Tuesday 18 May 2010

link to proposal presentation


http://term3hjg.blogspot.com/

Tuesday 11 May 2010

Shauna McMullan : Blue Spine Project


Blue Spine: An Invitation

As part of the Making Space project, Shauna McMullan is creating a single, long, blue, line of books borrowed and collected from women throughout Scotland.You are invited to take part in this artwork.

Can you lend a book to the Blue Spine collection?

Your book needs to:

  • Have a blue spine or have blue somewhere in the spine &
  • Be written by a woman

You will be invited to celebrate the opening of the artwork and to see your book as part of this collection in The Mitchell Library in May 2010. Following the exhibition your book will be returned to you with a numbered bookmark enclosed, recognising your book’s place within this collection. Your book will need to be borrowed until August 2010 and it is important to include a note of your name, address and contact details with your book.

Please send your book to Blue Spine Collection, Glasgow Women’s Library, 81 Parnie Street, Glasgow, G1 5RH – or drop it off at the Library.

If you have any questions about the Blue Spine collection, please contact us or email Shauna on shauna.mcmullan@womenslibrary.org.uk

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The idea of this project interests me , the involvement of all types of people is something that makes the project what it is. The concept of involving people in a project like Shauna McMullan's, is something I am interested in exploring in my current work. Without peoples involvement in this project, the work would be unsucessfull.

Performance Art

H&C lecture - 04/05/10
  • 60's & 70's
  • Eva Hesse
  • Robert Morris
  • Material - product - deterioration
  • Decay of work
Eva HESSE Contingent
Robert Morris
  • Art and Object
  • Michael Freed
  • Relationship between conceptual art and the 'body art' that emerged from the 1960's
ROBERT MORRIS Untitled 1967-8
  • Chris Burden -'shoot'
  • 'Rose-lee Goldberg, Performance Art'
  • John Cage
  • Marcel Duchamp - 'The Body of Language' 1974
'...unmediated engagement of viewer and performer in art, has also crossed over into architecture, semiotics, anthropology and gender studies'
- Rose-lee Goldberg, Performance Art 2000

TILLY LOSCH, Footprints carpet

What constitutes performance?
  • skill
  • audience
  • consciousness
1, Joe Goode, Ed Ruscha riding horses, (catalogue cover for Newport Harbour, Balbao Pavilion Gallery Exhibition, !968)
2, Ed Ruscha, says goodbye to college joys, full page advert in Artform, 1967
3, Ed and Danna, 1971
All photographed by Jerry McMillian

Audience
  • what makes a performance really interesting?
  • could be athlete performer - suspense
  • sympathy, connection and bond of trust between audience and artist. artist id drawing and pulling energy from the audience
Antonio Damastio
From the 'performance art' to the 'per formative'
Barbara Kirshenblatt - Gimblett, 1999
Richard Schechner - performance studier, 2002
  1. in everyday life
  2. in the arts
  3. in sports and other popular entertainment
  4. business
  5. technology
  6. sex
  7. ritual - scared and secular
  8. play
Fluids- people would be surprised or pleased. introducing 'play' in everyday life
The Futurists
  • noise rather than music
  • Hugo Ball- surrealist performance
  • fluxist movement
  • Joseph Boice, Yoko Ono
Drip Music - authorship and originality
anti consumerist and anti establishment

Joseph Beuys
Native Americans - repression

JOSEPH BEUYS, I Like America and America Likes Me 1974


Arists had to address the movement.


MARCEL DUCHAMP, Mile of String

International Surrealist Exhibition (New York, 1942)


An encounter with the real occurs within like the performance works.

Shoot, Chris Burden

Often works were culturally specific, addressing the contemry social and political situation.

Susan Sontag, 'Against Interpretation, 1964'

What is important, how is to recover our senses...


Ginapane, 1971 - to anger which was unfolding in Vietnam

SDS President Paul Potter - antiwarraly

George Skahel - 'Vietnam Letters'

John Filo - Kent state (1970), Velocity Peice
David Hammons

Faith Wilding, Waiting, performed at Womenhouse, Cal Arts 1972
anger about women in society
Movina Abramovic, Rythm
Peggy Phelan, The Ontology of performance, Representation without Reproductin. 1993

Performance is something which is live.We need images and film to keep record of it but the life of the performance is when it is live and happening.

Monday 10 May 2010

kohei Nawa


kohei Nawa | Japan b.1975 | PixCell-Elk#2 2009 | 240 x 249.5 x 198cm | Taxidermied elk, glass, acrylic, crystal beads | Work created with the support of the Fondation d’enterprise HermÄ—s | Courtesy the artist and SCAI, Tokyo | Photograph: Seiji Toyonaga

b.1975 Osaka, Japan
Lives and works in Kyoto, Japan

As a sculptor, Kohei Nawa is concerned with forms and surfaces and how they interact to become objects. His sculptures often exploit the tactile nature of surfaces, as in his ‘Pixcell’ series (2002–), in which he covers the surfaces of objects with glass beads of various sizes. The outer layer suggests a molecular structure, and also references the pixel of the computer screen. Fascinated by how we navigate objects in the virtual world via the internet, Nawa enters keywords into web search engines and creates sculptures based on the images that are returned, with his objects — such as taxidermied animals — sourced from online auction sites. Nawa’s skin of glass beads magnifies the object in some areas and distorts it in others, shifting our perception and questioning how we encounter things in our daily environment. His ‘Pixcell’ sculptures, such as PixCell – Elk#2 2009 shown in APT6, encapsulate Nawa’s longstanding interest in how we come to understand what we see.

Exhibitions (solo): Galerie Vera Munro, Hamburg, Germany, 2009; Miro Foundation, Barcelona, Spain, 2008; Peking Fine Arts, Beijing, China, 2008; Ierimonti Gallery, Milan, Italy, 2007; SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo, Japan, 2006. Exhibitions (group): ‘Parallel Worlds’ Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan, 2008; ‘Great New Wave: Contemporary Art from Japan’, Art Gallery of Hamilton, British Columbia, 2008; ‘Roppongi Crossing’, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, 2007; Biennial of Valencia, Spain, 2005. www.kohei-nawa.net

http://qag.qld.gov.au/exhibitions/past/recently_archived/apt6/artists/kohei_nawa

Kibong Rhee

Kibong Rhee | South Korea b.1957 | There is no place – Shallow cuts2008 | Glass, fog machine, artificial leaves, wood, steel, sand, motor, timer | Installation view, Kukje Gallery, Seoul | Images courtesy: The artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul

KIBONG RHEE

1957 Seoul, South Korea
Lives and works in Seoul, South Korea

In the installations of Kibong Rhee, audiences encounter dreamlike scenarios in which everyday objects and images are made extraordinary through the illusion of movement and transformation. Using water and light to manipulate form and matter, Rhee plays on our expectations of the possible and impossible, offering metaphysical speculations that provide his work with a contemplative quality. In one of his recent works, books magically swim within translucent water tanks, a mesmerising act inspired by the artist accidentally dropping a book into the water of his bathtub while reading. In his installation at APT6, There is no place – Shallow cuts 2008, Rhee employs light and vapour to conjure a sublime impression of morning fog as it shrouds and obscures the silhouette of a vast willow tree. A powerfully physical work, it also suggest traditional landscape painting, forming a connection between experience and representation.

Exhibitions (solo): Kukje Gallery, Seoul, South Korea, 2008. Exhibitions (group): ‘Drawn in the Clouds’, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland, 2008; Singapore Biennale, Singapore, 2008; ‘Thermocline of Art: New Asian Waves’, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2007.

http://qag.qld.gov.au/exhibitions/past/recently_archived/apt6/artists/kibong_rhee

Dye Garden Plant List


SHEEP





From Fleece to Frocks: A Brief Study on the Importance of Wool

By David Norton


Although modern fashions tend to avoid wool as unwieldy and conventional, Europeans from at least 1000 B.C.E. have worn this most utilitarian of fabrics. Warm, long-wearing, relatively cheap, and abundant, wool was the fabric of necessity for all Europeans, including the elites. Wool cloth came into production somewhere around 2400 B.C.E. Since then, Europeans have slowly improved the quality of wool from sheep through selective breeding, killing sheep with coarser wool for meat. Most sheep that Europeans used during the early modern period came from Italy, as was the case with Merino sheep. Long sought after for its soft fibers, merino wool originated from a Greek colony in southeastern Italy. Iberia boasted the best herds of merino sheep until well into the early eighteenth century, when other European countries began to expand their merino wool production from donated Spanish sheep.1

Like Europeans of the early modern period, historians have recognized the centrality of wool to understanding regional economies, cultures, and politics. Wool provides an ideal product for historians of differing specialties to understand the past. Social historians evaluate the herder culture of transhumance peasants. Economic historians evaluate wool as trade goods, as a foundation of the state's economy, and as a product of advances in credit. One historian has gone so far as to call wool "the dynamic core of pre-industrial urban production and long distance international trade."2 Three case studies will allow one to appreciate the centrality of wool in the early modern European world.

Any discussion of wool must begin in Italy as it is from there that Europe derives most of its modern varieties of sheep. John Marino has examined the culture and economic workings of the pastoral wool economies in the Kingdom of Naples during the early modern era. Naples possessed a transhumance organization , or royal sheep customhouse (dogana), that lobbied the monarchy for privileges. Marino disputes the accepted history of transhumance in Naples that highlights the crown as a pro-capitalist, anti-small-shepherd institution. In contrast, due to a wide variety of cultural and political ties, the crown of Naples protected s mall shepherds, at times to the detriment of economic development of the region. This study underscores the way in which wool was embedded in both peasant and elite values.3

From Italy we turn our attention to Spain, the jewel of wool production in this period. Spain produced the best and the most wool during the early modern period, forbidding the export of its merino sheep until the early eighteenth century. (The first sizable export of merinos went to Sweden in 1723.) Carla and William Phillips provide a long-overdue corrective study of transhumance herding in Spain in their book Spain's Golden Fleece: Wool Production and the Wool Trade from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century. Contrary to previous scholarship, transhumance herding did not undercut agricultural productivity. Rather, transhumance herding complimented agriculture, utilizing land unusable for farming. The Spanish version of the dogana, the Mesta, has long been vilified as the institution that damned Spain to crawl towards industrialization by monopolizing productive land. According to the Phillips', clearly this was not the case. Though the dispute is far more complicated than can be addressed here, one should note that wool production proved central not just as a sector in the Spanish economy, but as a factor in industrialization and, therefore, in the politics of nineteenth and twentieth century Europe.4

Finally, consider the environmental implications of transhumance flocks in the Mexican context. Elinor Melville has written extensively on the introduction of sheep to the Valle de Mezquital area in New Spain during the sixteenth century. Following a sharp drop in agricultural productivity, Spaniards introduced sheep to the area in the 1540s. The valley subsequently became increasingly barren and ecologically unstable. Nevertheless, most economic historians agree that the Spanish "acted in their best long-term interest" when they introduced large flocks of sheep to central Mexico. Melville, by contrast, says that significant evidence contradicts this theory and that most Spaniards gave little to no thought to the long-term ramifications of transhumance grazing.5 This case study highlights the long-term environmental consequences that wool production has had on Spanish Mexico.

These three studies highlight various levels of historical materiality. Wool production radically shaped the cultures, national development, and ecosystems of the areas it touched. Perhaps no product in this period allows for such a multi-disciplinary analysis of disparate issues. Fernand Braudel displayed his usual perceptiveness when he highlighted s heep as a force that changed the world.6

http://bell.lib.umn.edu/Products/wool.html

Naturally Dyed Wool


The Natural Properties of Wool:

1. Naturally absorbent and controls humidity on or near the human body.

2. A great insulator of heat and sound.

3. Soft and becomes softer with use.

4. A self-renewing resource which is biodegradable and safe for our environment.

Saturday 8 May 2010

Ernesto Neto



Pablo Mason photo Courtesy of Ernesto Neto and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

The Lycra sacks in Ernesto Neto’s “Mother Body Emotional Densities, for Alive Temple Time Baby Son” (2007) contain turmeric, clove and black pepper.

Ernesto Neto's work is intended for people to interact with the peice. i also like the way it takes hold of the space around it. the scale of this work inspires me to think big and avoid limitations.

Thursday 6 May 2010

Georgia O'Keeffe

Summer days 1936
Music, Pink and Blue

The Human Stain, Philip Roth


Book overview

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser.

Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of
The Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."

http://books.google.com/books?sitesec=reviews&id=3zfQtmFv6yUC

Own Experimental Work

I have been experimenting with Straining various plants, vegetables, and things which have been traditionally used for dyes. By using muslin, this strains the mixture/dye gradually. This process highligts the theme of time, growth, staining and traditions.
The use of furniture such as tables and chairs has been traditionally used in straining all impurities.
Hanging animals to mature the meat and remove impurities is a technique which reflects the process of straining.
  • process

Hanging

http://honest-food.net/2008/11/27/on-hanging-pheasants/


Hanging

The real purpose of hanging game is to enable the fibres of the flesh to break down and decompose so that the meat will be more tender. It is very difficult to give exact times as it depends entirely on personal taste. Some prefer slightly tougher meat with a fresh taste, while others enjoy very tender meat with a decidedly 'high' smell and flavour. These times therefore are only very approximate, and are for average seasonable temperatures. If the weather is hotter than average, hang for the shortest length of time given, and if colder than usual, for the longest. The older the game, the longer it must hang. Birds are ready for cooking when the tail, inside leg, or breast feathers can be plucked out easily. Game birds are always hung by the neck (although some say you should hang a pheasant by its feet, until the body drops!). Overhung flesh will have blueish patches on it. Game should always be hung in a shaded place in a current of air, well out of the reach of cats, dogs or foxes.

Partridge: 5-12 days
Pheasant: 3 days to 2 weeks
Grouse: 3-10 days
Blackcock: 3-4 days
Ptarmigan: 3-4 days
Capercaillie: Bury it in the ground for a few days, or hang it until it is really tender.
Pigeon: 2-3 days
Quail: Can be eaten straight away, or hung for up to 2 days
Woodcock
And Snipe: Can be eaten straight away, or kept for up to 6 days, but remember that woodcock and snipe are often cooked with the entrails left in them, so They shouldn't be left too long.
Wild Duck
(Mallard, Teal,
Widgeon, etc): can be eaten straight away, or hung up to 2 days. If left any longer the flesh is liable to turn rank.
Wild Goose: 1-2 days
Hare: About 1 week without paunching, a little longer in cold weather. Suspend it by the hind feet with a bucket under the nose to catch the blood, which makes good gravy.
Rabbit: Eat straight away, with no hanging.
Venison: 3 days to 2 weeks. There is a great deal of difference between these times, but apart from taste, it depends on many factors. A young roe deer in perfect condition will only need about 3 days, while a tough old fallow or red deer could need a good 2 weeks to make it tender.
For the average taste, test the hung meat every day by running a skewer into the haunch.So long as the skewer has no unpleasant smell when withdrawn the meat is in good condition, but if it does get rather too "high", wash it in warm water and dry it well before cooking.
If there is no fly-free larder available, rub the carcase with a mixture of flour, powdered ginger, and pepper. The furrow of the backbone should be well dressed with pepper. Wrap the carcase in muslin before hanging in the larder, but inspect it every day and give it a fresh coating of flour and ginger when necessary. Wipe with a cloth to remove any moisture which may have formed.
http://www.thehuntinglife.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=24462
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By looking into the tradition of hanging game and referencing my experiments with this process, it mirrors what I intend to achieve with my muslin experiments. i feel as though the experiments with muslin will gradually mature and dry up in a similar way to the meat when getting more tender as time passes.