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  • New “nature-morte” in Photography

    Vanitas still life (Christ with Mary and Martha), 1552 (panel), Aertsen, Pieter (Lange Pier) (1507/08-75)

    Still Life:

    “One of the principal genres (subject types) of Western art – essentially, the subject matter of a still life painting or sculpture is anything that does not move or is dead.

    Still life includes all kinds of man-made or natural objects, cut flowers, fruit, vegetables, fish, game, wine and so on. Still life can be a celebration of material pleasures such as food and wine, or often a warning of the ephemerality of these pleasures and of the brevity of human life.” http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/still-life

    In France during the Renaissance the term “nature-mort” (literally “dead nature”) came to be used to describe the many layers of meaning in works that remind us of both the vitality of life and it’s ephemerality – the “ever present threat of death”. (Revisiting the Still Life , Micheal Petry, Nature Morte.

    Pieter Claeszoon- Vanitas – Still Life, 1625

    DEAN BALDWIN: NOT STILL SHORT LIFE: October 13 – 28, 2012

    ” Not Still Short Life a single channel video work by Canadian artist Dean Baldwin which he describes as a contemporary reboot of 16th &17th century Vanitas paintings. Shot and produced in 2008 at The Banff Centre, it is presented here in Toronto for the first time, after a premiere in September 2012 in Montreal.

    Like the traditional Dutch or Flemish oil, Not Still Short Life is a visual feast of overripe fruit, spirit bottles, glasses, swords and seafood arranged alongside commonplace objects, as offered to a party of guests at some affair or celebration.

    Not Still Short Life features footage culled from hours of live tape which originally documented the indulgence and resulting actions of four individuals consuming a tableau of earthy treats in an evening’s conviviality. Eight minutes of footage is all that remains after the incidences of human presence within the frame of the camera have been removed. What lingers is an animated, playful and humourous memento mori of the unseen revelry that is anything but “still”.”http://katharinemulherin.com/dean-baldwin-not-still-short-life-october-13-28-2012/

    Ori Gersht (Using high speed digital photography)

    Time after Time (Blow Up from the series) 2007

    Klaus Pichler

    https://klauspichler.net/project/dust/

    https://klauspichler.net/project/one-third/

    See the Canadian artist’s site: Laura Letinsky: Say it Isn’t So series, and The Dog and the Wolf, and Fall

    See the artist’s site: Laura Letinsky: Say it Isn’t So series, and The Dog and the Wolf, and Fall

    Jessica Eaton:

    “Working with large format cameras, she applies unique analog techniques to manipulate properties of light. By creating photographic practice experiments blending and splitting light using lenses and geometric forms, Eaton creates photographs whose subject is light itself.

    In her vibrant images she pushes the rhetoric of abstraction to provoke questions about perceptual experience. “[Analog photography] doesn’t have to be intrinsically bound to the visible world,” she says. “It is full of possibility.”

    As noted in the Guardian article, Eaton uses light the way other painters mix colours and her images offer referential nods to colour field painting and the likes of Bridget Riley, Josef Albers and Sol LeWitt. And while her images may look like they came out of a Photoshop experiment, they’re actually the result of technical expertise and “hit-and-miss, old-school technology.” https://finearts.uvic.ca/research-dev/blog/2015/02/17/visiting-artist-jessica-eaton/

    In contrast, Eaton’s new series of floral subject matter, UVBGRIG (2014/2015), is close to home, more grounded in human subjectivity and art history. Each of the images in the series depicts the same subject: an ornate bouquet of flowers in front of floral wallpaper. Eaton’s approach to the new series is characteristically systematic. However, instead of using color filters on grayscale images, Eaton here separates out an incredibly noisy amount of color information, then adds multiple separations of top of one another. The results are not just strange but palpably impossible photographs that use the visual languages of both art historical still life painting and vernacular digital photography in the age of Instagram filters.

    Taryn Simon: 

    “The bouquets in her new series are based on floral displays present at the formal signings of dozens of agreements between nations and other dominions. They are part of the “stagecraft of power,” as Simon describes it—silent witnesses to the unfolding of world events. Using archival sources, Simon worked with a botanist to identify the various species in each bouquet. After ordering some 4,000 blooms from Aalsmeer, in the Netherlands (“the Amazon.com of flowers,” she says), she re-created and photographed them, surrounding the resulting images with heavy mahogany frames reminiscent of boardroom furniture.” 

    “In her work, Simon combines photography, text, and graphic design, in conceptual projects addressing the production and circulation of knowledge, and the politics of representation. For this latest project, Simon explores the stagecraft of power, examining agreements, contracts, treaties, and decrees drafted to influence systems of governance and economics, from nuclear armement to oil deals and diamond trading.” http://www.alminerech.com/exhibitions/3601-taryn-simon#prev

    Works by Jimmy Limit – untitled and undated (recent to 2017)

    Dean Baldwin

    Gusto Ricco, 2016, Dean Baldwin

    Gabriel Orozco – on photography and objects:

    https://art21.org/watch/extended-play/gabriel-orozco-on-photography-short/

    Gabriel Orozco, “Cats and Watermelons,” 1992

    Ball on Water, 1994.

    “He frequently manipulates what he discovers by arranging found materials (a deflated soccer ball, cans of cat food, simple planks of wood) and photographing his constructions. Sometimes he transforms the ordinary just by suggesting a form in a seemingly banal image, as in Pulpo (Octopus, 1991), which bestows meaning on a tangle of pipes. Here the readymade is not so much a thing found as a dynamic and poetic interaction between artist and object.” https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/4332

    Gabriel Orozco, Pinched Ball, 1993.

    Assemblage Art:

    Take an object / Do something to it / Do something else to it. [Repeat.]
    (Jasper Johns, sketchbook note, 1964)

    “In the 1950s and 1960s assemblage became widely used. Artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg adopted an apparently anti-aesthetic approach to making art. They used scrappy materials and found objects alongside messily applied paint to create expressionist reliefs and sculptures, earning them the name neo-dada. Artists of the Italian arte poveramovement, such as Mario Merz, made artworks using an assemblage of throwaway natural and everyday materials including, soil, rags and twigs. Their aim was to challenge and disrupt the values of the commercialised contemporary gallery system.” From http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/assemblage

    Sarah Lucas

    English sculptor, installation artist and photographer emerged as one of the major Young British Artists during the 1990s, with a body of highly provocative work. In the early 1990s she began using furniture as a substitute for the human body, usually with crude genital punning. In works such as Bitch (table, t-shirt, melons, vacuum-packed smoked fish, 1995), she merges low-life misogynist tabloid culture with the economy of the ready-made, with the intention of confronting sexual stereotyping.- http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/sarah-lucas-2643ecc29d0f42789f9cbd52aa5ca7cae53d-1Bitch, Sarah Lucas, 1995. Wood, enameled metal, cotton, synthetics, smoked fish and plastic (80,5 x 104 x 67)Lucas’s [work] is both enormously enjoyable and awful: awful because much of what she shows us about our relationship to the human body and our psyches is as grim as it is hilarious – the toilet as an extension of the human digestive tract, as receptical not just of waste but of parts of ourselves, dark thoughts as well as dark matter. She can bring us up short: a cigar and a couple of walnuts are balanced on the rim of a begrimed loo. I imagine the smell of the cigar and the taste of walnuts. It’s stomach-churning.- https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/sep/30/sarah-lucas-whitechapel-gallery

    Au Naturel, Sarah Lucas, 1994

    “Essentially, Au Naturel is a very simple sculpture of a man and woman in bed, he represented by two oranges and a cucumber, she by a bucket and a pair of melons. What  makes this work for me is that the visual joke of the assemblage triggers thoughts about language and the slang terms used for body parts. In particular, with works like this, Lucas draws attention to the derogatory way women’s bodies are often described colloquially.” https://imageobjecttext.com/2012/08/19/the-assembled-body/

    Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, 1992

    ‘In Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, Lucas makes the terminology explicit in the title as well as the work and uses a propped up photograph of the table top to make the face that completes the female form. Thus the woman is seen only in terms of breasts and vagina, an anonymous headless form who is, literally, part of the furniture.” From https://imageobjecttext.com/2012/08/19/the-assembled-body/

    Sarah Lucas, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ 2000

    Beyond the Pleasure Principal, Sarh Lucas 2000.

    “Creativity in Britain doesn’t shy away from the fact things can be shit, but also funny; and that sex itself can be ludicrous and silly.” From https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/british-creativity-is-messy-and-punk-as-sarah-lucas-toilet-vaginas-prove

    Abjection in Art:

    “Explores themes that transgress and threaten our sense of cleanliness and propriety particularly referencing the body and bodily functions.”

    Rachel de Joode

    “The strangeness of the shapes sometimes gives the work a look of abnormal scientific discoveries combining unknown minerals and molecules. De Joode’s work, as the result of an alchemy between raw material and the artist’s brain, is to be auscultated and dissected; it is porous, filled with cracks, abstract surfaces, giving way to the mysterious and extra-terrestrial.”

    dejoodedejoode2

    “Rachel de Joode is constantly seeking for raw substances, oozing pastes, or anything flabby but particularly photogenic that she will then tame with all the technological tools at her disposal. Going as far as a trompe l’œil, her pieces play with the ambiguity between 2D and 3D, between photographs and objects, that tends to make reality a little more artificial.”

    – http://www.ofluxo.net/porosity-by-rachel-de-joode-galerie-christophe-gaillard/

    dejoodedejoode4dejoode6dejoode7dejoode8dejoode3dejoode4dejoode5dejoode12

  • Deanna Bowen & Jon Sasaki

    Deanna Bowen

    “On Trial The Long Doorway re-inserts this forgotten teledrama into the present day. The galleries of Mercer Union are transformed into a series of sets (a jail cell, a legal aid office, a living room, a locker room and court house) for live rehearsals and recordings to take place every Saturday for its duration. These rehearsals take place amongst archival documents from the era, from Canadian documentaries exploring race relations and University of Toronto’s The Varsity, to Life magazine’s coverage of the Emmett Till murder trial. The script will be animated by five Black actors, multiplying their roles and representations, while blurring the lines between black and white, rehearsal, action and performance. As curator Liz Park has written “The political potency of Bowen’s work lies in her ability to recharge the power of historic and archival documents.”[3] On Trial The Long Doorway is an installation and ‘performed production’ work that uses the gallery space as a set for rehearsals and present day video production of the teledrama, from audition, to rehearsals, to final shot.

    In delineating the necessity of “wake work” (connecting the experience of enslavement to contemporary violence, mourning, survival, and happiness) writer Christina Sharpe argues “toward inhabiting a black consciousness that would rupture the structural silences produced and facilitated by, and that produce and facilitate, Black social and physical death.”[4] The antagonisms, divisions and traumas, of race relations in the 1956 teledrama re-staged in 2017 are even more urgent today”.

    http://www.mercerunion.org/exhibitions/deanna-bowen-on-trial-the-long-doorway/

    Photos: http://www.mercerunion.org/exhibitions/deanna-bowen-on-trial-the-long-doorway/

    Jon Sasaki

    “Clint Roenisch is pleased to open the fall season with a solo show of recent works by the Canadian artist Jon Sasaki, his first with the gallery. Widely known as a “Romantic conceptualist,” Sasaki’s many projects, videos, photographs, performances, objects and installations often revolve around trying to reach dubious goals through perversely optimistic means. Sasaki seems to court failure as a richer, more revealing outcome than the soundest of victories. His tragicomic endeavours, ridiculous as they might be, are propelled by a warm, positivist worldview, particularly if the works involve, as they often do, a collaborative audience or cohorts willing to work towards whatever absurd (or noble) premise the artist has set his studied sights upon. The humour and fallibility embedded in his various works are anchored by a methodical, reasoned approach, in the same vein as the sight gags and complex scenes in a Buster Keaton film. In Sasaki’s hands, expectation and outcome never seem to align, generating a simultaneous sense of pathos and levity. His self-exhaustive systems are caught in cycles of trial and error. The humour and melancholy shot through the works of Bas Jan Ader, find echoes in Sasaki’s, just as the exuberant, funny, often explosive video works of Roman Signer serve as beacons. Sasaki also continues to bend Canadian art history to his will, especially the sublime achievements of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. Their enduring, monolithic hold on Canadian artistic consciousness is a deep vein to be mined, to alternately pay homage to
    or to nudge into contemporary reality where hydro cables, gas stations, crowds and cell phone towers have come to mar the experience.

    The exhibition title is a quote borrowed from Michael Nesmith, the American singer, songwriter, actor, Monkee and heir to the Liquid Paper fortune. We may never know what his word was, it is likely lost to history, returned to whatever dreamspace it came from. What we do know is that Michael’s mother, Bette Nesmith Graham invented her Liquid Paper typewriter correction fluid using the family’s kitchen blender, improvising through trial and error a tool that would allow typists to revise, redact, and correct all imperfections. The desire to undo, re-do, mend broken connections (whether in a typewritten sentence or in a broader sense) figures prominently in
    this exhibition, which continues the artists’s investigation into the tropes of Romanticism”.

    http://clintroenisch.com/exhibitions/i-coined-a-word-the-other-day-but-i-forgot-what-it-was-it-was-a-good-one-it-came-to-me-in-a-dream/

    http://clintroenisch.com/artists/jon-sasaki/

  • Performing a Line

    Janine Antoni, Loving Care, 1992/2007

    Janine Antoni
    Loving Care
    1993
    Detail of performance, Anthony D’Offay Gallery, London
    The artist soaked her hair in hair dye and mopped the floor with it.
    Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates Limited
    Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine
    www.luhringaugustine.com

    “In Loving Care, a much discussed work from 1992, using her hair as a mop, Antoni dipped her hair in dye and mopped the floor with it combining mopping, traditionally women’s work, with painting”.

    Text: https://web.archive.org/web/20070411035729/http://www.massmoca.org/press_releases/09_2000/9_26_00.html
    Photo: http://jessicaannkern.blogspot.ca/2011/03/artist-post-janine-antoni.html

    Janine Antoni, Touch, 2002

    “In Touch, which was commissioned for SITE Santa Fe in 2002, [Antoni] balances on a tightrope, a skill she has sought to master. Here, on the beach in front of her childhood home on Grand Bahama Island, the artist walks a line that is parallel to the horizon. Dressed in sky blue, she enters the landscape from outside the frame. When the wire dips under her weight, it appears to touch the horizon, creating the illusion that she is walking on the water. Like many of Antoni’s works, Touch records a relationship—a moment of contact—and reveals the artist’s longing to bridge the gaps between herself and viewers, between her work and art history”.

    Photo/Text: http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/184183

    Trisha Brown, Untitled, 2007

      

    “A dancer and choreographer associated with New York’s Judson Dance Theater from 1962 to 1964, Brown experiments with space, gravity, and the inversion of the body’s hierarchies. Interested in daily activities and the distribution of weight, she was an essential contributor to the invention of postmodern dance, a style that emerged from the movement experiments of the early 1960s. Earlier in her practice she made small, notational drawings to represent movement; now she makes large performative drawings using her whole body, merging movement and mark-making. This monumental drawing is related to Brown’s most recent choreography project, for an opera”.

    Text: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/133311?locale=en
    Photo: https://patternobserver.com/2010/12/03/whats-in-a-line/

    Tony Orrico, Drawing Performance, 2010

    “As much of a performance as it is a drawing, the work of American artist Tony Orrico explores the capacity of the human body as a physical tool for creating art. With a background in dance and choreography, Orrico utilizes his own body – sometimes just the wrist, sometimes his whole form – to generate massive drawings that are at once organic and highly precise”.

    Text: https://www.designboom.com/art/tony-orrico-performance-drawings/
    Photo: http://beautifuldecay.com/2015/01/19/tony-orricos-drawings-test-limits-physical-movement/

    Tom Marioni, Walking Drawing, 2000

    “Influenced by Eastern philosophy, Marioni also produced a series of action drawings in which gestural marks were the product of the artist running, jumping, or rotating his arm in a circular motion, using his body as a compass to record his farthest reach and marry physical effort with mark-making”.

    Text: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/tom-marioni-walking-drawing-drypoint
    Photo: https://crownpoint.com/artist/tom-marioni/

    Meaghan Kombol, An attempt to draw a straight line on an NYC subway train, 2007

    Photo: https://www.meaghankombol.com/

     

    Ken Nicol,  flogging a dead horse 9 from the series …and it’s ending one minute at a time, fall 2015

    “Flogging a Dead Horse: The Seasons, […] is a mark-making action where Ken makes tally marks on a large sheet of paper with a pen until the ink begins to fade and eventually runs out entirely. The remainder of the work is finished with the inkless pen by scratching the tally marks into the page until the paper is filled. Each 100 hour work was completed within a single season and each is exhibited with the pen, or “dead horse”, that was used up in the creation of the work”.

    Photo/Text: http://k-nicol.com/section/452386_and_it_39_s_ending_one_minute_at_a_time.html

    Jonathan Monk, My Height in HB pencil, 2002

    “The face of the edition, with a single pencil line. The card should be installed on any wall with the pencil line six feet above the floor”.

    Text: https://artmetropole.com/events/launch-for-new-multiple-by-jonathan-monk-my-height-in-hb-pencil
    Photo: https://artmetropole.com/archive/1221

    Richard Long, A Snowball Track, 1964

    “In 1964, when Long was eighteen years old and a student at the West of England College of Art in his hometown of Bristol, he went on a walk on the downs after a fresh fall of snow, making a snowball and rolling it along. When the snowball was too big to push any further, Long took a photograph of the track left by his trajectory. The action, ephemeral and recorded in a fairly artless image, was named Snowball Track (Bristol, 1964)”.

    Text: http://londongrip.co.uk/2009/06/art-the-work-of-richard-long/
    Photo: http://www.richardlong.org/Sculptures/2011sculpupgrades/snowball.html

    Richard Long, A Line Made By Walking, 1967

    “This formative piece was made on one of Long’s journeys to St Martin’s from his home in Bristol. Between hitchhiking lifts, he stopped in a field in Wiltshire where he walked backwards and forwards until the flattened turf caught the sunlight and became visible as a line. He photographed this work, and recorded his physical interventions within the landscape. Although this artwork underplays the artist’s corporeal presence, it anticipates a widespread interest in performative art practice. This piece demonstrates how Long had already found a visual language for his lifelong concerns with impermanence, motion and relativity”.

    Text: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/long-a-line-made-by-walking-p07149
    Photo: http://www.richardlong.org/Sculptures/2011sculptures/linewalking.html

    Richard Long, Dusty boots line, 1988

    Photo: http://www.richardlong.org/Sculptures/2011sculpupgrades/dusty.html

    Richard Long, A Line in Ireland, 1974

    Photo: http://www.richardlong.org/Sculptures/2011sculptures/lineireland.html

    Richard Long, England, 1968

    “In a field of daisies, Long picked flowers along two lines to form an ‘X’. The work existed only until the daisies grew again. He made a more permanent record in the form of this photograph. Long”s art develops through a physical involvement with landscape. During a walk, for instance, he may subtly rearrange natural elements at a particular spot as a way of marking his presence. ‘These works are of the place, they are a rearrangement of it and in time will be reabsorbed by it. I hope to make work for the land, not against it’, he says”.

    Photo/Text: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/long-england-1968-p07151

    Richard Long, Circle in Mist, 1986

    Photo: http://www.richardlong.org/Sculptures/2011sculptures/circmist.html

    Richard Long, Waterlines, 1989

    “These words describe an event undertaken by the artist. They provide information which is specific but lacking in precise detail. Duration and distance covered, together with a generalised location, provide the parameters for the viewer’s imaginative interpretation. Water, invisibly marking the route taken by the artist, is the additional element connecting the starting and end points of the journey constituted by the shores of two seas”.

    Text: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/long-waterlines-p11266
    Photo: http://www.richardlong.org/Textworks/2011textworks/35.html

    Pawel Althamer, Pfad (Path), 2007

    “For sculpture projects münster 07, Pawel Althamer constructed a path. Starting where a footpath and bicycle trail meet in a municipal recreation area near Lake Aa, Althamer’s path will lead, through meadows and fields, out of the city. Just short of one kilometre, however, it will abruptly end in the middle of a field of barley. Surprised that the trail has suddenly ended, visitors will have to decide how to react upon this open situation and how to return to the city. Althamer’s idea for this project stems from his observation of how pedestrians and bicyclists here strictly obey the signs designating their respective paths, conforming to regulations in a way that appears unusually stringent to the average Polish observer”.

    Text: https://www.skulptur-projekte.de/archiv/07/www.skulptur-projekte.de/kuenstler/althamer/index.html
    Photo: http://www.shift.jp.org/en/archives/2008/02/skulptur_projekte_munster_07_6.html

    Francis Alÿs, The Green Line, 2004

    “In the summer of 1995 [Alÿs] performed a walk with a leaking can of blue paint in the city of São Paulo. The walk was then read as a poetic gesture of sorts. In June 2004, [he] re-enacted that same performance with a leaking can of green paint by tracing a line following the portion of the ‘Green Line’ that runs through the municipality of Jerusalem. 58 liters of green paint were used to trace 24 km. Shortly after, a filmed documentation of the walk was presented to a number of people whom [Alÿs] invited to react spontaneously to the action and the circumstances within which it was performed”.

    Text: http://francisalys.com/the-green-line/
    Photo: https://davidzwirnerbooks.com/product/francis-alys-sometimes-doing-something-poetic

    Nina Katchadourian:

    Finland’s Longest Road
    Paper map fragment in glass petri dish, 3/4 x 6 x 6 inches, 2000

    Working with an atlas of Finland, I cut out the entire length of highway E75, which runs from Helsinki in the south to Utsjoki in the north. This long paper strip was coiled up and placed in a petri dish.

     

     

    Cornelia Parker, Measuring Niagara With a Teaspoon, 1997

    “The silver that makes up the piece of wire previously took the form of a Georgian teaspoon which, as the artist explained in a 2003 interview, has been melted and ‘drawn’ to the height of Niagara Falls’ […] To make this work, Parker took the teaspoon to a jeweller called Blundell’s in Wardour Street, London, where the silver object was melted down and then cast into an ingot […] The jeweller then turned the ingot into a piece of wire by pulling it through a series of progressively smaller holes in a device called a ‘draw plate’ until it was stretched to the desired length, a process that is termed ‘drawing’ “.

    Photo/Text: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/parker-measuring-niagara-with-a-teaspoon-t07430

    Tom Friedman, Untitled (Pencil shaving), 1992

    “Friedman is concerned with the intimacies that working on a smaller scale can induce. Friedman also likes to keep the ideas behind the work small. For example, Friedman’s ‘Untitled,’ from 1992, (A pencil shaving that consists of the entire pencil), is not only a sculpture on a small scale, but also a small idea. The idea, (shave the pencil without it breaking), is beautiful in its own right […]”.

    Text: http://students.smcm.edu/jspencerzavos/308/artresearch1.html
    Photo: http://www.saatchigallery.com/aipe/tom_friedman.htm

    Tom Friedman, Loop, 1995

    “All the strands from a one-pound box of spaghetti, cooked, dried and connected end-to-end. The first piece connects to the last to form a continuous loop”

    Photo/Text: http://www.luhringaugustine.com/artists/tom-friedman/artworks/sculptures-1990-1999?view=slider#9

    Richard Tuttle, Ten Kinds of Memory and Memory Itself, 1973

    “Tuttle’s subsequent series of works alternate between two and three dimensions in various ways. The 1973 string ‘drawings’ on the floor, entitled Ten Kinds of Memory and Memory Itself, are barely three-dimensional, since string is such a linear material. Nonetheless, the drawings are executed according to a specific movement pattern, which can be repeated in order to re-execute the piece. The movements involve sitting, standing, stretching, kneeling, etc., as the string; is drawn, thrown or placed as a result of each movement. Although Ten Kinds of Memory and Memory Itself is the most linear and two-dimensional of Tuttle’s sculptural pieces, it was created in a state of transition between two and
    three dimensions because its execution involves a choreographed enactment in time and space”.

    Text: https://archive.org/stream/richardtuttle00tutt/richardtuttle00tutt_djvu.txt
    Photo: http://bombmagazine.org/article/3332/joel-shapiro
    Photo: https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/a-new-breeze/

    Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci, Performance at MoMA during ‘On Line’ exhibition, 2011

    “The work of Marie Cool […] and Fabio Balducci […] is rooted less in the tradition of performance art than in sculpture, painting, and drawing. The artists’ actions are composed from an inventory of simple, reductive gestures initiated by the physical properties of ordinary materials, such as string, paper, or a piece of Scotch tape […] The dancing body has long been a subject matter for drawing, as seen in a variety of works included in this exhibition. These documentations show dance in two dimensions, allowing it to be seen in a gallery setting. But if one considers line as the trace of a point in motion—an idea at the core of this project—the very act of dance becomes a drawing, an insertion of line into time and the three-dimensional space of our lived world”.

    Text: https://www.moma.org/calendar/performance/1581
    Photo: https://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/223/903

  • What is Experimental Studio?

    Performance Art/Sound Art

    Yoko Ono

    Click this link to see the courses required in Studio Art

     

    Yoko Ono responding to the win of Donald Trump in the 2016 election:

    https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/305733-yoko-ono-response-to-trumps-win-a-primal-scream

     

    Conceptual Art/Text as Art

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    Performance Art

    Performance/Social Practice Art

    Yoko Ono’s Wish Trees

    “As a child in Japan, I used to go to a temple and write out a wish on a piece of thin
    paper and tie it around the branch of a tree. Trees in temple courtyards were always
    filled with people’s wish knots, which looked like white flowers blossoming from afar.”
    Yoko Ono: “All My Works Are A Form Of Wishing”.

    3119372968_2a45fc9df4avant-garde-artist-yoko-ono-widow-of-late-beatle-john-lenn Y 3023556975_622d8d344a

    Make your own Yoko Ono Wish Tree: http://imaginepeacetower.com/yoko-onos-wish-trees/

    You will need: Tree, pencils, Wish Tags.

    Wish Trees are traditionally native, local and indigenous.
    Olive, Apple, Pomegranate, Ficus, Birch, and Juniper trees are all popular choices.

    For Wish Tags you could use paper and string, or pre-strung white shipping tags.

    Download and add the IMAGINE PEACE sign
    Download and add the WISH TREE instruction

    That’s it!

    When the tree is full of wishes: 
    email us     a photo and tell us your story
    mail all the wishes to IMAGINE PEACE TOWER, PO Box 1009, 121 Reykjavik, Iceland.

     

    Public Interventions/Text as Art

    imaginepeace3 2891957151_7d7480160a mcdonough-billboard

     

    John Baldessari

    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

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    I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, 1971

     

    Nihilist Celebration

    student work by Shay 2018

    Performance Art/Video Art

    Performance Art:

    Camille Turner

    VSVSVS

    See samples of artists works from the Extended Practices 3/4 Blog

    Tatoos as Art:

    Watch Tattoos,

     Leo Zhuoran 2019

    As a child, my friends and I used to draw watches on each other’s wrist for fun. Back in the days, a ball point pen is not easy to find for us since everyone uses pencil and only adult and older children can use a pen. To share a ball point pen that was hard to find and draw different watches on each others wrist was a simple mark of friendship. To recreate this childhood memory, I asked my classmates to draw each other a wrist watch with their own design and photographed it then translated it into a printable design. I then printed these “watches” on temporary tattoo paper and shared it with the class.

     

    Skin Swatch,
    Maddy Lychek 2019Download

    Skin Swatch

    This temporary tattoo is pulled directly from the artist’s arm and calls into question the practice of comparing one’s skin colour to others.

    Freckled

    These temporary tattoos form matching freckle patterns meant to be worn in the same spot by two people. They create a connection between two bodies through adornment that looks like it could be real.

    Embrace

    Embrace is a tattoo which only becomes complete with an action. This action is a warm embrace and creates a perfect circle. When the tattoo is not in action it is an incomplete line that starts in the middle of the forearm and ends at the tip of the index finger. It’s functional for both people, open up your circle and get hugged. In this circle is a safe space.

    Sarah Hernandez, Embrace, 2019

    Video Art:

    Ragnar Kjartansson

    Lee Walton

    Fiona Tan

    Social Practices Art:

    Choir! Choir! Choir!

    Conflict Kitchen

    Carmen Papalia

    Special Topics and links to course blogs:

    Stupidity

    Outdoor School

    Houseplant Vacation : Machine Project

    Andrea Zittel – Wagon Station Encampment

    Nina Katchadourian: Collaborations with nature

    Experimental Students on the Farm:

     

    Fastwurms on the Farm

    Fastwurms on the farm – Raku firing, flaming skulls and other dangerous magic

    Raft of the Medusa

    The farm team re-enacts the Raft of the Medusa by Gericault, on the platform /Multi-use room made possible by an anonymous donor.

     

    The Raft of the Medusa, a major work in French 19th-century painting—is generally regarded as an icon of Romanticism. It depicts an event whose human and political aspects greatly interested Géricault: the wreck of a French frigate off the coast of Senegal in 1816, with over 150 soldiers on board.

     

    Students spontaneously re-enacting the The Raft, in OUTDOOR SCHOOL 2019, on the Multi-use room made possible by an anonymous donor.
    Farm-Poster-2019-1Download

  • Abjection in Art

    Abjection in Art:
    “Explores themes that transgress and threaten our sense of cleanliness and propriety particularly referencing the body and bodily functions.” Tate.org.ukPiero ManzoniIn May 1961, while he was living in Milan, Piero Manzoni produced ninety cans of Artist’s Shit. Each was numbered on the lid 001 to 090. Tate’s work is number 004. A label on each can, printed in Italian, English, French and German, identified the contents as ‘”Artist’s Shit”, contents 30gr net freshly preserved, produced and tinned in May 1961.’In December 1961 Manzoni wrote in a letter to the artist Ben Vautier: ‘I should like all artists to sell their fingerprints, or else stage competitions to see who can draw the longest line or sell their shit in tins. The fingerprint is the only sign of the personality that can be accepted: if collectors want something intimate, really personal to the artist, there’s the artist’s own shit, that is really his.’ (Letter reprinted in Battino and Palazzoli p.144.)

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