Beautiful things, art as a message and displaced reality of Abigail Box @ Degree Art

 

 

 Abigail Box is showing her surreal paintings of displaced animals/locations at Degree Art.

As I walked in, I had this bizarre feeling that I really liked what I saw. Even before I read the press release about existence, perspective and belonging, I was attracted by the aesthetics of the paintings - they look like something I would really like to have on my walls (dear Abigail, would you fancy a swap, please!). They are bright and white, eclectic, gently disturbing (but not so freaky, you would need to keep kids out of the room). User friendly.

Every time I see something pleasing to my eye, I feel guilty for liking it.  Can aesthetics of an artwork stop the viewer from reading into the message?  Grayson Perry said, in one of his lectures this autum - he is an artist and he makes nice things. Sure, his work deals with complex and sensitive social realities. But - God! - it is beautiful too! It gives me a tingle. Reading New Scientist gives me a buzz too. But surely not for the aesthetic beauty of it! It does often deal with complex and sensitive issues, with displacement and existence. However, we would all agree that New Scientist is not a piece of visual artwork. I do not buy it for an aesthetic experience.

A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something, it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world. (Susan Sontag, On style)

DegreeArt.com Presents:
'A REALITY OF THEIR OWN'
New Work by Abigail Box

12a Vyner Street, London, E2 9DG
3rd - 31st March 2011 12-6pm DAILY
Private View Thursday 3 rd March 2011 6-9pm, R.S.V.P. vj@DegreeArt.com

A Reality of their Own is not only an iridescent-like juxtaposition of imagery, but also an examination of the spectator vs. the visual vs. our known reality.

Abigail Box's recent work forms part of her ongoing exploration into the curiousness of existence and toys with the contradiction involved in feeling both a sense of belonging and displaced.

These visual analogies are harmoniously presented and allow the spectators to ask themselves questions regarding their affiliations with their space, cohabitants and themselves.

A Reality of their Own catalyzes this experience by introducing wild animals into a series of human environments to provoke a fresh and inquisitive perspective onto something familiar. Attempting to reflect on our everyday surroundings along with our conventions and behaviour and in part making us feel outside what we consider our own space.

The work approaches the difficulties associated with confronting and comprehending our own reality through a remarkably captivating blend of painterly techniques and collaging of found imagery.

www.DegreeArt.com - 020 8980 03395 - vj@DegreeArt.com 
12a Vyner Street, London, E2 9DG

Cornelia Parker: continued again.

One more of her thoughts:

 I want the work to reflect what the viewer is as a person. So if you are a cynic, you'll think they're all fake and you'll spend the time thinking about that. If you're quite happy to accept them at face value, then you're off on another planet somewhere else. (C.P.)

London Art Fair: such a lovely picture!

I really should not complain about London Art Fair. It did have a mix of artworks with a mix of artists: established and less established; dead and alive; painters and printmakers. (no books, though). It also had the projects space upstairs, which was really interesting, mostly fresh and much less crowded. However - away from the project space - LAF in Islington did not look too different from AAF in Battersea. I really should not moan about it: these fairs are there to sell the work and earn money for themselves, galleries and artists. And selling is what they do.

"Lovely picture. We have just bought a new house in Australia and we need to fill one big wall. Really big wall. "

Lucky is the artist who made that big picture to suit the big wall. He will make a big sale.
While I am coming into terms with the thought that all I do, is make lovely things: ornaments for an Ideal Homes Show.

A positive thought:
"Treating art as commodity, a very expensive commodity, elevates the meaning of art... Because it becomes more important in people's minds, when you spend your money on it." - John Baldessari (from Again the Metaphor Problem).

"Hidden Spaces" sketchbook exhibition: sharing a vitrine with Grayson Perry.

Everybody knows Grayson Perry. Even my daughter (10) knows the potter who looks like Alice (in the Wonderland) and makes vases with penises. OK, she may not be an average ten year old. She does get dragged around galleries a bit. However, it did impress her, that I had to share a vitrine with the Grayson Perry!

Danny has assembled this really interesting exhibition of sketchbooks, that were shown at Camberwell for a week. I brought in mine just as he was arranging the others, therefore, I had a chance to flick through some amazing - I mean really amazing - and creative sketchbooks.

Dannys own sketchbooks are quite remarkable. He uses old books and works on top of them: a kind of pamplicest. Stephen Cooper's and Janet Bradley's sketchbooks are very "there": bright, bold, full. Natalie Yaxi brought bound volumes of junk mail. Grayson Perry, Christa Harris and me contributed "pocket" sketchbooks, used for casual notes and scribbles. I flicked though Perry's book yesterday. It was full of Jesuses and Marys and churches. A few rabbits on the bikes, a few babies, a few pretty girls. A hint of darkness. A fire. Some writing. It was not much different from his ceramics. However, I am tempted to say, that I enjoyed the sketchbook more, than his vases (and I do love his ceramics!). Is it because it is so much more immediate? More personal? Like looking into the person? Like getting to know the person.
(I suppose aesthetics of the work is the same, but content changes from personal to public).

Hidden Spaces Exhibition
For most artists sketchbooks have been spaces in which to rehearse and experiment without the pressure
of the outside world. This removal of audience creates a non judgemental, safe environment which
stimulates explorative play which in turn can feed the creative process. Many artists have told me they
consider their sketchbook work as important as final published works yet have never exhibited or shown
this work before, this still surprises me. The purpose of this exhibition is to bring together sketchbooks from
a range of successful practitioners that for the most part have never been exhibited.

1 Danny Aldred
My sketchbooks represent a process centred around the enjoyment of collage and the final completed
books on the most part have inadvertently become finished pieces in their own right. As a child Brian
Eno described his enjoyment of collecting fossils from the beach and described this process as ‘beyond
thinking’, when I am collecting material and making my sketchbooks I can relate to this comment.

2. Janet Bradley

3 Stephen Cooper
This selection of some 60 drawings is taken from a total of 300 drawings executed over four consecutive
days in Paris. The project began on the Eurostar journey from London and was completed during the return
journey. The drawings shown here were made in my hotel room, many between 2 and 4 in the morning
when I deliberately worked in complete darkness and was unable to view the paper. The subjects come
from memory and are concerned with science, brain function and consciousness. I have made drawings
in hotel rooms across the world for over 15 years but never “blindly” in this way or as intensively. They
represent a synthesis between collaged images and the process of drawing and thinking - a kind of collaged
drawing. I am interested in the unity of this process. My intention is to publish my drawings in various hotel
rooms in a series of books as well as to use them as a basis for a new body of painting installations.

4 Margaret Cooter
Crossing through, I become the last and only person to read this journal - having written it more than 10
years ago. The viewer is spared the moans, fears, doubts, exhortations, and trivia; dissolved or cancelled,
un-written, they are buried but have been ceremonially honoured. The insights, plans, ideas live on,
elsewhere; all content has been transformed.

5 Egidija Čiricaitė
My favorite sketchbooks are not the project books, but the handbag sketchbooks used for random thinking,
drawing and visual experimentation. I compile them using whatever is available at hand at that instant:
pens, soot, menus, weeds, tickets, etc. Those sketcbooks imprint the moment; they are directly linked to
the past through the existencial traces of the time and space where they were produced.

6 Andrew Foster
A sketchbook for me goes beyond an object, a sketch or a finished piece. Its simply about an attitude to
visual exploration. Its a place where you can allow yourself to visually be sick, without any pressure, pre
conceptions or boundaries from yourself or others. Its an intellectual space to play with intent.

7 Christa Harris

8 Charlotte Knox-Williams
I stopped making sketchbooks, and instead re-applied the principles or functions of these across my
practice. This folded drawing is a part drawn from a wider inter functioning conglomeration of work that
includes film, text, performance and installation.

9 Grayson Perry

10 Stewy
The selected sketch books were created in Toulouse, France in 1994. Between life drawing lessons I
explored the streets for three months making pen and ink architectural drawings, collages, photos,
collecting, food packaging, wallpaper scraps, tickets etc.

11 Natalie Yiaxi

ESSAY. Biblioclasm. Raphael Vella.

Bilioclasm! What a great word to remember!

Book burning, biblioclasm or libricide is the practice of destroying, often ceremoniously, books or other written material and media. In modern times, other forms of media, such as phonograph records, video tapes, and CDs have also been ceremoniously burned, torched, or shredded. The practice, usually carried out in public, is generally motivated by moral, religious, or political objections to the material. (Wikipedia)

Last week I read parts of Raphael Vella's PhD thesis on artistic biblioclasm. It has a very extensive literature review, which has helped me to track down a few valuable names. His own work is rather political. Sure, public book destruction can be an extremely powerful political act. On the other hand, book burning is often a result of spring-cleaning. Publishers pulp away excess copies on daily basis.

Interview with Matt Fishburn from AbeBooks.com:

Abe - Why are books burnt so often?
MF – “People love a celebratory bonfire, especially when it can symbolize a letting go of the past: burning old photos, marking a graduation by burning a hated textbook, or the like. This is one of the things that people I discuss my book with seem to implicitly understand, and indeed are often able to tell a similar story from their own past - just the other day someone told me that they had burned their provisional (driving) license once they properly graduated. Tellingly, in the US (and no doubt in other countries) many universities had an impromptu tradition of turning a blind eye to their graduating class burning their textbooks at the end of semester in a great bonfire. Indeed, when the Nazi fires were first reported in 1933, this was one of the most common comparisons made - the fires in Germany were, after all, organized by students and took place relatively early in the new regime. Nor is it idle to point out that such burnings are always a great spectacle. In Berlin there were marching bands, torchlight processions, group singing and college songs, parades, movie cameras, and members of the cultural elite.

“This is not meant to trivialize the impact of any such bonfire. Most officially sanctioned fires are designed to control, and to announce what they stand for and what will be accepted under their rule. Burnings like those of the Nazis have something in common with the early modern burning of books in Europe. They announced what would be acceptable in future, and in the process shaped the new public sphere. The book burnings are the symbol; the repressive legislation that came in its wake was what enforced it.”

Here is a snippet of an interview with Raphaell Vella by Susan Johanknecht, who is my course leader.

Susan Johanknecht: Can you discuss the word 'biblioclasm' in relation to your practice?

Raphael Vella: I’ve used the word to refer to work that destroys or alters actual books. It applies especially to artists who work with books as a sculptural medium, like the British artist John Latham, who I met in 2005. As you know, I’ve produced site-specific installations and sculptural work using books or book pulp – these are all examples of artistic biblioclasm. On the other hand, drawings of books are not, strictly speaking, examples of biblioclasm, unless they are made on book pages. My relation with biblioclasm has evolved quite a lot: from sculptural work in relief or three dimensions and installations to overprinted book pages. In 2006, I took the process a step further, or rather, I took it back to drawing. But this is not a straightforward representation of biblioclasm. In many cases, it is no longer a type of drawing that expresses directly an object placed before my eyes but a type of drawing that has already passed through other media – like television, or combinations of sculpture, photography and digital software – before ending up on a sheet of paper. The pages from religious books are still there, but the political implications of these drawings do not always permit me to treat them simply as objects of direct experience, but also, or especially, as ideas we learn through other sources. Sources like television and the Internet.

Susan Sontag and more problems with content

This is a follow up from my earlier post "Can aesthetics of an artwork stop the viewer from reading into the meaning?"

I am reading Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation and Other Essays". And it's good. Just what the doctor ordered to my undecided and confused self, who does not know how to deal with content, interpretation and aesthetics of my own work.

Of course, Susan Sontag does resolve any of my problems. She only provides arguments and insight into the issues along the same line of thought, that I have been following.

Here is my favorite quote so far:

"A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art it a thing in the world, not just a text or a commentary on the world." (p.21, Sontag)

Can aesthetics of an artwork stop the viewer from reading into the meaning?

We had our mid-point review the other day. The idea is, that a student displays one piece of their work and then he keeps his mouth shut, as others talk about it.

I had my one piece. In fact, I had one part of one piece - mine was only an element from a series. An abstract kind of an element too. As a result, nobody could "read" it.  It was agreed, that the work was aesthetically pleasing, that it encouraged the viewer to return to it, to explore and to discover. Then somebody said, that with some artwork, they are happy not to know the meaning (the intention?). And then came the question:
can aesthetics of an artwork stop the viewer from reading into the meaning?

Hm... Can aesthetics stop the viewer from reading into the meaning?

That brought the whole shitload of questions onto my poor unassuming brain.

1. Do I have to give a clear message?

2. Doesn't that make the artwork the same as a picture book? A dog = a picture of a dog?

3. Isn't straightforward representation of meaning called illustration?

4. Does art have to be "readable" only in it's direct interpretation of intended meaning?

Four days and four nights I did not sleep. Until I came a cross this blog entry from Jonathan Jones, called Explanations are the traitor of art.

If an artist can translate the meaning and purpose of a work into easily understandable words, it means one of two things. Either the artist is lying, in order to ease the way with patrons and funders; or the artist is a fool. And if dishonesty is the reason, that too is something that vitiates art. No serious art is easy to interpret. Nor is there ever a single valid interpretation of art. If art is good, there are many things to be said about it and much that will remain unsayable.

That blog led me onto this article in the Independent called Is art running out of ideas? Artist's forced to explain modern art by Tom Lubbock.

What we're up against here are two of contemporary art's guiding imperatives. Rule 1) Justification by meaning: the worth and interest of a work resides in what it's about. Rule 2) Absolute freedom of interpretation: a work is "about" anything that can, at a pinch, be said about it.

...

That's the problem with these meanings. They're not just highly tenuous. They're depressingly limiting. And we should put them aside. We should stop measuring art by its meaningfulness. We should heed the wise words of Susan Sontag, written almost 50 years ago in her essay "Against Interpretation".

"Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so that we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art – and, by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us."

And then Wittgenstein - of course :-) - came extremely handy too. "What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence" (from his Tractatus). I suppose art comes into the category of those things, with which language is incapable of dealing very well. Like any other kind of philosophy. To be continued.

Anyway, I can sleep now. I am getting somewhere.

I might have to read that Susan Sontag's book "Against Interpretation".