Video Diary 8

Craig Fisher

Fisher began his lecture in an unusual but effective looped clip of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (making me want to watch the whole film that night), featuring Marilyn Monroe, infamous for her glamour and beauty. This theme of glamour continued throughout his practice, with his introduction putting his personality and practice in perspective.

One thing that Fisher does very well is to portray the idea of glamour and desire mixed in with violence, as shown in the work below. The use of floral wall papering connotes the glamour of bright colours and soft patterns, juxtaposed with the deep red of fabric blood. One thing I did note was that his interpretation of glamour (wallpaper and checked floor) seemed to me to be quite homely and typical, with the blood spatters marking them and forcing them to become a scene of horror and death.

Many of his later pieces also incorporate the idea of materiality, as Fisher uses pearls, silks, sequins and glitter to then juxtapose with frankly quite vile imagery such as vomit splatters (below), an alley way covered in piss, "Leak in chav corner", and many more. It questions the idea of beauty and how we define it, as well as making a point to ask when beauty becomes grotesque. The dark humour of the work made it very appealing to me, as well as the urban vs theatrical battle that I saw within the work. The context became urban and recognisable as disgusting and vile, yet the fabrics still kept that essence of Fisher's theatricality and glamour that is seen throughout his practice.

Fisher liked to make sure the viewer could instantly recognise imagery, particularly violent imagery that he has put his stamp of glamour on (with the fabric materials) by choosing iconic scenes from horror films such as The Shining and Psycho. The idea behind using iconic movie sets again adds a sense of glamour due to the old school Hollywood and the deeply coloured fabrics. It also makes the idea of violence and horror appear to be quite sanitary and clean, due to the cartoon-esque style that the materials are shaped into. With both the context and the sumptious fabrics, the art work gets a theatrical quality that clearly imitates the artist's theatrical personality as well.

"Gotcha" (below) appears to be another representation of the film references, yet one Fisher came up with instead. It seems sexy yet dirty; the blood spatters are patterned and comic with deep red that seems to ooze slowly and seductively down the walls. Yet the context with the chainsaw on the floor makes it look like the viewer has stepped into a dark cartoon. What it did make me wonder was whether Fisher had ever thought of mixing his fabricated objects with real life ones. For example, with "Gotcha", the piece may change and produce a different reaction if the blood spatters stayed as they are but he replaced the fabric chainsaw with a real one.

One of my favourite pieces by Fisher is the crashed car piece (below, obviously) as you can tell the attention he took to detail of the car, but also the material of the fabric softens the violent blow from the car crash. Particularly in a time when car crashes happen all too often, his work makes something quite horrific, softly pretty. The juxtaposition makes the viewer step back and take in the entire scene. Fisher stated that he wanted the viewer to try and unravel the narrative behind the work, or at least to guess what it may be. It turns out the narrative was personal to him and his partner, something the viewer, without asking the artist, would have no clue about. It made me wonder exactly what narrative the viewer was supposed to get from the work, or what Fisher had in mind. Fisher has made the comment that he got inspiration from David Kronenberg's "Crash.

Overall Fisher played with the ideas of excess and the obscene, making the 'unlookable' become something that the viewer has the desire to look at and study.

"Art is the new consumerism"

Video Diary 7

Video Diary 6

Video Diary 5

Video Diary 4

David Rushton at Herbert Gallery

I'd never come across David Rushton's work before, and I hadn't even seen the exhibition advertised, so it was a coincidence I visited his exhibition at the Herbert Gallery in Coventry. One of the main gallery rooms had been emptied of all furniture and replaced by strange black boxes on stilts with an accompanying stool. It took me five minutes to get up the courage to sit on the stool and have a look into the box (I was alone in the room with just a gallery staff member). Inside the small slit in the box I could see a tiny reconstruction of a room, like a dolls house, but very lifelike. By which I mean all the furniture and embellishments were to scale. What I didn't get was why Rushton had done it. So I moved on to the next box, which was slightly bigger. As I sat down and peered in, sounds started playing; a siren and footsteps. The room reconstruction had the air of abandonment and looked quite creepy, with a chair strewn on the floor.

The other models were similar, all gave out a feeling of abandonment and loss, with empty rooms, stark old-fashioned furnishings and the creepy sounds of wind rattling windows, sirens and radio broadcasts. I loved how it felt like I was a voyeur into a tiny world, but I couldn't work out why he'd made the piece, I felt like I was missing something. It was only when I found a small sign announcing that the boxes were made in memory of the Chenobyl disaster that I had some indication of what it was about. Even then I wasn't fully aware of what happened in Chenobyl (it happened several years before I was born and for some reason never heard much about it) so I decided to research it after the exhibition. On 26th April 1986, one of the nuclear reactors at the Chenobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine exploded, releasing an enormous amount of radiation into the surrounding area, including the nearby town of Pripyat. It took three days after the event for the emergency evacuation of the town, when the Ukrainian government couldn't conceal the accident, nor the dangerous levels of radiation. Because of this the residents left the majority of their belongings, which can still be seen today. 

Once I had discovered what happened at Pripyat, a shudder ran up my spine as I realised that I'd been right in my feelings about the models, but that sense of voyeurism was replaced with shock about what had happened. Rushton's piece was well made and accurate of the ghost town, but because of that, I felt uncomfortable yet still attracted to looking at into the piece, almost as though it was a taboo subject.

Celebrity and Art

 The idea of “celebrity” status is attractive for a variety of reasons, the fame and recognition as well as the so-called success of your work, interweaved into the fact that ‘you’ are an ideal as a persona, something to aspire to. It’s a very dizzying idea, and one that many artists see as a benchmark to the idea of “success”. However the definition of “celebrity” is complex. It relates to how individuals see another, in terms of widespread public recognition rather than just their own, be it their work or they as an image. The artist as a celebrity relates to a persona; the public sees the person through their art, and finds the character of the artist as interesting as, if not more than, their art. The “art” world is vastly different to the so-called “real” world, and therefore celebrities differ within their statuses quite significantly. Of course there are certain names that most of the public recognize as artists, which appear to change every decade or so, for example, the figureheads of the 60’s were Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, the 90’s were Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst and the 00’s had Banksy. These are the types of artists that if the public recognize (mainly via name only) if asked about artists they know. As Millard (2001, pg 7) amusingly shows in “The Tastemakers”, the main two contemporary artists that the public knew were Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. There is a kind of mystique attributed to the art world, mainly due to how secretive it appears from the public’s point of view. Maybe this is due to the stereotype of the contemporary artist as “crazy” and their work making no sense, as well as the seeming lack of celebrity artists now around in a celebrity obsessed culture. A shift in postmodern culture has made celebrity status highly sought after, and artists have a history of using this status as a way of becoming successful.

 As the “King” of artist celebrities, Andy Warhol has become something of an ideal, wherein his aptitude of fusing success in the art world and creating an industry in which celebrities flocked to be a part of. Not only did he include famous faces in his photography and films, but he also strived to become a celebrity in his own right, surrounding himself with a circus of creative personalities to help him with his work, including his “Superstars” who featured in his films and became beautiful accessories to further his fame and career. Known as the “Factory”, his studio became the epitome of 60’s creativity, and his well known mantra “Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” has become one of the staples of today’s media crazy culture. After her suicide in 1962, Warhol became obsessed with the image of Marilyn Monroe and throughout his career he silk-screened and painted her image. This fascination with celebrity, beauty and the destruction and vulnerability behind many celebrities continued to fuel his creativity. In particular his “Screen Tests” (1964-1966) feature many of the celebrities and his “Superstars”, the most famous being Edie Sedgwick, who’s muse/artist relationship dominated the late 60’s until their infamous separation. The “Screen Tests” revealed in candid detail the idiosyncrasies of the person in front of the camera. Some of them posed, some toyed with the camera, and some of them appeared to fear it. The wide-eyed innocence and fascination of Edie Sedgwick’s screen test juxtaposed Lou Reed’s fidgety refusal to meet the eye of the camera, appearing to treat Warhol’s voyeurism as an authority figure. These 4-minute long “portraits” of Warhol’s many muses and friends are an elegant and almost cruel voyeurism into the depth of those we aspire to be, their vulnerability exploited for our gain, “Our fascination with the beauty and glamour of celebrities seems to have inevitable flip side, which is our deep-seated obsession with tragedy and death”(KJBNDKA). Of course Warhol’s early celebrity portraits (Marilyn Monroe etc) coincided with his other obsessive theme, death. This disturbing link explores the dangerous link that stardom can be destructive. Andy Warhol quickly became a celebrity artist and is now considered one of the most well known artists of the 20^th century. He became almost a franchise in how his image as the poster boy of Pop Art influenced popular culture and the way we looked at celebrities.

“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.” – Andy Warhol

He was a personality, a strange pale artist who partied with rock stars, models and actresses, as well as managing to produce a portfolio of work that was considered and incise, using the artists who surrounded him to make his “Factory” a working machine, pouring out his pieces. Who wouldn’t want to be like him? He made the art world extremely glamorous by becoming what he admired.

“What do you really want?”

“Instant recognition”

“From who?”

“The world”                                     (excerpt from Famous for 15 Minutes, Collins Dufresne, 2005)

Ultimately he got his wish and is now the most recognizable artist in the world.[1] Although he himself wasn’t the most charming man, he became an enigmatic character and used this mystery to project a puppet-master quality, using his celebrity acquaintances to further his career and name.

 Tracey Emin has also become a household name, her persona as the “bad girl” of the 90’s art world has long given her a place as the Britain’s second most known contemporary artist, after Damien Hirst. Emin found her fame when she “captured the lingo of everyday Estate English, the retorts of a rebellious teenage girl or of lovers having a row with great precision”(1) and her modeling for Vivienne Westwood secured her as the new edgy muse of the decade, many citing her a feminist with her blatant sexualism and rock’n’roll image. Emin’s second seminal piece “My Bed”, which consists of her bed, the way she left it after waking from a heavy sleep and a depressive state causing her to stay in bed for several days. The chaos and embarrassingly familiar objects such as empty alcohol bottles, cigarette butts, stained sheets and underwear thrust the breakdown of a woman who has money, fame and the art world singing her praises into the audience’s view, revealing her imperfections and showing her persona through her art. She reveals her bed as her true self in the midst of a self-destructive state and invites the viewer an intimate look at her vulnerability and creating a piteous bond between them. Emin’s storytelling technique to explain her existence and her way of life has given her a draw that pulls out her tongue-in-cheek but frighteningly honest character that is either loved or hated. What fame gave Emin was a strength that meant despite her unsuccessful input for the 1999 Turner Prize (My Bed), she got more publicity of her work than the actual winner, who’s name faded into the dust behind her. Emin’s work is purely based on her life, or what she knows and has experienced in her life; a method that not many choose to do, or that the public and art world can stomach, “This is an incredible strength in her art - the way she can call up old emotions, feel old pains - but it must be quite a drawback in her life”(2). It is Emin’s strength of character and her charm as the party girl with a deep intelligence that has brought attention. Her work demands attention, whether you like it or not. However the media is extremely fickle and although they can bring you fame and success with praise, they can also turn on you and although you still maintain a sort of fame, you don’t inspire the majority with the luster you once did. Emin managed to somehow hold onto her notoriety, “With other artists, such as Rachel Whiteread, or Damien Hirst, you can hate the work and like the person, or vice versa, but with Tracey no such split is possible. Her art demands a sort of subservience to an Emin-ocentric vision of the world that feels like surrender. That is why, I think, people often resist her art for a long time and then suddenly fall for it”(3), which explains her appeal. Time after time, her critics have argued that her work is rough and unattractive, yet she is still a household name.

 Since the media poses such a huge part of the celebrity culture, some artists use the media to their advantage within their work, such as Barbara Kruger, who’s advertising campaigns for Selfridges have made her a name to watch without her compromising her existing work. By using phrases such as “I shop therefore I am” and “buy me I’ll change your life” flashing in red and white as the television campaign, Kruger’s collaboration with the shop is an ironic social commentary using anti-consumerism campaign titles. This irony is post-modern concept that Kruger has drawn upon to “The assumption is that the Selfridges customer is so post-modern and media-savvy that they're all in on the joke. But what is the joke exactly? That shopping is an alienating process. To say, "I shop, therefore I am" is to point out the emptiness at the core of the capitalist lifestyle. The joke is on us. Selfridges is laughing at its customers. Only we can't help but laugh along, for fear of appearing unsophisticated; unmetropolitan. How very clever of them.”(1) Obviously Kruger’s work with Selfridges promotes her own artwork and her use of the shop lends her a broader and young audience. The negative result being that many critics dub her as a “sell out”, although nobody can fault her business-like way of maintaining a name for herself. And perhaps the new way forward for contemporary artists is to bridge the void between the media and the art world, in a bid to draw in the public and to gain recognition. By using the media and becoming a recognizable name from the art world, artists once again can be idolized.

 Banksy has become a household name, synonymous with the post-modern cynicism felt in Britain today. He has also become the ‘typical’ contemporary art in today’s youth culture, with a vast army of families of art students recognizing the name in the mad rush for presents at Christmas. But this is for a reason. Banksy’s work explores the childish play between graffiti and the law, his pieces popping up on empty walls, roads, in fact anything he wants. Although none of his pieces are exclusively seminal to his notoriety, one that stands out for me is the piece he did on the segregation wall in Palestine. Using his usual ‘spray can’ graffiti to frame a beautifully (and kitsch) detailed painting of a landscape with a cartoon window and lounge scene, Banksy explores the nature of the walls that the Israeli armies constructed from 2002 to change Palestine into “the world’s largest open-air prison and ultimate activity holiday for graffiti artists” (Banksy, 2006, pg 136). This comment on one of the more controversial subjects that he deals with is a subtle approach compared to his usual feats. Yet it is the subtlety that makes it an important piece. By creating a work that appears to render the wall useless and still mocks it’s intent is a brave thing to do and inspires a discussion into religious politics that a canvas painting would not. It ceases to be just a statement and instead becomes an argument that the audience is drawn into as Banksy scrawls his clever graffiti on a wall manned by armed guards and security towers. This sense of danger makes the character of Banksy likeable and a hero artist. The most interesting thing about Banksy is that this persona is anonymous; it is based on an illusion of the artist rather than a real person. This anonymity has made Banksy more than just a graffiti artist, he has become the prankster of urban Britain, using his amusing graffiti cartoons to comment on politics and social absurdities, as well as past events. Although we may never know who Banksy really is, his name will be remembered.

 Of course the obvious drawback of the celebrity lifestyle is that your name and persona is remembered more than you work, unless your work is successful enough to inspire a social population. Yet the best-known celebrity artists have managed this feat, to inspire the public with their work and capture them with their character. It is clear that for success in this field you need to have both. An artist is no longer just an artist in terms of celebrity; they are an icon of their field by promoting their face, name and image in a unique way, and using their artwork as memoirs almost, so that they will forever be remembered.

Celebrity obsessed media can either work for or against an artist, without promotion they will not gain recognition in the public forum, no matter how well they are received in the art world. The celebrity culture has many false icons; people who use the media to become famous for an image rather than producing any intelligent work, such as glamour model and “headline queen” Katie Price. Yet it is the public who ultimately decide the celebrity idols, “You can switch on the TV when you want to be nice to the celebrity and switch it off when you're sick of them. So once the public has a power over these successful celebrities and I think they're like little things -- or big things in England.”(2) But one point remains clear; the culture today is celebrity based, and as artists we can either use it to our advantage or make a point to stand against it, but we cannot ignore it.

1 http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/artblog/2007/dec/27/catchofthedayistheselfri

2 http://voices.washingtonpost.com/celebritology/2007/11/doubletake_celebrity_clones_as.html

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1       http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23700768-tracey-emins-really-done-it-this-time.do 

2       http://www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/oct2001/going_down.html        

         3       http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2001/apr/22/features.magazine27

An Essay on Art Therapy

Art therapy exists to explore repression and renunciation through artistic expression, using either literal or metaphoric symbolism. As both practising artist and educator Edith Kramer says “Art is a method of widening the range of human experiences by creating equivalents”. The arts have helped man reconcile the eternal conflict between the individual’s instinctive urges and the demands of society.

In the contemporary art world, many artists use the concept of art therapy to create their own pieces, often exploring their own experiences and feelings in a way that projects onto the viewer. Many feel that a successful piece of artwork is one where emotions evoked by the artist are effectively conveyed to the viewer, although where art therapy is concerned, this would be where the analyst is able to see through the symbolism of the work to identify cause and effect of the patient.

Artists such as Nicola Oliver and Amy Cordero use art therapy to explore their own mental health and life experience, although when viewing their work, you are able to see the conscious thought behind each piece; the paintings of Oliver project her anger and frustration of others and Cordero’s anger over her own health. When dealing with the unconscious, art therapy is most useful when interacting with children and the pathologically “insane” such as Adolf Wolfli, as they are removed from many influences in every day life.

William Kurelek’s “The Maze”, a depiction of his tortured youth produced during his time in Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital, clearly becomes an act of autobiography, a way of trying to construct or understand his own identity.

Kurelek himself says of the piece,``The subject, seen as a whole, is of a man (representing me) lying on a barren plain before a wheat field, with his head split open. The point of view is from the top of his head. The subject is then roughly divided into the left hand side of the picture, with the thoughts made in his head represented as a maze; and the right hand side, the view of the rest of his body. The hands and feet are seen through the eyes, nose and mouth, tapering off into the distance and the outside world.

The Maze. An exit-less one, it occupies and divides the inside of the cranium into groups of thoughts, the passageways being calculated to do the grouping. The white rat curled up in the central cavity represents my Spirit I suppose. He is curled up with frustration from having run the passages so long without hope of escaping out of this maze of unhappy thoughts. Outside World. Grasshoppers and drought sun before the clouds) represent the mercilessness of Nature, which bankrupted my father, a farmer, and brought out of him the cornered beast. The thorny, stony ground is a kind of T.S. Eliot Wasteland ± spiritual and cultural barrenness: the pile of excrement with flies on it represents my view of the world and the people that live on it. The loosened red ribbon bound together the head of a T.S. Eliot Hollow Man, and was united by psychotherapy (Dr Cormier), but since the outside world is still unappealing, the rat remains inert. Before the head was opened, burrs (bitter experiences) choked the throat and pricked the sensitive underside of the tongue, and when it was opened the sawdust and shavings (tasteless education) spilled out from on top the tongue: mixed with the sawdust are symbols of to me) equally tasteless Art, painting, literature and music.

The burrs also represent, in the eye socket, the successive evaluations of my character by any friend during the process of acquaintance, all repellant but hopeful till the last, when the heart is discovered to be a grub. On the tongue and in the throat, the Kurelek family big burrs produce little burrs), representing my father as the hard domineering blue burr opening up the mushy yellow burr, my mother, to release a common lot of burrs, my brothers and sisters, and one unique orange one myself. The last burr, spearing culture, is I at the university. The inverted one is I as a child, trapped painfully between two aspects of my father, the one I hated and the one I worshipped.''

This is Kureleks thought about “The Maze” in retrospect, it’s unclear whether he felt this way while the work was in progress. Yet, the painting itself leaves the viewer in no doubt, whether knowing Kureleks history or not, that the artist is troubled and unable to formulate clarity about his life, represented by the maze of rooms and scenes.

Similarly, case studies by Kramer in “Art as Therapy”, children use art therapy as a means of communication and understanding circumstance, particularly shown in the case of Angel, a young boy who stopped speaking and had become increasingly violent. His results from art therapy showed repetitive images of himself as Superman, saving others and showing his strength. Ultimately the metaphor of Superman and his alter-ego Clark Kent, as Angel showed his own self in the hero, is revealing of a young boys feeling of self worth, an unconscious thought that something about him, and his life is lacking, thereby wanting to change himself.

The process of art therapy is similar to Freud’s free association method of analysis. The patient is observed, rather than encouraged or guided in any way. The message conveyed by the work in progress is an intuitive response to the immediate situation, as well as by past experiences. The process encounters two opposing forces; regression and formed expression. These forces are what converts into metaphor and literal representation that the analyst then can explore with the patient, much like Freud’s dream analysis. Daydreams and fantasies can often be enjoyed with a minimum of guilt, even when they contain asocial and forbidden wishes, as they bring about no physical asocial behaviour. Where this does take place, art therapy uses a process of sublimation, where a primitive asocial impulse is transformed into a socially productive act, such as a piece of sculpture or a painting. With maturity and establishment of the superego, sublimation becomes the ego’s method of reconciling the demands of the superego with instinctual demands.

Video Diary 3

Video Diary 2

Video Diary 1

Group Exhibition

As part of the course, we have been asked to join other artists to create our own successful exhibition based on a collective idea. The group I'm in have to decided to incorporate the idea of "provocation" and are looking at what we need versus what we want. It will link into stereotypes, consumerism, other countries and politics. At the first meeting we have decided:

- we are ALL going to go a month with no unnecessary or materialistic spending, from now until 11th Feb!!! Keeping a journal of this so we can compare notes, note down spending, urges, feelings etc

- thought about going out several times dressed in different personas/stereotypes (dressed up and then again with no make up etc) to compare the different reactions from people, how the nights differ etc

- documentation of EVERYTHING, film, photography, audio, journals

- think about venues, run down buildings maybe?

- getting Mark mcGowan involved. Maybe have some facebook debates with him about consumerism, control, materialsm, society in general