbs%3Disch:1 (accessed September 5, 2010)

Atelier Van Lieshout, BarRectum, 2005. fibreglass and mixed media, 16m x 4m. Reproduced from Atelier Van Lieshout, http://www.ateliervanlieshout.com/ (accessed September 5, 2010)

Atelier Van Lieshout, Utopian Doghouse, 2002. Reproduced from Atelier Van Lieshout, http://www.ateliervanlieshout.com/ (accessed September 4, 2010)

Atelier Van Lieshout, Workshop for Alcohol and Medicines, 1998. Reproduced from Atelier Van Lieshout, http://www.ateliervanlieshout.com/ (accessed September 4, 2010)

Up The Organization - Joep can Lieshout, Atelier van Lesihout - Interview (2001)http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_8_39/ai_75830817/ (accessed September 4, 2010)

About AVL - Atlier Van Lieshout, Official Website http://www.ateliervanlieshout.com/ (accessed September 4, 2010)

DesignBoom: Joep van Lieshout Interview in Milan (2007) http://www.designboom.com/eng/interview/vanlieshout.html (accessed September 5, 2010)

ART & Globalisation

Background to Documenta 11

As the ideological forces of the “New World Order” recede and those of institutions of global economics and politics become entrenched values, there has emerged a number of powerful questions about the fate of democracy at the beginning of the new millennium. Though these questions have preoccupied intellectuals, institutions, and thinkers of all stripes for more than half a century, it was only in the waning moments of the 20th century that the full meaning of the political fragmentation that attended the dissolution of the Soviet empire made issues of democracy more pronounced. Several factors have contributed to the current wave of reassessments of the ideological hegemony of democracy, namely: the scale and penetration of global capitalism in determining every facet of cultural and political life around the world; the rise of nationalisms and fundamentalisms of every imaginable kind as responses to the neo-liberal globalist onslaught; the widened horizon of notions of citizenship produced by large scale displacements and immigration that today are reshaping the face of once stable societies; and finally, the emergence of the postcolonial state as it grapples with the imperfect legacy of imperialism and colonialism.

Within all these transformations, crucial to the narration of modernity in our time and the formation of subjectivity (ethnic or national, individual or collective), an important qualification needs to be made, which is the extent to which current tendencies of democratic governance are inherited from, and connected to the traditions of Western conception of democracy. But because it can not be denied that the state of democracy around the world today has become more varied and flexible we are moved to question whether the notion of democracy can still be sustained only within the philosophical grounds of Western epistemology. What are the possible ways to imagine democracy today as method and praxis available to both governors and the governed, the nation and subjects alike?

Even if democracy has been the watchword for different kinds of participatory governance and political systems of the last half century, to a large degree it remains a project under constant reinvention. The notion unrealized alluded to in the title of this project is a way to interpret the varied modifications that the ethic of democracy and its institutional forms have undergone and continue to undergo today, making democracy a fundamentally unrealizable project, or put another way as a work in progress.

As an example we may recall the subversion of the democratic logic by far right extremists, nationalist parties, and xenophobes sweeping through Europe today, or the conditions of democracy within the totalitarian governments in the former communist countries, dictatorships in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the appropriation of the democratic ethic recently enacted by the reformist movement in Iran, calls for a fresh examination of the fundamental concept of democracy as essentially a secular endeavor. Equally, the history of the independence movements and de-colonization in Africa, Asia and the Middle East testifies to the extreme topicality attained by the idea of democratic politics. This has led not only to structural changes in those societies in which democracy and its institutions form part of the heritage of the former colonial state, but also in the political culture itself. These associations have been reinforced after the collapse of the USSR at the end of the eighties and the ensuing, apparently natural co-dependence between liberal democracy and global capitalism.

In the last twenty years, the very structure of a powerful ideological discourse has crystallized in the West that emphasizes the mutual belonging of these two components. This is a model of democracy that emphasizes individual rights above any form of collective action. While in the developing world a search for an alternative paradigm to this system is producing sober reassessments. Activists, thinkers, artists, and cultural producers both from Western and non-Western contexts have sought to resist and contest these assumptions. Entirely new uses and possible forms of democratic contestation have also been articulated, at the core of which lies an interpolation of the traditional Western European conception of democracy and the appropriation of its rhetorical methods in service of other agendas. Notions such as "representation," "hegemony" and "popular participation" have been refined by different groups in an attempt to elaborate new forms of resistance to the pervasive neo-liberal ideology and ascendant rightwing extremism that characterizes late capitalism in the West.

To grapple with many of the issues around the debates of democracy within this project a few issues require consideration:


1. Exploring the Term Unrealized

The central impetus of this project is to discuss how liberal democracy has been presented in the post-cold war setting - not only as the best of all systems but as a totally realized, essentially completed project. From this rather triumphal, post-Cold war viewpoint, if democracy is in any way to be described as an unfinished project it means that no structural changes are conceivable or necessary, that it is complete in all its foundational features – only small technical adjustments and minor tinkering is what it may need in future. The logic of this argument can be seen as the technocratic interpretation of the term unrealized which is seen as fine tuning of democratic procedural methods and due processes that had already been largely settled. This has been the way in which the main Western democracies see themselves – at best as “incomplete implementations” of equality and justice on which modern democracy is based, rather than limits, flaws, dead-ends, and problematics inscribed in the principles themselves. In reaction to this presumption, we start from the idea that Democracy Unrealized is a matter of bringing to light what liberal democracy promises but fails to deliver. The emphasis, then, is on potential for revision, revaluation of values, extension and creative transformation to keep in step with 21st century globalizing processes – the idea of an ever-open, essentially unfinishable project that in principle has fallen short of its ideals.


2. The End of History, Emergent Democracies, Unstable Democracies

Against the backdrop of the Soviet Union's meltdown in the early 1990s, Francis Fukuyama in The Last Man and End of History (1989/92) came to spell out what would become almost a post-cold war doctrine - that liberal democracy is tied to the marketplace. According to him, the end of communism proved that no other system could match, supersede or improve upon liberal democracy. Hence his claim that liberal democracy marks the 'end of history,' – not in the sense that everyday events and developments have come to a halt – but in that no further structural development beyond the framework of contemporary liberal democracy was possible. No viable alternatives appear on the contemporary horizon. Liberal democracy, tied up with global market economics represents a limit case of the development of political life, “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” he calls it. A part of Fukuyama’s thesis uses not an analysis of rational factors or economics, but a master/slave metaphor. In this analysis, liberal democracy emerges and evolves from the idea of the recognition of the master (aristocracy, bourgeoisie) into a form of universal recognition. But is the recognition available to citizens of contemporary liberal democracies completely satisfying? The long-term future of liberal democracy, and the alternatives to it that may one day arise, depend above all on the answers to this question.

We may have already arrived at the point when such alternatives need careful examination. The various forms of democratic processes that have engulfed the emergent countries of Eastern Europe, the struggle to align democracy to the theocratic, authoritarian political institutions of present day Iran, or in the case of Africa the sheer futility of asking postcolonial African regimes to reform the former colonial state’s institutions mark the ontology of forms of democratic governmentality that are irreconcilable with the principles propagated in the West. Equally pressing in this evaluation are the dynamics of what emerges as the dialectics of fundamentalism and liberalism as played out in Algeria, Turkey, and ex-Soviet Union; the violence enacted in former Yugoslavia, China’s “One Country, Two Systems” policy. Whatever one may make of these democracies, their very contradiction calls for an analysis of democracy both from the inside and without in order to form a coherent picture of the present system of global transition.


3. Tolerance

With issues of tolerance, we see most strikingly the construction and exclusion of difference and otherness, the demand for assimilation put on immigrants and outsiders, and the de-legitimation of other ways of living and knowing. All of these mark the limits of tolerance in liberal democracies. Tolerance itself implies looking outwards from a ready-made body of values to which others are expected to conform, as opposed to perhaps ethical encounters and engagements with difference, mutual exchange or transformation. What are the implications of the construct of tolerance in our present global society?

In this forum on democracy’s ethical and epistemological blind-spots we are confronted with forms of living experience and knowledge it is unable to acknowledge or provide for; its limits as Western liberal democracies encounter new categories of citizens: economic immigrants, political refugees, asylum seekers, sans papiers, and other excluded groups, whose pressing demands for recognition, presence and participation have increasingly shown up the limits of tolerance, limits of notions of civil rights to universality of human rights. From the foregoing, it seems necessary to re-engage and examine how narratives and testimonies of marginalized groups, especially how their struggle to overcome their sense of exclusion presses on democracies to examine their ethical and epistemological limits, sometimes forcing them to extend and forge new spaces and provisions for difference.

4. Work Ethic

The claim that democracy can only be realized and operate when its prerequisite – the work ethic – is strongly established is the argument put forward for the basis of liberal democracies in the West and Japan. In the United States, it is attributed to Protestant culture; this argument is similarly wielded against places that through colonialism are struggling to develop alternative forms of governance. Is the work ethic then the instrument of conversion? What are the counter-narratives that question whether democracy can only truly secure itself when a work ethic is inculcated and institutionalized?


5. Development Ethics, Globalization and Democracy

Since the end of Second World War, “development” has been a catchword of modernization, the great leap forward toward sustainability and self-sufficiency. It has equally been the directive from a range of global institutions of creating democratic societies within the confines and fringes of the Western capitalistic model. By grafting an economic structure onto the rhetoric of democracy, rigid practices of such developmental institutions as the World Bank and the IMF have in fact disrupted societies in the process of transition. The ethics of such globalization has been bitterly debated from inside the countries which are “to be developed”, offering alternatives to the polarization of tradition and modernity and a simultaneous conflation of development with progress.


Okwui Enwezor

Art & Globalisation

One of the most important factors to affect contemporary art has been cultural and economic globalisation. Increasingly, international art exhibitions draw their contents from all over the world, and artists address a wide range of subjects relating to this developing situation. However despite an increase of sources, it has been suggested that an international style has developed rendering the variety stagnant.

I have attached the introduction to an article, addressing this idea.

Contemporary Art and Globalisation: Biennials and the Emergence of the De-Centred Artist

By: Mr. John Byrne

he impact of Globalisation on contemporary art practice has been both obvious and disconcerting, apparent and subtle. Most recently, the world wide growth in 'Biennials' has provided the most obvious evidence of the radical changes which have been taking place in the global economies of contemporary art practice since the collapse of the Eastern Block. Globalisation has, as in many other areas of social relations and endeavour, both homogenised and fragmented engagements with and responses to the 'art world'. This has led to a kind of new, postmodern 'International Style' of works which, despite their differing quality, simply appear to be the same in any kind of location. In response to the blandness of such 'airport art', many Biennials have recently sought to encourage a direct 'engagement' with the 'cultural specifics' of their location. The result of this has been, perhaps predictably, a kind of 'parachute documentary art' produced by artist willing to make lightening fast responses to the possibility of a financially rewarding brief. However, in spite of this polarisation of the contemporary art world, into the glibly general and the impossibly specific, many artists have begun to produce works which are intentionally 'de-centered' - dispersed over time, space and location – simultaneously denying the possibility of their works post-biennial absorption into a globalised economy of commodified art objects and further de-stabilising the traditional relationship between artist and artwork. Drawing on the experience of researching Channel 5's programme on the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art 04, this paper will attempt to evaluate some of the significant shifts that are taking place in, and as a result of, the growth in the contemporary globalised art economy.

http://h05.cgpublisher.com/proposals/631/index_html

Art & Globalisation- Yinka Shonibare, MBE, Presentation.

Yinka Shonibare was born in London and move to Nigeria when he was a young child, he moved back to London in his late teens to continue to study. His parents are both Nigerian so he has a strong cultural background. Being born and living most of his adult life in London, his art practice reflects his Nigerian background as well as the history and culture of London. The materials he uses represents the connection between different countries and how each country would not be the same that it is today with out the past influences from other countries. Shonibare also likes to create a lot of humour in his works, this is mainly done by having deadless fiberglass mannequins or the positions the mannequins are placed in.

Yinka Shonibare creates works using many different methods such as painting, sculpture photography, film and performance.

Finding information about the meaning of his works and detailed discriptions was relatively easy, this information could be found in journal articals and the section of information in the art & today and in interviews with Shonibare himself. Information that showed a different perspective of his works was difficult to find. Being able to read contrasting points of view may have been helpful in seeing his work in a different way.

Lewis, Sarah. Yinka Shonibare MBE. ArtForum, 48, 2. p-227. (NewYork, 2009).

Elliot, David. Yinka Shonibare's theatre of the world. Art and Australia, 46, 2. (2008).

Heartney, Eleanor. "Art & Globalism" in Art & Today. Phaidon:London (2008).

http://www.yinkashonibarembe.com

http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/crossingborders/interview/yinka_interview.html

Summary Art & Globalism - Yukinori Yanagi

Banzai Corner1991
90.0×240.0×240.0cmplastic toy(x approx.380 pieces) and mirror

EC Flag Ant Farm 1992
32.0x48.0cm(x13 pieces)ants, colored sand, plastic boxes, plastic tubes and plastic pipes

Yukinori Yanagi is a Japanese installation artist. He was born in 1959 in Fukuoka, Japan. He has displayed work in numerous countries including Japan, but most often in the US, where he lives. In 2006 he displayed work at the Art Gallery of NSW. Yanagi creates works that explore Japanese culture, politics and international relations. It is through a focus on Japan that globalism can be explored in the works by this artist.

Most of Yanagi’s works have a similar fell to them. They are critical of ideas and events in Japanese history and recent relations, but retain a sense of hope for the future.I felt it required research into Japanese history to better understand his artworks. In studying globalism this is probably required for most artists from foreign countries. I needed to expand my basic knowledge of Japanese history and understand emblems or in the case of Banzai Corner, the term ‘banzai’ and what it represents. Without this knowledge I found his work interesting, but I struggled to critically analyse it. As it is, I doubt my ability to fully comprehend these works as I might if I were Japanese, or if I had a greater understanding of the nuances of Japanese culture.

One of the features that drew me to this artist was his use of ants in a number of his works. I have included images of more than one of these works, but will only describe one in the presentation. It has, I believe a strong relation to mimicking group relations, relevant to this topic. The use of live animals interested me as it is usually an ethical point for many works, but in the case of this artist this could not be argued, because the ants were treated the same as they would be for study purposes in other fields.



Eleanor Heartney, Art and Today, Art and Globalism
New York, Phaidon Press, (2008)

http://www.artfacts.net/en/artist/yukinori-yanagi-12627/profile.html#Biography


http://www.iniva.org/dare/themes/space/yanagi.html


http://www.yanagistudio.net/home.html


Karin Higa, Some Thoughts on National and Cultural Identity: Art by Contemporary Japanese and Japanese American Artists, Art Journal Vol.55, No.3, pp. 6-13 College Art association. http://www.jstor.org/stable/777760

Patrick Burns, Into the Atomic Sunshine Exhibition, Shift online magazine
http://www.shift.jp.org/en/archives/2008/02/into_the_atomic_sunshine_exhibition.html


http://www.article9society.org/pp-08.pdf



http://japanese.about.com/library/weekly/aa060300.htm

Art and architecture

for my presentation on wednesday i'll be talking about Rachel Whiteread and her work :)

Art and Architecture - Yin Xiuzhen

Portable City: Mebourne, 2009
Suitcase, used clothes, magnifying glass, map, sound, light
Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery

Portable City: Melbourne, 2009
Detail

Portable City: Jia yu Guan, 2009
Suitcase, used clothes, magnifying glass, map, sound, light
Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery

Portable City: Jia yu Guan, 2009
Detail

The Beijing-based artist Yin Xiuzhen's Portable City series fits into both themes of architecture and globalisation. Each piece resembling a major city, Xiuzhen incorporates used items (mainly clothes) to create these worlds within a suitcase, ready to be packed up and taken to a new place. There is a nomadic sensation within her practice, which engages with the differing environments and the memories of the artist's experience within each city. The 'suitcase architecture' is not functional, but it explores the personal impact that a major city can have on its inhabitants. I like this work because it brings together both the overly public and functional purpose of architecture and the unique experience that each individual has within the environment in which they live.

Art and Architecture Callum Morton

Callum Morton was born in Canada and moved to australia and spent the rest of his life at university. he is a bit of a hero when it comes to qualifications. He has studied architecture, painting, sculpture to name a few but more importantly his work is great! I can't explain why this is architecture apart from it just is. Maybe he is incorporating living spaces with art and he is working with the urban environment. I am very unfamiliar with architectural movements, I would be interested to know if he was associated with a particular style.

There is actually a wealth of architectural type artists at the moment it seems. Artists that use the walls and structures themselves.

http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/artists/27/Callum_Morton/profile/

CONCERNING THE SPIRITUAL IN ART BY WASSILY KANDINSKY

To understand this text to its full potential, it was important to contextualise it; as it was stated in the beginning of the essay “Every work of art is a child of its age”. This was published at the cusp of modernism and when Wassily Kandinsky's first abstract painting was made. The ideals of this text stemmed from romanticism which was against the scientific explanation of the universe and what was clear to the naked eye did not necessarily summarise or represent a feeling or emotion.

Kandinsky goes on to say that artwork that is an attempt to emulate ideas “achieve only a similarity of form and remain soulless for all time” referencing the 'soul' of an art work. This entire introduction is based around the idea of a spiritual experience in relation to art steering away from the traditional anglo conceptions of a soul. Perhaps it may be more likened to the funky meaning of soul where something has a natural aura or attraction to it. Kandinsky on abstract art has similarities with ancient Chinese art critic Xie He, where the first of six guidelines for rating a painting is 'Spirit Resonance' which is the energy of the painting. This seems to be a less esoteric definition of the spirituality of art and is summarised as an overall energy of an artwork. This is an energy that is visible but not seen or described. Futurism and Romanticism and abstraction have many similarities and also quite contrasting. Kandinskys definition of abstraction speaks strongly about the future and progression and with clear aesthetic similarities depicting speed and movement.

It is hard to grasp the full impact of this text today because imagining contemporary art without abstraction seems to be impossible for me as I am simply 'a child of my age'. Kandinsky speaks abstraction as being a radical point of view where in current times it is hard to imagine contemporary art without abstraction.

The comparisons between contemporary abstraction and the modernists abstraction are still apparent but may not be making the same romantic statements. Although you can't completely detach spirituality from abstraction, today it sees like it is a language similar to the instrumental of a song where emotion can be induced without the use of words.