Tuesday, 17 March 2009


Leture Five: Time Based Art/Multimedia/New Media

Time based art can be defined as artists who crossed boundaries. It can include Film, video, and photograph. Artists such as Andy Goldsworthy(scupltor, photographer and enviromentalist), Edward Mubridge(motion image capture) and Marcel DuChamp (nnude walking down the stairs) all broke down barries with their art work.

Street art is art that has been created anomonously usually using spray paint or placed upon billboards or buildings. Such artists as Barbara Kruger (criticism of sexism and the circulation of power within cultures), the Geurilla Girls , and Kieth Harring all front the billboard liberation idea. But by far the most the most outstanding political artist is Banksy, a graffitti artist, who has managed to keep his identity secret for years, and whos work can be found all over the uk.

Other forms of spreading a political message is through books, spraypaint, chalk, fly posting, and t-shirt give away.

Post Modernism
The most modernism era was all about art trying to appeal to a wider audience, about making it more accessible to everyone, not just the art world. The idea behind it was for it to be more about the art than the artist, leaving the work open to social interpretation. Creating the clashing idea of art VS popular culture. An example of postmodern art is Margot Lovejoy, she is commited to engage her audience in direct interactive experience through her installations, websites, and bookworks.

Lecture Four: LAND ART

Land art is not a new phenomeunom. It emerged in the late 60's early 70's in the USA. It was a back lash to the commercialisation of art and the rise in industry happening at the time. It was an act of active protest inspired by natrual processes and the enviroment.

Lancelot Brown (1716-1783) created hyper nature, a form of created something very natural looking but, almost even perfecting nature. He created such things as grass meadows and ruined forts in large unkept gardens.

Stone Henge is one of the oldest and most mysterious of earthworks in britain. Nobody knows the real significance for it being built. Some believe it has religious significance.

Landart links to the idea of natural process. Just like the real life cycles of plants and animals, land art isnt permanent and is usually documented by photograph.

Lecture Three: The body as a place for art.
















There are many ways in which we change our bodies to decorate or make a visual statement. One of these methods is tattoos and scarification. Tattoing skin has been around for hundreds of years, for such uses as marking what tribe you are in to just making a statement. Maori men and women created a type of body art called Ta moko. Ta Moko is the permanent body and face marking by Maori, the indigenous people of New Zeland. It is distinct from normal inked tattoos in that the skin was carved by chisels rather than punctured. This left the skin with grooves, rather than a smooth surface.

The Yakuza, or the Japanese mafia used unique tattoos to distinguish who was in their gang.


There are also non permanent ways of decorating such as body painting, which is just the simple method of using paint onto the skin. It gives the same effect as a tattoo without the permanent effects.

Another form of body decoration is body reshaping. This is when silicon implants are inserted under the skin in a specific shape or form and they stick out from under the skin. People are beginning to insert silicon into their two dimensional tattoos, to add another dimension to them.
Dr Gunther Von Hagens is a contreversial artist/scientist who elbams bodys and reforms the bodys in whatever pose he wants. He does this by replacing the bodily fluids with plastic essentially preserving the skin and organs. Von Hagens work is seen as very contreversial as it is not quite understood whether it is seen as art or science. It can percieved as a sick joke, or an eye opening look into the way the body works and moves.
Performance artists also experiment with the body as a place for art such as Marina Abramovic.
In one of her performances she explored elements of ritual and gesture using ten knives and a tape recorder. In this performance she was experimenting with the physicla andmental boundaries of the body.
ORLAN is another female performace artist that in her earlier work began a series of plastic surgeries in the course of which the she started to morph herself.






Tuesday, 24 February 2009

Lecture Two: Rebecca Horn

EXTENDED SENSES.
Rebecca Horn is an artist who is highly intrested in senses, cycles, sound, movement, smells, music, painting, motion picture and performance.
Her work is extremely personal due to her travellers past and the isolation she suffered from severe illness.
Some of her work revolves around the theme of ISOLATION, she quashed this lonlieness by communicating through forms of the body. (Finger gloves 1972, long fingers are an extension of the body.)
The 'finger gloves' theme revolves around the ideas of flight and escapism. If i was asked in what way i would tranform my body i think i would go for complete decoration. Something that would entirely cover my body in a design. And tell my story too, decorate myself in things that remind me of my most important moments in life. I like the idea of something visually exciting on the outside but with a much deeper meaning under the surface.

Lecture One: Tapestry

Todays lecture highlighted the meanings behind, and use of tapestry's, contempary and historical.
The earliest tapestries were made by the greeks, with a myriad of practical advantages such as portable, durable, easy to clean, as well as being a highly regarded status symbol.
Though the primary purpose of a tapestry is a decorative status symbol, they were also used to illustrate biblical stories and morals.

Tapestry has been passed down into contempary art, with a copy of 'Gurnica' by Picasso being translated into tapestry form.

Even though the world of tapestry has never really influenced me, it was intresting to learn about a field which i have never researched in to.