The Venice Biennial is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years (in odd years) in Venice. The formal Biennale is based in the Giardini Park, which houses 30 permanent national pavilions. However Palmer focused on three Aperto events, i.e. an exhibition that coincides with the Biennial and one that is usually put together by artists of a national origin that does not feature in one of the permanent national pavilions.
Thursday 29 November 2007
Seminar with Roger Palmer
The Venice Biennial is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years (in odd years) in Venice. The formal Biennale is based in the Giardini Park, which houses 30 permanent national pavilions. However Palmer focused on three Aperto events, i.e. an exhibition that coincides with the Biennial and one that is usually put together by artists of a national origin that does not feature in one of the permanent national pavilions.
Paul O'Neill
-Working towards a PHD in Curatorial History from Middlesex Uni- this course was first created in 1987, so still relatively new
- Curatorial anthologies have been a major publication since '96- O'Neill's favourite being 'Thinking About Exhibitions'
- 4 Considerations when approaching Curatorial Practice:
1) How useful can I be?
2) Is there a system or a form of enablement that I can use as a creative strategy to produce an opening out rather than a closing down of my own 'usefulness' in the given context?
3) How can I incorporate failure as part of the project?
4) How can I use 'lots of people'?
- Artist/curator- skill needed when thinking about juxtaposing one's work- helps the practitioner to think about spacing, lighting, walls and spaciality
- Artworks already exist in the world- idea behind his exhibition, 'All That Is Solid'- as artists were invited to add artistic epherma to the gallery space
- O'Neill believes the typical white cube gallery is out-dated and restrictive- believes curating should be 'an invisible gesture'- give up autonomy
- Curating helps the work interact with the viewer and subtly imposes a route for the visual spectator
- His conclusion, that the exhibition space was always divided into the background, middle area and foreground, was quite interesting. The background not allowing interaction with the spectator- just offering a visual aesthetic. The middle area offered partial interaction, whilst the foreground interacts fully with the viewer- something I had not considered...
Sunday 25 November 2007
Material Experimentations
Notes from 'Contemporary Installations'; Kate Davidson and Michael Desmond
- Era of fluid identities, mobile lifestyles and undefined relationships- installations are 'islands of refuge'
- Connect with world through physical materiality- can be beyond visual- sound/ smell/ spatial
- Self-contained spaces- exclude the extraneous, reinforcing a singular and insular aesthetic
- Art of connections- unity of the components
- Suffer from a loss of the real- long for 'first-hand accounts and for contact with primal sources of information' Jean Baudrillard, 'Simulations', New York: Semistexte, 1983
Geography of Installations:
-Sets up borders to create physically separate spaces
- By mapping a place- establishes as environment that exists as a work of art
- Elements are choreographed- making movements within a complex and varied site
- Haphazard accumulations of disparate data
- Follows a tradition of walking and viewing- origin in Flanerie- the nineteenth century practice of promenading
- Emergence of exhibition halls, department stores and museums- encourages the pedestrian's mobilised gaze
- Advent of cinema, television and computers, non-commercial transactions increasingly depend of the immobility of the audience
- 'The gaze becomes more virtually mobile, [while] the spectator becomes more physically immobile'- Anne Friedberg, 'Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern', Los Angeles: University of California, 1993
Time in Installations:
- Allows the artist to compress and manipulate the time the viewer spends within a work
- 'The 'flow' of life as a primary inner experience [is, in reality] a succession of states that melt into one another to form an indivisible process'- Paul Edwards, 'The Encyclopedia of Philosophy', New York: Crowell, Collier and Macmillan, Inc. 1967
- Artist's capacity to evoke memory, displacing the past into the present
- Christian Boltanski's installations attempt to create a hiatus, momentarily suspending the audience's belief that they are in an art museum- his works are more reminiscent of disused storage areas than the pristine white cube characteristic of modern museum spaces
- Materials can be selected for their appearance of embodying time- Rosalie Gascoigne's materials- weathered artefacts- prompt a Proustian evocation of their modest life and the passage of time
Theatre of Installations:
- Illusion of reality in theatre and cinema depends upon the convention of a single-point perspective- the view of the immobile spectator
- Installations- offer a multiple of viewpoints for the 'mobilised gaze' and offers palpable references to the material world
- Senses- surround and enhance the encounter of the work
- An arena for personal performance- the viewer is implicated within the work of art as a participant
- The 3-D space- visitors acutely aware of their bodies
- Sensation is the data of immediate awareness- the audience 'acts a [both the] catalyst and the receptor' Andrew Benjamin, 'Installation Art', London: Art and Design, 1993
- Frequent use of 'found' objects- apparent that the objects are props, choreographed for effect, placed for seduction
- Installations themselves are displaced objects, never able to join the 'real world'
Space of Installations:
- Fundamental to installation art
- El Lissitzky, 'Proun Environment', 1923: 'Space is the equivalent of a physical material with properties such as wood and stone'- considered to have form
Materials of Installations:
- Enormously varied
- Hybrid of art forms- little respect for established conventions- strength derives from its novelty and synaesthetic effect
- Objects- unaltered from ordinary existence, preserve an aspect of reality- have the capacity to intrude and provoke with their presence
- Familiar, domestic items- never innocent or neutral- remain recognisable and retain their character
- Collage of meanings- provides a rich, synthetic field of relationships- generating allegory and metaphors
- Metaphoric process- combination of object and context diverts original meaning and intent- creates a dynamic between literal and implied meaning
Site of Installation:
- Not permanent or site-specific- destined to be 'works in progress'
- Planning and preparation must be re-negotiated for each new site- enable's the work's renewal - Location of an installation defines its meaning- context of the museums to evoke institutions per se.
Saturday 24 November 2007
Simon Callery
'Wool- A Fabulous Fibre'- The 'Behind the Seams' Series
-the wool industry in Australia has a value of £3, 000, 000, 000 a year- its in Australia's top five exports
- the shearing process accounts for 1/5 of the cost of wool production- on average a shearer can collect the fleece from 150 sheep every eight hour working day
- the bulk of wool comes from the sheep's back- that specific cut is called a 'long blow'
- the shed hands remove the tangled belly wool and the poor quality edgings of the wool, which is referred to as the 'skirting', on the grating table
- a Wool Classer assesses the fleece and classifies the wool according to its quality and the thickness of fibre (each fleece has over 100,000,000 fibres)
- the raw, greasy wool is packaged in bails and transported to a large holding warehouse
- exported through local buying agents, who price the wool according to the length and strength, the style of the clip and how well prepared the sheep's wool was (clean wool brings a high premium)
- most Australian wool goes to Italy, France, Japan, Germany and China. A sizable quantity also goes to the UK, America and Russia. There is a constant demand, due to growing populations in these countries and the fast turnover of fashion trends. The sale is subject to 'supply and demand' fluctuations
- three quarters of the exported wool is sold in an unprocessed state
- the quarter processed has to travel a large physical distance= high cost
2 main systems to process the wool fibre into yarn: the woollen system and the worsted system
The woollen system:
- uses coarser, shorter stapled wool, which is highly contaminated
- used to produce upholstery, bulky knitwear, carpets and tweeds
- used in Bradford
The worsted system:
- uses fine, long stapled wools, which has a low level of contamination
- used to produce fine, smooth suitings and fashion fabrics
- used in Leeds
- First process, Scouring- the raw wool is washed vigorously in water and hot detergent, which removes dirt, perspiration salts and vegetable matter from the wool- it also removes lanolin, the wool's natural grease, which is sold as a by-product
- the dirty water causes a lot of pollution concerns, as in a year it produces the same amount of waste water, as twenty-five thousand residents- nowadays most wool factories are forced to have their own sewer treatment system
- Second process, Carding- uses large blowers to dry the wool and then feds the wool into the carding machines, which uses large revolving drums with rollers and pairs of fine wire teeth, to shred the wool into a continuous slither/ web and lay the fibres roughly parallel to each other.
- this process also removes seeds which may have remained immersed in the wool, even after the scouring process
- Third process, Gilling- continues the carding process by aligning the fibres further using rollers and combs, and stretching the slithers into thinner hanks
- Fourth process, Combing- uses pinch rollers that thrust the fine slithers onto a revolving drum comb, which eliminates any fine or broken fibres. This process unifies the fibres and creates a slither of uniform thickness. These slithers are then wound into balls called 'tops', which are immersed into a chemical bath, which coats the fibres in shrink-proof resin. The fibres are then dyed in a boiling dye bath an hour later if needs be.
- Fifth process, Drawing- spins the tops into yarn for fabric production, by passing the tops through a drawing machine, which is set to adjust the fibre to a certain weight and thickness, ready for spinning. The drawing machine also twists the fibres adding strength to the yarn
- Sixth process, Spinning- completes the yarn process by spinning the yarn through a spinning frame, which twists the fibres, stretching and strengthening the yarn. The yarn is finally then spun, at high speed, around a rapidly turning bobbin. Two single spun yarns are combined to produce worsted yarns.
- The yarns are then packed for overseas mills, ready for domestic fabric and garments.
Knitting- Interlocks loops of one or more yarns
Weaving- Interlaces yarns at right angles. The warp is the name given to the length yarn and the yarn that travels across the material is called the weft. This process takes place on a loom, which produces a much finer and softer fabric than knitting. This fabric is usually used for suitings and quality apparel.
Thursday 22 November 2007
Oliver Richon
- Swiss artist that has been exhibiting for over twenty years
- Has always been fascinated by the page- Laurence Stern's first modernist work had a complete black page for pg. 61- alluded to an excess of writing 'a black page soaked in ink'
- Reminded him of photographic darkness- not meant to be read as text but you can do
- His work is not triggered by the image but by the allegorical reading- Platonic idea of imitation
- Multiplication of copies- 'mimesis'- Richon's realm of art
- Velasquez's painting- very allegorical- excess of signs to be deciphered- 'melancholic burden to show all the signs'
- Interested in how to paint or capture emptiness as a content
- Made a sign for 'Inventing', which commissioned him to create a design for a large billboard in America- His two signs read:
The unveiling of the presence of nothing and The concealment of the absence of nothing
- Follows his idea that photographic images always have an absence, something which is outside the image- the signs were therefore a commentary on advertising
- Richon's work also addresses the Still Life genre- a genre about closeness, that dispenses with people and landscape, and focuses solely on the close-up, a world of objects
- I thought his reasons for shying away from depicting the human figure were particularly accurate- 'humans still the show, everything then becomes an attribution to the human'
- Uses a direct image for inspiration- the table in a still life becomes organised as a microcosm
- The trompe l'oeil effect is used to destabilise the viewer
Saturday 17 November 2007
'The Art Fabric: Mainstream', Constantine Larson
'Cloth- wrapped, compressed, nonutilitarian, has played an early and important role in the twentieth century art concepts. Dadaist Man Ray wrapped an 'enigma', 'Enigma of Isidore Ducasse', 1920.
Christo Javacheff, 'The Museum of Modern Art Packaged', 1968.
'Soft Drainpipe - Blue (Cool) Version', Claes Oldenberg, 1967, Acrylic on canvas and steel.
The interest in cloth has extended to the use of compression, laundry elements for his environments and totem-like forms. Working directly with cloth and other 'non-art' materials, some artists have broken the barriers and changed the definition of what constitutes art. (Man Ray, Robert Rauschenberg, Eva Hesse, Sam Gillian, Colette.)
' Sans II', Eva Hesse,1968, Fiberglass and polyester resin.
Interest in dye and needle techniques stimulated the increased use of silk and, especially, cotton in the mid-70's. Fabric- usually fine counts of mill woven cotton- became a prime material. Dyed/ stuffed/ machine embroidered/ darned/ fabricated and woven.
A Few Artists whose work I was particularly inspired by:
Francoise Grossen, 'Metamorphosis 1.5', 1986, (braiding; manila rope); knots ropes using Chinese twists which emphasise the ply and the natural luster of the hard twisted, honed smooth sisal. Uses ropes which have a smilar gradations of colour, so create a strong aesthetic of colour and form. Grossen fixes the ropes into bisymmetrical and biomorphic forms, which are sculpted into freize-like forms.
'Metamorphosis I.5', Francoise Grossen, 1986, mixed media, 38" x 14''.
Ritzi and Peter Jacobi, 'Ohne Titel', 1974, (tapestry, drawing; goat hair, horse hair, paper); combines wrapped elements and tapestry together with charcoal drawing on great sheets of 'rice' paper. The combination is unified by the palette and image-especially the fibre-like drawing and drawing-like fringes.
Jolanta Owidzka, 'Leather Exercise', 1976, (weaving; hemp, leather, silk, linen); old industrial beltings of waxed leather recycled for a small hanging. To exploit tonal subleties within the leather surface, she wove the beltings through a spaced warp of hard polished linen. There is a strong aesthetic in the stiff, patinated leather of the discarded industrial beltings.
Madeleine Bosscher, '7 Banen', 1972, (knotted pile; polyethylene tubes); Bosscher knotted transparent plastic tubing into a woven ground, which creates the luminous relief. The precision of the sheared contours and the symmetry of the minimal forms, alongside the transparency of the polyethylene tubes, creates a really successful Minimal sculpture. I also liked her 'Small Squares' piece, which was tens of thousands of mill cotton squares wovem into the white-on-white hanging. The shadow lines and the matted thread ends produce a richly opaque texture. Bosscher's work relies on the collective impact of an object, which is systematically multiplied.
Magdalena Abakanowicz, 'Wheel and Rope', 1973; love the industrial nature of her sculpture and the mammoth scale, which seems to command the space its presented in. The sense of space is another key element in her work, which plays alongside voids and lighting. Out of all the artists featured in this book, I found her work to be the most thought-provoking, yet the understanding of the fibre's materiality is always at the forefront.
'Wheel and Rope', 1973, wood, burlap and hemp; Wheel: dia. 234 cm; 122 cm Ropes: lengths variable.
Sachiko Morino, 'An Air Sent from Switzerland', 1977, (knotting; cotton rope); Morino packages air in her many roped works; her hallmark is the void she contains. The object's main frame is made of rope, leaving the inside visibly hollow.
Sheila Hicks- Works with cloth and linen on a large scale. Often uses iridescent colours, though varies the thicknesses. Unlike the other fabric artists I have looked at so far, she works with several techniques in one piece, such as wrapping, hanging, stacking, braiding and weaving. Similarly to Abakanowicz, Hicks creates a suitable environment for her work;
'It will concern itself with the communication through the language of textiles, to conceive and to realise a certain nuber of practical and personal objects'.
'Linen Lean-To', Sheila Hicks, tapestry bas-relief, 1967–68.The artist conceived the work in 1967–68 after a winter trip to Normandy, France, where she saw houses with snow piled high on the roofs. She successfully re-creates the effect of this compelling sight with a totally unsuspected material.
Cynthia Schira, 'Seascape 1, 1975, (weft brocade/ cotton/ wool); The brocading elements are cotton tapes pre-dyed in a range of half-tone shades. Some of the tapes eccentrically weave in and out of the others- a technique that extends the weaver's range of expression. It also serves to tie down the very long weft floats.
'Four and Three', 1973, (weaving; aluminium/ linen); On a conventional handloom Schira wove flat aluminium strips through linen warps, then lulled the lower portions into cylindrical forms. The look of the slubby grey linen against the polished metal is very aesthetically pleasing, and ties in with the formal composition.
Friday 16 November 2007
Project Idea
I have put the research photos up once again around my studio space, so I can look for aesthetic forms that I would like to work with. I plan to start a Henry Moore way of sketching and morph the chosen forms together into some sort of minimalist sculpture...
For further inspiration and ideas, I have been reading a variety of art books, around the issues of craft, fabric art and soft sculpture, as I am looking to create a hard edged, perhaps fibreglass form, which I can then compose wool or cloth or thread around/ in/ through, as I loved how the flax-linen passed through the power loom system in Armley, or the how the bulkiness of the sheep's wool was converted to thin threads through the loom and weave machines.
Thursday 15 November 2007
Elly Clark
- graduated 9years ago, after beginning a Curating MA Course at the Royal Academy, only to switch to a Fine Art MA Course at Central St. Martins
- Very interested in research and practice/ video installations/ follows a mostly photographic practice/ inspired by modern day travel and communicability and how it affects space and relationships
- Her work also travels, thus ironically adding to the journey concepts within her work
- Clark's work was heavily informed by conceptual writing and literature. I was really interested by the David Rousset (1912-1997) extract she read, about how the French writer's diary was a recording of his wanderings around Paris as in these 'hours of solitude, he was his own master, what nature made him to be'.
- Clark's work reflected her enjoyment also in fluidity, as her art practice often had an unpredictable ending due to the methods she implemented
- 'Everything is fluid, I like to capture these notions of presence and absence'- therefore allowing her work to portray Clark's and her participant's mental and physical travel
-Her initial work was inspired by the internet, as Clark felt threatened by the ability to publish or find anything, the lack of personal space, the reduction in individuality etc.
'Broadway House Photo Project', 2002-3
- Lived in a large council estate in East London and wanted to gain a sense of her neighbours
- Those who agreed to participate in her project, she lent a camera to for a week
- Asked the participants to take a photo of the view from their kitchen, lounge and bedroom window, and a photo of something they liked in their appartment
- Exhibition of the photos held in a nearby gallery- participants got to take home their photos
- I thought the idea was relatively simple, but the organisation due to Clark's particular methodology, meant the final images were really thought-provoking and subtly informed the viewer of the participant's character and thoughts about how and where they lived
'The Trans-Siberian Photo Series', 2005-6
- In some ways, this was a continuation or enhancement of the Broadway House project, as this too mapped an area, though one from Moscow to Beijing
- To fund her travel, she auctioned photos even before they had been taken on Ebay- I thought this was ingenius
-Asked already assembled and translated questions to the passengers on the train and if they agreed she took a photo of them. She also gave cameras out to willing participants who agreed to take photos of their journey and send the camera back to her
- the cultural and linguistic gap made the project a really interesting way to document the differences
Wednesday 14 November 2007
Yoshio Kitayama/ Naomi Kobayashi
I was also intrigued with the fibre artist, Naomi Kobayashi's geometrical forms, which are created by bundling, grouping and layering soft, fibrous material. However, the final forms seem very rigid and solid.
Kobayashi's ring series stood out to me especially as she had glued thread around horizontal circles, to form huge rings, sometimes up to 6metres in diameter. The artist usually leaves one or two gaps in the frame allowing the thread to droop in that section, giving the overall ring a softer accent.
'Like a poet, I wish to chant the vast cosmos of eternity, using fragile threads, instead of words and phrases. This is the basic concept of my works'.
I liked her work, obviously because it deals with fibrous material, which I am hoping to include more in my work, but also because it has quite a natural, delicate element, similar to Kitayama's work.
Tuesday 13 November 2007
Sunday 11 November 2007
Whitworth Gallery
Trade and Empire Exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery
The slave plantations in the West Indies provided Manchester with raw cotton during the eighteenth century, alongside the traditional sources of the Middle East and India. From 1790, this shifted to a dependence on the slave plantations of the American south and by 1802 America had become the largest supplier of cotton to the British market.
Slavery continued in North America after the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 and Manchester remained dependent on slave grown cotton. As late as 1860 America supplied 88% of the cotton imported into Britain. Slavery enabled cotton to be grown cheaply and was a major reason why the price of cotton textiles fell steadily from the 1790s to 1840. Also, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, new generations of rich industrialists and other businessmen emerged whose wealth derived from businesses associated with cotton.
The exhibition was really thought-provoking as it linked the rise in the population of the Northern cities, especially Manchester, with its population rise of 17,000 to 180,000 people between 1760 and 1830, to the obvious rise in the cotton industry, which led to the increase of African slaves, estimated at over 12 million. The exhibition also highlighted the working and living conditions of the British workers, which is another facet I was looking at, though the images and written text about the crowded, dirty and dangerous conditions of the Northern cities, was completely overshadowed by the basic lack of human right and the inhumana treatment, which the African slaves had to face.