research: Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum

Research

I first came across Mona Hatoums work very literally by walking across it, in an exhibition that has had a lasting impact on me.

It was a controversial group retrospective of 200 female artists at the Pompidou titled 'Elle' in 2010. Corps étranger (1994) and Deep Throat (1996) are endoscopic journeys, video recordings of Hatoum's body. One of these videos was projected vertically down onto the floor so could stand as if you were falling slowly feet first through a fleshy helter skelter. Squirm inducing, uncomfortable viewing, despite being familiar with such images, I remembered thinking what sort of artist would do this to themselves and knew little of the background or intent of her work. I was directed towards her work this year after discussions about anxiety inducing images and my intent for my video project.

Her sculptures are equally interesting, simple statement installations that are beautiful and intriguing. 

marbles, world map for venice biennale

Born in 1952, Mona Hatoum is Palestinian but grew up in Lebanon.

She is a contemporary installation and video artist, most known for her works addressing exile, politics and the body.
She was displace to Britain in 1975/. Thinking the stay would be shortlived she enrolled at art school, an experience which not only politicised her more than her previous witness of conflict, but also triggered an interest in class divides and femisinism.
She studied at Goldsmiths in the late 70s. 
Her work has a number of themes, she uses sculpture, video and installation.
Her most famous works include an endoscopic video of her insides and a touching video work using letters and images from her mother back in Lebanon.
She is represented by the white cube gallery and has exhibited in the Venice Biennale twice.
She cites her influences as conceptual and minimalist art.

Sexuality, exile, uprooting, violence and intimacy

 " I grew up in Beirut in a family that had suffered a tremendous loss and existed with a sense of dislocation"

"There is a sense of instability and restlessness in the work. This is the way in which the work is informed by my background"

"There is a sense of instability and restlessness in the work. This is the way in which the work is informed by my background"

"There is a sense of instability and restlessness in the work. This is the way in which the work is informed by my background"

"Later, when I got into the area of installation and object making, I wouldn’t say I went back to a minimal aesthetic as such, it was more a kind of reductive approach, if you like, where the forms can be seen as abstract aesthetic structures, but can also be recognized as cages, lockers, chairs, beds… The work therefore becomes full of associations and meaning—a reflection on the social environment we inhabit. Unlike minimal objects, they are not self-referential."

References:

Conversations with artists

http://www.macval.fr/english/residences/residence-archives/article/mona-hatoum-5044

http://bombmagazine.org/article/2130/mona-hatoum

interview by janine antoni

http://en.qantara.de/content/interview-with-mona-hatoum-the-idea-is-what-matters

research: Tacita Dean

Project 2

Research file

Artist:Tacita Dean

capturing the green ray, Tacita Dean 2001

artist infront of Tate turbine hall entitled 'Film' 

Born: 1965 UK

Lives:Berlin with husband artist  

Credentials/labels

Exhibited in Freeze show alongside contemporaries the YBA, more nostalgic

Bio

Artist biography

English draughtsman, photographer and filmmaker. Although trained as a painter, in her early work she showed a predilection for expressive formats more often found in the cinema. Her practice of drawing took on the form of storyboards, a narrative format used in the planning of movies. Her taste for storytelling triggered many of her works, often based on the possibilities raised by chance encounter. Dean gave equal weight to fictional and historical narratives, emphasising their power of evocation: notions of time, memory or nautical elements are part of her personal themes.

Dean's works play poetically on the theme of searching, as well as on the blurred identities of mysterious people or things. Dean's stories embraced the notion of struggle over elements, which explain the recurrence of the sea as a major protagonist in her work. Dean's minimal narratives are imbued with a sense of human failure and never-ending expectation resulting from actions that are curiously both heroic and modest. Some of Dean's later works are reminiscent of the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher in their focus on derelict places endowed with powerful history, as in Sound Mirrors (60 mm black-and-white film, 1999; London, Frith St. Gal.). The quaint and obsolete buildings are the remains of some prototype air-raid warning structures built in 1920; by accompanying the images with ambient sound recorded in 1999, she doubles the act of preservation of those buildings, already saved from destruction in 1988. She was shortlisted for the 1998 Turner Prize.

Themes:

Coincidence… almost a methodology of producing a work, using chance

Blink and you’ll miss it

Quotes:

Process:

“I think a lot of pre-imagined work can be quite inert.”

I proceed illogically. (laughter) But I’m very formal strangely enough. The final manifestation isn’t chaotic, although the process is, I think.

“I never know where I’m going when I cut my films”

Choice of medium:

Film is being lost because it’s about the money, it’s cynical.

Not nostalgic: as this implies things were done better back in the day, it’s not about that it’s about using a medium for it’s worth

 (1)

“Everything that excites me no longer functions in its own time.” (2)

About film analogue vs digital

"The real crux of the difference is that artists exhibit, and so care about the final presentation and presence of the artwork in the space. Other professions have their work mediated into different formats: TV, magazines, billboards, books. It remains only in galleries and museums that the physical encounter is so critical, which is why artists, in the widest sense, are the most distressed by the obsolescence of analogue mediums.”

"I GRADE MY FILMS WARM"

Others Opinions:

Of her Tate turbine hall installation:

A joyful, resplendent meditation on the mediums of film and photography—Dean’s signature theme—

The artist’s conceit is that the space in which one stands is both host and subject, and this makes for a loaded viewing experience.

The children’s joy reiterated that of the adult viewers, who were invited to remember the wonder and decisive presence of celluloid.  (3)

known for her serious-minded, beautiful, patiently paced film (5)

My thoughts:

·      Like how articulate she is: she’s not dressing up or pontificating

·      Like the idea of following an idea, coincidences and the honest narrative of her work

·      Like her defense of the importance of film vs digital-use of masking, anamorphic lenses, how she works alone

·      Meditative quality of work
·      Warm use of colour, referencing the past

Biography:

1. ACCA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dOEXl_3lzI

2.Bomb Magazine: interview Jeffrey Eugnenides

http://bombmagazine.org/article/2801/tacita-dean

3.http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/tacita-dean/:

REV IEWS FEB. 16, 2012 Tacita Dean LONDON,

at Tate Modern

by Charlotte Cotton

4.http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/feb/22/tacita-dean-16mm-film

5.Adrian Searle http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/oct/10/tacita-dean-film-review
6. http://www.necsus-ejms.org/the-last-ray-of-the-dying-sun-tacita-deans-commitment-to-analogue-media-as-demonstrated-through-floh-and-film/

artist research: Agnes Martin

Oh i do like a bit of zen.
First came across the work of Agnes Martin, in an amazingly diverse book on drawing by Tania Kovatz.
it's a relief to relate to drawings that aren't just figurative and have an element of meditative art to them.

Read up more about the artist after discussion with tutor Vera Boelmer Kahn. There's a wonderful large section of handwritten notes by the artist in the book in the library about her. I think it's her prep notes for a speech she gave to some graduating art students. On yellow paper with grey lines, the blue biro scrawls across the pages notebook size inserted in the middle of the book in a clump.
There's some great quotations and somewhat reassuringly and predictably there's mention of koans and meditation

Still looking outward to other artists to find a connection and resonance with their own personal histories and stories as if I need that to justify what I like. Am not comparing myself in any other way....

Canadian born, in the vast prarieland of Saskatchewan in 1912, Martin studied in Oregon, California and New Mexico. Despite a stint in New York she spent the majority of her life in rural big sky america, finally settling near Taos in New Mexico. Her ashes are buried under an apricot tree in the grounds of where her work is now exhibited.
Described as an abstract painter her contemporaries and friends included Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, and Donald Judd. Her style was more influenced by the spiritual than the intellectual so she preferred to be described as an abstract expressionist. She was interested in eastern buddhist philosophies as guidance for living rather than a discipline.

   Martin praised Mark Rothko for having "reached zero so that nothing could stand in the way of truth". Following his example Martin also pared down to the most reductive elements to encourage a perception of perfection and to emphasize transcendent reality. Her signature style was defined by an emphasis upon line, grids, and fields of extremely subtle color.

 Her works contains flaws and signs of the artist's hand. 
Known for her grid patterned works before moving to new mexico after 1967 her works until then had been brown/black.

“When I first made a grid,” Martin said, “I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence . . . and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, this is my vision.” Martin made fine vertical lines and lightly shaded horizontal bands in oil and pencil, softening the geometric structure, which seems to expand beyond the confines of the canvas. For Martin the grid evoked not a human measure but an ethereal one—the boundless order or transcendent reality associated with Eastern philosophies.


Keep it simple stupid.


References:

1. Glimcher,A., 2012. Agnes AMrtin: Painting, Writings, Remembrances by Arne Glimcher, United Kingdom: Phaidon Press Ltd.

2. Kovatz,T., 2007 The Drawing Book: A Survey of the Primary Means of Expression, United Kingdom: Black Dog Publishing.

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_Martin

Research:Bernaud Smilde

Photos of Dutch born artist Bernard Smilde's 'cloud installation' titled 'Nimbus' went viral in 2012. All seeing all knowing art-God Saatchi emailed Smilde to include his photographs in the Saatchi photography show, and the rest as they say, is history in the making.

The artist credits the light in the netherlands, as well as another more famous dutch artist Vermeer as inspiration. Noting that the water reflecting light back into the dutch clouds creates the luminous effect that the dutch painters have sought to reproduce.

He's also interested how objects are altered by the architecture within which they're placed. Hence the choice of varying locations for his nimbus series (photographs of fleeting cloud phenomenon created with a complex DIY set of equipment including a smoked machine). These have included a dutch castle that in the 70s housed psychiatric patients, or the cologne cathedral (photo above) where Rubens was baptised.

Without having been to these places and seen these clouds, there's something that instantly draws you in. Isolated clouds like a nimbus conjure up memories of spaciousness and childhood. Summer days or bright sharp cold springs when the light is uplifting rather than grey and depressing.

One of my favourite books as a child was a story about a looking for patterns in clouds. Smilde comments himself that the clouds themselves have a multitude of meanings but he likes to see them as having personalities. Other projections about deeper meanings are likely to be rebuffed however:

“I’m not interested in nature… I do like the idea that the cloud is a universal icon. Some people think it’s geography, others religion. Some say [my work] is about Surrealism, others Minimalism… Actually it’s more of a canvas to project ideas on.”

I like the calm and feelings of solitude from the photos not just the concept.

I'm interested in traces and memory in walls and pavements which contrasts nicely with something so fleeting and almost supernatural as the clouds.

The spontaneity and impermanence of the installation is one that I like. You can enjoy the after-image but you can't experience it the same way, unlike a painting or photo. I like that detachment and the sneakiness to it. Like running up kissing someone on the cheek and legging it before they see you.

Exhibition review: Richard Tuttle

Exhibition review:

Richard Tuttle: I Don’t Know. The Weave of Textile Language

“You make something in order not to have to sign it. It should be already a better signature than any signature you could possibly put on it.”

The turbine hall in the tate modern is a industrial cathedral sized space. Previous installations as part of the Unilever series by famed artists have included Louise Bourgeois’ ginormous malevolent spider sculpture and Olafur Eliasson popular ‘weather project’ sun like orb.

Hyundai have committed to the longest funded programme of turbine hall commissions, 10 years. This new series starts in the autumn. In the meantime, the current exhibit is of a site specific piece by American artist Richard Tuttle. Entitled ‘I don’t know’- the weave of textile language’ is his largest work to date. It coincides with a retrospective of his work currently showing at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Richard Tuttle a contemporary American artist whose work came to prominence as part of the post-minimalist movement in the 1960s, continues to forge his own path. Usually known for small scale minimalist work, often sculptural made pieces, using found objects, things overlooked. He uses sculpture especially textiles to draw our attention to the space and the world around us.

Like other artists confronted with the challenge of the huge space, Tuttle has avoided the height issue by exploiting half the length of the hall with a suspended sculpture level with the walkway in the middle of the turbine hall. The concrete grey floor and high ceiling space invite something colourful and contrasting.

The installation dangles motionless from the ceiling, lit subtly, physically it is easily missed if walking from the Southwark ramp obscure by the first floor walkway. The warm bright colours flag it up when you get closer.

Comprising of 8 interconnected wood segments, brass screws gleaming where they fix the aeroplane wing like side-pieces to a vertical centre piece. Like some strange winged sea creature, the central part shapes like a globular S-shape with segments of wood slotted horizontally along the vertical centre piece.

Draped over parts of the piece are matte stretchy pieces of  manmade and natural fabric, invisibly pinned in places. Erratically folded, thicker mushroom-topped layers cover the centre piece more completely that the side arms. Crimson and orange, the colour scheme feels warm and matches the unvarnished unfussy brown plywood.

There’s no sound other than the odd footstep along the walkway that’ll stop briefly then carry on down the stairs, no shrieks, gasps. I hear someone disparagingly say ‘So this is modern art?’ and walk on without further comment. For such a large geometric piece in such an iconic place, there’s a bizarre lack of intrigue from other visitors. This in itself becomes the most intriguing part about the piece.

I walk over to the poster bearing information about the titled work, feeling not so much deflated as underwhelmed. The size of the piece fits the space. The colours warm up the surrounds on a dull February day. But there’s a niggling annoyance.

I read that Tuttle likes to challenge what people see as beautiful and is interested in the collaboration with textile artists whom he commissioned the specially made fabric.

The Tate is visited by upto 5 million people a year. It’s half term. I realise I’m expecting a busy packed hall noisily gabbing at a crowd pleaser or shocker, or even an awe-inspired hush.  But, however open minded I’m trying to be, I feel a bit pissed off. I could imagine a grumpy visitor ranting, 'Who the hell is this yankee artist, coming over here with his bits of plywood to our art gallery and he can’t even be arsed to finished what he started?'  What a waste of space of an amazing space.

Tuttle I learn is known for his small subtle intimate works.
There’s subtle and there’s downright opaque and quizzical. Seeing the guts of a wooden mutant giant sea creature could qualify for some kind of surreal intimacy I guess.

I read that Tuttle is

“looking at issues of perception that can be extrapolated onto questions of perception in general”.

Oh good, that makes it so much more appealing and intruiguing. Er hang on a sec. No it doesn’t.

Is it a vanity project lacking in vanity? Tuttle has said about his work

“You make something in order not to have to sign it. It should be already a better signature than any signature you could possibly put on it.”

In which case, the signature appears to be an aspirational indeciferable scrawl in cheap mass produced biro. From India. Indian ink?

I’m clearly either not perceptive or lacking questions.

So I start to create deliberate questions to try and give the experience more of a chance and less judgement.

Is it a comment that you can’t glam anything up as the guts will always show in the end? Oh so maybe the ambiguity has deeper meanings and I’m being vacuous and superficial.

This piece if it’s referencing the people that made it, just makes me think, are they on such poorly paid wages in India that they walked out on a strike and there was never enough material made to cover the sculpture.

My mind as always wanders stubbornly away from anything that might be too pretentious into more farcical territories.

I wonder where the wood came from. Is it Indian plywood or would you ship in your artists wood. Oh, so maybe it’s a comment on hard wood forests and deforestations. Or maybe it’s a comment that Wickes is better than B&Q.

 Maybe it’s a statement about a wrestling with creativity and how textiles is a metaphorical language for man’s struggles. That wrestling with an imaginary sea creature to cover it in fabric isn’t as easy as you would think, like trying to dry a small wriggling toddler who refuses to wear their pyjamas to bed. At some stage you have to give up the fight and realise it’s probably not important. Is that the message?!

Maybe it’s a comment that they’re aren’t enough sea-horse shaped floating wooden winged things in galleries these days. Is this man on drugs I then think. He did get started in the 60s. Hang on, am I meant to be questioning how drug addled a man who grew up in New Jersey is?

It is making me question what is beautiful and what I know, but I realise I don’t really care about being challenged with this as it is so unappealing and my judgemental conservatism just makes me shrug my shoulder with a 'meh'.

Clearly, anything can be laden with symbolism, cliché, our own projected memories and emotional responses.

Tuttle seems to have created something so underwhelming it’s not even intriguing.

 It feels apathetic, so half-hearted and insignificant despite it’s size and boldness of colour that I don’t even have the energy or inclination to scratch my head in bafflement.

Since returning home, I think the niggling frustration about the lack of impact is possibly covering a need to be shocked, challenged by something. For something to trigger an extreme emotion, calm or anger or scorn.

I read later that

“This room and this work are simultaneously arguing for the support of ambiguity because you just need to go out the doors and you enter a world that is constantly trying to crush the ambiguous in every way”

 Life can be underwhelming, ambiguous and half-hearted so to be reminded of this in someone’s work, might be a message he’s trying to give, but I would argue it’s not a

particularly inspiring, long-lived or interesting one. But he’s done it successfully if that’s what he’s after. I don't necessarily want a mirror held up to ambiguity in this way, I 'm feeling childish and wanting something more accessible and classically beautiful. How banal.

I realise I’m more aching to get upstairs and see the potentially depressing exhibition on conflict photography, or stare into the dead eyes of Marlene Dumas eery paintings. As I walk under the piece trying to give it another go, my mood’s lifted by 2 kids gurning for a photo. I look down at a piece of red tape stuck on the floor and realise the patterns in the concrete are awkwardly more mesmerising that the piece above my head. I’m more interested in the connection between the people that laid this floor and the unpredictable random patterns that result from such a utilitarian generic worldwide building tool. Or some such pretentious art speak. The language of textiles wove no such spell on me.

Richard Tuttle: I Don’t Know . The Weave of Textile Language

Tate Modern: Exhibition

14 October 2014 – 6 April 2015

Turbine Hall

References

Quotations:

1. http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/richard-tuttle-i-dont-know-weave-textile-language

Background reading:

1. http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/%EF%80%A1Exhibs_RichardTuttle_InterpPanels_13Oct_REPRINT.

2. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/11159082/Richard-Tuttle-Turbine-Hall-Tate-Modern-review-evokes-nothing-whatsoever.htmlpdf

3. http://www.theartsdesk.com/visual-arts/richard-tuttle-tate-modern-whitechapel-gallery

There is, as ever with ticket-holders-only minimalism, a very fine line between the mindfully simple and the simple-minded

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/02/martin-creed-whats-the-point-hayward-review

Ash wednesday, clouds & a dutch artist: Berdnaut Smilde

Ash wednesday.
half term,
quick trip to the big smoke to try and check out Bill Viola's Martyrs exhibit.
I turn up never having been in this part of the city before.
City proper.
Where was all the bustle.
Famous church. Has it's own cafe and loos.
So I was a bit surprised and sheepish when I was told it was services today only as it was Ash Wednesday and the exhibits were closed. 
I was handed a leaflet in several languages telling me what Ash wednesday meant. I can't remember what it said but I remember the smell,
Smells and bells. The joke about high church.
it smelt like the all saints church in bristol that always seems open, empty, quiet and a refuge. It's windows were designed by artist John Piper for the modern repairs to it after it was half-decimated by a german bomb.
It always smells strongly of incense. And age.
The windows are dark blue, it's like sitting in an underwater cave. There's a comforting surrealness to the gloom. Boiled sweet bold primary coloured windows at the front but mainly a cool tint of blue to the interior from the vast window that's blue.
Except there's no tinkling sound or waves just the strange odd sound like water running down the side of a building. It's the noise of the fibreglass windows creaking every so subtly and eerily.....

Anyway, I'm walking into St Pauls, thinking of home and incense and All Saints church. 
It's nearly noon and the sun is streaming in through the southern windows facing the thames. The rays struggle through the smoke and they're isolated and split by the leaded windows. It's absolutely breathtaking.
 I'd read that frankinsense is used in churches as it slow down your breathing. Could be new age nonsense.
But it feels like you can't get enough of breathing in the stuff and then there's these windows making visible light rays. Clever stuff. See here the light we preach to you each week.
 I'm gobsmacked and am itching to get my camera out my pocket but know i can't.

 The copula is vast and high and tastefully guilded. Walls dove grey stone,solid columns, no messing, this place isn't going anywhere over time. I inch towards the brightest area, seats are lined up in a circle and hanging in the middle, perfectly just above head height, dense and obvious enough to obscure the pulpit is a perfect cloud. Tears prick, hands clench, the overriding annoying modern urge to take a photo of everything. Recording something for posterity that makes you feel connected. Then you will always have it with you when the feeling drains away along with your energy and sense of humour.

I sinned that day and here it is.

But hang on a sec, that looks familiar. Is life imitating art after all:

Berndnaut Smilde's website








It got me thinking about the age old question of what art is for.
Just like we cut flowers to bring them indoors to die and admire them. There's enough mad beautiful stuff in nature without chucking a whole lot of ego, intellect and nostalgia out there.
Creativity might have made us the wheel, craft might have wiled away some hours when the woolly mammoths weren't trying to eat us for tea. But those preocupations are long gone now. Why do we need it now? do we need it more than ever? do i like those photos of clouds in rooms more than I would like the experience myself. Am I so bloody jaded and removed that an image is better than a feeling.
I mean look at the windows in the second one. I just opened iphoto and it randomly jumped to photos I took in paris in 2010 on the foundation trip. thinking about the point and place of the viewer as it's something i've been reading up on from Olafur Eliassons work which is about phenomenology...try saying that after a couple of beers.

Research: Michal Rovner

researching art theory for my essay in a book called 'how artists think and work', came across a chapter about Michal Rovner.

A still showed what looked like abstracted bird like images. As I read further, with a sinking feeling, I read described in dense art-speak a video installation of large scale projections on 3 walls in a darkened room of birds in flight. The text describes the disorientating feeling along with the metaphors of birds, and the unnerving sound of having helicopters drone unseen but heard through the speakers.

I know there's nothing new, but it kind of makes you think, I'm not doing this to be original but I'm doing it because the idea came from being in a place at a time and I want to work from that experience.

Rovner is an Israeli artist. Something that gives a weight and legitimacy to her work, so yep using a helicopter. Deep. Growing up in Israel sure that's a reality.

I've been adding audio of a 9 month old unborn baby's heart beat to my video work.

 Ironic unreality to that. 

Put that in your pipe and smoke it

...

Anyway, i digress, looked up to see if I can enviously spy on this proper work with birds by a proper artist. Of course nil such luck but there was the you tube video clip below, furtively filmed by someone walking fairly soberly round the Pace exhibition. (getting more familiar with the names to linked with, Pace, Frith, Pippy Houldsworth, White Cube). 

Shows some amazing videos that look banal enough at a quick glance. Then something catches you eye, 'am i imagining things' 'nope something just moved', looking more closely at the videos, what look like hieroglyphics or cuneiform is actually small stick figures walking across a page, what looks like a textured roughened factory concrete wall seems to have a exodus of anonymous black figures walking off to a non-existent horizon. They're blood brilliant to look at. A friend once spent about 2 hours looking at Jacques SOulages Black Paintings. I think I lost interest after about 15 minutes despite trying hard to be interested when I found out the artist dude hung out with Miles Davis. But these videos, god I reckon you could sit there for hours immersed trying to work things out and always see something new.

Just a shame the only reference to the video titled 'Mutual Interest' that I was looking for originally was only represented by an enlarged still from the film.

Michal Rovner at Pace at Armory Show, New York (March 2008)

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/interviews/michal-rovner-pace-gallery/

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/art-now-michal-rovner

Bio:
Born 1957, Tel Aviv, Israel. 1979-81 Tel Aviv University. 1981-85 Bezalel Academy of Art. Lives and works in New York

projection stills