Context in previous work.Figure/Ground: Abstraction/narrative: collage,assemblage/projection/drawing/painting/text/texture/map/contour/topography COLOCATE: NUMERIOUS GEOMETRIC ORDERING SYSTEMS AND FOUND IMAGERY
THE NUMINIOUS AND THE EVERYDAY
Rawson, P.S., 2005. Art and time. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press.
palimpsest/surface...and deep histories
Chatterjee, A. ed., 2014. Surface and Deep Histories: Critiques and Practices in Art, Architecture and Design. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
‘abstract constructions and paintings that merge the formal structure of the grid with an interest in more organic forms found in nature.’
http://www.twma.com.au/exhibition/hilarie-mais/
Fragmentation/Mosaic/Collage/Painterly/Drawing/
Mark-making/Digital Data
Landscape as cultural sedimentation /precipitation
Painting as site for liminal experience/threshold
2d screen/panel as component of architectural space experienced/engaged.
SURFACE AND SKIN INTERACTING WITH ARCHITECTURAL SPACE AND VIEWERS SUBJECTIVE MATRIX.
Figure /Ground/painterly/non linear narrative from digital collage
Local/Global...landscape with calligraphic sky.....
Source imagery stored elsewhere/
Coal ships queuing off east coast New South Wales, bound for china
Work in progress Staff as symbolic object:‘philosophy of walking’ Image ,Object ,Event"
Cultural reference multiple readings, such as reference to Marshall Macluan and his reference to going forward while looking through a rearview mirror, actual rear view mirror legacy of 200,000km of road trips ,commuting and migrating.
‘Staff’ art history reference to Joseph Buyes, cultural to prophet, shepherd, magus , etc, literary/theory reference to Anne Marsh:Presence, ritual, shamanism in ‘Performance -Ritual-Performance”
Also see reference with Krzysztof Wodiczko, Alien Staff varients 1992-1993
Work in progress using material from building site skip.
Contemporary and Historical, Theoretical Frameworks.
This REFLECTIVE JOURNAL appears at on the TEXT page
for easier reading.
Taking art practice for a walk.
The walk is both a coming in towards an inner life that can be framed as studio practice and a stepping out of artistic practice into the public realm. “The Expanded” field as described by Rosalind Krauss, a text that I used as a focus for an undergraduate Architectural Thesis in 1988 called ‘Architecture in the Expanded field”. The perception of space how we move through it and our sense of belonging and engagement within our inhabited realms and atmospheres and the place artworks have within the culture as Images, Objects and Events.
These terms be expressions of territories that have permeable boundaries, as an object can become an event as it is engaged with, and everything can become an image as it is captured on a screen.
There are many contemporary examples of artists who use found objects within a socially engaged art setting. Particularly socially or politically engaged practice, from Baudelaire and the Flaneur and Benjamin and the Arcades Project, the Situationists and the Derive, Richard Long in the 60’s and 70’s to Dominico DeClario, in contemporary Victoria the artists walk has been a central part of artistic activity. This document is a walk of sorts through some of the historical leads and
As Rebecca Solnit puts it in :Wanderlust, A History of Walking,” Walking is the antithesis of owning ’. This thought could be a good point of departure for a discussion of what is public space and its relation to private space, personal space and inner space- even issues of privacy.
Place, space and notions of home and homeland are at the core of much discussion of identity both personal and communal.
Loking for mr and mrs goodart, or waiting !
THE WALKABOUT, THE DERIEVE AND THE CLOUD SURFERS
Bachelard, G., 1994. The Poetics of Space. 1958. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon, 199.
As a source text based on poetics and the phenomenological reading of space and Architecture
The poetics of the lived experience as described by this author has relevance to my research as it is mapped out in the outlines and references commented on below. Its contribution to the perceptual analysis gives historic context to contemporary discourse in readings such as ‘Embodyment and the lived City’ by Phil Hubbard and ‘The Fluid City’ Kim Dovey.
Higuchi, T. and Terry, C.S., 1983. The visual and spatial structure of landscapes (Vol. 19888). Cambridge, MA: Mit Press.
Applying Kevin Lynch’s concept of perceptual analysis, to the landscape rather than the city as Lynch dose. Tadahiko brings together concepts drawn from ancient Fung Shui stratergies to understanding of landscape, and western concepts such as the German idea of homeland as expressed in the ide of Heimat. ( The 50 Hour film series and accompanying documentation and commentary, by Edgar Reitz is a good source for background on this concept)
Higuchi advocates a typology of historical landscape and an examination of experienced and lived in space. He uses this approach to consider ‘the natural terrain, the city, various architectural elements, and other visual factors as composing an integrated whole.’
The positioning of this text within my research serves as a link from more contemporary readings of the city–country relationship within the current dialogue of the local and the global, to more ancient historical and mythological understandings of place and space.
The link with painting as a frame of reference for discussing aesthetic concerns also ties in with a central concern of my practice lead research.
In any contemporary study of the town –country relationship one wonders how it can be considered while being aware of conditions that produce epidemic of male suicide in rural Australia and disproportionate outbreaks of Leukemia in Chinese factories producing smartphones for the cities of the global economy.
A study of landscape beyond the city limits and how this addresses the city follows such recent research such as OMA’s Rem Koolhaas ,’On The Countryside’( talk at Melbourne University, 4 October 2017, and critiqued by Jillian Walliss- A failed manifesto- 12 October 2017,ArchitectureAU ). Also compare these views with Wang Shu , ‘Cities should learn from Countryside and Cities should learn from villages, and beyoud the conflict between countryside and the city, ( Wang Shu discusses a poetic sensibility to space coming from an appreciation of traditional Chinese landscape painting, with parallels to Higuchi within a practice in the contemporary Chinese situation of growth and rapid change.
Human language is capable of spatial and temporal displacement. According to Derick Bickerton, displacement is the hallmark feature of language.
‘words allowed the formation of concepts rather than mere categories that animals are also capable of. Words began as the anchors for sensory information and memories about a specific animal or object. Once the brain had words it could create concepts which came together as a 'protolanguage'.
Universal language, universal grammar, linguistic theories developed separately by Noam Chomsky--- see “Roots of Language” 1981-
A question for art practice, raised through this study of creole language is; Are there similar forces and flows at work in the development of visual culture, such as the artwork of
Mark Bradford?
Mark Bradford and “Social Abstraction”
Amongst many contemporary artists working with found and repurposed material Mark Bradford has been foregrounded here simply for his current conspicuousness, other artists have been commented in earlier writing with the use of collage, montage as practice and theory in art and film, its relationship with the city tracing back to artists active at the turn of the nineteenth and early twentieth century such as Hanna Hoch and Kurt Shwitters through the cubists the Situationists and the movements of the 60’s and 70’s and the post modern and appropriation artists.
Walking the talk in South Central Los Angeles.
Accumulation of the detritus material of the city repurposed in the studio by creating an abstract poetic language that holds an imminent narrative, a visual musicality absorbed from the landscape beyond the studio. In this case the urban American landscape saturated in the ‘hyper Reality’(Umberto Echo) of pop and consumerist culture, and percolated with contemporary social issues of race gender and identity.
The studio, often characterized as an ivory tower separate from the outside world, becomes an incubator of artistic expression where the artwork becomes a site for contemplation and reflection.
The language of materiality developed within a process of harvesting through walking the streets has precedent in the philosophy of walking that has manifested in many formats through the history of modern, postmodern and contemporary art.
This visual language may have a similar progressive nonlinear development like the development of Creole languages as discussed by Derick Bickerton with his language bioprogram theory (see Derick Bickerton, The roots of Language 1981).
A comparison with Timothy Ingolds theories in ‘The History of Lines’ and” The Life of Lines” may also prove relevant.
Lines, Networks and Meshes, all appear in the visual field of Mark Bradford’s art, these keywords also connect the work of Timothy Ingold and Timothy Morton. Preliminary research of the writing of these two authors suggests a comparative reading of key texts by these authors will anchor visual theory suggested in my own practice and those of artists such as Mark Bradford in a philosophical and anthropological context. Through this direction the research develops a platform to explore how artworks can operate in the public domain to affect social thinking.
Material Histories,
There are many contemporary examples of artists who use found objects within a socially engaged art setting. Particularly socially or politically engaged practice, from Beaudelaire and the Flaneur and Benjamin and the Arcades Project, the Situationists and the Derive, Richard Long in the 60’s and 70’s to Dominico DeClario, in contemporary Victoria the artists walk has been a central part of artistic activity
The description of the Paul Klee monoprint, “Angelus Novus” (New Angle),1920 by Walter Benjamin, who purchased the print in 1921, is a point of departure to align the material and theoretical framework of my practice. Klee’s famous quote from his Pedagogical Sketchbook, suggesting that the genesis of a drawing starts with “taking a line for a walk”, resonates with Benjamin’s appreciation of the city and his Arcade Project.
These notions of walking, both literally and metaphorically potentially coming together as a “Philosophy of Walking” as a way of engaging with the world and respond in a constructive way to create cultural meaning in a poetic language that is experienced bodily.
The creation of material objects of various dimensions and materials that relate to a human scale within public and private space, become the residue or trace of a continuous walk.
‘A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.’
‘The Tower of Song’Leonard Cohen
The relationship between studio practice and public space.
In the context of current social, political and environmental issues,
How can a study of poetic aesthetics influence art in the contemporary public realm.?
Theoretical Frameworks.
As a practice led research project, theoretical frameworks that inform the practice include those that discuss thinking through making.
THE PERFORMATIVE IN STUDIO PRACTICE
From the going out into the practice of everyday life, in the streets and spaces of public engagement, the walking of everyday life takes on a perception of discovery and celebration, not seeking but finding from a position of acceptance, gleening in all meanings of the word.
That gathered returns to the studio and the act of making through material engagement, becomes an act of transformation and metamorphosis of the materials and through the making a process of thinking. Thinking through making, a bodily engagement with the materials available, the found and the acquired.
Painting as model and painting as performative action.
See Jackson Pollock , and painting and ritual, see, Anne Marsh, PerformanceRitual_Document,ch.3 Presence, Ritual, Shamanism: Jackson Pollock and the Performative Turn, see Alan Kaprow “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’)
Collage and sculpture as an extension of painting into three dimensions from two.
The screen, the panel and the frame.
The image as found object, the snapshot as a slice of everyday life , projected as a drawing of silhouette, as reference, frame for intuitive hand gestural mediation, a transformation of the image by the inclusion of hand gestural mark making that is separate from any attempt at representing the depicted scene while using the outline of the projected image as an ordering system, a fluid geometry that references the source while allowing the gestural application of paint to have its own spontaneous outcome privileging the abstract qualities of the actual mark making as a separation from the forms depicted. In this way the outline of the projected image function similar to the use of a grid, as an ordering system for the spontaneous application of colour. By creating a disjunction between the image projected and the application of paint/colour, that is in the terms of traditional Chinese painting as described in “A Theory of Cloud”, a disjunction between the usual relationship between ink and brush. Or in western terms, between drawing and painting, the intention is to explore a visual language of the space between the two modes of representation, or rather the space between representation and abstraction within the same frame. Keeping the outline of the source pictorial reference as a photographic trace while allowing the application of paint to suggest a divergent, abstracted and multi dimensional reading through the application of the paint.
It is intended that through this process, pictorial outcomes shall emerge that convey a non linear narrative where multiple dimensions and horizons of vision, with a collapsed timeline, yet exist all at once on the same surface.(Where all at once on the same surface can form part of a definition of painting in relation to other media where the time base is time as cronos as opposed to time as logos) Where the copy and the reproduction inhabit the same frame and surface.
Where the outcome, the painting, is the residua of a performative process coupled to a reproductive process to produce intersectional visual imagery.
This imagery can stand on its own as an autonomous object that can find a place beyond the studio either through instillation in public space, private space or be subject to further translation through, digital and electronic transmission and projection.
Through the performative lense painting can be considered as a touchscreen technology and architecture through the analysis of writers such as Walter Benjamin, can be framed as a form of social media.
Studio practice becomes a laboratory for developing imagery and objects of contemplation to connect the everyday to the universal through poetic transformation. The artwork, painting, sculpture coupled with their integrations into site or sites become in themselves sites for further contemplation, sites of memory and reflection. Using poetic visual resonances to trigger responses perceived by the bodily engagement of the viewer. The artwork by itself can offer itself within its context, however the viewer will need to choose to engage, to participate in the exchange.
In his book “The Sympathy of Things“, Lars Spuybroek argues that ‘we must undo the twentieth century’ and find our way back to beauty and proposes an approach to digital generated design that has its roots in the premodern. Exploring the ideas of John Ruskin, he calls for a,” Digital Gothic “and a “Radical Picturesque”. In tracing his thoughts through many modern and postmodern philosophers he deftly avoids any deference to spiritual or theological thought.
Lars Spuybroek Research Interests:
William James, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, Speculative Realism, Object Oriented Ontology, John Ruskin, Theory of ornament, Theodor Lipps, Wilhelm Worringer, Empathy, Gothic architecture, Sympathy, Beauty, Digital design, William Morris, Owen Jones, Picturesque Theory, and Speculative Aesthetics
For my research a comparison of these Ideas with traditions that persist from earlier cultural histories would be a helpful approach to this ‘undoing of the twentieth century”, a process that is carried out throughout the twentieth century though the narrative of modernism and its counter narratives.
A text to contribute to this discussion ; ‘No Idols’The missing Theology of Art, by Thomas Crow (Power Publications,2017
In a discussion of Corita Kent, a contemporary of Andy Wahol in the early 1960’s, the author quotes, “… the venerable theological logic of Analogia Entis . Roughly translated as the ‘analogy of things’, Saint Bonaventure supplies the classic, high-medieval definition of the term:
‘All created things of the sensible world lead the mind of the contemplator…to eternal god…They are the shades, the resonances, the pictures of that efficient, exemplifying, and ordering art; they are the tracks, simulacra, and spectacles; they are the divinely given signs set before us for the purpose of seeing God’
Also cited in the same context of early 1960’s American art ‘is a then current theological thought(that was) activated in 1799 by Frederich Schleimacher (widely acknowledged as the founder of modern theology. The romantic Schleiermacher rehearsed Bonaventure: ‘Every finite thing is a sign of the infinite, and so these various expressions declare the immediate relation of a phenomenon the the infinite whole’
The use of metaphor and analogy and the sympathy of things, as meaning through constructed relationships of things(composition), with the potential to regenerate new meaning. ‘The analogy of thing’ and and ‘the sympathy of things’ become talisman within a practice led, studio based, research into art. Art as a site for aesthetic contemplation, reflection of cultural memory within a contemporary context. As Lars Spuybroek makes the case that aesthetics is first philosophy and proposes a new aesthetics for the digital age, a component of this research would be to pose a comparative study of aesthetics with roots in theology and spiritual meaning.
Painting in the background, non linear narrative with multifaceted backstory , referencing historical precedents illustrated in this album.
Back story described elsewhere, reference to the street, the city and current events through personal relationship with recent tragedy coupled with trauma memory, cultural and psychological referencing.
also formal concerns of materiality and image mediation ,translation and transmission via digital reproduction and projection.
Reference Indigenous strategies, contemporary installation,
hunters and gatherers/the gleaner, visual and conceptual reference found to this work by Rebecca Belmore after completion of the hunters and gatherers project.
‘ …and let the hills hear your voice’, Micha 6:1
'The body repeats in the landscape.they are the source of each other and create each other.We were marked by the seasonal body of the earth, by the terrible migrations of people, by the swift turn of a century, verging on changes never before experienced on this greening planet. I sensed the mound and swell above the mother breast, and from embryonic eye took sustenance and benediction, and went from mother enclosure to prairie sphere curving into each other.' Meridel LeSueur
Performance with abstracted object, precedent to walking hunters and gatherers (see video)
This reference found recently, since developing my own similar object, writings by this theorist to be followed up in the future.
This reference has been included because of its similarity to a form I have been developing in the studio in the form of a Staff.
Since using my own work in progress as a performative component of my last Mapps presentation, I am developing it into the foreground of future projects.
The Staff,has cultural reference going back to biblical times and has been used in contemporary art by such artists as Joseph Beuys.
There is a rich seam of cultural reference in this symbolic and practical walking aid and can form part of a group with the work developed last year that also references cultural archetypes through poetic visual association.
Because of its obvious visual connection ,discovered after developing my ‘staff’. I have bookmarked the literature associated with the Wodiczko work for its particular relevance to art in the public space. The interest is conceptual, formal , and social/contextual.
One of many images gleaned from the street.
Walking in the embodied City. See writing referenced elsewhere
Detail, the massive ark currently grounded in the Barrel Vault, recreates part of Mark Bradford’s earlier work Mithra which was installed in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. Detail consists of a steel and wood core to which is attached plywood panels to form the outer hull.
‘Social Abstraction’ as a concept described by Mark Bradford has resonance in my practice methodology where recycled found material is brought into the studio from the street,(Hard Rubbish, Dumpster Diving etc, as described in earlier writing on The Gleaners _ see last semester project_)
This process also relates to writings around walking in the city, again referenced elswhere.
‘Social Abstraction’ as a concept described by Mark Bradford has resonance in my practice methodology where recycled found material is brought into the studio from the street,(Hard Rubbish, Dumpster Diving etc, as described in earlier writing on The Gleaners _ see last semester project_)
Theaster Gates uses sculpture, installation, performance and urban interventions to bridge the gap between art and life. His projects attempt to instigate the creation of cultural communities by acting as catalysts for social engagement leading to political and spatial change. Gates trained both as a sculptor and as an urban planner, but his works are rooted in a social responsibility. His pieces use mostly found materials, often from the neighborhoods in which he is actively working.http://www.tag-arts.com/blog?tag=artist+profiles
Martin Puryear (born May 23, 1941) is an American artist known for his devotion to traditional craft. Working in wood and bronze, among other media, his reductive technique and meditative approach challenge the physical and poetic boundaries of his materials.
Known for turning things inside out; as is represented in the structural oddities of After(pictured), Richard Deacon is a complex artist and a British institution. Looking at form and mobilising it in new and intriguing ways,Photo © Richard Deacon, After 1998, Tate
Enlightenment/Modernism/ social and political background, echoes of contemporary see:
EVENINGS EMPIRE
Ibsen, K., 2010. Maximilian, Mexico, and the invention of empire. Vanderbilt University Press.
Ibsen, K., 2006. Spectacle and spectator in Edouard Manet's Execution of Maximilian. Oxford Art Journal, 29(2), pp.213-226.
also TJClarks, Monets Modernism
Historical precedent to news footage of Sydney Siege.
Enlightenment/Modernism/ social and political background, echoes of contemporary see:
EVENINGS EMPIRE
Ibsen, K., 2010. Maximilian, Mexico, and the invention of empire. Vanderbilt University Press.
Ibsen, K., 2006. Spectacle and spectator in Edouard Manet's Execution of Maximilian. Oxford Art Journal, 29(2), pp.213-226.
also TJClarks, Monets Modernism
Also see Manet the execution of Maximillion and Picasso ETAL. the slaughter of the inocents.
A screen reference that forms part of an historical.non linear narrative the forms part of the back story of an image inspired from footage observed on screen of the siege in Sydneys Lint Cafe where there is a personal connection with one of the victims.
At present this image is being developed as a a design base for a large scale tapestry to be entered in a competition outlined in a brief that will become part of the integrated project for this course.
Preliminary sketches and large scale painting/drawing is currently in preliminary development, It is anticipated that the documentation of this project will eventually have its own page on this website, for now, Images and literature assembled elsewhere, including :
Harris, J. and Koeck, R., 2013. Picasso and the politics of visual representation: war and peace in the era of the Cold War and since. Liverpool University Press.
Nord, P., 2014. Impressionists and politics: art and democracy in the nineteenth century. Routledge.
Ibsen, K., 2010. Maximilian, Mexico, and the invention of empire. Vanderbilt University Press.
Ibsen, K., 2006. Spectacle and spectator in Edouard Manet's Execution of Maximilian. Oxford Art Journal, 29(2), pp.213-226.
Figure/Ground/Abstraction/Narrative/Direct Painting/Drawing/Mark making/Image/Text/Politics
"the geometry of innocent flesh on the bone, causes Galileo's math book to get thrown.....'Bob Dylan,Tombstone blues.Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music
Thompson, R.F., 1983. Flash of the Spirit (p. 5). New York: Vintage Books.
Harris, J. and Koeck, R., 2013. Picasso and the politics of visual representation: war and peace in the era of the Cold War and since. Liverpool University Press.
Painterly/Political , visual equivalents with , slaughter of the innocents and related images
VISUAL REFERENCE -ABSTRACTION/FIGURATION , SOCIAL NARRATIVE
Collage/Paint/Scale/Image/Text/repettition
VISUAL REFERENCE -ABSTRACTION/FIGURATION , SOCIAL NARRATIVE
MATERIALITY : PAINTED IMAGE: MARK MAKING
MATERIALITY : PAINTED IMAGE: MARK MAKING
Refer interview stored elsewhere re. figuration/painting .sculpture tradition and continued relevance...
Geometry as symbol and imminent narrative.
‘As with her religious interests, af Klint was not a visual monotheist. There’s a continual fluctuation in forms, references and degrees of abstraction. The richly mixed-media “Tree of Knowledge” drawings from 1913 show an awareness of Art Nouveau, starting with a silhouette reminiscent of a toadstool — or a perfume bottle. The “Swan” series culminates in paintings whose segmented targets on red or black anticipate the unequivocal abstraction of Kenneth Noland, the 1960s Color Fielder’ Roberta Smith NYTimes.
Geometric Abstraction as woven picturing.
The Bauhaus and its legacy in modern art an craft.
“Just as textiles have stretched between art, craft and industry, they have also oscillated between being defined as leisure and as labour.”
Bryan-Wilson, J., 2017. Fray: Art and Textile Politics. University of Chicago Press.
Geometric Abstraction imbedded in folk /craft tradition outside the mainstream of art history and aesthetics.
References
VISUAL/TEXTURAL /MATERIALITY, RECYCLED /REPURPOSED FABRIC…Abstraction imbedded in folk tradition
Geometric/ asymmetry/spontaneous/intuitive/hand made
Abstraction imbedded in folk/craft tradition outside the mainstream of western art history
Asymetric/intuitiveapplication of color in painterly expression across a geometric field.
Between 2004 and 2009 Maree studied and completed a Masters of Arts titled Reflections on Creative Practice, Place & Identity, RMIT University, Melbourne. This research continues to be significant in providing information to Melbourne Museum about the material culture of her Ancestors.
cross-reference with description of spiritual dimensions of this work as discussed in :“Crow, T.E., 2017. No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art. Power Publications.
Built on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah entirely of mud, salt crystals, and basaltrocks, Spiral Jetty forms a 1,500-foot-long (460 m), 15-foot-wide (4.6 m) counterclockwise coil jutting from the shore of the lake.
In 1999, the artwork was donated to Dia Art Foundation. Since its initial construction, those interested in its fate have dealt with questions of proposed changes in land use in the area surrounding the sculpture.
Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt also known as Gego, was a modern Venezuelan artist and sculptor. Gego's most popular works were produced in the 1960s and 1970s, during the height of popularity of Geometric abstract art and Kinetic ArtWikipedia
Lines, Grids,Networks Meshes, relates to reading s of Ingold and Morton and Spybrouk as philosophical underpinning of thinking through making, the texturally of making and embodied meaning.
NETWORKED, LANDSCAPE, MESH, WIRE FRAME , CONTOURS, GEOMETRY, ORGANIC, SPACE FRAME,
'Systematically Altered Photographs' focuses on systems of knowledge in society and how images convey meaning
Reference for methodology, treatment go sourced imagery/transformation /photo/copy/drawing/trace....
methodically disintegrating pre-existing generic images of Australia using a photocopying process, Burn reevaluates the notion of originality and authenticity. This series of photographs eloquently realise the artist's exploration into art-making, language and representation.
Burn spoke about this group of works in 1988. He said "…imagery was reintroduced in ways which deliberately exposed its problematic status. In the 'Systematically Altered Photographs', the image was photocopied, then the copy copied and so on, for about a dozen times. The altered image was then juxtaposed with the original, with the readings drawing attention arbitrarily to certain features and details. The original image was cut from a magazine. There was no sense of creating the image, only of recreating it within a new system. The source was a promotional publication put out for overseas consumption by the Australian government…The clichéd character of the images was important". (Melbourne, 1988)
ROLAND MÖNIG Art historian
“I have been following Denise Green’s work now since 2002. In 2006 I curated her solo show at theMuseum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany. What impressesme about her painting is that it defies all firmly established terms and concepts. As simple and rational as her images might appear at first glance, their origin lies in the irrational, the unconsciousand the preconscious. Green draws inspiration from empathy and participation and is entirely engrossedin the very situation that she’s experiencing in the given moment. When she grasps a brush or a pencil, she ignores the boundaries between the self and the world, between subject and object. The result is a work that branches out like a rhizome in all directions, absorbing and conjoining ever- new aspects of reality – near and far, visible and
invisible, present and past – seeking similarities and correspondences without conditioning phenomenaand the experiences they generate.
“Denise Green builds bridges between continents and cultures, through her life as well as through herart. In a globalised world, her work does not only embody the enormous possibilities which open up when you cross borders and change contexts. It does also testify to the ability of art to offer new frames of meaning that engulf and unite what is seemingly incompatible. For me, Denise Green’smost recent works are very exciting, because they usephotographic images in quite a peculiar way. I feelthat this new approach refreshes her artistic practicein a stunning way. Let’s see what will come of it!”
Naomi Gall
reference for tapestry competition project
Enlightenment/Modernism...Utopia/distopia/deconstruction/constructivism compare with Tinguely For Mona Tapestery brief,
chaos and order : culture of fragmentation v ordered utopian vision.
See Lars Spyrbruck : ‘The sympathy of Things’ for overview of philosophy of aesthetics as developed from enlightenment through modernism to post modern and digital contemporary philosophy of aesthetics in mediated constructed form and the interrelationship of things in the material and conceptual world.
Also reference Grids, Meshes , networks as contrast to classical ordering systems.
‘The essence of New Vision photography is pointedly expressed in this picture, commonly known as The Constructor, which puts the act of seeing at center stage. Lissitzky's hand, holding a compass, is superimposed on a shot of his head that explicitly highlights his eye: insight, it expresses, is passed through the eye and transmitted to the hand, and through it to the tools of production. Devised from six different exposures, the picture merges Lissitzky's personae as photographer (eye) and constructor of images (hand) into a single likeness. Contesting the idea that straight photography provides a single, unmediated truth, Lissitzky held instead that montage, with its layering of one meaning over another, impels the viewer to reconsider the world. It thus marks a conceptual shift in the understanding of what a picture can be.’
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/83836
Drawing /painting/Collage/Map/scale/projection/silhouette-also see Kara Walker
William Kentridge, Kinetic Sculpture (Bicycle Wheel)
Assemblage/sculpture/object constructed from found parts
Biggs and Collings are interested in something they have noticed by looking at art from the past. Art, as it used to be understood, has come to an end. But what strikes them is that old ideas and habits of mind are hard to shake off. Former ways of thinking constantly influence behaviour today. You could say that an example of this phenomenon is the way the aestheticisation of the art object has been replaced by the aestheticisation of the art experience. The thorny issue of how the past is present in what we, as a society, see and do, and the way in which it may differ from what we believe we say and do, is at the heart of Biggs’ and Collings’ work.
statement from artists website
http://emmabiggsandmatthewcollings.net/statement/
REFERENCES
SPONTANIOUS/ GESTURAL/PAINTERLY