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, compulsive hoarding: continued.

 

I have just had a bust pipe in the basement, which caused substantial flooding. As a result, I had to get rid of bags and bags of damp rubbish. So much of my compulsive hoarding!

After the last post, I picked up my Cornelia Parker books and I found that bit where she talks about hoarding:

I had filled my house up with junk and the gutter was the next available space left to make work in. I used home as a studio for along time so any space is potential space for making work. On the ceilings, underneath the carpet. That is why I did a lot of things suspended from ceilings because that was the only available space. That, and the gutter outside.

With my basement half empty now, I will not be needing a gutter soon :-)

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).

Deficit: loss of language, loss of identity, loss of memory

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"Neurology's favorite word is "deficit", denoting an impairment or incapacity of neurological function: loss of speech, loss of language, loss of identity, loss of memory, loss of vision, loss of dexterity and a myriad other lacks and losses of specific functions or faculties." (from Oliver Sacks "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat")

ESSAY. Yeppee! and the problem of borders (book arts)

Essay submitted, done and dusted!

That essay research was certainly hugely beneficial for me: it answered a few important questions. Unfortunately, it has also revealed a few problems. For example, it is not helpful to come to this area of books from linguistics, having had focused on language and meaning structure  all those years (a bit like arriving to the wrong religion school: god is the same, but perspective is different). While it might be exploratory to question where the book/text/page/etc. starts and where it ends, I see those things distorted by the cognitive linguistics. Aristotelian classification does not work. Mental categories have prototype structure and fuzzy edges (uh. clever me.). Therefore, my category of books can extend right into periphery without questions about borders: no starts, no ends.

Well, this looking for borders is what I  find frustrating. Once they are established, some things become "in" and others - "out". For example, Johanna Drucker offers an alarmingly narrow view of what a book is. All of the stuff of my previous pages about the burnt books would be "out". Alternatively, it could be called "periphery".

Instead of trying to build the walls, to keep the wrong kind of books "out", it might be more productive to establish prototypes for the categories, so the rest of the group could locate itself somewhere around it. Just a thought.

Sure - it is not as simple as that. I was reading Stephen Davies recently. He mentioned "disjunctive definition". It sounds very Wittgensteinian, but - certainly more to the point (from my point of view).

ESSAY. Helen Lessick. Metaphor.

Linguistic signifier of the metaphor stands as a metaphor for the sign itself.
That is one very confusing thought, I've just had.

Anyway - very clever, Helen Lessick. Very clever.




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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.

Frieze 2010: very visual Seb Patane

I had never come across Seb Patane before. Strange, that is. I really like his work. To the extent where I wish his work was mine. Hm.

Why this fixation throughout your work with erasing identities: hiding heads, obliterating faces or eyes, using masks?

I am interested in performance and in performers, but not so concerned with their personalities or in portraying anyone. What is important to my work is the choreography and composition of things. I consider my pieces more abstract than figurative. And when I started working with found images, I guess the natural gesture for me was to obliterate the face, to remove that sense of identity, which makes everything quite confusing for the viewer, who is used to attach a face to a narrative, to a attach to a type of behaviour or personality to a type of face, say physiognomy. So it is like giving something to the viewer and then taking it away, like a game of contradictions. And that just grew and became more complex, more organic. And, finally, I think I am also reacting culturally, and probably unconsciously, against the whole cult of the celebrities, of the ego.

You often rescue images from the past and re-introduce them in the present tense, which often charges them with a nostalgic-symbolic element that they lacked when they were originally produced. Why do you think this time warp, taking them out of their context, produces that shift?

I operate in the present, and so do the viewers of my work who are faced with the images I chose with their baggage according to their age, their knowledge of things and their personal understanding of history and culture, whatever level that may be. But we are all inevitably challenged when faced with past, faded imagery; I think it must be because our mind tries to fill the gap between our present life and the one that is depicted in those pictures; this void, and I hope my visual interventions on those pictures, create a blurred feeling of confusion and wonder that I find interesting.

So this show is about war, or uses images of the war, rather. And the one at Tate took as a premise the whole idea of protest songs. However, even if these themes are heavily political, you have always justified your interest in them as the product of an aesthetic infatuation, rather than a desire to make a political statement.

Exactly, my work it is not that charged with political meaning, and I don’t pretend that it is. The thing is that, eventually, I will research these issues and learn about them, but I rather use their aesthetics. I am very visual person and that is what I am interested in. I am not saying it is devoid of content, I am saying that it comes with it, eventually. It is impossible not to engage with it. But also I am very interested in the way we look at images and we can detach ourselves from their content.

These are sippets of his interview to the Celeste magazine. His work does look like it should be politically charged: war, obliterated faces, etc. There are all sorts of assumptions and presumptions appearing. However, however, however - he is not interested in that. Great! He is interested in aesthetics. He is interested in interpretation. Uh - my new best friend!

So is it aesthetics or content first? Chicken or egg?

Bruce Nauman: the title that speaks loud

Bruce Nauman - My name as though it were written on the surface of the moon

1968

What would this work be without the title?

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)

Louise Bourgeois on art, writting and life.

"The feminists took me as a role model, as a mother. It bothers me. I am not interested in being a mother. I am still a girl trying to understand myself."

"An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing."

"Art is a guarantee of sanity. That is the most important thing I have
said."
“Art is manipulation without intervention.”

I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands.”
“I like Francis Bacon best, because Francis Bacon has terrific problems, and he knows that he is not going to solve them, but he knows also that he can escape from day to day and stay alive, and he does that because his work gives him a kick.”

"I came from a family of repairers. The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn't get mad. She weaves and repairs it."

"What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself."



What a life she had! Louise Bourgeois art is beautiful, clever, sensitive, provoking and ... it makes you think.

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".

Tony Trehy, Text Festival & other stuff.

When looking for some Art and Text reviews, I came across Tony Trehy's blog. Tony Trehy is a poet and a curator. He is also a founder of the Text Festival.

which brings together contemporary linguistically innovative poetry with conceptual art practices in a remarkable, internationally recognised, space of dialogue, sharing and experimentation in the field of creative language art.

Really enjoyed the blog! Very interesting, at times personal. Among many things I found on his blog, is the mention of Writing on the Wall, which is what I am reading now.

What Waldemar Januszczak said about text art.

Tower of babble: Jenny Holzer's text art.

This an article from March, but I keep returning to it.

"Text art gives me problems. Obviously, it is not an ism that speeds the pulse. You cannot imagine anyone adoring it with a crazy passion, can you? “What’s your favourite art?” “Text art. It shakes my kidneys!” That isn’t going to happen. If text art gives pleasure, it does so in a mild, thoughtful, dry and passionless way.

As a writer, I also have powerful conceptual difficulties accepting its basic premise. If someone has put some writing in a gallery, surely it needs to be judged first as a piece of writing, not as a piece of art?"

Why is it, that text art seems so passionless as compared to... hm... non-text art? Generally, purely text art gives me a kind of intellectual pleasure that a good thought does. However, it never really grips my heart. Visual, less language based art, on the other hand, can stop the breath. Is it because of the hemispheres or is it just me?

"Introducing Wittgenstein" to those who get easily bored

That could be me :-)

Heaton and Groves show, that one does not have to bore readers shitless when dealing with the "serious" philosophy. Fantastic illustrations and a great sense of humor throughout the book.

In Introducing Wittgenstein we meet a strange man, a rigorous logician who prized poetry above philosophy, who inherited a fortune and gave it away, who sought death in the trenches of the First World War, a great teacher who advised his students to give up philosophy, a solitary man who nonetheless inspired lifelong friendships. We are also given a clear and accessible guide to Wittgenstein's central works.