meadowbrookow

[meadowbrookow]

(read article)

“The same artwork might provide material for a complex theoretical argument, and offer simple enjoyment. If an artwork, as research, is underpinned by a weighty rationale, is such plurality still possible? Artistic outcomes do not have to embody the ideas that gave rise to them.”

Melbourne-based visual artist and writer Helen Johnson addresses the Australian art institutions’ relationship to art-making. How does the push for research-based creative outcomes change the outcome itself? Is intentional research (and the written component of a university artwork) a necessary or helpful component of art-making?

[meadowbrookow]

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever… It remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.

Aaron Siskind

[meadowbrookow]

‘Pears and Oranges’, Michelle Bui, 2018.

[meadowbrookow]

(read article)

“...Turner continues to wax lyrical that ‘what Australia needs most from Ben Quilty right now [is] not so much his likeability as his increasingly rare ability to put himself in someone else’s shoes.’ The empathy espoused here is artificial. One may well put themselves in another’s shoes, but it is impossible for them to don the clothes, experience the everyday and grapple with the anxieties that comprise the totality of living as another.” 

Written in response to Brook Turner’s article on Ben Quilty and his present status in Australian art, Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung’s The Canonisation of Quilty pulls apart the actions upholding the value of white Australian men in Australian art.

[meadowbrookow]

(read article)

“[Paper points] to reinvention, and the quick joy of assemblage over the slow process of painterly construction. In Demand’s hands they seem to return us back to one of the artist’s core obsessions: paper as material. Paper is both the material of proposition and the tool of historical record.”

[meadowbrookow]

(read article)

“The issue is not with how it starts, but rather what happens to the art on the other side, after the act of creation for that particular piece has ceased. How can the artist explain the emotional, heartfelt discovery they just unearthed deep inside to other people without sounding cheesy and totally unbelievable at the same time? Trying to explain how much emotion you felt as an artist in the creation of a piece, and then getting that other person to feel that emotion with the same amount of intensity, is incredibly difficult and will ultimately result in mixed signals and misunderstanding.”

Timothy McCool discusses artists and their personas, the complexity of being sincere in art-making, and today’s retro/vintage/mish-mash culture.

[meadowbrookow]

‘Léger’, William Wegman, 1998.

[meadowbrookow]

‘Disassembly 3′, Pawel Bownik, 2012.

[meadowbrookow]

‘Some Days’, photographic series, Wang Ningde, 1999-2009.

[meadowbrookow]

‘Sumie 2′, Zoë Zimmerman, 2006.

[meadowbrookow]

‘Simulation of a Simulation (New York)’, James Clar, 2015.

[meadowbrookow]

‘Speculations’, Sarah Mehoyas, 2017.

(as discussed in SLEEK Magazine: ‘The Mirrors So Meta They’ll Make You Question Reality’, read here)

[meadowbrookow]

Cut (Color), Anne Collier, 2010.

[meadowbrookow]

(read article)

“There’s close to probably 17 images that have been copied...and it has always been a hollow feeling for me to know that that’s happening.” 

[meadowbrookow]

Lecture: Rachel Knepfer

Sentiment in the digital age

Having previously worked as a photography editor for two large American magazines – first Us magazine, then Rolling Stone – San Francisco-born Rachel Knepfer has met many talented photographers and seen many incredible photographs. However, amid her fast-paced career, the photographs she returned to were not the ones she worked on in previous years, but the portraits of herself and her family when she was growing up in Australia. Methods of correspondence and the sentimental weight in images were particularly important then as Knepfer’s father still resided in San Francisco. Decades later, he still lives in San Francisco, but now text message, email and Instagram are Knepfer’s modes of communication. 

‘New Jersey III’, Diane Meyer, 2011. (source)

Tonight, Knepfer described a recent experience in which she somehow deleted a year’s worth of text messages between herself and her mother. It was alarming to notice how easy it is for digital things to cease existence. Digital software offers no transparency; once a file is removed it can take skill and experience to retrieve – skill that does not equate walking over to the bin and digging. Though our ability to feel sentiment has not lessened, the technologies around us do not foster sentimental behaviours. Many of us already use our smartphones to take countless images, screenshots and save online posts. Though phone storage has been an issue in the past, cloud storage options and Wi-Fi syncing have greatly lessened this. Such technological capabilities allow us to ‘save’ everything without ever having to assess the value of the item or prioritise certain items over others. Though we could always hoard our photographs, notes and newspaper articles in the same manner, the physical amassing would eventually force us to evaluate our habits. We are all active creators of much more image and text content. Could our part in creating more and more change the way we’ve been valuing our digital images and messages the way we do photos and letters? What is the psychological difference between digital hoarding and physical hoarding?

‘New Jersey II’, Diane Meyer, 2011. (source)

The work of Santa Monica-based artist Diane Meyer addresses this rift between the sentimental and the digital through pixel-like embroidery over analogue photographs. In the New Jersey works, the obscuration of faces and the mould-like embroidered pixels suggest a breaking down of emotional value. We are prompted to question our habitual conflation of emotion and object, as well as the devalued state of digital images.

Those who grew up with older technology may have experiences that evidence the emotional impact of the physically-present artefact. These artefacts have the power not only to be visually evoking, but also tactilely arousing. During tonight’s talk Knepfer shared photographic prints from her childhood, the same prints she pinned in her New York workspaces in the nineties. For us those prints hold the significance of physically being ‘there’ with Knepfer during her successful career. In Part Two of Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980), Barthes discusses this same ability to refer to the existence of another being or another time; “There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past.” (p 76) Rachel Knepfer seemed to have a deep understanding of this, as she had brought along her original copies of Rolling Stone, and the same notebook pictured in her lecture slides. Today, these objects are the symbols of her career and her experiences in the 1990s.

After hearing Rachel Knepfer speak I’ve begun to consider things from other perspectives. Weeks ago, I asked if there is still a place for studies of materiality in today’s intangible digital world – maybe I was asking the wrong question. What experience does materiality offer in a time of ungraspable images? How can we reconcile the analogue and digital in photography? 

[meadowbrookow]

Constructed Objects on a Flat Plane, Johnathan Chapline, 2017.

[meadowbrookow]

Lecture: Heath Franco

Aesthetic power in art

For Sydney-based artist Heath Franco common instances in Western popular culture are the starting point for the creation of his ‘alternate realities’. Franco’s videoworks often tap into our exposure to popular culture and mass media, presenting us with tropes, instances and stereotyped characters we are familiar with, such as the informal and friendly tradie from Your Door, 2011, (excerpt of work seen at 00:42 in linked video), or the embodiment of American gluttony preoccupied by an iced donut (see below) – one of many embodied-tropes and stereotypes in Franco’s latest videowork LIFE IS SEXY (2016-2017). I find Heath Franco’s works fascinating, obtrusive, and bizarrely focused, considering the overlays-upon-overlays of sounds and images. His videoworks such as TELEVISIONS (2013) bring attention to the omnipresence of mass media and capitalism, by their immediate connection to our ways of understanding such themes in his work.

‘LIFE IS SEXY’, video still, Heath Franco, 2016-2017. (source)

Franco’s works initially have no ulterior motive; the purpose seems to be for humour’s sake, alternatively to create discomfort in the highbrow viewers. However, as we become more familiar with his works, or as we watch on longer, the fixations made through caricature, repetition, pacing and other video techniques lure us into a state of dissociation that allows us to see the abnormality of certain accepted ideas in Western society. In similar ways, a previous lecturer I wrote about, New Zealand photographer Yvonne Todd provoked such reflection from viewers of her work, instead focusing on standards of beauty in society. (see below)

‘Drexel and Frottex’, Yvonne Todd, 2008. (source)

Both Heath Franco and Yvonne Todd create works which utilise the grotesque and bizarre to filter through the elements of society they find personally compelling or worth contemplating. However, such works can be polarising as they can be displeasing to the senses, explicit, confrontational, or unorthodox, making it uncomfortable to witness. As I am someone who has previously approached similar works with hesitation, I ask – does art need to be poetic, or at least pleasurable to view, to be considered art? When it comes to works like Franco’s, is there a less turbulent way to present the same suggestions?

‘Beat of a Wing’, Bran Symondson, 2013. (source)

British artist Bran Symondson creates sculptural works which utilise juxtaposition to convey an idea in an aesthetic-appealing manner, proving that artworks can indeed prompt the same sense of contemplation without having to use unsettling aesthetics to do so. Using decommissioned weaponry and natural elements such as insects, Symondson’s Beat of a Wing effectively draws attention to the investment of war at the expense of nature. Just as efficiently San Francisco artist Michele Pred’s Wage Gaps explores the effect of the patriarchy on women’s earnings compared to men. However, Symondson’s work and Pred’s work do not have the immediacy and potency that Franco’s work possesses. 

‘Wage Gaps’, Michele Pred, 2017. (source)

So, what do artworks gain by embracing the unaesthetic or creating shock? I argue that the provocative art movement is underpinned by the Dada movement, as each has a sceptical attitude toward traditional art-making, and address socio-political issues through challenging the conventions of language, behaviour, politics and perceptions of art and beauty. In the words of Dada artist Tristan Tzara, “The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of art, but of disgust.” This quote suggests the reactionary nature of Dada – in a comparable way provocative political art is also reactionary.

‘Whoever Reads Bourgeois Newspapers Becomes Blind and Dear’, John Heartfield, 1930. (source)

The unaesthetic of many provocative contemporary works is a deliberate tool used to confront and challenge the viewer. ‘Pretty’ art may not wield the power that unaesthetic art does, simply because unaesthetic art does not provide the pleasure expected of art. When this expectation of visual pleasure is not met, we are driven to search for value in its concept. Artists like Heath Franco and Yvonne Todd push this further by presenting anti-aesthetic visuals, reaching into the grotesque to strike for stronger emotive reactions which leave lasting impressions.