Tuesday 24 October 2017
Art bollocks bingo
Meanwhile, on Alistair Gentry's Career Suicide blog, you can play Art Bollocks Bingo
Saturday 21 October 2017
Notes on the Index
Rosalind Krauss for October Vol 3 Spring 1977
Rosalind Krauss art critic writing about the variety of art forms in the 70s and what such different art forms (video, performance, ‘earthworks’ &c, all share. She writes about the primacy of photography in art (as compared with painting for earlier generations)
What the different art forms share is the idea of the index – something ‘standing in’ for something else. She gives the examples of physical traces – eg footprints, medical symptoms, cast shadows.
I understood the ideas she was talking about, but the terminology was confusing.
Refers to terms of structural theorists Lacan (French psychoanalytic theorist) and Roman Jakobson (Russian–American linguist and literary theorist writing about language)
Shifter = a linguistic sign which is empty, having a floating meaning which depends on the context.
–eg ‘this’ - when you say ‘this chair’ ‘this table’ the word ‘this’ is only given a meaning by the context.
also personal pronouns – ‘I’ or ‘you’ change meaning depending on who is speaking in a conversation.
Rosalind Krauss compares the symbol to the index
Symbol -
An image which can be detached from the object or idea it represents – “completely arbitrary and must be culturally learned”
different types of symbol
Numbers and written language/words are also symbols – there is no connection between the thing itself and the word representing it. For example:
in Chinese |
(This talk about the index and the symbol also reminded me of Magritte's The Treachery of Images)
Index
“they are the marks or traces of a particular cause, and that cause is the thing to which they refer, the object they signify.”
This is where I started to become interested, I’ve been photographing these (index) images as visual sources for a long time without realising what it was called.
Just some of them below (for some reason Blogger is rotating some of the photos upside down & won't let you correct this)
Monday 16 October 2017
Site and Situation: (not) at Home
Professor of Contemporary Art, Theory and Criticism at Middlesex, an art critic and historian with a specialism in feminist art criticism and theory about contemporary women artists.
An
introductory essay to Fran Cottell’s book, which collects together descriptions
of different interative installations in her home over a period of time.
Cooking Up the Self Bobby Baker and
Blondell Cummings “Do” the Kitchen by Lesley Ferris
Critical
writing with some historical background, analysing two different performance
artists; Bobby Baker stages her work in her own kitchen and Blondell Cummings performed
in kitchen ‘sets’.
Written by Lesley Ferris - Arts & Humanities Professor, Department of Theatre
at Ohio State University, a theatre director and scholar.
Blondell Cummings Chicken Soup –
video still 1989
https://danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org/blondell-cummings/chicken-soup/
Bobby Baker: Redeeming Features of Daily Life edited by Michèle Barrett and Bobby Baker (2007), Routledge.
Fran Cottell: “During the 1980s and 1990s I had started to think about the public/private relationships between and within the body (often represented by clothing) and or the spaces we occupy.”
Fran Cottell is the Fine Art Senior Lecturer at Camberwell.
“Since 2001, Cottell has used her own house as both subject and experimental site for her performative events, subtly altering this domestic environment through architectural interventions. (Camberwell website)
Back to Front installation 2011– photos by Terry Watts from Fran Cottrell’s website
The work made
interventions (eg viewing platforms, peepholes) over a period of time in her
own house in Greenwich and invited people in whilst going about her everyday
life with her family.
Platform for visitors to stand on
while family got on with daily life
Fran
Cottell’s interest has been in exploring the relationships between ‘inhabited
spaces’ – the body, the home, and the exterior world. (Introduction by Fran Cottell)
She found
that galleries were too public a space and wanted to explore ‘real experience’
– the interior space and the life that took place there.’
Collecting time – invited different
curators and critics to put their heads through a hole in her daughter’s
bedroom floor so that she could take a photo of them
In this
essay, Katy Deepwell writes about the work in the context of sculpture, and
cites Rosalind Krauss idea of the ‘expanded field’ –
“No longer an object to be looked at, the work
will literally put us in another place, create another kind of environment”.
Instead of
standing and looking at one fixed object in one space, the experience can be a
‘4D experience’, being immersed in an environment or installation, happening
over a period of time.
Some examples of other immersive installations for
comparison:
DreamThinkSpeaks’
Absent, Shoreditch Town Hall, 2015
photo Jim Stephenson
‘An intimate
promenade installation inspired by The Duchess of Argyll’s residence at a central
London hotel in the 1970’s’
14 Radnor Terrace
1974 – feminist art group SLAG – South London Art Group took over/squatted a
small terraced house as a large scale installation called ‘ A Woman’s Place’ - contemporary critique of family life.
In 2017 Raven
Row gallery reconstructed some of the work, the show was called 56 Artillery Lane in homage
Su Richardson
for Fenex 1977 (my photo) recreated in Raven Row in 2017
Conclusion:
Fran Cottell
explains in her introduction how a live ‘real’ experience is more vivid and
alive , something that it is not possible to deliver through a performance in a
gallery.
(I enjoyed
the Raven Row show very much but you can see how much more powerful it must
have been in the squatted house the artists had taken over in the 1970s.)
Also, by
inviting people into her home with her family, the work ‘invites viewers to
consider ‘where’ they are in the process of viewing the work: a viewer/a
resident, a participant/an observer, part of the life displayed/or on display” .
I felt that
Katy Deepwell and Lesley Ferris were both admirers of their respective artists’
work.The writing
was enthusiastic and keen to give the reader a personal impression of the
work, and to argue for its value.
Both pieces
admitted the work is not easy to convey in description. For this kind of live
work, to get the most out of it you really have to be there.
I also
thought that the pieces played down the humour of this work, as though if something is
funny, it can’t also be serious and meaningful.
I liked Fran
Cottell’s remark on her visitors.
“Most people reacted with humour… although
some… reported back afterwards, complaining that they had been unable to sleep,
after a visit, because they found it unsettling’.
Questions:
It is alive
and vivid , more so that a traditional gallery installation, but not repeatable,
recordable (or sellable?)
I wondered why
the book was only available as a download?
Sunday 8 October 2017
Symbiotic postures of commercial advertising and street art: rhetoric for creativity
Before looking at the article, it is useful to consider the Situationist concept of Recuperation.
Debord in the Society
of the Spectacle said that official culture is a ‘rigged game’
‘where
conservative powers forbid subversive ideas to have direct access to the public
discourse.’
‘ Such ideas get first trivialized and
sterilized, and then they are safely incorporated back within mainstream
society, where they can be exploited to add new flavors to old dominant ideas.
This technique of the spectacle is sometimes called recuperation.
To survive, the spectacle must
maintain social control and effectively handle all threats to the social order.
More broadly, it may refer to the appropriation or co-opting of any subversive
works or ideas by mainstream media.
It is the opposite of détournement, in which
conventional ideas and images are reorganized and recontextualized with radical
intentions.’
(Quote about Recuperation from Wikipedia.)
This article is a good example of recuperation, as the
authors state at the beginning
“…we analyze a set of rhetorical practices employed by
street artists that not only reflect, but might also be used to shape,
commercial advertising…’
Street art and graffitti can be about subverting
consumer culture.
Dr D Sly
Fiat 1980s?
Adbusters
Absolute AA
Brandalism
The article suggests using the techniques of street
art and graffitti to reinvigorate advertising and sell more successfully to their
audience ‘appropriating street art’s authentic essence to revitalize their own
commerical efficacy.’
It was written by four professors of marketing at
American and Italian universities for the Journal of Advertising published by
the American Academy of Advertising in 2010.
It is aimed at professionals working in the
advertising industry and is written in academic language, based on a 3 year study with 20 artists across
Italy and the USA in person and through ‘netnography’ (study of websites?) and
on 60 ‘consumers’ – ie viewers of street art.
It offers as
analysis of the techniques of street art and suggest advertising can appropriate these techniques. It concludes ‘Street art can be
considered as an emerging template for commercial advertising’.
They claim to use ‘visual data’ as examples in the
article, unfortunately in the copy the pictures have reproduced poorly and are
unclear, which is ironic considering it is about the power, persuasiveness and
impact of visual images.
I found this article depressing, but in the end
concluded that advertising (capitalism) and graffitti (radicalism) will always coexist
and feed off each other in a loop.
Thursday 5 October 2017
‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography' Guy Debord, 1955, Ken Knabb (ed)
A
French philosopher and theorist influenced by Marx, Debord founded Situationist International in the mid 50s.
The Situationist artistic and political
movement experimented with the idea of constructing
a situation. This was to combat the passivity created by
capitalism, which Debord called the Society of the Spectacle (people being seduced
into consumerism by capitalism through contemporary mass media.)
Written
as a manifesto for the group, this introduces key ideas such as psychogeography; "the
study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment,
consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals”.
It
concentrates on the urban environment.
Debord’s Psychogeographique de Paris. A map of the city of Paris, cut it into pieces and glued together in a different way. The new map was supposed to show locations which evoked the most emotions from people.
Debord’s idea seems to be that capitalism turns
people into robots moving in a fixed, passive, predetermined way (eg
home/work/home).
People can explore psychogeography through dérives (–
translating as ‘drift) which encourage people to move actively and consciously
through the city, moving at random, & finding chance encounters and personal
memories.
‘Never work’ written all over Paris in the1950s
'Call in sick' DFace 2008 Hackney
Debord writes about ‘…
a general idea of happiness prevalent among the bourgeoisie and
maintained by a system of publicity… an idea of
happiness whose crisis must be provoked on every occasion by every means’.
Another prophetic idea by Debord was the idea of ‘détournement'
(can be translated as diversion, or in current usage, hijacking) ie changing a pre-existing work of art or
literature to subvert its meaning. Quoting
or plagiarizing existing images so that the original is subverted.
(Le
Retour de la Colonne Durutti altered
comic by André Bertrand that was handed out at a University in 1966 during a student protest
Cowboy 2: "Realisation"
Cowboy 1: "Yeah? I guess that means pretty hard work with big books and piles of paper on a big table."
Cowboy 2: "Nope. I drift. Mostly I just drift."
Starts Wars - Dr D 2003
Sold Out/ Clearance sale Aida Wilde -
Screenprint/posters in Hackney Wick by Aida Wilde on the sale of artist studio buildings to make way for investment properties.
The opposite to‘détournement' is the idea of recuperation, in which subversive works or ideas are taken
over by mainstream media. This is a survival technique for capitalism, as it attempts to absorb resistance. I will talk about this in
the next blog.
The word count didn’t allow for examples of
contemporary artists/inheritors of the Situationists but here are some links:
@specialpatrols Special Patrol Group
www.Platformlondon.org
www.brandalismuk.ch
https://www.instagram.com/resistanceisfemale/
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