Narrative
Art today increasingly wants to do something it hasn’t prioritised for a very long time: tell a story.
Narrative, a fundamental driving force behind centuries of art, is again preoccupying artists, and although the desire to recount and illustrate remains fundamentally the same, what is new is the adoption of an unprecedented range of narrative techniques, especially those gleaned from literature, theatre, film or TV.
Charles Avery
In 2004 Charles Avery embarked on a project called The Islanders, which was conceived as a way to explore, consolidate and give direction to his art and ideas. The Islanders is a painstakingly detailed and diverse description of a fictional island in drawing and painting, sculpture and texts.
Untitled (View of the Port at Onomatopoeia) (2009–10) shows the full might of Avery’s imagination and drawing skills. Measuring over five metres wide, this drawing immerses the viewer in a scene of the bustling port of Onomatopoeia, the main town on the island. With the edges of the composition less detailed, attention is focused on the centre of the paper, which shows a diverse group of mysterious island inhabitants and their wares, alongside visitors who have arrived by boat.
Avery’s drawings are made entirely from his imagination. He improvises as he goes. Once a narrative emerges he develops it in several directions and uses different ways to tell the story.
The island’s natives are known as the If’en and have their own specific customs, gods and favourite foods. They live in a geometric landscape of vast plains and towns with cultural buildings and municipal parks.
It is important to consider the differences between Avery’s drawings and his sculptures. In essence, the drawings are narrative whilst the sculptures, such as hats, trees and animals, can be understood as items which have been sold as souvenirs to the island’s tourists. Therefore they have been removed from their original island context and are now situated in reality – creating a direct connection between the two. Avery extends this link through the inclusion of the protagonist, the Hunter, who has travelled to the island and documents what he experiences from an outsider’s perspective.
Avery prefers to exhibit a broad selection of works together so as to pose questions concerning the likes of mathematics, philosophy and time, whilst also offering the viewer a more in-depth experience of the island’s topology and cosmology. If The Islanders is ever completed, Avery hopes for it to be consolidated in a large, leather-bound encyclopaedic book, accessible to anyone interested in it.
Examples of Narrative Art can be seen very early in the history of art. A number of reliefs in the European Bronze Age rock art of the Iberian Mediterranean Basin show narratives of hunting or battle, and Narrative Art is also evident in Egyptian tomb paintings. Greek vase paintings from the 6th century BCE also display narratives that describe both mythological and actual events.
Narrative Art can also be seen in “history painting”—defined as painting consisting of subject matter drawn from classical history, poetry and religion. Scholars believe that the use of the word “history” to denote narrative painting almost certainly goes back to the influential fifteenth century humanist Leon Battista Alberti, and it is at this time that narrative painting first acquired its status as the preeminent mode of expression. In his treatise on painting, De Pictura, Alberti wrote, “The great work of the painter is the narrative.” From the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, history painting was regarded by academics as the highest, most worthwhile kind of painting.
Linda Colsh – Narrative Textile Art
‘Her colors are restful, but her imagery is not. Linda Colsh’s work mostly stays within a limited palette of browns, blacks, and whites…Her images repeat, fading in and out of the background as if seen through the mist. Figures are mysterious, seemingly glimpsed from a distance…The viewer has to work to decipher the messages implied in Colsh’s imagery, but the resultant sense of a deeper understanding is worth the effort.’
Martha Sielman, Masters: Art Quilts, Lark Books, 2008
‘Currently, I am making a few very new pieces with no character imagery at all – these works are still narrative, but based on characters who “got away,” that is, people who figure strongly in my imagination and workbooks, but whom, for one reason or another, I do not have photos of from which to develop screens. The new direction will complement and not supplant my current way of working, involving similar motivation and abstracted content and imagery that is ultimately narrative-based.’
Culture and Identity
Grayson Perry
By tackling the matter of identity on prime-time television – and making his subjects a vase or a canvas along the way, Grayson Perry is brave and bold.
Some might say he’s on to a loser here. For deep thinkers, academics and ardent internet quackers, any discourse on “identity” can vacuum up vast hours of precious life. To bastardise Ginsberg entirely: I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by the furious fight over gender politics. Starving hungry through their inability to leave Twitter and reach their refrigerator, they drag themselves to the Twitter abuse monitors to report each other for racism, for Islamophobia, for homophobia, for transphobia or for sitting on the bloody fence.
Identity is a vast, vital, gnarly, and deeply subjective matter. It is fascinating to watch groups who one might think share strands of identity grow wild with anger towards each other over minor definitions. I wasn’t sure how Grayson, with his clay and paintbrushes, might cover the subject, keeping in mind that to a whole prime-time audience demographic, the fact that Jazz in episode one was born a woman and now identifies as a man would be wholly baffling. How does one delve deep but keep the show accessible?
One advantage Perry has is the innate ability to slip among people and lure normal folk to chat and explain themselves in terms everyone understands. I didn’t expect the television presenter Rylan Clark to be so movingly, unflinchingly transparent about his identity, which he believes is little more than a protective mask, but there is something about Perry which disarms, stuns and envelops his subjects. His interview manner on the wonderful, and I must say slightly stronger, documentary In the Best Possible Taste – in which he infiltrated Northern families to question them about their “going out” dressing-up routines – was gorgeously warm while incessantly clever. There’s something about the fact that Perry adores a beautiful dress and vibrant make-up when it suits him, yet has risen above gasps and phobias to nigh-on mainstream acceptance, which draws admissions of inner “oddness” from all he meets. We are all odd. We all, when prodded, could reveal examples of our strangeness or our silly, fragile egos. Perry is the perfect foil to a person trying to pinpoint who they really are.
Chuck Close
Chuck Close is associated with the style of painting called Photorealism or Superrealism. In this style, artists in the early 1970s created a link between representational systems of painting and photography. Photorealism developed as a reaction to the detachment of Minimalism and conceptual art, which did not depict representational images. Photorealists frequently used a grid technique to enlarge a photograph and reduce each square to formal elements of design. Each grid was its own little work of art. Many of the Photorealists used the airbrush technique.
Big Self-Portrait, in black and white, was the first of Close’s mural-sized works painted from photographs. This painting took four months to complete. To make this work, Close took several photographs of himself in which his head and neck filled the frame. From these he selected one of the images and made two 11 x 14-inch enlargements. On one of the photographs he drew a grid, then lettered and numbered each square. Using both the gridded and ungridded photographs, he carefully transferred the photographic image square by square onto a large canvas measuring 107 1/2 x 83 1/2 inches. He used acrylic paint and an airbrush to include every detail.
When Close was making his painting he was concerned with the visual elements–shapes, textures, volume, shadows, and highlights–of the photograph itself. He also was interested in how a photograph shows some parts of the image in focus, or sharp, and some out-of-focus, or blurry. In this portrait the tip of the cigarette and the hair on the back of his head were both out-of-focus in the photograph so he painted them that way in Big Self-Portrait.
Tracey Emin
‘Me, my Selfie and I’
When I was a child, there was a charity called Sunny Smiles. At school, around the age of eight or nine, we were given their tiny little books, containing hundreds of images of orphaned children. The idea was each page could be torn out and sold for a penny. All the money was then sent to orphanages around the UK. The sad thing was that all the cute babies and toddlers would sell in a flash. Then we were left with the not-so-attractive older unwanted children. The strange thing for me, even though I knew I wasn’t adopted, was that on first handling a Sunny Smiles book, I would pour through every page looking for a photo of myself. A mad thing to do, as I had grown up with images of myself: as a baby; with my twin brother; being held in my mother’s arms; being pushed in a giant double pram; sitting on a beach on Turkey’s Black Sea coast (a family photo of us surrounded by Turkish wrestlers).
Up until the age of four, I had a weird little princess look about me. Long golden curly hair, white gloves, handbag and ankle socks. Posing for the photographer looking straight into the lens. Giant almond-shaped eyes. Miniature button turned-up nose. Sad pouty turned-down lips. Never ever a smile. I saw all these images of myself and other family members in my mum’s photo album. There was only one album. It had a romantic cover of two lovers walking into a palm tree sunset. The album didn’t just have straightforward photos. She had cut some figures so they would be floating or just suspended on the page. The album went from the late 1950s with her husband Frank Cashing; my elder brother Alan and their life in west Africa; my mum travelling with my father by road through Turkey in the 1960s; and finally, our strange dysfunctional life in Margate in the 1970s.
And after that, there are hardly any photos – apart from the ones my brother and I took ourselves with our little camera, and the obligatory school photos taken every year, where I look strange (a giant smile but unhappy behind my eyes). There are hardly any photos of family occasions or events. This is because we never really existed like a family. I grew up with a strange extended family of people coming and going. My mum worked from 7am to 9pm. My father lived with his new wife, and we rarely saw him. After the age of seven, moments captured on camera were few and far between. There was no responsible witness. The eye behind the camera just wasn’t there. So there are massive gaps in the documentation of my childhood. This would explain why so much of my work relates to memories of my early years. A need to clarify and confirm events. Not all palatable. I did not grow up with any images of the family that marked time.
I love the photo booth. Photo booth photos were how I marked time. From the age of 10 to my 30s, I have documented my mood and face alone in the photo booth. When I was 13, my purse went missing at school. Inside were maybe 50 strips of photo booth photos. I found my purse some time later. I then found all my photos in a pile in the corner of the playground, ripped into tiny pieces. I knew then how bad this was, not because they were my photos, but because it was all I had to prove to myself who I had been and how I appeared. They were my identity. The memory of my own existence. And someone had destroyed them.
Somehow, since my teenage years, so much more has been documented. At 17, I even tried to emulate my mother’s exotic photo album, with floating cut-outs of myself and friends, suspended in time. Now, in my mind, both these albums collide into one. I feel my book is similar to those albums – a document of the passing of time. An invisible line held by the hand of a ghost, moving from one world to the next. I think when I’m old, I’m really, really going to like this book even more.
Banksy
Banksy is the pseudonym of a “guerrilla” street artist known for his controversial, and often politically themed, stenciled pieces.
Banksy’s artwork is characterized by striking images, often combined with slogans. His work often engages political themes, satirically critiquing war, capitalism, hypocrisy and greed. Common subjects include rats, apes, policemen, members of the royal family, and children. In addition to his two-dimensional work, Banksy is known for his installation artwork. One of the most celebrated of these pieces, which featured a live elephant painted with a Victorian wallpaper pattern, sparked controversy among animal rights activists.
Other pieces have drawn attention for their edgy themes or the boldness of their execution. Banksy’s work on the West Bank barrier, between Israel and Palestine, received significant media attention in 2005. He is also known for his use of copyrighted material and subversion of classic images. An example of this is Banksy’s version of Monet’s famous series of water lilies paintings, adapted by Banksy to include drifting trash and debris.
Banksy’s worldwide fame has transformed his artwork from acts of vandalism to sought-after high art pieces. Journalist Max Foster has referred to the rising prices of graffiti as street art as “the Banksy effect.” Interest in Banksy escalated with the release of the 2010 documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop. The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was nominated for an Academy Award.
In October 2013, Banksy took to the streets of New York City. There he pledged to create a new piece of art for each day of his residency. As he explained to the Village Voice, “The plan is to live here, react to things, see the sights—and paint on them. Some of it will be pretty elaborate, and some will just be a scrawl on a toilet wall.” During that month, he also sold some of his works on the street for $60 a piece, well below the market value for his art.
The Dinner Party – Judy Chicago
Nan Goulding
The Gorilla Girls
Richard Billingham
Sam Taylor Wood – David Beckham Sleeping
Sensation Exhibition
Censorship
Put a paragraph of my thoughts on censorship here
Eric Fischl
Although our primary focus in this class is the literature of 9/11, one of the particularly interesting and complex issues that arose in the wake of the tragedy was the public’s response to visual art, particularly “public art.” Such works — those that are situated in a public place where the work might be encountered by accident rather than intention — are often regarded in quite a different way than works in an art museum or gallery.
“In the aftermath of 9/11,” Robin Cembalist wrote last year in ARTNews, “it quickly became clear that art about or at Ground Zero was perceived by many as subject to a vetting process by constituencies connected to the attacks—and that stated priorities of patriotism, as well as the moral rights of victims and their families, trumped freedom of expression.” Above is an example of a work that received such scrutiny: Eric Fischl‘s Tumbling Woman, which was displayed in September of 2002 in the lower concourse of Rockefeller Center but was met with criticism for its depiction, as the Associated Press reported, of “a naked woman with her arms and legs flailing above her head, as if in a backward somersault.” The sculpture was, the AP report continued, “abruptly draped in cloth and surrounded by a curtain wall” and then removed. A spokeswoman for Rockefeller Center apologized, saying that she was sorry “if anyone was upset or offended by the display of this sculpture,” and Eric Fischl issued a statement as well. “The sculpture was not meant to hurt anybody,” the statement said. “It was a sincere expression of deepest sympathy for the vulnerability of the human condition. Both specifically towards the victims of Sept. 11 and towards humanity in general.”
Pablo Picasso
Probably Picasso’s most famous work, Guernica is certainly the his most powerful political statement, painted as an immediate reaction to the Nazi’s devastating casual bombing practice on the Basque town of Guernica during Spanish Civil War.
Guernica shows the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals, particularly innocent civilians. This work has gained a monumental status, becoming a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war, an anti-war symbol, and an embodiment of peace. On completion Guernica was displayed around the world in a brief tour, becoming famous and widely acclaimed. This tour helped bring the Spanish Civil War to the world’s attention.
This work is seen as an amalgmation of pastoral and epic styles. The discarding of color intensifis the drama, producing a reportage quality as in a photographic record. Guernica is blue, black and white, 3.5 metre (11 ft) tall and 7.8 metre (25.6 ft) wide, a mural-size canvas painted in oil. This painting can be seen in the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid.
Interpretations of Guernica vary widely and contradict one another. This extends, for example, to the mural’s two dominant elements: the bull and the horse. Art historian Patricia Failing said, “The bull and the horse are important characters in Spanish culture. Picasso himself certainly used these characters to play many different roles over time. This has made the task of interpreting the specific meaning of the bull and the horse very tough. Their relationship is a kind of ballet that was conceived in a variety of ways throughout Picasso’s career.”
Some critics warn against trusting the polital message in Guernica. For instance the rampaging bull, a major motif of destruction here, has previouse figured, whether as a bull or Minotaur, as Picasso’ ego. However, in this instance the bull probably represents the onslaught of Fascism. Picasso said it meant brutality and darkness, presumably reminiscent of his prophetic. He also stated that the horse represented the people of Guernica.
Richard Price
The room is dark red and womb like. On one wall hangs a photograph, fairly small, surrounded by a wide, white mount inside a tacky gilt frame. You have to get close to really see the image. This is where the complications begin.
Head to one side, the model stares back at the viewer. It is a knowing, adult look, though the naked body appears much younger, as if it is a montage.
An uncomfortable image in all sorts of ways, as Richard Prince realised when he first presented it in an otherwise empty gallery in New York in 1983. He borrowed the title, Spiritual America, from a 1923 photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, depicting the nether regions of a gelded workhorse. The disjunction between the images and the title they share is extremely powerful.
Throughout his career Prince has borrowed images, from Marlboro Man ads to New Yorker cartoons. It would be too simple to say he is commenting on the American psyche; in fact, he leaves much of the commentary to us.
If Spiritual America is a comment on the commodification and premature sexualisation of Brooke Shields, who was complicit in turning her into a 10-year-old sex object? Not Prince. That had happened almost a decade before he re-used the image.
There is something horrible about the photo. I feel uncomfortable.
Prince compounds our unease by not providing a hand-wringing commentary.
If doubt remains about whether this is a comment and corrective, or a symptom of social malaise, it is clear Prince took responsibility when he borrowed Gary Gross’s photo, and knew exactly what he was doing.
Grayson Perry
Marcus Harvey – Mira Hindley
Chapman Brothers
Tierney Gearon
Land Art and ideology
Chris Drury
I am an environmental artist, making site specific nature based sculpture, often referred to as Land Art or Art in Nature. I also work in art and Science. I make installations inside and make works on paper, works with maps, digital and video art, and works with mushrooms.
My work makes connections between different phenomena in the world, specifically between Nature and Culture, Inner and Outer and Microcosm and Macrocosm. To this end I collaborate with scientists and technicians from a broad spectrum of disciplines and use whatever visual means, technologies and materials best suit the situation.
Richard Long
Richard Long is most famously known for documenting his journeys from epic solitary walks through photography, maps and text.
My art is about working in the wide world,
wherever, on the surface of the earth.
My work is not urban, nor is it romantic.
It is the laying down of modern ideas
in the only practical places to take them.
Milton Becerra
Marxist analysts of culture, as well as sociologists, have always struggled with the problem of how to explain the social nature of art without making art into an appendage to ideology, that is an expression of class interests. Most Marxist art historians agree that reflection theory, i.e. artistic works a reproduction of the norms and values of a social group – such as the Boston elite for example – is a rather crude way of defining the relations between artistic production and social surroundings. Reviewing various Marxist approaches Janet Wolff tries to find a more subtle approach.
Wolff asserts that all art is ideological, in a broad sense, in that it is socially and historically situated, related to people’s material conditions.
“Works of art (…) are not closed, self-contained and transcendent entities, but are the product of specific historical practices on the part of identifiable social groups in given conditions, and therefore bear the imprint of the ideas, values and conditions of existence of those groups, and their representatives in particular artists” (49).
Ai Wei Wei
Michael Rakowitz
Art activism’s attempts to combine art and social action come under attack from both of these opposite perspectives—traditionally artistic and traditionally activist ones. Traditional artistic criticism operates according to the notion of artistic quality. From this point of view, art activism seems to be artistically not good enough: many critics say that the morally good intentions of art activism substitute for artistic quality. This kind of criticism is, actually, easy to reject. In the twentieth century, all criteria of quality and taste were abolished by different artistic avant-gardes—so, today, it makes no sense to appeal to them again. However, criticism from the other side is much more serious and demands an elaborate critical answer. This criticism mainly operates according to notions of “aestheticization” and “spectacularity.” A certain intellectual tradition rooted in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord states that the aestheticization and spectacularization of politics, including political protest, are bad things because they divert attention away from the practical goals of political protest and towards its aesthetic form. And this means that art cannot be used as a medium of a genuine political protest—because the use of art for political action necessarily aestheticizes this action, turns this action into a spectacle and, thus, neutralizes the practical effect of this action. As an example, it is enough to remember the recent Berlin Biennale curated by Artur Żmijewski and the criticism it provoked—described as it was by different ideological sides as a zoo for art activists.
In other words, the art component of art activism is often seen as the main reason why this activism fails on the pragmatic, practical level—on the level of its immediate social and political impact. In our society, art is traditionally seen as useless. So it seems that this quasi-ontological uselessness infects art activism and dooms it to failure. At the same time, art is seen as ultimately celebrating and aestheticizing the status quo—and thus undermining our will to change it. So the way out of this situation is seen mostly in the abandoning of art altogether—as if social and political activism never fails as long as it is not infected by art viruses.
,
Martin Kippernbergen
The critique of art as useless and therefore morally and politically bad is not a new one. In the past, this critique compelled many artists to abandon art altogether—and to start to practice something more useful, something morally and politically correct. However, contemporary art activism does not rush to abandon art but, rather, tries to make art itself useful. This is a historically new position. Its newness is often relativized by a reference to the phenomenon of the Russian avant-garde, which famously wanted to change the world by artistic means. It seems to me that this reference is incorrect. The Russian avant-garde artists of the 1920s believed in their ability to change the world because at the time their artistic practice was supported by Soviet authorities. They knew that power was on their side. And they hoped that this support would not decrease with time. Contemporary art activism has, on the contrary, no reason to believe in external political support. Art activism acts on its own—relying only on its own networks and on weak and uncertain financial support from progressively minded art institutions. This is, as I said, a new situation—and it calls for new theoretical reflection.
The central goal of this theoretical reflection is this: to analyse the precise meaning and political function of the word “aestheticization.” I believe that such an analysis allows us to clarify the discussions around art activism and the place where it stands and acts. I would argue that today, the word “aestheticization” is mostly used in a confused and confusing way. When one speaks about “aestheticization,” one often refers to different and even opposing theoretical and political operations. The reason for this state of confusion is the division of contemporary art practice itself into two different domains: art in the proper sense of the word, and design. In these two domains, aestheticization means two different things. Let us analyse this difference.
Jenny Holser
Jenny Holzer is an American Neo-conceptual art artist who utilizes the rhetoric of modern information systems so as to address the politics of discourse. In 1989 she became the first female artist to represent the United States at Italy’s Venice Biennale. Holzer lives and works in Hoosick Falls, New York.
The Body
The human body is central to how we understand facets of identity such as gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. People alter their bodies, hair, and clothing to align with or rebel against social conventions and to express messages to others around them. Many artists explore gender through representations of the body and by using their own bodies in their creative process.
Lorna Simpson
Lorna Simpson is an African-American artist and photographer who made her name in the 1980s and 1990s with artworks such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal. Born in Brooklyn, New York, she attended the High School of Art and Design and the School of Visual Arts in New York, and then the University of California, San Diego. Her earliest work was as a documentary street photographer, before moving her observations of race and society into her studio. Simpson began exploring ethnic divisions in the 1980s era of multiculturalism. Her most notable works combine words with photographs of anonymously cropped images of women and occasionally men. While the pictures may appear straightforward, the text will often confront the viewer with the underlying racism still found in American culture.
John Coplans
John Rivers Coplans was a British artist, art writer, curator, and museum director. A veteran of World War II and a photographer, he emigrated to the United States in 1960 and had many exhibitions in Europe and North America. He was on the founding editorial staff of Artforum from 1962 to 1971, and was Editor-in-Chief from 1972 to 1977.
The Body
Vadim Stein
Given his background, it’s not that surprising that Vadim Stein’s photography has a sculptural–even monumental–look to it. Born in Kiev, Ukraine, Stein studied sculpture restoration. He also worked as an actor and lighting designer, fields which play a significant role in his sculptures, in which carefully chosen lighting helps create the folds and shapes of the the people he photographs, often in staged and dramatic positions.
Emma Fay
The Marvels of Nature series explores some of the vast animal kingdom looking at creatures with remarkable evolutionary traits and combines them with contortionists who push themselves to their physical and perhaps evolutionary limits as well
“The animal body has reached the limits of its evolutionary ability” ~ Terrance Mckenna
Heather Hansen
Heather Hansen, a contemporary performance artist and dancer in New Orleans, has come up with an elegant and creative way to capture her dancing motions on paper – she gets up-close and personal with a big piece of paper and some charcoal.
For the performance aspect of her work, Hansen invites observers to watch her dance on a huge piece of paper. As she dances and prostates herself on the piece of paper, she marks it with charcoal, gradually building a beautiful diagram of her seemingly ritual dance. She has also created a video called “Emptied Gestures” that features studio recordings of her graceful and dramatic work for those that cannot see it live.
Ji Yeo
Ji Yeo is a New York based artist who pursued her master’s degree in photography at Rhode Island School of Design, as a President’s Scholarship and Henry Wolf Scholarship awardee. She graduated Seoul National University in Seoul, Korea in Visual Communication Design and achieved certification program at International Center of Photography in New York. Her work is held in collections at The Smithsonian and Rhode Island School of Design Museum. Her work has been shown in International Center of Photography in New York, National Portrait Gallery in London, ClampArt in New York, Baxter CCNY in New York, Houston Center for Photography in Houston, Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Glasgow, Space 22 in Seoul. Her work has been featured worldwide; Guardian UK, BBC Brazil, BBC Worldwide, NPR, ABC Australia, Huffington Post, Daily Mail, National Geographic, LA Times, Daily Mail UK, Wired Magazine, Dazed Digital, Marie Claire Brazil, Esquire Russia, Blink Magazine, Von Magazine International, MBC(Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation), KBS(Korean Broadcasting System), SBS(Seoul Broadcasting System), and many others.
Kate MacDowell
We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words–to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. – C.S. Lewis.
In my work this romantic ideal of union with the natural world conflicts with our contemporary impact on the environment. These pieces are in part responses to environmental stressors including climate change, toxic pollution, and gm crops. They also borrow from myth, art history, figures of speech and other cultural touchstones. In some pieces aspects of the human figure stand-in for ourselves and act out sometimes harrowing, sometimes humorous transformations which illustrate our current relationship with the natural world. In others, animals take on anthropomorphic qualities when they are given safety equipment to attempt to protect them from man-made environmental threats. In each case the union between man and nature is shown to be one of friction and discomfort with the disturbing implication that we too are vulnerable to being victimized by our destructive practices.
I hand sculpt each piece out of porcelain, often building a solid form and then hollowing it out. Smaller forms are built petal by petal, branch by branch and allow me the chance to get immersed in close study of the structure of a blossom or a bee. I chose porcelain for its luminous and ghostly qualities as well as its strength and ability to show fine texture. It highlights both the impermanence and fragility of natural forms in a dying ecosystem, while paradoxically, being a material that can last for thousands of years and is historically associated with high status and value. I see each piece as a captured and preserved specimen, a painstaking record of endangered natural forms and a commentary on our own culpability.
Colour
Niki Pilkington
Niki Pilkington is a Welsh illustrator based in New York producing highly charged, trend inspired fashion portraits, gaining her a client list which includes TOPSHOP, Ted Baker, Sir Paul McCartney & MTV. Specialising in portrait commissions from around the world Niki Pilkington’s playful yet highly detailed style feeds off the everyday people & places she sees, focusing mainly on fashion and the people who wear it.
Widely known for combining her love of phrases, idioms and beautiful quotes into her pieces (often in her mother tongue – Welsh) she tells a multi-layered story through each piece. Whether in clear view, hidden or disguised, the illustrations and their meanings are created to take you on a fairy-tale journey.
Mark Rothko
One of the preeminent artists of his generation, Mark Rothko is closely identified with the New York School, a circle of painters that emerged during the 1940s as a new collective voice in American art. During a career that spanned five decades, he created a new and impassioned form of abstract painting.
Rothko’s work is characterized by rigorous attention to formal elements such as color, shape, balance, depth, composition, and scale; yet, he refused to consider his paintings solely in these terms. He explained: It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
Joan Salo
Joan Saló is an emerging artist from Spain, who earned a BFA from the University of Barcelona and currently splits his time working and living between Barcelona and Berlin. He has been shortlisted for an extensive international project, “100 Painters of Tomorrow,” which will be published in book form by Thames & Hudson in 2014.
Joan’s works are unconventional in his use of ink on the canvas, rather than the more traditional medium of paint. This choice of medium allows him to craft abstract pieces composed of brightly colored sharp lines and geometric patterns. His most recent body of work focuses on fleeting time and the structures of abstract meaning. He has exhibited extensively in both group and solo shows throughout Spain, Italy, New York, and London, and was a finalist at SWAB, Barcelona’s annual international art fair.
Marcel Christ
Marcel Christ’s approach to still-life photography is truly unique, making his images some of the most recognizable in the industry. Having studied both chemical engineering and photography, Christ blends these two interests to achieve his powerfully dynamic work. He took his first photographs – a black and white series – while traveling in Prague and from that moment on he switched his studies from chemical engineering to a major in photography at the Academy in Amsterdam. After graduating with honors, Marcel kept his focus on that he is truly passionate about: still life photography with a twist of chemistry.
His imagery is the outcome of his interest in the unpredictability and surprise of the ingredients he chooses to work with, but through meticulously controlling the studio environment, he finds ways to give life to otherwise inanimate objects, immortalizing a singular moment in time.
“Nothing is accidental – I push the boundaries of the special effects and photographic techniques I’m using to create controlled coincidence.”
There is nothing still in his still-life work. Everything moves, jumps and flies, like a memorable single-frame film.
KwangHo Shin
Inspired by the exuberantly painted compositions of the Action Painters group of Abstract Expressionists, KwangHo Shin works with oil paint and charcoal on canvas to produce portraits that merge inner states with outer appearances. Often working at a grand scale, he creates sketchy, vigorously executed images of human figures, heads, and faces using a multi-coloured patchwork of brushstrokes. In some compositions, his brushstrokes obscure his figures, whose contours can just be made out amid the pigment. In others, faces and forms are more clearly articulated. The conglomerations of marks make such forms appear almost sculptural. By replacing flesh and features with thick strokes of pigment, Shin reflects the tumult of thoughts and emotions that lay concealed below our surfaces and that fundamentally shape our identities.
Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler was among the most influential artists of the mid-twentieth century. Introduced early in her career to major artists such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline (and Robert Motherwell, whom she later married), Frankenthaler was influenced by Abstract Expressionist painting practices, but developed her own distinct approach to the style. She invented the “soak-stain” technique, in which she poured turpentine-thinned paint onto canvas, producing luminous color washes that appeared to merge with the canvas and deny any hint of three-dimensional illusionism. Her breakthrough gave rise to the movement promoted by the influential art critic Clement Greenberg as the “next big thing” in American art: Color Field painting, marked by airy compositions that celebrated the joys of pure color and gave an entirely new look and feel to the surface of the canvas. Later in her career, Frankenthaler turned her attention to other artistic media, most notably woodcuts, in which she achieved the quality of painting, in some cases replicating the effects of her soak-stain process.
Memory
What do we remember and why? What images of our history do we share and how were they created?
Lyndall Watson
Heavily referencing what has come before in process, yet imaging what is still to come in product, a memory of a memory explores the concept of weave as a contemporary craft. Fabric possesses an undeniable physical presence regardless of whether it is purely hand-made or technology-assisted. Similar to the way in which modern memory relies more and more on links to knowledge than simply memory itself, fabric can provide links to the history of crafts past. The craftsmanship of weave becomes an integral part of the design process. Like a memory of a memory, its influence lingers.
Blake Morrison
I tell myself I’ve never owned a camera, but that doesn’t square with a memory of being given one as a birthday present in my teens, and of a losing struggle with light, shade, aperture, distance, angle, focus. Cameras were more demanding then, and I hadn’t the patience. Other people did it better.
Not least, to begin with, my father. A stranger looking through my childhood photos might deduce a) that we were perpetually on holiday in north Wales, and b) that my father never accompanied us. But he wasn’t absent, merely hiding behind the lens of his Nikon. Most of his snaps were taken without us noticing. But a few were trick photos, such as the one with my mother, sister and me arranged above each other on a steep hill, to look like acrobats standing on each other’s shoulders.
Despite their playfulness, my chief feeling when I look at those photos is sadness: that most of the people in them are now dead; that the times they commemorate can’t be retrieved. It’s sentimental, I know: time passes; the moment goes even as the shutter clicks. But those photographic images are a source of sorrow, whereas the images in my head are not. Larkin has a poem about how memories “link us to our losses” by showing us “what we have as it once was,/Blindingly undiminished, just as though/By acting differently we could have kept it so.” That’s the effect old photos have on me. Worse, though, would be to have none at all. My favourite photo is one of my mother in pigtails as a child, an image unknown to me until a few years ago, after her death, when a cousin sent it. The earliest image I had of her till then was a graduation photo, taken in Dublin. There were none of her large family, either. I felt shut out from her past, and the lack of pictures was part of the reason.
My father’s childhood was heavily documented by comparison, and he was scrupulous about documenting his children’s, first in tiny black-and-white prints, then with colour transparencies, which were looked at through a viewfinder or (at the annual Christmas slide show put on for my long-suffering cousins) on a white screen. He also had a cine camera, and I sometimes feel guilty that my own children, unlike me, have no moving images of themselves to look back on. Why my wife and I never bought a video camera, I don’t know (laziness? expense?). But she at least has been diligent down the years, with box cameras, Polaroids, disposables and (most recently) a digital Canon. The results have been pasted in albums and dated, and every so often I get them out to see what we got up to. These, too, make me tearful.
I now have a photo folder on my computer, for emailed pictures sent by friends and family. More to the point, I own an iPhone and have begun to take snaps. My shots from the Shard at night were disappointing. And it’s too late for me to compete with the poet Hugo Williams, who has been taking his camera to parties and book launches for decades and who must by now have one of the great literary photo-archives of our time. But tentatively, decades too late, I have made a start.
Steve Pyke
I grew up in Leicester in the 60s. The first time I became enthralled by photography was when my mum got a subscription to Life magazine: the Apollo 8 cover from December 1968 was particularly dear to me. I never wanted to be a train driver, always an astronaut. I went on to work for Life, and my astronauts series ended up in its pages in 1999/2000, so I came full circle.
I’ve been photographing my children since they were born. I don’t photograph them every day now, but every few months: Jack’s now 26 and Duncan’s 21. It came about in the 1980s: I was making Super 8 films and working on a film with Peter Greenaway that photographed things over time. David Attenborough did it first, with a dead mouse that eventually had maggots in it. I thought: what an amazing thing to do with a human being, film someone on Super 8 from birth to death. When Jack was 20 minutes old, I made my first image of him, with the idea that the death at the end of the cycle would be mine, not his. I also photograph my daughter Lola Rae, who is six. She plays to the camera and is more aware of herself. Now I’ve started to scan in the photos to make stop-motion animations.
I store all my images in print form, but also as digital scans on hard drives. I borrow my girlfriend’s digital camera and iPhone sometimes, but I haven’t ever bought one because I shoot with my Rolleiflex. It’s difficult to do it any other way now. I’ve also been collecting photography prints since 1980, and have an eclectic collection: a Brassai, an Enrique Mezenides, a Diane Arbus, an Eggleston, and a couple of Nan Goldins, because I was a part of that time and place here in New York. I have a wall of photographs in my studio, for inspiration and influence, that I change sporadically (pictured at the top of the article). The rest of the walls are covered with my own portraits of people like Joe Strummer, John Waters, Robert Johnson.
I’ve shot millions of images so it’s hard to pull something out that’s symbolic. But there is a photo that means a lot to me hanging in my studio. I photographed it on the first roll I ever took at Billy Smart’s Circus in Battersea in the early 1980s. Days before, a friend had taken me to a pub on Tottenham Court Road. He had a Pentax and he showed me how to use it, then gave me two rolls of film. I photographed circuses, fairgrounds, bars. The image is a woman lying down, balancing a table on her feet. It’s her job, but there’s a whole sexuality aspect to it, too. Photography and surrealism are so linked. It’s a crazy way to earn a living, on your back like that.
Louise Wilson
I got into photography at art college. I borrowed a 35mm camera, and would go in the dark room for hours, practising how to load the neg on to the spools.
But I only bought my first camera later: a Mamiya C330 with a twin lens. My sister Jane and I would make our own large-scale prints, about five metres wide, with an enlarger that we had to tilt on its side to make the projections big enough. We would bring garden troughs into the dark room, roll these massive sheets in water, then in developer, then fix them, before running each sheet under water for hours. We got weekend access and I would stay in there till all hours.
I use a digital camera, and an iPhone: you can do little effects, and I love apps where you can shoot grainy, black-and-white movies. We did a big number for the ICA in London, in 2011, where we shot a recreation of the Odessa step scene from Battleship Potemkin on my iPhone. The idea was that it looked really lo-fi, that we just captured it on the fly with loads of volunteers, which we did. The curator Norman Rosenthal was there that day, which was serendipitous: he played the wailing woman that gets shot, and drag queen Jonny Woo was the mother pushing the pram down the steps.
It’s interesting to see how playful my nephew is at six, shooting his own movies. The next generation have a complete familiarity with documenting themselves and their surroundings in a way we just didn’t. Photography has entered such a democratic sphere now, with the digital realm open to all. Younger people edit their own movies, set up their own events, and there’s a real confidence – it’s totally entered their language. I often take him to exhibitions and he loves sitting cross-legged on the floor and watching video art; his generation have such an empathy with that kind of work.
My father had a dark room before Jane and I were born. A few years ago, we found a really interesting image he’d taken and turned it into a sculpture (pictured above). It’s a picture of my mother and a friend of hers bending down to pick up shells on the beach, looking very 60s. Their posture mirrors each other, and there’s a man in the middle holding a camera, and these beautiful long shadows from a low, late afternoon sun. Jane and I put his photo behind a set of old-fashioned weighing scales. The scales reflect the balance, the way the women seem on the same plain. Today, it’s in my house with a lampshade on top of it. I’ve never talked to my dad about his photography, but this curious construction always reminds me of him, and where my love of the dark room came from.
Hanna Greenhalgh – Presentation
AO Art Observed? 