Benjamin Part 2

On Monday, 27th January, we "responded" in 3D to the 2D stuff we've already done on the essay by Walter Benjamin (see Benjamin v Gombrich).

This was my response:

"The growing proletarianisation of modern man"

Update:  I've just corrected a mistake on my website.  I called this geezer Walter Gabriel (a country yokel character that used to in The Archers).  Made me chuckle!

What's The Point Of It?

An exhibition of works by Martin Creed, a Turner prize winning artist, is opening in London's Hayward Gallery tomorrow.

I like the title of his show - "What's The Point Of it?"  - and I find it a little frustrating that Creed isn't able to answer that question in this review on the BBC website:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-25925354

His answer is: "I don't know.  It's a question I often ask myself.  I don't really understand it but it means a lot to me."

For the uninitiated, Creed won the Turner prize for an empty room in which the lights go on and off.

Apparently, this exhibition is "great - one of the best solo exhibitions I've seen in the gallery"writes Adrian Searle in The Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jan/27/martin-creed-hayward-exhibition

Overall, I get the impression that it's designed to make you feel self-conscious.  I like the sound of some of it.

For instance,  "Half the Air in a Given Space", a room full of white balloons that you have to navigate through, sounds interesting.  "The experience is an unalloyed pleasure.  It is also, oddly, a very sculptural one," writes Searle.

 On the other hand, I feel quite disgusted by the idea of the video of a woman who "enters a blank white space, crouches, defecates and promptly exits".  Does my strong reaction prove that it's art?

As I said, I like the title, "What's The Point Of It?".

It seems to me that there used to be a point to art up until the arrival of the post-modern movement.  I was going to write that now,  anything that makes you think is counted as art.  But I'm not even sure that's the case.

Would a room with the lights going on and off make me think?  Yup.  It would make me wonder whether someone's having a laugh at my expense.

Shocking

Bjarne Melgaard, a Norwegian artist that lives in New York, Melgaard, has hit the headlines in recent days because of this photo:

It's Roman Abramovich's girlfriend,  Dasha Zhukova,  sitting on the "chair" by Melgaard.

All the usual suspects are accusing Melgaard of racism when in fact he's satirising the way people jump to this conclusion.  He's rejuvenated a similar work of art, using a white rather than a black woman, made by pop artist Allen Jones in the late 60s:

Good article by Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones about the current brouhaha here:
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/jan/21/racist-chair-bjarne-melgaard-dasha-zhukova#

Melgaard has a track record of producing shocking sculptures.  I suppose it's a good way of getting noticed, akin to cross dressing (Grayson Perry) or appearing drunk on TV (Tracey Emin).

 I'd never heard of  Melgaard (or Allen Jones)  before now ..... not that this proves much!

Benjamin v Gombrich

This morning Mary Loveday-Edwards, our context of practice lecturer, gave the class copies of a 1936 essay entitled "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"  by Walter Benjamin, a German philosopher, social critic, radio broadcaster and essayist.

Here's are links to the Wikipedia entries for:

The essay:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction

Walter Benjamin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin

Benjamin was from a wealthy Jewish family who narrowly missed escaping the Nazis.  In the early days of World War II he moved to Paris.  He planned to go to the U.S. via Spain and Portugal, but got apprehended in Spain (at the request of the Vichy government in France) and committed suicide on the night of 25th September 1940 by taking an overdose of morphine.

I'm struck by the number of artists, curators, philosophers coming from a similar background, by the way.

According to Wikipedia, Benjamin's essay was a major influence on the Frankfurt School of art and his ideas were used by John Berger in "Ways of Seeing", a book I struggled to read at the beginning of this course (see my previous post).

At Plymouth College of Art, we are using Benjamin's essay as the basis of various exercises.  The first one, today, involved "responding" to the essay without actually bothering to read it in a conventional way, by cutting out phrases from the photocopy and images from magazines and pasting them into a strip of paper folded into multiple pages.

I have to admit that I quite enjoyed doing this, largely because it enabled me to make fun of the idea.  For instance:

Mary introduced this by saying that people typically didn't read essays like this from beginning to end because that would take a lot of time and effort.

I'm quite shocked by this.  

I totally understand why it takes a lot of time and effort to read this type of stuff, but in my view it's the way that it's written that's the problem.   

If you've read some of my previous posts you'll have gathered that I've come to the view that the exclusivity of the "top" of the art world is preserved by "intellectuals" using a pretentious language I don't understand - long sentences written in riddles,  obscure references that I have to look up on the Internet and words that I have to look up in a dictionary.

I've ground my way through a couple of books of this stuff, notably John Berger's Ways of Seeing (cited previously) and Antony Gormley's book  (see my previous post).

Now it turns out nobody expects you to read this stuff from cover to cover anyhow!   

I would be quite cynical about this Context of Practice course by now if I hadn't discovered  "The Story of Art" by E.H.Gombrich (also from a wealthy Jewish family, this time in Austria, who fled to the UK.)

In this book, Gombrich maps out the whole history of art and puts all the different movements and so on into context.  

He starts off by acknowledging that a lot of commentary about art is pretty incomprehensible to the uninitiated and makes a solemn commitment to write in plain English.

Music to my ears!  And he sticks to his word!  I'm on chapter 2 at the moment and so far it's an interesting (and relatively easy) read!

Credit to Antony Gormley for this.  His book starts off with a conversation with Gombrich, in which he tells him that his "The Story of Art" inspired him to become an artist.  As a result, I bought a second-hand (30 year old) copy on Amazon for 1p.

And as you can see from my previous posts, Gormley's book was far from being a waste of time in other ways (see "Sir Antony" and "More on Sir Antony").  I begun to understand him and his work.  In my view, however, I would have got more out of it if I hadn't been forced to "decode" the language. 

UPDATE:  I think I should qualify my remarks a little now that I've read a bit more of Benjamin's essay.  It's easier to understand than some of the other stuff I've struggled with.

Mini Making Futures Conference

"Making Futures" is a conference staged by Plymouth College of Art every year which brings together art researchers,  academics and activists to "investigate contemporary craft as a change agent within 21st century society".  Here's a link to its website:

http://makingfutures.plymouthart.ac.uk

The college ran a much condensed version of some of it yesterday.

I wasn't impressed.  Some of the presentations were dire - surprisingly dire considering they were given by lecturers who should be good at public speaking.

I only attended the morning session and only three presentations made the grade in my opinion. They were by:

Ian Hankey

Great stuff on how digital technologies (laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC routing machines)  can be used in contemporary craft and how thinking outside the box enables you to make things using these technologies for a relatively modest cost.

I am going to pursue this stuff!  First step is to get competent using Rhino, one of the 3D modelling software packages that feeds into digital manufacturing kit.

Stephen Felmingham

Great talk on drawing!  Almost made me wish I was doing drawing under his guidance!  In the afternoon I joined Stephen's cross-college drawing session,  doing a collaborative life drawing of Kevin, a severely disabled person.

Mary Loverday-Edwards,  our context of practice lecturer.  

 I was struck by one of her statements:

"The purpose of knowledge is to act on it"

When she said it I wrote it down and put a big box around it because it goes to the heart of my "issue" with this context of practice course so far,  namely:

"How should I be acting on the knowledge I'm acquiring?"

More often then not I come out of a lecture wondering this.  If I could see a more direct relevance to the stuff I'm making I might find it easier to pay attention!

Theorists, Revisited

I wouldn't bother reading this!

It's just a list of art theorists and a paragraph or so about them, copied directly from stuff on the Internet.

I had to do this for homework but as you might have gathered from my previous post on art theorists,  I've yet to understand why I should be interested in them.

The first three were cited by Kim Charnley in his “Making Futures” paper on “The Politics of Making: Contemporary Art, Craft and Social Practice” in the mini Making Futures conference (see next post). I couldn’t follow his argument but it was handy that he identified 3 theorists!

Claire Bishop

Her blog: http://clairebishopresearch.blogspot.co.uk

Claire Bishop is an art historian at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and is the author of Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

Professor Claire Bishop joined the Graduate Center in 2008, after teaching at Warwick University (UK) and the Royal College of Art, London. She is interested in post-medium specific art (performance art, installation, social practice, conceptual art) and exhibition history. Recurrent themes in her research are spectatorship and the relationship between art and politics. She is a regular contributor to Artforum and other magazines.

Grant Kester

http://www.grantkester.net

Grant Kester is Professor of Art History in the Visual Arts department at the University of California, San Diego. Kester is one of the leading figures in the emerging critical dialogue around “relational” or “dialogical” art practices.

Community arts, also sometimes known as "dialogical art", "community-engaged" or "community-based art," refers to artistic activity based in a community setting. Works from this genre can be of any media and is characterized by interaction or dialogue with the community. Often professional artists collaborate with people who may not otherwise normally actively engage in the arts. The term was defined in the late-1960s and spawned a movement which grew in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia. In Scandinavia, the term "community art" means more often contemporary art project.   

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_arts

Shannon Jackson

Shannon Jackson is the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair in the Arts and Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. She is also the Director of the Arts Research Center. Shannon’s most recent book is Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Routledge 2011), and she is  working on a book about The Builders Association. Shannon’s previous books are Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, and Hull-House Domesticity (2000) andProfessing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (2004).

http://tdps.berkeley.edu/people/shannon-jackson/

The ones I listed in my previous post:

Rosalind Krauss

Rosalind Epstein Krauss (born November 30, 1941) is an American art critic, art theorist and a professor at Columbia University in New York City. Krauss is known for her scholarship in 20th-century painting, sculpture and photography. As a critic and theorist she has published steadily since 1965 in Artforum, Art International and Art in America. She was associate editor of Artforum from 1971 to 1974 and has been editor of October, a journal of contemporary arts criticism and theory that she co-founded in 1976.

Hal Foster

Harold Foss "Hal" Foster (born August 13, 1955) is an American art critic and historian. He was educated at Princeton University, Columbia University, and the City University of New York. He taught at Cornell University from 1991 to 1997 and has been on the faculty at Princeton since 1997. In 1998 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Foster's criticism focuses on the role of the avant-garde within postmodernism. In 1983, he edited The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, a seminal text in postmodernism. In Recodings (1985), he promoted a vision of postmodernism that simultaneously engaged its avant-garde history and commented on contemporary society. In The Return of the Real (1996), he proposed a model of historical recurrence of the avant-garde in which each cycle would improve upon the inevitable failures of previous cycles. He views his roles as critic and historian of art as complementary rather than mutually opposed.

Yve-Alain Bois

Bois is a professor at the European Graduate School and at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in the chair inaugurated by Erwin Panofsky.[ Previously, he served on the faculty at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.   Bois has written books and articles on artists of European modernism. He is an editor of the journal October.

Theorists

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Born in Cologne, Germany on November 15, 1941, Buchloh received a M.Phil in German literature from the Freie Universität Berlin in 1969. He later obtained his Ph.D in art history in 1994 from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, where he studied with fellow art historian Rosalind Krauss.

After time as an editor for German art journal Interfunktionen and teaching stints at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, NSCAD University, and CalArts, Buchloh began teaching art history at the State University of New York at Old Westbury and the University of Chicago. He later taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an associate professor from 1989–1994. From 1991–1993, he also served as the Director of Critical and Curatorial Studies for the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. He then taught at both Columbia University and its sister college, Barnard College, as Virginia B. Wright Professor of Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Art from 1994–2005, including service as a department chair from 1997–2000. He later joined the Harvard University department of History of Art and Architecture in 2005. He was named Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of Modern Art. In 2006, he was named Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art. Buchloh is currently also a co-editor of the art journal October. In 2007, Buchloh won the Golden Lion award at the 2007 Venice Biennale for his work as an art historian towards contributing to contemporary art.

More on Sir Antony

I've managed to read more than 160 pages of Antony Gormley's book.

I say "managed" because I've found it a really tough read so far (and there's only a 52-page "Update" to go).  From my point of view, quite a lot of it is written in riddles - I read bits of it over and over again and still can't figure out what he and the other writers are trying to say.   They have their own sort of language, peppered with words I have to look up in a dictionary (when I can be bothered).

Part of me thinks these folk are deliberately using riddles and strange words to preserve the exclusivity of their art world.  They've certainly got me excluded.   I can't see me ever wanting to use their language.

Having said that, I still like a lot of Gormley's work and have even started to understand some of it thanks to this book.

On Gormley himself, he's clearly highly intelligent.  He studied archeology, anthropology and art history at Trinity College, Cambridge (which I would have hated).

And Gormley is really into faith, religion (in its widest sense) and meditation (all of which drive me bonkers).  He was brought up as a strict Catholic and after Cambridge he spent three years traveling through the Middle East to India and Sri Lanka, where he studied meditation in monasteries.

A lot of Gormley's work is about meditation - about looking within himself at his soul, for want of a better word, and trying to express this through "body cases".    The body cases represent the skin - the interface between inside and outside the body.

In most of his sculptures, Gormley uses his own body as the starting point.  He gets folk (including his painter wife) to encase him in plaster.   I think this has become a semi-religious ritual - something that tests him in terms of pain and control and in which he meditates.

Early on, he used the resulting mould to create a fibre-glass version of himself which he then lined with lead sheet, soldered together on highly defined vertical and horizontal lines.

He's careful to say that the sculptures are made from air as well as fibre-glass and lead because his focus is on what's inside the body cases.  The use of lead is deliberate - its neutrality draws attention away from the skin and into the interior.

Most of the body cases look as though they are deep into meditation, which I'm sure was Gormley's aim.   I'm not sure whether this comes from the poses or simply from the way the body cases are made (or both).  

Quite a lot of Gormley's body cases make a big thing of the orifices - mouth, genitals, anus etc - as the only exit and entry points between the inside and outside.

Later on, Gormley makes body cases from cast iron.  He also makes some out of concrete, notably a set of 300 boxes where the inside dimensions match those of people, so they would fit inside exactly. I get the idea but they don't do anything for me.

And then of course, there's his "Field" installations, which I really like.   Gormley sees these as almost the opposite of his body cases.   Tens of thousands of terracotta figures, with their very deep-set eyes,  are staring at you, making you self-conscious - the opposite of inviting the viewer to think about what's going on beyond the lead-lined skin of a Gormley look-alike.

Another interesting aspect of Field is that Gormley gets lots of people to make them.  Each person is assigned a row at a time and, apparently, they get engrossed with the process of using their hands to mould the clay into figures.  In some respects this reflects Gormley's use of his own body in other sculptures - he's not making something from scratch, he's using an existing resource.

Being a former engineer, the logistics of Field interest me.  In some versions, as many as 190,000 figures have been installed.  If everybody made 100 you'd still need almost 2,000 people to make that number!  I suppose the figures aren't fired because firing that number would take forever!   And what happens to Field when it's dismantled?  Or is it?