John Baldessari was born in National City, California in 1931. He attended San Diego State University and did post-graduate work at Otis Art Institute, Chouinard Art Institute and the University of California at Berkeley. He taught at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA from 1970 – 1988 and the University of California at Los Angeles from 1996 – 2007.
Douglas Gordon was born in 1966 in Glasgow, Scotland. From 1984 to 1988, Gordon studied at Glasgow School of Art, Scotland, and from 1988 to 1990, he studied at The Slade School of Art, London. Gordon is a conjurer of collective memory and perceptual surprise whose tools include commodities and mechanisms of everyday life. Into a diverse body of work—which spans narrative video and film, sound, photographic objects, and texts both as site–specific installation and printed media—he infuses a combination of humor and trepidation to recalibrate reactions to the familiar.
On three monitors a filmed sequence of crows wander on the roof of a gothic church. Each sequence starts with the eerie screeching of the birds, followed by a spotlight that continuously chases them as they move around, eat and attempt to fly. The raven has often been used to symbolise bad omens or death in literature and art, Edgar Allan Poe famously depicted the raven as a supernatural messenger in ‘The Raven’ (1845). Here Gordon portrays birds as a symbol of menace and explores film’s ability to elicit fear. The title of the work comes from a popular Scottish poem about a bird sitting on a treetop, while looking down on a group of children.
This black and white photograph documents Douglas Gordon as a hitchhiker holding a sign addressed to oncoming drivers, but instead of a destination Gordon has written the word ‘Psycho’. Gordon elicits fear into the imagination of onlookers via this simple act of public performance art, in an era where the travelling loner is seen as threatening rather than vulnerable.
Self-portrait as Kurt Cobain, as Andy Warhol, as Myra Hindley, as Marilyn Monroe (1998)
In this self-portrait, Gordon merges and mimics iconic images of well-known blondes – Cobain, Warhol, Hindley and Monroe – in a single photograph. All the figures appropriated by Gordon had obviously dyed hair, and the artist contrasts their often notorious life histories with ideas of purity traditionally associated with blondeness. Gordon’s pose also refers to ‘Rrose Sélavy’, the notorious alter ego of the Dada artist, Marcel Duchamp.
A Divided Self I and II (2012)
On two monitor screens two arms – one hairy and the other shaven – fight one another on a bed sheet. On one monitor the hairy arm defeats the shaven, while the reverse happens on the second monitor. Gradually the viewer becomes aware that the arms belong to the same person suggesting a battle between two halves of the self. The work recalls Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ (1886) and the split personality of the key protagonist. The work’s title comes from Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s (1927-89) pivotal and controversial texts on mental illness ‘The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness’ (1960).
Born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Bruce Nauman has been recognized since the early 1970s as one of the most innovative and provocative of America’s contemporary artists. Nauman finds inspiration in the activities, speech, and materials of everyday life. Confronted with the question “What to do?” in his studio soon after leaving school, Nauman had the simple but profound realization that “If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.”
Untitled (Three Large Animals) is one of a series of works Nauman has made using ready-made taxidermic molds which are normally used in modelling stuffed animals. It is closely related to Untitled (Two Wolves, Two Deer) (private collection) which was made earlier in the same year, and constructed from the same animal parts. In both works the artist has created hybrid creatures of impossible anatomical structure using the disparate sections of the two animals, wolf and deer. By using thin wire to join and suspend the animals in a circular formation, Nauman creates a sense of delicacy at odds with the brutality of the processes evoked by the animals’ severed and reconstituted forms. Connecting predator and prey on an equalizing level, the hybrids propose all animal life as similarly vulnerable.
La Brea/Art Tips/Rat Spit/Tar Pits (1972)
For his 1972 retrospective, Nauman proposed an outdoor work that would encircle the walls of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which stands adjacent to a famous prehistoric site, La Brea Tar Pits. The piece included the name of the site along with two anagrams of these four words depicted in neon tubing. This work is an indoor version that Nauman made in the same year. Throughout the early 1970s Nauman created several more luminous signs that used a combination of witty word games and bold colour to disturb the meaning of everyday phrases and expressions.
Violins Violence Silence (1981-2)
This wall-hung work comprises the words ‘VIOLINS’, ‘VIOLENCE’, and ‘SILENCE’ spelled out in coloured neon tubing. Each word appears twice; one of each pair is written left to right while the other is presented backwards from right to left. The six words are composed to form a loosely triangular shape, the horizontal bottom of which consists of two instances of the word ‘SILENCE’, one overlaid on top of the other so that the individual letters are barely distinguishable.
“Art critic Gregory Volk has detected links between the words in the form of a narrative, noting that ‘violence often results in violins, as in funeral music, as well as in silence: The silence of victims and the silence of those who chose not to bear witness or to oppose’ (Ketner, Kraynak and Volk 2006, pp.71).”
Violent Incident (1986)
In 1973 Nauman employed professional actors for the first time in his videotapes, previously having used his own body. He then stopped working with video for twelve years, returning to it in 1985 (see Good Boy, Bad Boy Tate T06853). He has said that the confrontational work he made around this time stemmed from his feelings of ‘anger and frustration … My work comes out of being frustrated about the human condition. And about how people refuse to understand other people. And about how people can be cruel to each other. It’s not that I think I can change that, but it’s just such a frustrating part of human history.’
Erwin Wurm is a contemporary Austrian artist working across media with a critical approach to visualizing present-day life. Often featuring comic or absurdist elements in his mix of sculpture, painting, performance, video, and photography, the artist acknowledges that “[for me] humor is primarily a method for getting people’s attention—it should ultimately prompt people to look at things more carefully,” and places the viewer’s engagement as the most important ingredient in his art. Born in 1954 in Bruck an der Mur, Austria, Wurm follows in the tradition of Joseph Beuys with ideas around “social sculpture” with his popular One Minute Sculptures series of short performance pieces, inviting audience participation and interaction in a manner similar to Ernesto Neto’s immersive installations.
In the series ‘One Minute Sculptures’ by Erwin Wurm viewers are asked to do more than merely look at the museum artworks surrounding them, but to experience the artworks and themselves in new ways. In the form of drawings or brief written directions, the visitor is instructed and encouraged to become an artwork – a ‘One Minute Sculpture’ – for the duration of sixty seconds.
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