Hans Richter

Early Works by Hans Richter, GFT Sunday 3rd October. Live performance by Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra

Ghosts Before Breakfast, 1927

Rhythm 21, 1921

The Land

Initiated in 1998, the land (more direct translation from Thai to English would be, the rice field) was the merging of ideas by different artists to cultivate a place of and for social engagement.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Kamin Lerdchaiprasert, Uthit Athimana

Bobbly Baker

Bobby Baker

Video of "Cook Dems"

"She is commonly described as a performance artist or live artist, and is one of the most widely acclaimed and popular performance artists working today. It is true that she does perform and is alive but she also works in other media, including radio, TV, film, painting and drawing. Over the past 11 years she has periodically gone mad and is an active campaigner for more acceptance of and human rights for people categorised by society as 'disordered'."

http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/events/bobby-baker-in-conversation.aspx

“Performance artist and painter Bobby Baker has daringly confronted the fragilities and pleasure of human existence with challenging honesty. In a powerful feminist tradition of speaking herself - speaking her own truth - she has ranged from hilarity to the deepest pathos. Her vision, sometimes excruciating, has produced a singular and profoundly important body of art work about the struggle and the joys of living.” Griselda Pollock, University of Leeds

Anissa Mack

This work Pies for a Passerby" by Anissa Mack in Brooklyn.

Interesting article about the work and some quotes from it's audience/recipients.

Liam Gillick

Liam Gillick (1964) is a British artist and is mentioned many times in Nicholas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics. His work is also mentioned in Claire Bishop's essay Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics to which he has written a response. The discussion of issues surrounding 'relational art' - it's audience, as well as the intentions of the artist and so on - by artist's and critics/writers is particularly interesting here where there is a development of ideas as responses are written and challenges made.

His work is "underpinned by rigorous theorising: he is as much a writer as a maker of objects. However, Gillick's work is shaped by a very visual awareness of the way different properties of materials,

structures and colour can affect our surroundings and therefore influence the wa

y we behave."

He has published several books which exist alongside and explore ideas of his built work in another way. This makes it particularly interesting to see him as the subject of written critique such as Bishops.

"As art critic Ina Blom has stated:

Artists such as Liam Gillick ...no longer address abstraction as the principle for the creation of distinct minimalist objects, but rather try to create through design spaces for open social interaction [artworks] whose actual use is to be constantly redefined within the situation of the exhibition - without necessarily producing relational-aesthetic models of community.^[8]"

(Provisional) Consultation Partition 2000
Anodizied aluminium, formica, plywood
Courtesy Corvi - Mora, London

Meret Openheim

Associations could be drawn between this and a tea cup I cast form concrete. Mine was a small experiment just trying to use the casting process again but it is interesting to think how our views of something so familiar are changed when we see it in another material.

Georgina Starr

Erik

Sound piece where Starr used a found object with a note to Erik as inspiration for the work. Asking people se met if they new Erik and collecting these stories she created a new, "Super Erik". The work was distributed to subscribers over a 20 month period. And later installed as a sound installation 12 speakers played together, simultaneously to create a cacophony of noise that forced the listener to go right up to the speakers to hear anything clearly.

relational aesthetics/ antagonism and relational aesthetics etc

Ben Lewis made a BBC film Art Safari - Relational Art: Is It An Ism? looking at various artists mentioned in Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics. You can watch it here. An interview about it is here.

Tim Head

Levity 1 1978,

lev·i·ty (lv-t)

n. pl. lev·i·ties

1. Lightness of manner or speech, especially when inappropriate; frivolity.

2. Inconstancy; changeableness.

3. The state or quality of being light; buoyancy.

I like the playfulness of this work which I think exists as a photograph rather than being a photograph of an installation. By using everyday objects familiar to the viewer you can enter into the work and read it through your knowledge of object, mass, gravity, balance etc.

Dorothee Golz

Golz has made some interesting installations that play with norms in a humorous way. Coffee Table uses altered everyday objects which question how we use them. By combining and merging these objects the idea of the people who use them coming together is represented.

Christine Hill

Works such as Volksboutique and Tour Guide? (1999) combine a performative element along with the artist providing a service and thereby gaining an audience in that way whilst also questioning the artist's role in society.

This idea of merging income and art occupations culminated with opening the Volksboutique-as-shop in 1996. It was a way of claiming autonomy. It both freed me from being anyone's employee, and launched me straight into Proprietor-status, and it absolved me from having to rely on the art system to provide me with an audience. It allowed me to build a base of operations, and work from it, which is a device I've held onto over years.

Really intersesting interview with Christine Hill here.

I'm also curious about her work which uses a kind of documentation of her work and life and which then becomes the work itself for example Minutes (2007 Venice Bienalle).

Initially, I thought of this book as a sort of end of year Annual Report, and was thinking of course about summing up.

"It is entitled Minutes (as is the entire piece for Venice) — referring to detail, minutae; the passing and accruing of time; and of course, taking meeting minutes, the tallying of progress.

The book as an object is patterned after a calendar/datebook. In considering what one could/should put in an exhibition like Venice, there seemed to be pressure for Big Project, and I sort of dislike the notion of the masterpiece or opus. I like the continuum, that the machine is humming, that things are ebbing and flowing insofar as industry is concerned, and that many factors contribute to the so-called Process. This is most easily evidenced by a glimpse into my own datebook. So, the piece for Venice speaks to that...how my (or the mind) is organized, and what things are in there, and they can be very small things, and that it is something about growth via accumulation. And organization. I like that haircut appointments reside in the same space as big deadlines, and so-called Events of Note."

Insight into Hill's view of her notebooks and work for Minutes "they illustrate my method of ordering and apportioning time and energy ‹ specifically addressing how my labor is divided between my daily life, my artmaking, and my responsibilities as a professor. These lists, these tallies, the organization of details in setting up projects start to become their own project. "

Rirkrit Tiravanija

quote from wikipedia:

"Rirkrit Tiravanija (b. 1961, Thai: ฤกษ์ฤทธิ์ ตีระวนิช, pronounced RICK-rit Tira-vanit) is a Buenos Aires-born contemporary artist who divides his time in New York, Berlin and Bangkok.

His early installations involved cooking meals for gallery-goers.^[1] Tiravanija's artwork, which explores the social role of the artist, is described by Nicolas Bourriaud as having a "relational aesthetics." His installations often take the form of stages or rooms for sharing meals, cooking, reading, playing music. Architecture or structures for living and socializing are a core element in his work. He is represented by Gavin Brown's Enterprise in New York.^[2]"

Article about Tiravanija show at David Zwirner Gallery in 2007, by New York Magazine. Show also included recreation of Gordon Matta-Clark's 1972 work Open House.

Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics

Some interesting definitions from the glossary of Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics, 1998

"Relational (aesthetics)

Aesthetic theory consisting in judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt.

Relational (art)

A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.

Co-existence criterion

All works of are produce a model of sociability, which transposes reality or might be conveyed in it. So there is a question we are entitled to ask in front of any aesthetic production: "Does this work permit me to enter into dialogue? Could I exist, and how, in the space it defines?" A form is more or less democratic. May I simply remind you, for the record, that the forms produced by the art of totalitarian regimes are peremptory and closed in on themselves (particularly through their stress on symmetry). Otherwise put, they do not give the viewer a chance to complement them."

starter

Starters, not something you eat before your main course, I'm thinking about sourdough starters. A combination of flour and water (or fruit juice etc.) which contains a stable symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. The aim is that the yeast already present on the flour is allowed to grow and bacteria such as lactobacillus also develop in the starter and then it is used as the leavening agent in sourdough recipes. The starter is "grown" and then "fed" and if you keep it right and like the flavour it creates a starter can survive generations. I have only just started my starter so it will be at least a week before I can try it out.

starter recipe

Sophie Calle

Link to Guardian article.

examining human behaviour

differences between public lives and private selves

process of investigation and documentation

rules or constraints which create the work (following people, Address Book, Take Care of Yourself etc.)

who is in control of the work?

Sleepers (1980)

Take Care of Yourself (2007)

Gordon Matta-Clark

Splitting, 1974

The impact that Gordon Matta-Clark's work has is incredible. He forces you to really look, to see something you thought you were familiar with in a completely new way, he plays with perceptions. Each "building cut" work seems to have been approached with a very clear decision which creates a monumental work. The actions have a violence and deliberateness but also a playfulness. The physical labour of the construction (deconstruction?) creates challenges both in the process of making and in viewing. (And the idea that most of these works were demolished soon after completion.) It is the physicality of the building cuts that makes them so amazing to me - a sense of disbelief and enchantment at seeing something so structural changed so dramatically.

Link to New York Times review of retrospective in Whitney Museum of American Art.

clean start?