Wednesday 26 November 2008

Mark Melvin Seminar

Discussion centred around 2 main points; the artist as craftsperson/technician and processes in video editing which mimic old media techniques - splicing, razoring in Final Cut for example. I have tried to reproduce some comments that were made below.  The text for discussion was Lev Manovich's Flash Generation available at this link www.manovich.net/DOCS/generation_flash.doc

Sarah Tulloch discussed the physicality of film as a medium being a relevant consideration in its use, Mark Melvin later re-inforced this point by mentioning the presence of film (as opposed to video) projectors in gallery spaces as being a particularly powerful one.

Ross (1st year?) mentioned that he had produced some work contrasting new and redundant technologies (typwriters vs word processors) and physically pulling old technologies apart and making interventions. Ross if you could include a link to this work on the blog that'd be wicked.

Gavin (4th year) made the point that older technologies require more time and investment. This lead to further discussion about how much artists should learn about the technologies or skills they work with. Mark Melvin suggested as an example that learning to arc weld for a one of project would not represent an efficient use of an artists time. Tom Schofield suggested that the danger with that can be a lack of awareness of processes at work within the building of something which can feed into the work. Sarah pointed out that this mostly only true in process-based work.

Please post on these issues! This blog is your chance to think about what you want to say before you say it. 

Wednesday 19 November 2008

Denise Hawrysio

We were originally interested in the idea of how collaboration works, and how open this is in Denise's work. We looked at her collaborations with other artists or "non-artists", the environment, incidents and natural processes and encounters with objects. These happenings or performances were often marked onto the printing plate.
We were also interested in the links between Denise's work and the ideas of Fluxus, including social engagement, chance/impulse change, process and performance.


During the discussion the following questions were raised:

What constitutes collaboration, are there rules that should be complied with?

Can you really give up all aesthetic control to the subject/collaborator, and does it really matter?
Highlighted in Denise's Log splitter prints, good collaboration was when the artist had no aesthetic control. Within this piece Denise is questioning this framework.

Is a paradigm shift the "best" outcome of collaborative work?
Although this is not a motive for Denise it can sometimes be a unexpected result.

Wednesday 5 November 2008

Rachel Thorlby seminar: Face Value?

We used the text The ontology of the Photographic Image from Andre Bazin’s What is Cinema? as a starting point. We felt this was a way into the issues surrounding the effect photography had on the plastic arts and their ability to represent reality.

Based on looking at the work of Rachel Thorlby and our own areas of interest we arrived and three core questions to be explored in the seminar:

The object/image relationship in Rachel’s work

The use of impoverished materials in the construction of artworks

What is the contemporary relevance of the romantic and how does that relate to our ‘idea’ of landscape?


Discussion:

Briony asked a question about whether Rachel’s criteria for choosing images was purely aesthetic/formal or if she selected images because she was interested in their history.

This sparked a discussion centering around the undermining of any claims to ‘truth’ in images both painted and photographed. Rachel was drawn to images that could have a slippage of meaning, i.e. a dress becomes a type of landscape. She did not select images on the basis of their historical narrative but once selected she became involved in their background stories.

The discussion moved on to Rachel’s use of impoverished materials vis a vis the elevated status traditionally associated with portraiture or landscape painting. The low-value, low-tech use of materials like cardboard and polystyrene within Rachel’s work was a mixture of experimentation allowing the materials to ‘do what they do’ and a desire to reconfigure and re-invent the original source material.

Rachel talked about the masking or intervention in a straight reading of the face within her work on portraiture. She wanted to direct attention away from this figurative aspect of portraiture as she was not interested in the figurative. By using strategies related to Surrealist ideas of juxtaposition and masking out the figures within a landscape she hoped to provoke a sense of the uncanny and in some way reinvent the image.

The consensus of opinion was that to merely represent reality was not central to what is considered interesting within contemporary art practice today.

We ran out of time to really cover the third question in our framework: What is the contemporary relevance of the romantic and how does that relate to our ‘idea’ of landscape?

Please feel free to discuss this here on the blog. As a starting point we thought that the romantic movement has a huge influence on how we represent and construct visual and mental ideas of what landscape is even if it’s ideals have been superceeded by a more naturalist/realist sensibility.


Posted By Sue Warlock and Sarah Tullock