Authenticity In a City Mediated by Images

Post-interim show thoughts

For my interim show I created an installation in the film and video room which housed a performance. The installation comprised of the 'orifice' sculpture, from which the idea had developed, linked up to some faux medical monitoring equipment. Around this, I hung some plastic sheets and a spotlight focused on the sculpture. On the projection screen was a looped video of the sculpture which I had created prior to the event, with accompanying loud bass-y audio. Red, blue and white, the colours of the sculpture were themed throughout the event, including the drinks and sunglasses worn by the actors. The orifice sculpture, originally a symbol for babbling nonsense, became the emphasis of this work. Viewers were made to queue outside whilst they acquired one of the colour coded drinks and a paper paint suit. An actor manned the door informing viewers that the suits were to prevent them from, 'contaminating the orifice'. The colour code came about by chance of the raw materials from which the sculpture was made, however I found their likening to both the logo of Tesco's and the French flag humorous and interesting. Along with the initial ideas that arose from the sculpture, I wanted to create this colour coded environment as a suggestion of generic uniform or authority. As the viewers were being greeted at the door and the importance of cleanliness around the orifice was emphasised, I was also greeting them as they came in the door, using a megaphone. The sound from the projection was intentionally loud, attempting to immerse the viewer, so the megaphone was needed both to communicate and to serve as an action of hilarity. The viewers/participants were then prompted to thank the orifice for their ideas, one by one. This action was as satirical and unrealistic as the overall idea of the sculpture holding some sort of wisdom. This was my first time experimenting with performance and I found it quite difficult to take seriously. I am happy that I developed the ideas from the orifice as a single sculpture into this larger work but I do not feel the performance as a 'live' element was crucial. However, with the manipulation of editing, the documentation will serve well as a part to a film, a further development. I wish to use the documentation as one part of a film, the second part focusing on the character, which manned the door, as a cvonfused professor. His thoughts on the event will be narrated, through which I will vent my own loosely problematic questions regarding the work. The thoughts that are narrated will be a mixture of fiction and reality, including my real thoughts on the work. I have been thinking about what it meant for me to be included in the performance, the basis of a sculpture in a performance installation and the colour coding; did it work, what did it display?

Marck Leckey: Artist Film Club @ ICA

Leckey's early video work has a heavy stigma of 90's dance music attached to it, which I initially couldn't help being repulsed by as is it is so unbelievably hip and fashionable right now. Once I got over this I was able to enjoy his absolute poetic depiction of this era in , 'Fiorucci made me Hardcore', 1999 (below). Works following this continued to look at aspects of 90's culture, with a rave seemingly in someone's bedroom and, 'Parade', a video named after a men's porn magazine in which Leckey's appearance is seemingly influenced by a phantasmagoric procession of images (stills below).

Then came the favourite for me, 'Green Screen Refrigerator'. An epitome of consumer fetishism, this film based around the artist's self confessed infatuation with a Samsung fridge is a spectacle about a spectacle. Leckey's personal attachment to his work is the thing that inspires me. It doesn't matter that I wasn't old enough to go raving in the 90's, this era was strewn with DIY ethics that are ever present in my own interests, this is enough to relate to and appreciate his great and interesting work.

'Micro Seminar' aka Day Long Tutorial with Jesse Ash/ Benedict Drew Artist Talk

For my part of the tutorial we looked back on the work I had produced for the 'Strong Body' exhibition. It was the first time to get more of an in-depth insight into the Chisel, Really High Plinth and Orifice sculptures. I explained how I thought it would be important for me to create more works like this as they didn't seem to deserve much speculation and were simply quick with style jokes like the work of David Shrigley. However it was suggested that I may spend more time thinking about the scale and the malleability of an idea, even though it may exist in thought form as a quick gesture or joke. I was still toying with the idea of the really high plinth, think about how it's initial purpose, to exaggerate the traits of a stereotypical successful human being, such as egotism, could be combined with some other ideas amongst the 3 sculptures. Previously I had thought about placing the orifice sculpture on top of the plinth and creating a live video feed down to a television screen, referencing actual programs of such nature. Regarding aesthetics, I thought back to an animation I had made for as part of a work about a suggested value given to fried chicken I want to try and use the colour scheme from the chicken box to create a generic gradient for the plinth/orifice/live feed combination. I was inspired to bring these ideas together after and artist talk by Benedict Drew. Drew creates video/audio and sculptural installations that seem to look at ideas surrounding information and technology in contemporary culture. His exhibition, 'The Persuaders', was home to some sculptural heads, their basic clay make up seeming to reference a generic drone that is the general public of today.

I felt a similarity between these beings he had created and my orifice sculpture and that perhaps they represented a similar idea. Thinking about the way Drew had presented these sculptures in relation to this video work - facing the screen as motionless onlookers, prompted thoughts about the presentation of the orifice on the plinth and ways I could include colour gradients, sounds and a video feed. I will create a new installation merging the ideas of value from my fried chicken works and the ideas of egotism amongst social situations that are mentioned in the strong body exhibition.

Tino Sehgal; Artist Talk

After a few return visits to Sehgal's Unilever commissioned piece, 'These Associations', I was delighted to attend his artist talk at the Tate this weekend. He made some key points that I related to regarding his work and the wider spectrum of contemporary art in general. He explained that people visit museums and galleries to see art, as if to suggest that is where art belongs, then you can differentiate between styles and forms within that setting. He talked about Western culture and the western world in general, relying on change and how art has to be different than what was deemed current before it. I agree with this idea of opposing what has gone before but not as the totality or complete basis for an artwork. He talked about it being hard for a painting to be an artwork because it is so familiarised in society, which is something I have been constantly puzzled by thinking about the painting course here at Wimbledon and the idea of dividing fine art up whatsoever. Finally, he talked about his lack of involvement in the work and his restrained mehtod of imposing instruction, " the performers know more about the piece than I do", he exclaimed, whilst referencing to those involved in the work that were seated in the auditorium. In response to an audience question about the future of 'live art' and where it sits in the time line of contemporary art, he talked about the work of Joseph Beuys and how his charisma got in the way of the work which was ground breakingly conceptual. This made me think a lot about where Sehgal draws the line, after all I laughed and enjoyed his talk, answers were delivered with charisma, would I be a different kind of spectator if I went and viewed the work after seeing him sitting on a stage answering questions?

Unit 7: 200 Word Statement

Prelude - Due to the last minute non-use of the foyer, I was forced to have a re-think about how I would display my work. It actually pushed me to do what I have always wanted, to create an installation based piece of work that involved an element of interaction, questioning the typical use of a white cube space. My research journal will back up my thoughts on the individual components of the work that, before this change in viewing situation, I would have been prepared to show individually, namely the wetherspoons place mat print and the golden chicken. However, I believe that the environment I have created for, 'Beautiful Inside My Stomach Forever (Chicken Party)', allows my investigation into these suggested cultural artefacts to be seen while the works sit side by side. There is a clear interest in consumerism, pin pointed by the works I have included as they sit around what I believe to be less direct pieces of information relating to my practice and also my personal life as a student/artist, backed up further by the inclusion of props from previous works. This is very much multi-layered work, not to be viewed as a whole, involving fabricated artefacts, appropriated objects and social interaction which exists beyond the work's static form via documentation.

200 Word Statement - Struggling with reasoning for showing a body of works that felt unconnected or would confuse each other and also the personal drive to include an element of community atmosphere and interaction, thus challenging the perception and use of a 'white cube' environment, I have come to the conclusion of showing an edited version of my studio space. The element of the incomplete, that inevitably comes with being 2/3 of the way through a degree, is the same element that will always be present in my work, social commentary or cultural investigation of the current cannot be finalised. This is an insight into my on-going stream of conciousness. The material or physical section, the edited version of my studio, becomes static but is incorporated into a social environment by inclusion of a bar and free fried chicken in the surrounding area. Elements of humour can be found not just in individual objects but in a general celebration of cultural paraphernalia. Direct theoretical references such as specific texts have been removed, where the remnants of previous works have been included, whose states convey their current use as I arrive at this time in my artistic journey.

Re-Thinking the Digital

Chris Gere was suggesting the importance of digital media and links to pre-analogue times through philosophy. He made some very valid points, I have copied this from the twitter feed, - 'the 'white cube' is end product of centuries of privatised idea of self'. I find this statement interesting in relation to my own thoughts on fine art currently being treated as a vocational subject. In our recent placement presentations I was surprised at how little of a connection there was to fine art. I am not against 'art' or rather, 'the creative industries', (which I believe is a more appropriate name in this case) being used for monetary gain, but the approaches on which I am commenting on , e.g. photographic event coverage, have no critical value and therefore in my personal opinion have no relevance to fine art. Student's are being taught that you show work in a white cube space and that is simply 'what happens', with little thought on how this environment arose or possible contradictions it may hold in the viewing of contemporary art. To be continued............

Damien Hirst/Alighiero Boetti/Yayoi Kusama @ Tate Modern

I wasn't exactly expecting to be blown away when visiting this show, it was more of a conformation of sorts. It confirmed that I don't really get much of an in depth feeling when looking at the work of Damien Hirst. The type of shock tactics used in, 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living', Hirst's shark in a tank of formaldehyde or the flies feeding off a rotting cow's head in, 'A Thousand Years', simply do not make me think about death, his supposed theme. I always wonder why, when attempting to rile up fellow students on the subject of Damien Hirst, they simply shrug their shoulders and suggest, it does what it say on the tin. Its like a short joke with the pleasure of laughing removed, look at this dead animal, now walk away, its comparable to a drive down a road kill laden country lane. Surely the more interesting points surrounding the theme of death in a world of supposed high or fine art, are more than the presentation of some dead animals in blue liquid, have we not moved beyond that by the year of 2012? It really seems as if its not rocket science to entice slightly more thought from the viewing public. However, reverting back to my earlier thought of, 'it does what it says on the tin', this is a certain kind of artist celebrity culture that is comparable to the pop music/performances of Lady GaGa, shock tactics to entertain with as little thought participation from the viewer as possible.

I was pleasantly surprised, after Hirst's show leaving me jaded, by the Alighiero Boetti exhibition a floor below. Boetti's mixture of sculpture, print and found objects raised important questions on the context of art, for its time. I was completely new to Boetti's work but instantly felt that, unlike Hirst, it was clearly questioning what had gone before, for example, the huge pane us glass which he had placed over an empty gallery and entitled, 'nothing to display, nothing to hide', raises important questions on the idea of a gallery space itself, even when displayed as some sort of sculptural documentation as it is in this case. When you compare just this one piece to any of Hirst's regularly displayed shock objects, you may start to feel the itch under my skin brought on by pill cabinets, fly colonies and excessively high auction prices. It is strange to think that not that long ago in 2009, John Baldesseri and Francis Alys's hugely thought provoking retrospectives stood in the same building.

Moving onto Yayoi Kusama, who perhaps sits somewhere in the middle of Hirst and Boetti. The saying, 'start how you mean to to finish' may apply to this retrospective of the Japanese mental asylum inhabitant. Starting out with some interesting small scale ink drawings and paintings, the show quickly descends into a performative fluxus-esq naked acid nightmare as the artist moves to New York and into circles with Andy Warhol and Claus Oldenberg. The shift in landscape culminated in the film, 'Self Obliteration', a sex orgy fused with shots of Kusama's polka dot laden mirror and paint performances, after which period she moved back to Japan to reside in a mental home and return to working in the more traditional way in which she began. The final pieces are mirrored rooms with coloured l.e.d.s which lean more towards the idea of infinity than party room, as with the New York era installations. It is interesting to think about how her time in America around possible celebrity culture influenced the work and how she acted, especially within this group of 3 exhibitions I have seen today, especially Hirst.

15th November: Transgression and The Carnivalesque

Pieter Bruegel the Elder The Battle between Carnival and Lent (1559)

-Desublimation - relating to the freudian term sublimation, where he suggests a spiritual re-direction of the libido.

-Abjection - In contemporary critical theory, "abjection" is often used to describe the state of often-marginalized groups, such as women, unwed mothers, people of religious faith, people of color, prostitutes, convicts, poor people, disabled people, and queer or LGBT people.

Themes

- Ambivalence: Praise and Abuse
- Duality of the body


Jenny Saville, Branded, 1992

- Market place speech: Slang, Abuses,
- World Turned Upside down
- What is at stake in such inversions


Chapman Brothers, Tragic Anatomy, 1996



Sarah Lucas, 2 fried eggs


Sybolism
- A medieval trial of a pig
- the pig
- the dirt



Meat Joy, carolee schneemann, 1964

Transgression through enjoyment and perversion

Paul Macarthy, The Garden, 1992


Mike Kelley, Paul Macarthy, Heidi

CP Lectures: 'Resistance is Futile'

Debord's Society of the spectacle and Complicity in Art

The spectacle: description of consumer driven capitalism.

. the language of separation
. social relations mediated by images
. a visual reflection of the ruling economic order
. a total colonization of social life by commodities
. capital accumulated to the point it becomes images
. alienated production and alienated consumption

All of our basic needs are taken care of, but in order to maintain 'the spectacle' - the fabrication of 'pseudo needs' must take place.

-problems we didn't have until they are pointed out by the manufacturers (ipad, kindle)

- Automation drives growth of service industries
- Distribute and glorify the latest commodities
- Provides employment for consumers

The image of the object is what we are made to believe we require, Fetishism;commodity replaces religion - The attribution of mystical qualities to inanimate objects.

Statements of definitive perfection pervade - advertisers promote products as being the absolute, prime example - gillette - the best a man can get

Spectacular time - false conciousness of time; co-modified time - time as a linear progression of homogeneous continually dividable units of labour and production - 'time is money'

Pseudo cyclical time is perpetual present that give the illusion of time passing dominated by vulgarised pseudo festivals: halloween or christmas

Spectacular time - offering an image of time that doesn't really exist; white sandy beach holidays.

Celebrities become the agents of capitalism: defined by their expend-ability

. Offer an Illusion of freedom
. Inaccessible results of social labour
. Spectacular abundance

- real qualities like love anf happiness are replaced

Tiger woods made public apologies to his sponsors rather than his wife.

The Art world as spectacle - the art world becomes dominated by social relations mediated by the spectacle. Qualitative measures of art become replaced by quantity as price becomes more important.

-artists become concerned about their market profile and the value of their works at auction.

- Chinese and Russian billionaires drive up prices of art in the pursuit of capitalist appreciation. For them the purchase of the artwork is a purchase of an image of themselves as possessing attributes such as taste power and intellectual superiority. It provides them with status in the art world and underpins their relationships with other powerful people.

Hedge funds have started to promote art, comparing diversification benefits to assets and bonds, investment analysts develop new metrics allowing them to track the performance of different artists and sectors of the art market.

Government ministers justify money spent on art in terms of invetment in the culture industries and the benefits of a thriving art world for advertising and media companies.

Art Provides a spectacle in which countries can engage in international relations without having to talk about war or trade disputes.
- biennials

German pavillion at the venice 2009 hired the scissor sisters for their launch party, social relations mediated by the spectacle.

Even in art the 'spectacular image' can outstrip the reality - New York Waterfalls (Artist’s Impression), Olafur Eliasson, 2009

Complicity in art -

Is it really such a problem?
- if the spectacle is already an all encompassing totality, is it possible that someone can take up a position in or outside in opposition to it.

- complicit formalism canters as the basis on which autonomy could be assumed while returning respect for the aesthetic properties for works of art.

- fine art, artists and critics exist under a condition of complicity with the institutions and values of contemporary culture rather than in opposition.


Why is the spectacle bad and should be resisted?

- falseness of social life
- the idea of a living as a spectator where the only way of communication is a one way monologue with the speakers of the image.
- vision of neoliberalism, the best way we can help each other is by helping ourselves
- freedom is defined by opportunity to recruit capital as it opens up more possibilities of what we can buy.
- we can invest in an image of ourselves and change the image of ourselves through the investment in goods and services; fashion, gym membership, cosmetics
- its the ethics of greed

The spectacle makes it impossible to rise up against it.

Detournement - re appropriation of media for radical purposes. Similar to a parody but uses the original to generate new meaning.

After Detournement (recuperation) - example, Gordon Matta-clark - splitting. Critique of the spectacle, what we're left with is a repetition of the image that blunts it's impact. We forget what the actual experience of the piece might have been like.

St. Pauls protest - fashion shoot at the anti-capitalist protest.


Documentation of the spectacle - Fish Story, Alan Sekula, 1989-1995

Documentation as the spectacle - Manufacturing #18, Cankun Factory, Edward Burtynsky, 2008
(edition of 30)

The Inside job , if we're gonna be part of the spectacle, we may aswell go the whole hog- Beautiful Inside My head Forever, Damien Hirst, 2008. ultimate act of complicity.

Superflex, flooding macdonalds


The destruction of the spectacle as spectacle - disaster movies

CP Lecture: A Boy, A Girl and a Gun:What does criticism as practice look like? New Waves, New Cinema

Lecturer: Kyran Joughin

Text: Cahiers du Cinema:1960-1968:New Wave Cinema, Re-Evaluating Hollywood


Pierrot le Fou (1965, Jean-luc Goddard) - changed the usual format of girl, boy and gun story. Different film cuts, moving typical elements around.



A run through example of early english cinema.

Hugely controversial film at time of release, major factor in finishing Micheal Powell's career.

Famous Hitchcock film, biggest indoor set to date of release. Long sweeping shots with no breaks. View from the windows important, each house/flat makes up a different story.

Contemporary French film. The answer to the puzzle of the film is never answered, abstract approach.

CP Lecture: The Predicament of Contemporary Art 2

History of Abstract Art diagram by Alfred Bar, "an American art historian and the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City".

Art became a pseudo-autonomous discipline limited by its own ideology, however the avant-garde brought art away from this and into the social fabric of every day life.

Modernism became a critical tradition, form (colour, shape, line, perspective) over content (subject matter).

Essays published in the 1960's theorising this time line that led to abstraction.

Greenberg said criticism in art was lagging behind other disciplines such as music, theatre and writing. He noted the 2 dimensionality and direct mass culture influences in painting. He thought art transcended mass culture by means of abstraction, transcend the taint of political ideology.

1968 - political unrest, Vietnam war, protest. Nancy Spero, Leon Golub, influenced by the war. Alot of images were shown on television, less censorship than current day media.

Art and the Left (1991 inteviews with new york artists, critics and curators exploring the impact of social and political change circa 1968) :





Discussion: The Burden of responsibility of the artist: who speaks for whom and how?

- Trends engulf such ideals as making art for the self. Trends are set by those who do things for themselves without care of outside input or views.

CP Lecture: The Predicament of Contemporary Art:1

Paula Smithard & David Theobold
Core text: The Predicament of Contemporary Art (Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh)
Outline presentation - here.

Methodology - An intellectual system or philosophical method.

Key methodologies presented:

- Psychoanalysis
- Structuralism
- Post - Structuralism
- Phenomenology
- Social Historical

Out of the methodologies in case, the one that interests me the most is psychoanalysis.

"Psychoanalysis is the name given to the theory of mind developed originally by Sigmund Freud, a theory which has had and continues to have an enormous impact on culture and intellectual life. Although there has been considerable development in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis since Freud’s day, certain key ideas have retained their place and vitality within the theory.

These include:

the discovery that there are large aspects of our psychological functioning which, though having a profound determining effect upon us, are largely hidden, that is, they are unconscious
the recognition of the ubiquity of unconscious conflict
the understanding that when human beings become involved in relationships with others, they bring to those relationships ‘templates’ derived from early childhood situations and transfer them into the current situation, that is they form transferences
the recognition of the centrality of sexuality and aggression in mental life and that important aspects of this are laid down in childhood

Psychoanalysis has shown itself to have very broad relevance and finds a home in many diverse contexts including art, literature, philosophy, politics, sociology and film studies. It has made seminal contributions to the understanding of cultural phenomena such as group functioning, institutional process, and wider socio-cultural phenomena such as paranoia and racism." (http://www.psychoanalysis.org.uk/about_psa.htm)

Part 1 outline:

Question faced - What's the problem with the Avant-Garde?

Avant Garde in French, literally means, Advanced Guard. It was used to describe small left wing groups in the French millitary in the mid-1800's. Early experimental and for their time, radical, artists such as Gustave Courbet associated with such military groups, beginning the idea of the avant garde in art.

In Peter Burger's 1974 book, 'The Theory of The Avant Garde in Art', he saw Russian Constructivism and Constructivists as pioneers of the term, bringing together art as the social fabric.
Buchloh is suggesting that In the present day, we have moved beyond the ability to view art in such a critical way due to consumer driven capitalism. Buchloh says, "Art now functions as commodity production, investment portfolio and entertainment", using the artist Matthew Barney as an example.
HF then argues that the decentralisation of the art world, due to globalisation, combats to this, spawning new movements in Japan and Brazil. YAB then argues that these movements looked to western ideas from New York and Paris. However in 1968 with unrest, protest and the Vietnam war, things changed around the world, in the direction of anti American Imperialism.
HF then mentions 'Magiciens de le Terre', an exhibition in Paris 1989, suggesting it displayed a concerted attention to local traditions, likening it to biennials in Gwangju, Johannesburg and Sharjah, unlike today's shows that seem very generic. YAB suggests that non-west art is no longer exotic and just points in a network of markets. HF disagrees, stating that models opposing the American empire exist, contemporary art in China, India and the Islamic world may be following social projects other than global corporatism. The problem would the be transferring those alternatives to Western audiences without distorting them.

Aside from this argument, we could say that Duchamp's idea of the ready made and other modernist ideals had been re-discovered in the 60's and could continue to be applied to this day.

Post-Structuralism: Art media have no essential characteristics.