Critique
Feedback
- Laurel Sparks:
“I think you should continue working on the collage
self-portraits. Have you considered painting from the collages or would that be
too mechanical?”
See Sterling Ruby’s ceramic vessels that are in
dialogue with Lucio Fontana’s work and are grotesque and earthy. Your buckets
are almost like cauldron’s where rituals take place and then have the residue
of whatever ritualistic process went into them. I am interested in the use of
the ready made, like the plastic bucket, and not being precious about it in
something that has a lot of intentionality about it. You don’t have to move
into ceramics although it might be really interesting.”
“I think that your paintings and objects belong in
the same space together. The witch cats are incredible and I think you should
keep painting them - like the portrait and its association with imagination and
the archetype.”
“I see your work as really eclectic. There’s
performance, the object and you’re a painter and the work can be all these
things because they’re all talking to each other. Joan’s work is a good source
for you because she has really specific symbolism but has a flexibility of
narrative and a complexity of atmosphere and emotion to it. For me painting the
deer in the snow was a riff of a documentary of Jackson Pollock but also had
this ritualistic side simultaneously.”
“The ridiculousness is just in the work. I’m glad
that Joan Jonas’s work touched you because I see the relationship so clearly.
Her work is very thoughtful but there’s a certain flimsiness to it.”
“You’re reiterating the stereotype but it’s not
really about the stereotype. You can acknowledge that without getting heavy about
it.”
“Yves Kline and the symbolic colours and movements
and body painting that is riveted with stereotype problems which plays into the
humour of your work. There’s also the mythology of Leonora Carrington.
- Sunanda Sanyal:
“The collage portraits are working very well, you
should continue layering the portraits”
“Do not treat the photographs of the buckets as
documentation and you may want to make the buckets even more exotic. I would
like to see the sides, these look like the mandalas, perhaps make them unstable
– there’s a monumentality here that you can play with, put them on the edge of
a table… In other words, in these the objects lose their objecthood but you can
also go back to the object and treat them as objects. These look invincible but
you can have them looking like just buckets.”
“The vessel is a metaphor for woman’s receptivity –
the implication is passive at least historically... I see these buckets as
having a presence and that is empowering and I think the discussion of
abstraction and studio, is not completely unrelated to your central concerns of
femininity. You’re forgetting the most obvious, who’s making this? It’s a woman
as an artist in control of the studio process.
Laurel will be good for you. Your work just has to
be pushed in different directions to see what comes out.
Think about the whole installation first rather
than combining all your projects and hoping they’ll work in an installation.
The components should not make sense on their own.
- Tony Apesos:
Julia Kristeva
‘Formless’ by Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss –
the collapsed, lost form
Dichotomy of mushy and spiritual discussed
beautifully in ‘Antigone’
Mathew Barney exploring male stereo-stypes – uses
Vaseline to comment on the phallic obsession with sperm.
‘Beauty’ by Roger Scruton
‘The Sticky Sublime’ by Bill Beckley
‘The Power of the Centre’ – Rudolf Arnheim
‘The Mandala’ - Jung
- Peter Rostovsky:
Kant
‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’ by Leotard – the
sublime is associated with the grotesque.
‘Visions of Excess’ by George Bataille – a
Surrealist deals with the abjection of the body, the stuff that’s lowly and
formless, the monsterous and ridiculous on a certain level and how they enter
the sublime and the numinous and what distinguishes them from beauty is the
intensification.”
“I would zoom in (the buckets) so it’s less of a
documentation. You really want to plunge the viewer into the world. I don’t
need the object, I saw them as abstract painting”
“Ruby Sterling has similar fetishistic objects.
Julie Kristeva ‘The Powers of Horror’: The Monstrous Feminine. What is abject?
What is suppressed? Freud’ Fetishism. Another book on the fetish was published
by Zone (?) In the 90s”
“If I come in here as an indoctrinated viewer and
if you tell me that It’s about the feminine, the body and materiality it’s all
I need. Everything else becomes redundant for me. Donna Harroway talks about
Feminism as a state of hybridity between man, machine and animal as a release
from the feminine identity, which is what is happening here.
Hal Foster ‘The Return of the Real’ discusses the
transition from subject to representation.
“Do not fetishise the object but plunge the viewer
into a world where they are confronted with materiality as opposed to looking
at a sculpture that already frames it. If the idea is about the formless then
give me the formless.”
- Lynne Tillman:
“Joan Jonas looks to poets and epics – these
grounding stories from different cultures, these early, rather dramatic
narratives.”
“It’s interesting when you talk about narrative,
because you can’t draw from a specific cultural narrative. You have two very different backgrounds
and you’ve never lived in those countries and your parents have formed their
own culture… I can understand you being drawn to spiritual philosophies.”
“My favourite photo is where the object has
maintained its objecthood. I feel that with a lot of the others, the
photographs are about something else. The photograph is a window. I don’t want
to think that I’m looking at something else that has been photographed.”
“Narrative doesn’t have to be created with words.
You said you’re interested in the cat, but anything can be a cat, it depends on
how it’s done and sequenced in a series. One of my favourite artists is Peter
Dreher and he has been painting a water glass since 1974. That glass has become
a character. Since 1974, he has changed so much. His capacity to paint and see
and the way he sees, so the glass is also an autobiography.”
“Think about an object and then stay with that
object. So that object and the way you see it, can become a character. And have
it in your life where you can see it and maybe from that you can develop a
character.”
“You’re using a lot of different forms and that can
be a little confusing.”
- Jan Avgikos:
“The photographs that I respond to are the ones I
can’t resolve. The interesting thing about that experience is that I can’t
resolve it and I can’t name it. Putting language to these things is a way to
access them or define or locate them is part of the activity I engage it.”
“This stuff (portraits) is completely compelling
and scary. Are these indexical with the feminine for you? This one feels like a
vampire to me. What’s interesting to me is that in Greek mythology you have a
whole family of Gorgons. The Medusa is one of them and that’s where I go. I
think these images are empowering. This one where you stitched the eye, because
the eye is such a powerful element of this gaze. My immediate impulse is to
take the buckets down and put the portraits up on the wall. I’m liking the way
the photograph has been altered as attributing to something that’s menacing and
that’s powerful that’s not necessarily so specific. I don’t even understand
these as male of female but some space that’s more ambient or protean,
shape-shifting more of a Cyborg. Have you read anything by Donna Harraway? It
has to do with hybrid, colonisations that might be stretching back and have
migrated from the ancient to the present or ritualistic or things that don’t
necessarily obey the idioms of contemporary life. I think they’re very powerful
and exciting.”
“Why lighten up? Why not go all the way in?”
“Because something has been done, it’s even more of
a reason to do it. I am so uninterested in the emphasis on the development of a
new form. Whatever you do, you have never done before, so you are in charge of
stealing, thievery, trickery, borrowing, dispersing, bringing together – that’s
artistic practice.”
“I revere Joan Jonas… she’d interested in what is
referred to as pagan. She wants to avoid her work being in a stereotypical
position or one that can be easily resolved to create a gestalt that is either
accepted or dismissed to work in and out of spaces that are antithetical to
contemporary art.”
The carnivalesque is a big player here.
- Michael Newman:
Connections with Richard Wilson and Francis Bacon.
“What about performing with masks?”
“Have you ever read any Gilles Deleuze the
philosopher? There’s a text in a book called ‘Thousand Plateaus’ called
‘Becoming Animal’ which may interest you. Funnily enough Deleuze was Jungian in
an early phase of his career but takes it into a much more contemporary
direction. He also wrote a book on Francis Bacon, called something like ‘The
Logic of Sensation’, so have a look.
“This developing an alter ego through painting is
quite interesting also in terms of your context – where you’re working is quite
oppressive. This other character could be a source of freedom.”
“I like the materiality of the buckets and working
on that could be interesting. Seeing them as portals and mirrors, putting oil
and other stuff in them to see where that takes you. I think they’re almost
more interesting as photographs than objects. It’s almost like reading
tealeaves. ”
“You’re working between materiality and some kind
of narrative that you’re developing in terms of a double of yourself, it seems
very promising. Your practice is intermediary sort of three-dimensional
photography and painting and I would press ahead with all of them.
Seminar
Ideas:
- Book as a precious
object
- New Zealand Book
Council – book animation - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_jyXJTlrH0
- All books in the
West originally made by monks in the worship of God
- Books made out of
clay, then skin, then decorated, then illustrated and finally organized
into columns
- Book of Hours -
peacock feathers around text/image – illustration moving from text to
blank age – borders/windows/skies – ornate letters/faces in letters –
God/clouds/rays/creatures – envelopes – writing in margins – brail/coloured
texts/secret writing/overlapping/cutting out text – 3-D illusional
illustrations – pattern - mirrors
- Yuken Teruya –
paper artist – environment
- Justine Smith –
money flowers
- Mia Pearlman –
paper ceiling sculptures
Critical
Theory
Ideas:
- The archive results
from the work or feeds into the work
- What are the
fundamental elements for an archive? How would it be distinguished from a
library or a collection?
- Archive as a
metaphor – archive and memory
- Archive and
narrative – fiction and factuality, documentation (what of?) how will it
be interpreted?
- Archive as a
trace/mark of a moment
- Gerard Byrne –
artist as archiver – photography and film as proof
- Kabakov –
collective needs, collective fantasy
- What is the
difference between an archive and garbage?
- Installation of a
fictional archive of a fictional character
- Museum place of
display – archive stores documents
- Colonial objects
used to create a temporal structure
- Analogue data –
there’s a physical trace
- Freud –
erasure/suppression of memory a coping mechanism
- Hitchcock and the
MacGuffin – a plot device
- Memory as trace
and memory as construction
- Proust’s ‘In
Search of Lost Time’ – returning to memory through non-visual triggers
(dunking madeleines in coffe).
- The role of
technology mediating the archive
- Parafiction: is
related to but not quite a member of the category of fiction as
established in literary and dramatic art. It has one foot in the real.
Real/imaginary personages and stories intersect with the world.
Pragmatics of trust – fictions experienced as fact. Deception.
- Antique memory
jug – vessel for the afterlife. Object as archive. Vessel for the soul.
- Susan Hiller –
relation of archive to display/storage – open archival boxes.
- Sculptural –
grave-like – Christian Boltanski – introduction of fictionality
- Freud’s house –
spaces – psychoanalysis and architecture – ‘The Sense of the Interior’ by
Diana Fuss
- Photographic
archive – the object loses its value
- Artist as curator
of artwork
Goals
for the Semester
Investigating
the performative, abject, sublime, sincere and satirical in my work in a
variety of media including film and sound.
List
of Reading
- ‘The spiritual in
Art: Abstract Painting 1890 – 1985’ by Tuchman et al
- ‘Symbolist
Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art’ by Dee Reynolds
- ‘Joan Jonas’ by Marina
Warner et al
- ‘Living the
Magical Life: An Oracular Adventure’ by Suzi Gablik
- ‘The Reenchantment
of Art’ by Suzi Gablik
- ‘Simians, Cyborgs
and Women’ by Donna Harraway
- ‘Susan Hiller’ by
Ann Gallagher
- ‘Sexual Personae’
by Camille Paglia
- 3x Abstraction: New
Methods of Drawing-Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Martin
- Whitechapel Series:
The Sublime, The Gothic, Colour, Beauty
- Paul Laffoley ‘Book
of Lies’ – Symbolist artists protecting the sacred by being campy
Artist
for Research
- Joan Jonas
- Joachim Koester
- Susan Hiller
- Edward Munch
- Hilary
Harnischfeger
- James Hyde
- Rineke Dijkstra
- Kiki Smith
- Ruby Sterling –
ceramic vessels
- Dana Schutz – the
self-eating people
- Nicole Eisenmen –
symbolic characters
- Jebediah Ceasar –
makes stuff from his environment or finds from his walks / journeys.
Geological and talismanic.
- Paul Klee - puppet
work
- David
Wojnarowicz - "A Fire in My Belly" – performance
- Harry Smith and
Kenneth Anger (‘Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome’) – Synesthetic
filmmakers
- Yves Kline –
painting and performance
- Gutai movement –
performance art
- Marchesa Luisa
Casati (‘Infinite Variety’) – she was the work of art
- Leonora Carrington –
mythology
- Sarah Bernhardt –
opera singer who slept in a coffin
- Jutta Koether –
sincerety and satire bound up in an ambivalent place
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