ART and GLOBALISM

Art and Globalism is by definition the attitude or policy of placing the interests of the entire world above those of individual nations. Globalism has its pros and cons it opens up boarders between nations artistically, culturally, economically and in many other ways, allowing information to be shared easily and more freely.
Globalism is the mass or the collective that is made up of individual or it can be viewed as the collective vs the individual.
The danger following globalism is the threat of the loss of the identity of the individual or of single nations as the attention is concentrated on the greater good of the whole, where the smaller people or countries may get left behind. Some argue that globalism creates opportunities that would never before had been possible for the individual.

Through his work Do-Ho Suh born in Korea 1962, shows this duality in globalism. The installation Some/One 2001 is thousands of metal dog tags which make up this emperors style of jacket or a coat of armor. This suggests of the thousands of people that may have lost their lives protecting a nation. Viewers are invited to walk on the jacket also.

















The installation Karma 2004, a giant pair of legs fashioning a mans suit walks with the shadow of hundreds of tiny men supporting his every step. A similar theme here is represented by the individual supporting the mass, or is the individual being crushed by the man in power?
















Fallen Star 1/5 literally shows the boarders of nations being lifted and cultures colliding as Suh shows his first home in Korea being catapulted into his first home in NY.

The other dilema facing globalism is the idea of the nomadic man wandering around the globe with nowhere to call home. Suh addresses this issue in his artworks Reflection 2005, where he creates these translucent buildings that he can pack up and take anywhere with him.

The word for the week

Polysemy - having many potential meanings or a work of art that has ambiguous meaning i.e. it could have different meanings to individuals.
Sorry I can't give you a reference... I returned the book but any art dictionary should have this word.

Do Ho Suh

Hi everyone,

I was just thinking about Do Ho Suh's work on Globalism, particulaly his work "Floor," and thought I would post a blog :-)

In our last tutorial, we were talking about how so many of the artists in "Art History" could be written about in so many different chapters, depending on the viewers reading.

If I hadn't read about Do Ho Suh in the article "Art and Globalism," I was thinking what his work would mean to me, and how I would read it. Looking at "Floor," I interpret it to be a comment on Anarchism. Obviously there is a powerful figure standing on/over these small people, but once they all work together, they can overthrow this figure (or government) and start working and living together, which I suppose links back to Globalism anyway. But I see it as much more of a political artwork. The little figures resemble toy army men to me, more so than the common man, which then adds a different layer, perhaps the entrapment of being drafted and going to war.

ART & Globalism

Another interesting article: CHINA: New Opportunities in the Global ART ARENA

Worth a read if this topic interests you!!!

My first glass installation

Hi,
I did my first glass installation and had a hell of a time finding display methods. I went to a shopfitting place on 2 George St. Leichardt - they have lots of bits and pieces but nothing that is "adjustable" for holding slumped float glass. I'm still on the prowl so I will blog what I find.. but if any one has ideas I would be most grateful. I will post a picture asap and you will see what I mean ... The display solution is not too aesthetically pleasing.

ART & Globalism

Apparently the artist Ai Wei Wei is an angry man?

The artist as an angry man

His commentary on China's role in becoming the leading power of the 21st century is published outside of China only - yet he is revered by his country as an example of success in true capitalist fashion. What is going on here... ? What does this situation say about China's intentions as far as embracing the global market go...? 

Art and Spirituality - rediscovering transcendence

And I, shall enlighten you with the works of Ana Mendieta... plus more!

Art and Globalism

Tomorrow on Art and Today....I will be taking you on a tour of Korean artist Do-ho Suh and GLOBALISM! See you then.

Art and The Foot

I was really excited about reading Eleanor's essay on Art and the Body, due to a new found love for all things performance art (which of course, revolve around the body) and a deep love for all things feminist (also, the body... I'm a huge fan of the body!)

I was really surprised by the huge difference between the use of the body in the 60's and 70's and now. It seems that when exploring the body Contemporary artists are very interested in the banal (such as a number of photographs of their foot) and it is almost microscopic, rather than using the entire body as an object. It feels to me like a far more conservative use of 'medium'.

Which I'm not saying is a bad thing in itself, I mean when everything's been done, when scrolls have been removed from vaginas and arms have been shot and so on and so forth, what is there really left to do? I guess I'm just disappointed that I missed the 'extreme body in art' bus, because it's something I've been interested in for a really long time.

Art & Identity - Barbara Kruger

"Today we find ourselves in a double blind, both obsessed with identity and haunted by the fear that it doesn't really exist"

- Does race exist?

Art identity is the questioning of ethnicity, gender and sexuality.

Barbara Kruger

The central themes in Barbara Kruger's work are gender, consumption and power. She is battling against the stereotype, and attacking the world of consumerism and advertising, as we are surrounded by advertising.

Her work 'Untitled (we will no longer be seen and not heard)' was produced in the 1980s but it is typically 50s and would have been messages that would have been heard in the 50s, which she is referring back to and creating a political statement about power and women being able to speak for themselves. Her messages were obviously powerful because the viewers were reacting to the images and reproducing them, sometimes in a commercial context.

'Untitled (you construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men)' is a poster about women having a choice. It was designed for a specific event,

 for the pro-choice movement, but ended up being a lot more than that, it became an icon for the pro-choice movement. She was giving a graphic expression to the womens experience to their lives and bodies and the choices and reality.

Danks Street Gallery

I Have been snooping about Danks Street on Saturdays - not open Sundays - and there are a couple of things that I thought were worth mentioning - Caroline Rannersberger in gallery Thirty Seven has a number of landscape paintings with a graphic touch. These are comments on colonial Australia se says " I was caught then by the idea of the European gaze constructing the landscape" - not sculpture but interesting given the theory lectures.

There is also an exhibition of sculpture in Carrara marble by Joseph Sabadash in Depot 2 gallery. The curators etc. in these galleries are usually really helpful.. often you get to speak to the artists. I'm of to visit Peter francis Lawrence's workshop to meet Joseph (Peter promotes Joseph's work".  The sculptures are based on organic forms - plant forms (but to me they evoke micro biology forms). The surfacing of the marble is interesting.

If you go to Dank St. pop in on the Porters Paints store at Bourke Street Waterloo. They have some great products for patinas such as iron rust - lack & white and copper that you could use on concrete products, wood or other materials. 

Cheers

Kate

Art and The Body

Kara Walker-
How does Walker represent ‘Art and the body’? Walker’s central issue (as many of you already know from writing all about her!) is the continuing portrayal of African American women as veracious sexual beings, shaking their ample bosoms and abundant booty at the venerable male collective; of which is generally accepted to lack the self restraint required to ignore these temptations.
This mythos is born from the times of slavery, where respectable decent folk (more than likely the sexually reserved lady folk of these times) would have been threatened by the tantalising bodies of the slave girls, broadly available to their men. This dual oppression of both racism and bigotry is what Walker addresses, what it means to be a black woman today and how this parallels with past experiences of African American women.

Walker has chosen to emphasise her references to human afflictions, with the use of the body, simplified into black cut out silhouettes. These cut outs create lurid scenes such as the ones in ‘Gone: An Historical Romance of the Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart’. Fat lipped pickaninnies appease the sexual desires of formally attired white men, while these same men disappear up the flowing skirts of slave girls. Dancing minstrel like silhouettes give birth to doomed and falling foetuses. Beautiful women with secrets hidden under their skirts, stare submissively up at lords who absentmindedly sodomise devil horned children who hold dead animal offerings. All of these happenings are obvious to the viewer, but more because of their own imagination then the clear imagery of the silhouettes. Walker uses this, the bringing to light of ones own relationship with graphic and obscene imagery to express that everyone, on even a base level, has absorbed and retained the degrading image of African-American females through societies derogatory representation of those women in everyday life.

ART & THE BODY / ART & IDENTITY

For this weeks discussion I will be presenting the work of COCO FUSCO - among others. 

I would like everyone to read the following interview: ART, GENDER, POWER, AND THE F WORD: AN INTERVIEW WITH COCO FUSCO Colette Copeland - Afterimage; Mar/Apr 2008; 35, 5; 

You can access the article HERE

Alternatively, you can access a PDF download from the library website - within the journals section... you can all do this as your research class was on locating journal articles!

AND +++

CHECK OUT: COCO FUSCO website 

VIEW: Operation Atropos Exhibition 2006

Edourdo Kac

The last work mentioned in 'Art and Nature and Technology', Eduardo Kac's 'GFP Bunny' poses quite a dilemma for me. The article says that he is raising the question, "Should we do things simply because we can? Evoking debates over the ethical limits of science and technology". It also says he functions on a middle-ground, but to me, making a bunny that glows to raise the question of whether it's morally corrupt to make a bunny that glows doesn't entirely make sense to me. This reminds me a little of what Michelle was saying in regard to Land Artists, and how she wasn't sure whether they were working to preserve the land or simply to create new forms of art. I'd be interested to hear what everybody has to say about this... Let's have an argument! Yay!

Orlan Image

Deformation

Hi guys,
I think that deformation is a really interesting topic. How people want to change themselves either because they are unhappy with how they look (plastic surgery) or because they are bored (piercings for example), or because they are unhappy in general (self mutilation.)
Apparently Orlan's goal in getting surgery is to acquire the ideal of beauty as suggested by the men who painted women. Her aim was to have the chin of Boticelli's Venus, the nose of Germone's Psyche, the lips of Francois Boucher's Europa, the eyes of Diana from a sixteenth-century French School of Fontainebleu painting and the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.
She picked these characters, not because of beauty they represent, but because of the stories associated with them; Diana because she is inferior to the gods and men but is a leader to goddesses and women; Mona Lisa because of the standard of beauty, or anti-beauty, she represents; Psyche because of her fragility and vulnerability within the soul; Venus for carnal beauty and Europa for her adventurous outlook to the horizon, the future. Now if you look at the final product of Orlan, do you reckon she has achieved all this???

I looked deformation up in the dictionary and it said that to deform something is to be put out of shape OR spoil the appearance of. So technically the former means that plastic surgery is a form of deformation, not only if it looks bad, because it has just simply been changed.
Another form of deformation is piercings and tattoo's, like this image I found of this man. (It didn't say how many piercings he has on his face/or body, and I didn't really feel like counting.)
I just felt like putting this picture in... enjoy!

Nature, Technology & Deformation.

Tony Cragg Stack, 1975 (right), Constellation 2005 (left)


















Following our class on ART & Nature/Technology/Deformation: I thought I would follow up with a few more examples of artwork and push the notion of deformation beyond the obvious references to the body!
The two works shown above, by British artist Tony Cragg, present the notion of 'deformation' in a very different way to say Orlan. His work has a monumental feel to it - using brutal materials - steel, bronze and softer materials such as wood - he literally 'fashions' form from the raw material - pushing towards abstraction. You could easily say -- the concepts of nature, Technology and the shaping of our environment equally inform this work:

'Tony Cragg sees physical matter as the fundamental basis of experience. Many of his works consist of numerous components, methodically arranged to reveal the superficial relationship we have with the vast array of things which surround us... miscellaneous objects and materials, collected at random, into a solid, geometric structure. The layering suggests geological strata, showing how both natural and fabricated elements are incorporated into landscapes shaped over time by mankind. Stack demonstrates Cragg’s interest in humanity’s impact on nature through industry, science and technology, as well as the evolution of both organic and man-made landscapes.'

Speaking of Rrap..................

I went to the Cuckatoo island again on Wednesday and reluctantly when into the Mike Parr house of horrors. Im not sure whether this is classed as deformation or more as mutilation. Mike Parr's work is challenges limits of the body and mind. It comes across as a specticle, shock value, the sublime. Though I don't know in detail (or at all actually) about Parr's concepts somehow through all this blood and gore Parr's work seems to fill a gap in society.

A friend was saying that she didnt want to watch Jamie Oliver's show about the chicken industry because she liked eating chicken and she didn't want to get turned off eating it. Here in lies the space that Mike Parr is eerily lurking about. The reality in the middle, that we choose to turn a blind eye to in our everyday lives. Yes the chicken meat gets delivered to the supermarket in a small clean plastic package, but how exactly does it get there. There is a step missing that we choose not to get involved in. Not wanting to know the realities of what we are doing to the world or lives around us. Not acknowledging poverty, not acknowledging environmental polution, not acknowledging death. Mike Parr seems to be exploring in the field of this lost transaction and moving around in this area we pretend is not there.

Well if anyone does know more about Mike Parr's concepts, I am interested. This is just how I am reading into his the work I have seen.

Deformation

HHHHmmmm....... im not quite sure how to propaly add links yet... can someone help me?
sorry.
I was thinking of a few works that explore the theme that Kate was talking about on Monday-deformation.

This is one of Julie Rraps flesh rocks, it is so human, and so deformed, yet in a strange way......beautiful. Also this half rock half human thing kind of relates to what we are doing on fridays..... a hybrid work. We are making deformed art as we speak!!!






















Orlan- the queen of derformation art (although that may not neccessarily be a good thing......)



What do you guys think of Orlan, or plastic surgery as a form of deformation? Is something only 'deformed' if it is made 'worse' or decreased from it's original state? Or is any form of alteration and transformation deformity, even if it makes something look better? I reckon it's fair to say in some cases plastic surgery 's deformation is about the former!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!






Actually, the more I think about it the more there is to be said for this topic. Think about cubism!!! that is all about depicting forms in geometric shapes, deforming the subject to simple forms.
This may be taking it a little far but..... what isnt deformed? All art is, is a depiction or representation of something else. for example a painting or photograph, is a deformed image of life, no matter how realistic, it is not the real thing!!!
'Deformity' , whether intentional or not, makes art art. Without it, art would be nothing (or the real thing, depending on how you see it)

Street art, anyone?

I had a bit of a streetart fixation a while back, and this video brought the memories flooding back:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=uuGaqLT-gO4&feature=rec-fresh
(I suppose it's not really street art per se, with the intended artwork being the resultant video, but it's still awesome and semi-relevant. Then again, who am I to say what is and isn't street art?)

I loved the idea of using public areas as space for art - presenting art where it was least anticipated, and making it accessible to a wider audience who otherwise mightn't interact with it... like some insidious program of indoctrination to make all the world art appreciators*. I also fell in love with the anonymity of it (with the pieces not easily being attributed to any one person, it seems to run less of a risk of being seen as for the sake of ego, and the concept of faceless communication just makes me insanely happy), the idea of proving that not all markmaking in public spaces is necessarily malicious and aesthetically displeasing (as is such in the case of tagging) and, to be honest, the slightly subversive undertones of making art where it supposedly shouldn't be.

However, after further thought I realised a few drawbacks. For street art to be noticed by any large number of people, it would have to draw attention to itself by being large/bold/colourful/whatever, as people wouldn't generally anticipate finding art outside of a gallery, and thus street artists would be somewhat limited in terms of style (though there's enormous room for variation within those limitations. (God I'm contradicting myself left right and centre.)) Then again, that is supposing that the artist would want to draw attention to their work... but what can an artwork do if no-one knows it's there?
Also, would proper consideration be given to concepts behind street art (presuming the artist has something specific to convey)? How many people passing by something on a train station are going to stop and stand and think about it? I suppose the same could be said for works in an art gallery, but at least if you're in an environment surrounded by things that you're told are art, you're going to at least attempt to think about them. (Incidentally, do you think if things like the works in Experimenta Playground were placed in somewhere like an arcade or a cinema anyone would extract the same meaning from them?)

I guess the latter point could be overcome by sticking with one particular visual language - one that is bold and straight to the point (a lot of work, like that of Banksy's, is quite unsubtle) - but I just really dislike the idea of restrictions when it comes to artmaking.

Actually, that presumes that street art is only the "imma paint/draw/attach an artwork on/to this wall/seat/etc now, and I don't have council approval!", rather than other forms such as the subtle alteration of preixisting things on the street, or larger planned/approved works such as "Maria Kozic is Bitch", a billboard by Maria Kozic (...I'm not 100% sure if this was actually placed on a public billboard because I am going mad).

Um. I've kind of forgotten what I was talking about so I might stop.

*Okay, I exaggerate. But I really would like something like that to happen one day. Nothing coercive, of course.

Abakanowicz's and Asian Field

Did anyone else think of Anthony Gormley's 'Asian Field' when looking at Magdalena Abakanowicz's work?

I thought it was interesting to compare them. To me they have a similar visual impact, but reading a little more about them, conceptually they were representing different ideas.

Anthony Gormley's clay figures are made conscious as he gave them eyes, which gives them identity and being. Abakanowicz's figures have identity and being in a different way. Even though they don't have heads, each individual figure has it's own expression and skin details, but at the same time she has de-humanised them.

Abakanowicz's and Gormley's both have created a mass of figures, each individual figure lose their individuality and become a mass.

guess what? i thought of something and i blogged it...

This afternoon I thought of this artist Cathy de Monchaux (who Michael told me about last Friday, good old Goldburg) and i think she really fits into what we were discussing today about the correlations between technology, nature and deformation.

I really like the interplay between the raw, organic, carcass-like forms and the man-made, ornate brass hooks and hinges, which have in this case been made into claws. To me it speaks of beauty in the natural world, and beauty that we have constructed.

There is something quite bizarre in the way that these organ-like shapes have been created from fabric, leather, ribbon, and glue... i really expected them to be cow entrails...
How can you make an inanimate material appear alive, or at least as if it was alive once?


The idea of constructing natural beings evokes the post-modern fear of technology surrounding cloning, stem-cells, etc, which we descibe as "ethical concerns". De Monchaux carefully arranges these living/dead pieces in patterns mimicking the ornate brass decoration of the art-deco period.

These works are really lovely somehow (to me anyway... i know Nat disagrees)... and on another tangent they carry a little of an old doctor who/ early sci-fi monster vibe.

"In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes"

a little late, but this is referencing nat's presentation about pop art. There was a wonderful quote from Andy Warhol "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes"

i think that future has come! because of sites like youtube we have what is known as the "internet celebrity", someone who will make a stupid or vaugley entertaining video, post it on the internet then become famous among the internet or in poular culture, and seen by thousands of people over the world, until the next video comes along.

I think Warhol would have loved to see the age of the internet

ART & NATURE AND TECHNOLOGY: Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson

The Weather Project, Tate Modern 2004















The mediated motion 2001, installation view
Kunsthaus Bregenz