The pictures I took for the project
The pictures I took for the project
The pictures I took for the project
The pictures I took for the project
SOFIA HULTÉN - Events With Unknown Outcome
I placed various objects (beer crates, a blanket, ball and plastic bag) in the park surrounding the last border watchtower still standing since the GDR in Berlin. I secretly videotaped whatever happened to the objects from the vantage point of the tower.
Tacita Dean - Fatigues
UK artist tacita dean has created ‘fatigues’, a six panel blackboard pieces recreating the mountainous landscape of afghanistan for dOCUMENTA (13) in kassel, germany. following dean’s visit to kabul to film the rugged countryside belonging to this middle eastern nation, she found her footage to be flawed and instead offers this ex-business center enormous blackboard mural sketches picturing afghanistan’s terrain. While some of the landscapes are covered in a bright white chalk, standing in stark contrast to the darkness of dean’s blackboard canvas, Others are decorated with only a hint of line to portray the movement of rivers, snow and the interaction of these elements with sunlight. The massive artwork spans the walls of an open air two-story space belonging to a former banking hall and was commissioned and co-produced
by the festival for which the piece is displayed.
Tina Hage - Rehearsal
This series was inspired by Sigmer Polke’s piece 'Menschenbruecke' and found imagery such asBuster Keaton film stills. The juxtaposition of these reference materials combine to explore ideas of formality, social structures, endurance and art making process. The ‘rehearsal’ is preparation for an event that will never happen. The poses in the work feelas though they are mid-action and in the act of forming a gesture rather than existing as a completed visual form. Although the patterns and physical language of the individual figures that form the collective act appear strangely natural and familiar, there is an underlying sense of struggle, tension and alienation. It is as though the figures in the image are aware of the temporality of this situation.
Gregor Schneider - Die Familie Schneider
In 2004 Schneider created an environmental immersive installation—Die Familie Schneider—in London under the auspices of the art foundation Artangel. Artangel itself is worthy of note here because it is dedicated to art that operates outside the confines of the museum. However, in the case of Die Familie Schneider there were constraints similar to those evident in a gallery environment. But in this case the time limit imposed on the viewer appears motivated less by a desire to preserve the precious object than by a desire to make the experience more chilling than it might have been given more time to become familiar with it.Die Familie Schneider consisted of two neighbouring disused houses in an East London street being turned into theatrical mises en scène complete with actors. As in Totes Haus ur Schneider manipulated the space and ambience creating a disorienting and disturbing mise en scène. The major difference with this work is his addition of professional actors who ignore viewers’ attempts at communication making the experience one in which both the viewer and the actors are akin to ghosts. The experience is unnerving when one finds a man masturbating in a shower, and another person trussed up in a bin liner apparently dead in a stifling, seedy bedroom. It is certainly more unnerving than watching The Amityville Horror because one is not imagining that one is there, one isactually there. Perhaps one of the most creepy features of this mise en scène are the references to children, a child gate on the stairs, a closet filled with sweets, a child-sized mattress. And several commentators have referred to the terrible crimes that have happened behind the seemingly innocent facades of British houses. All of which serves to make a comparison with the prurient gaze associated with The Amityville Horrormore salient.
Francis Alys - The last clown
The animation is just over a minute in length and displayed as a continuous loop. A man walks along a path in a park dressed in a grey suit, brown shoes and glasses. As he walks towards the top right corner of the frame, facing away from us in three quarter profile, his hands are clasped behind his back, and his gaze is down. A yellow dog passes by in the opposite direction and the man catches his foot on the dog’s tail, causing him to fall on all fours as the dog scampers off. The film is backed by a soundtrack of circus-style jazz, interspersed with peals of canned laughter when the man falls down, and titters when he later turns his head sheepishly towards the viewer. Contemporary artists are often ridiculed in mainstream press with contemporary art variously referred to as absurd or pointless. Alÿs’ work plays on these expectations of an audience, probing the need for us to see the artist as a performer or entertainer.
Gillian Wearing - Homage to the Woman With the Bandaged Face Who I Saw Yesterday Down Walworth Road
It is an early video work from 1995, Homage to the woman with the bandaged face who I saw yesterday down the Walworth Road that provides evidence for Wearing’s early fascination with masks. After videoing a woman with a bandaged face she saw in the Walworth Road, Wearing decided to bandage her own face and go out into the street to record the reactions of those passing by with the aid of a hidden video camera. In so doing she set about subverting the relationship between the observer and the observed. The following year she made 10-16, which remains one of her most affecting projects. Here she recorded children between the ages of 10 and 16 talking about their lives, their fears and dreams. These voices were then lip-cinched on video by adults so that they appear to be talking with children’s voices. The effect is disturbing, affecting and often very sad, reminding us, yet again, that trauma and dysfunction in childhood remain evident within the adult personality.
A book I read
Why We Lie by David Livingstone Smith
The picture experiment 1
The Exhibition
Confusion in her eyes that says it all by Tamsin Casswell, Jennifer Douglas, Hans Rosenström at Maria Stenfors, London
Confusion in her eyes that says it all brings together three artists who each in turn explore perceptions of intimacy and communication, deceptive illusion and control. Humble, everyday materials are transformed, creating new narratives and spaces that draw us in and make us question the nature of experience. Hereby, the exhibition examines the unique perspective an individual experiences at a particular moment in time, and the altered perceptions evoked by an artwork. - by the description
Analyzing the matter in Freudian terms: as human beings add, subtract and modify each of life’s obstacles in order to interpret reality, they attempt to balance the unconscious with the conscious.
I especially loved the one by Jennifer Douglas(Still got it’, 2012 (detail)). When I first saw it my image was the lights are absorbing the ink's color into the lights. (or the other way around)
It is simple but also complicated. There is a lot of things are going on with each work.
An instruction how to make a toro(Japanese lantern) in Japanese
The outcome for this class's last day.
I made a toro(a Japanese lantern) and floated in the bathroom.
The pictures I took for the project
The pictures I took for the project
The pictures I took for the project
The pictures I took for the project
Susan Hiller - Rough Seas
The show open on Hiller’s Rough Seas series, a collection of postcards from Britain’s coast depicting rough waves crashing on beaches, usually with a caption featuring the phrase ‘Rough Sea’. The collection has taken a number of years to form and includes black-and-white and colour images. The postcards are mounted in frames below their annotations. The frames above the postcards hold information as to the location of the rough sea, the date it was sent, the recipient’s name and address, and the message overleaf. The overall effect is impressive; the postcards together form an also typographical language. As a viewer, you begin to make connections by linking repeated images, colours and locations.
Tina Hage - Gestalt
The title of the series ‘Gestalt’ translates from German into English as “form” or to “take shape”. Specifically, it can mean that a figure/person is taking shape for e.g. coming out of the dark or from far away. It defines that moment when someone/thing appears and just before it might become clear what or who it is. Tina Hage's interest in these series (Gestalt (guise), Gestalt (built) & Gestalt (stature)) is in the formal language that protesters started to create. Until recently, protests were usually pre-organised with defined leaders and political agendas. The language emerging from these new protests represent a different way in which masses now form. It is one of anonymity and viral chaos.
Martin Creed - WORK NO. 227: THE LIGHTS GOING ON AND OFF
We all have our bad days, when you just can't get it right, like moments of loss and surrender. And we all have our good days, when everything seems to run smoothly, just perfect for no apparent reason. I can see clearly now the rain has gone. You wake up, things are okay, and the sun is shining. And then out of the blue, there you go again, down into the dark pit of depression. It's not just a matter of mood swings. Its something more basic and perverse: the inability to preserve joy. The need to measure it against a black background. Art is no different. It’s a ride on the roller coaster of emotions. Sometimes I feel so happy, sometimes I feel so sad. I always thought Martin Creed's Work No. 227: The lights going on and off had something to do with this simple truth. It has the ability to compress happiness and anxiety within one single gesture. Lights go on, lights go off – sunshine and rain, and then back to beginning to repeat endlessly. I do not know what Creed was thinking about when he made it but to me it always looked like a swing, a mood swing. That's why I never found it funny but frightening in its simplicity, it's a sculpture for our lithium oriented, Prozac enhanced reality. Are we afraid of the dark or just blinded by the light? I see a rainbow and I want to paint it black.
Douglas Huebler - Duration Piece #5
A representative example of Huebler's early work is Duration Piece #5, 1969, a series of ten black & white photographs with accompanying text; to document the piece, Huebler stood in Central Park and, each time he heard a bird call, he pointed his camera in the direction of the call and shot a photograph.
John Cage - 4'33"
The first time Cage mentioned the idea of a piece composed entirely of silence was during a 1947 (or 1948) lecture at Vassar College, A Composer's Confessions. Cage told the audience that he had "several new desires", one of which was
to compose a piece of uninterrupted silence and sell it to Muzak Co. It will be three or four-and-a-half minutes long—those being the standard lengths of "canned" music and its title will be Silent Prayer. It will open with a single idea which I will attempt to make as seductive as the color and shape and fragrance of a flower. The ending will approach imperceptibility.
Another cited influence or this piece came from the field of the visual arts. Cage's friend and sometimes colleague Robert Rauschenberg had produced, in 1951, a series of white paintings, seemingly "blank" canvases (though painted with white house paint) that in fact change according to varying light conditions in the rooms in which they were hung, the shadows of people in the room and so on. This inspired Cage to use a similar idea, as he later stated, "Actually what pushed me into it was not guts but the example of Robert Rauschenberg. His white paintings when I saw those, I said, 'Oh yes, I must. Otherwise I'm lagging, otherwise music is lagging'."
A book I read
Memory by David Samuel
The picture experiment 2
Compulsory reading
Berger Ways Of Seeing
She's Lost Control (the lyrics : Confusion in her eyes that says it all) by Joy Division
Tōrō nagashi is a Japanese ceremony in which participants float paper lanterns (chōchin) down a river; tōrō is traditionally another word for lantern, while nagashi means "cruise, flow". This is primarily done on the last evening of the Bon Festival festival based on the belief that this guides the spirits of the departed back to the other world.
The ceremony may be done on some other days of the year for other reasons such as to commemorate those lost in the bombing of Hiroshima and those who died on Japan Airlines Flight 123; or in other areas of the world, such as Hawaii, to commemorate the end of World War II. The Bon Festival takes place on the thirteenth to sixteenth of August or July, depending on the calendar you go by. The white lanterns are for those who have died in the past year. Traditional Japanese beliefs state that humans come from water, so the lanterns represent their bodies returning to water (traditionally the sea in this case)
I found this as I was researching a chinese lantern.
This might be possible because it could be just one = I am saying goodbye to my grandmother.
I need to try this as an experiment.
The outcome for this class's last day.
I made a toro(a Japanese lantern) and floated in the bathroom.
The pictures I took for the project
The pictures I took for the project
The pictures I took for the project
The pictures I took for the project
Susan Hiller - J Street Project
There are 303 roads, streets, and paths in Germany, whose names refer to a Jewish presence. Artist Susan Hiller has visited all of them over a three-year period, filming and taking photographs of these historically evocative places. The J. Street Project is an exhibition of photographs, video and an artist’s book that explores the landscape’s capacity to memorialize. Hiller’s subject matter is the tracing of an absence, explicitly named on maps and street signs as “Judenstrasse” or “Judenweg.” These banal markers invest ordinary German places, inner-city shopping streets, dreamy lanes, anonymous suburbs, and secluded country roads, with an eloquent silence. Hiller’s approach to the enormity of the Holocaust is completely fresh and succeeds in pulling in audiences who no longer feel capable of considering the subject and engages them in a new dialogue about survival and renewal.
Tina Hage - Afflux
The Afflux series (2010 - present) references contemporary news images from online and traditional media. The found scenes specifically show scenes from crowds trying to flee their countries. Past wars in the Middle East region have led hundreds of thousands of people to migrate and in many cases to remain as permanent residents in their new locations. These scenes form the base for this work and are then reenacted and reproduced.
Richard Wentworth - Making Do and Getting By
Artist and photographer Richard Wentworth registers chance encounters of oddities and discrepancies in the modern landscape. Renowned mostly for his readymade sculptures but also known for his photographic series, namely Making Do and Getting By, Wentworth is inclined to explore the nuances of modern life and the human role therein. Mundane snapshots and fragments of the modern landscape are elevated to an analysis of human resourcefulness and improvisation, whereby amusing oddities that would otherwise go by unnoticed become the subject of intent contemplation. Wentworth captures pictures of improvisation, where objects are removed of their original context, stripped of their ordinary function and yet often rendered functional in an altogether new and unexpected way. A car door serves to mend a wire fence. Wooden crates, wedged into a doorway, exert the function of a door. There occurs a rupture between object and function, which allows a subsequent rupture between function and meaning. Meaning is no longer hinged on the commonplace and uniform functionality of the mass produced object, but rather augmented by the unfamiliar and, thus, noteworthy new function with which the object is instilled. Wentworth’s photographs bear witness to instantaneous transformations, wherein everything is celebrated for its conversion into something else. Such encounters with incoherencies in the modern landscape, resulting mostly from the mutation of function, are injected with an inherently human vigour, despite the blatant absence of the human figure. It may even be argued that the centralised objects stand in for the metaphysical human presence they symbolise, precisely by occupying the central foreground, which, in popular amateur photography, is generally inhabited by the human figure.
His subject matter deals primarily with a vision of a deliberately altered modern space of which, in Wentworth’s own words, “the chief components are humans who simply don’t conform to the rules”. It signals a sort of victory over the mass-produced, materialistic modern world, for it is both due to and in spite of the absent human figure, that its unique metaphysical presence becomes manifest.
Just as Wentworth renders the familiar unfamiliar, he converts ordinary situations into insightful remarks on seemingly mundane but rather extraordinary human experiences of modern life.
Tom Friedman - Untitled - A Curse 1992 An 11inch sphere of space floating 11inch above the top of a pedestal cursed by a witch 133.4 x 28 x 28 cm
In 1992, Friedman created Untitled (A Curse), which appears to be nothing more than a pedestal. But he had employed a professional witch to cast a curse on an 11-inch sphere, resting 11 inches over the pedestal. At the time he said he was thinking about "how one's knowledge of the history behind something affects one's thinking about that thing". And once you read how it was made, Friedman's pedestal becomes a loaded object that tests the roles that belief and imagination play in our encounters with art.
Marina Abramovic - The Artist is Present
From March 14 to May 31, 2010, the Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective and performance recreation of Abramović's work, the biggest exhibition of performance art in MoMA's history. During the run of the exhibition, Abramović performed "The Artist Is Present," a 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she sat immobile in the museum's atrium while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her. A support group for the "sitters", "Sitting with Marina", was established on Facebook as was the blog "Marina Abramović made me cry". The Italian photographer Marco Anelli took portraits of every person who sat opposite Abramović, which were published on Flickr, compiled in a book and featured in an exhibition at the Danziger Gallery in New York. She said the show changed her life "completely" and claimed that the fact that Lady Gaga came to see it helped boost her popularity among a younger generation: "The public who normally don’t go to the museum, who don’t give a crap about performance art or don’t even know what it is, started coming because of Lady Gaga." Ulay made a surprise appearance at the opening night of the show. In September 2011, a video game version of Abramović's performance was released by Pippin Barr.
Walter De Maria - Lightning Field
t does not matter if you have never visited The Lightning Field, an array of 400 steel rods in the New Mexico desert that he installed in 1977. Of course, it is worth a pilgrimage to experience it over time, with or without lightning, as the artist intended. But the briefest glimpse of it in colour photographs, the sky illuminated by streaks of electricity drawn to the vast field of attracting rods, communicates so much, so eloquently.
Here is a romantic vision of nature that uses modern means – the almost clinical arrangement of a grid of poles – to achieve the awe-inspiring effects the American Hudson River school of landscape painters sought to elicit with paint.
A book I read
Alzheimer by Peter Granster
The picture experiment 3
A Paper lantern , also known as a "Thai Lover's Balloon," is a lantern made of thin, brightly colored paper. Paper lanterns come in various shapes and sizes, as well as various methods of construction. In their simplest form, they are simply a paper bag with a candle placed inside, although more complicated lanterns consist of a collapsible bamboo or metal frame of hoops covered with tough paper. Sometimes, other lanterns can be made out of colored silk (usually red) or vinyl. Silk lanterns are also collapsible with a metal expander and are decorated with Chinese characters and/or designs. The vinyl lanterns are more durable; they can resist rain, sunlight, and wind. Paper lanterns do not last very long, they soon break, and silk lanterns last longer. The gold paper on them will soon fade away to a pale white, and the red silk will become a mix between pink and red. - Wikipedia
To describe a goodbye to my grandmother.
It is beautiful but how can I try this? I cannot afford all those lanterns so maybe it is impossible.
I became a witness of Yayoi Kusama's pumpkin.
The outcome for this class's last day.
I made a toro(a Japanese lantern) and floated in the bathroom.