Gary Hill

Tall Ships

"Enter a long dark corridor, like a narrow harbour, and encounter a fleet of twelve human figures like tall ships adrift in space. They are the only source of light, their faces like white sails in the moonlight. Like the spectral figures in Dante’s Purgatorio, or the sirens in Homer’s Odyssey, these phantoms stand silently, waiting, until you enter and disturb the fragile peace. As you journey into the stillness of this space, sensors are triggered and the nearest figure will move closer. Each apparition, whether man, woman or child, offers itself to you as if about to speak. Yet they stand, shimmering and silent, until they turn away, unable to unburden the secrets hidden behind their eyes. This fleeting moment leaves an unearthly, haunting sensation. Do we ever really connect, or are we just passing ships in the night?

American artist Gary Hill first exhibited Tall Ships in the early 1990s as he rose to prominence as one of the world’s pre-eminent video artists. While Hill has explored interactive encounters between life-size video imagery and exhibition visitors in other works, Tall Ships is considered to be the most profoundly immersive experience in his body of work. In the artwork, Hill allows his video art to move toward an expression of the intangible sensations that tingle on the surface of the skin, and linger in the dark recesses of our hearts and minds.

Tall Ships transports us from the real world, crossing into an unfamiliar world of experience where we discover lost friends and dream-like figures. Visitors to the deep spaces of Hill’s work transcend physical movement through the installation into darker, uncharted waters. Into the space of emotions, intuition and ghostly sensations. Into the space of premonitions, memories and dreams."

Artist's Statement  

"...That person, however vulnerable, will come forth no matter 

what. It’s the simplicity of the idea - humans approaching humans in a space of a work that is 

always slightly haunted by the notion of “ships passing in the night.”

identical twins

Take 10 Identical Twins from the guardian online

Link to photographs

Below- Alice and Lilly

Right- Me and Katie at the 'Muchty festival when we were about 4 (from the local newspaper)

some of the things I've been looking at

Bill Viola

Ocean Without a Shore, 2007

Using a mix of the oldest, black and white surveillance  filming and the newest HD cameras with a sheet of pouring water the person begins in black and white then breaks through the water barrier into full colour and detail.

The Reflecting Pool, 1977

Playing with the reflections in the pool and the tension/suspense of a person jumping and being frozen in mid air- suspended above the water. Then the activity continues only in the reflection and eventually a person does emerge again from the water.

Gary Hill

Viewer

People watching, people watching, Who is watching, who is being watched..

Mark Wallinger

Threshold to the Kingdom, 2000

Filming international arrivals at the airport, slowed down as people move through the doors an d then as doors in the background close the image fades into the next group of people entering, Links between Customs and the emotions or judgement people have there with the religious idea of Confession,

Angel, 1997

Filmed himself reading religious scripture backwards while treading on the bottom of escalators in the underground. The whole film is then played in reverse so that the words are fairly audible but distorted. Ends with him "floating" back up the escalators as if going to heaven. 

Bruce Nauman

VIDEO DATA BANK

biography

Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square (Square Dance) 1967

Some other studio experiments

Pinch Neck

Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square

Clown Torture

"Nauman's "Clown Torture" is a shattering spectacle of color, motion, and sound. Displayed at high volume, the audio level of the five simultaneously occurring videos is an assault on the senses. Heard long before it's viewed, one must bravely enter into an enclosed, darkened room in order to see where all the noise is coming from. Once inside, two pairs of stacked monitors and two wall projections come into view. Immediately one senses that something is awry, as only two of the four televisions are oriented right side up. With one monitor turned upside-down and the other placed on its side, the images become abstracted and disorienting. The videos playing on the monitors record clowns in unnerving or difficult situations. In one sequence, a clown screamsat an unseen antagonist. In another, a clown repeats the elliptical story "Pete and Repeat were sitting on a fence. Pete fell off; who was left? Repeat. Pete and Repeat were sitting on a fence." Recited with a variety of expressions (happy, scared, mad, etc.), the clown can't help but hide a growing frustration at not being able to finish the story or have it make sense. Two videos show clowns trying balance objects - goldfish bowls and buckets of water - with little success. The final video resembles a scene from a closed-circuit security camera, only it's a disconcerting image of a clown using a public toilet.

Nauman's "Clown Torture" makes its artifice obvious, from the caked makeup of the clowns' faces to the many power cords that run across the ceiling, walls, and floor. With activity occurring from nearly every angle, the viewer - like the clown - is the subject of experimentation and interrogation. While it's easy to tell that these clowns are only acting-out traumas, it is nevertheless difficult to watch and purposefully so. "Clown Torture" makes the viewer question his or her own participation in the events on screen. Alluding to difficult subjects such as insanity, political torture, and surveillance, the work makes complex connections between theater, media, and apathy The makeup, hair, and costume of each clown act as a disguise for the actor or person underneath. Anonymous victims and inciters of brutality and pranks, these scared and scary clowns seem simultaneously real and unreal."

some of the things I've been looking at

Mona Hatoum

"poetic and political oeuvre is realised in a diverse and often unconventional range of media, including installations, sculpture, video, photography and works on paper. 

Hatoum started her career making visceral performance art in the 1980s that focused with great intensity on the body. Since the beginning of the 1990s, however, her work moved increasingly towards large-scale installations that aimed to engage the viewer in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination. In her singular sculptures, Hatoum has transformed familiar, every-day, domestic objects such as chairs, cots and kitchen utensils into things foreign, threatening and dangerous."

Corps Etranger (2000)  (endoscopic camera exploring her insides and projected onto the floor of the tower like building). Then Homebound (2000)

The Seventh Seal

Ingmar Bergman Dir. The Seventh Seal in 1957. Swedish drama film about a knight Antonius Block returning from the crusades to see Europe being wiped out by the Plague. On return he meets the personification of Death and is allowed some reprieve from death by gambling his life over a game of chess. The knight and his companions travel to Block's wife whilst the chess game continues. Ultimately Death wins and Block, his wife and four others are seen at the end of the film in a "solemn dance of death" by the juggler friend Block let escape.

Amazing cinematography, every shot is stunning.

Like the use of transitions fading between scenes. Allowing the viewer to know time has passed but in this case it seems ominous.

 

Martin Puryear

Martin Puryear

wiki link

Sculptures show such skill in craft and art:

"At a certain point I just put the building and the art impulse together. I decided that building was a legitimate way to make sculpture, that it wasn't necessary to work in the traditional methods of carving and casting."

His understanding of the philosophy of craft- Soetsu Yanagi's The Unknown Craftsman- essays on aesthetics of Eastern Craft- reconciliation of opposites or embracing opposites... intuitive and inclusive... beauty as a "liberation from duality"

Sanctuary 1982

Thicket 1990

Thoughts on techniques???

Casting- multipes, cast vs mould, positive vs negative etc.

Carving- carved object and the remnants of saw dust etc. what if the saw dust was the deisred outcome though? carve wood etc to get the scrapings and the original piece of wood is just the byproduct?

Rubbings- taking a record of a surface but in a different way- lacking in form, certain detail, colours change etc.

Erase- layers/tracing/repetition/ build up/break down/remnants/palimpsest etc.

Film/photography- recording but can easily be altered. Could play with expectations. Or beleif in film or photographs to tell the truth.

Rachel Whiteread

Rachel Whiteread

biography

Like the use of materials and exploration of technique of casting. Process to use? Idea of multiplication, repetition, (twins etc). Also positive vs. negative with cast and mould etc. Which is the intentional outcome and which is the byproduct???

dichotomy/opposite

"A dichotomy is any splitting of a whole into exactly two non-overlapping parts.

In other words, it is a partition of a whole (or a set) into two parts (subsets) that are:

• mutually exclusive : nothing can belong simultaneously to both parts, and
• jointly exhaustive : everything must belong to one part or the other.

The two parts thus formed are complements. In logic, the partitions are opposites if there exists a proposition such that it holds over one and not the other."

"In lexical semantics, opposites are words that lie in an inherently incompatible binary relationship as in the opposite pairs male : female, long : short, up : down, and precede : follow. The notion of incompatibility here refers to fact that one word in an opposite pair entails that it is not the other pair member. For example, something that is long entails that it is not short. It is referred to as a 'binary' relationship because there are two members in a set of opposites. The relationship between opposites is known as opposition. A member of a pair of opposites can generally be determined by the question What is the opposite of  X ?"

self-initiated project

Interested in...

Individual or object's histories and experiences being revealed, hidden or distorted (looking at remnants, traces, memories as ways to explore this)

Dichotomies or opposites e.g. noticed vs. unnoticed, reality vs. expectation, sense vs. nonsense, intentional vs. accidental, revealed vs. hidden... thinking about what these reveal about our experiences, how we position ourselves in our surroundings and in relation to others.

Notion of time- consumed, recorded, remembered (cyclical). Time passing- relating to memory and becoming part of our personal experience.

Objectives...

Relate these ideas to me personally as an identical twin. Think about differences/similarities, other people's expectations- double take etc.

Look at fictional books- in relation to ideas if reality/expectations/perceptions. Story telling: records experiences but also has potential to change them blurring the line between reality and imagination; also in relation to childhood and therefore our pasts'.

Fables or pourquoi stories (eg Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories and Aesop's Fables) both because they were a part of my childhood and because of how they use story telling (explaining why something is how it is or using stories to teach morals).

Process Development...

Balance collaborative work with my sister and individual work. Possibly use film/photography/sound to try something new - especially because of their ability to record what can be perceived as "reality". (distort? play with expectations etc.)

Also continue to experiment with materials- perhaps by playing with our perceptions and expectations of their physicality by altering them (e.g. fabric soaked in glue becomes stronger, moves differently etc. but still looks like fabric.)

the body as a site for cultural representation

some images of my project hung up in the studio.

looking at the other side of the fabric - drawn on side

the patches of fabric before I stitched them together

one and other

Anthony Gormley's project "One and Other" for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square this summer.

For 100 days, every hour (applicants chosen randomly though also representational of the geographic of UK) a different person will stand on the plinth creating a "monument built in time out of 1 hours of people's lives".

liked this article

Assaulting the Surface
A Conversation with Sarah Lovitt
by Ana Finel Honigman

skin/clothes/marks etc

list of links and notes:

Human skin is the largest organ of the integumentary system made up of multiple layers of epithelial tissues that guard underlying muscles and organs. As the interface with the surroundings, skin plays the most important role in protecting.

microscopy images

national geographic photo gallery

 

penn museum of archaeology and anthropology  online exhibits 

human skin- binding book

"FACTOIDS:

• As an adult, you may have more than 20 square feet of skin -- about the size of a blanket.
• You are likely to shed some 40 pounds of skin in a lifetime"

^^^ taken from "Your Gross and Cool Body"

wikipedia on skin

clothes- distressed and repaired showing their history etc and current economic climate "make do and mend"

wikipedia clothing and clothing maintenance

anna deavere smith

Anna Deavere Smith 

An actress, writer and playwright from Baltimore. She has been doing a project since the late 1970s called "On the Road a Search for American Character". This has involved recording conversations with over 2,000 people which she then re-enacts generally without props or costumes. The aim was to "absorb America". She is able to embody the character regardless of their age, race, gender etc. 

I like the idea of using scripts from conversations or interviews and reconsidering them out of their original context. Might experiment with film or sound of Katie and I- identity, compare/contrast, mirror, repeating, expectations etc...

Timecode at DCA Dundee

This weekend I went to the Timecode exhibition at the DCA, Dundee. Since it's the DCA's 10th anniversary year the work was all linked with the theme of time passing.

There was a really interesting sound piece from Kelly Mark titled "I really should" which was a spoken stream of consciousness where Mark listed things such as "I really should check my blood pressure... I really should go and see the world... I really should have used primer... I really should join the going trend. I really should celebrate my uniqueness." This list had originally been a film but was translated to a written piece on a fridge and now as this sound piece. 

Another interesting piece was Beacon by John Thomson and Alison Craighead using a mechanical railway flap sign to display internet searches someone somewhere is making at that moment in time. Every few minutes the public information sign changes acting like an "endless piece of concrete poetry; the authors of each line of text remain totally anonymous, whilst the viewer experiences a random stream of information that indicates current interests and preoccupations."  Reading each line as it appears gives you a real curiosity for who was searching, why they were and what results they read etc. 

the twin thing

the body as a site of cultural representation 

I had a look at The Art of Reflection: Women Artists' Self Portraiture in the Twentieth Century so that directed a lot of my thoughts towards considering the body as object and objectification of the female body. 

I was also reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley which is really interesting in its discussion of a fictitious future society where people are conditioned to fulfill certain roles in society. "Community, identity, stability" 

Stemming from ideas around Henry Ford's mass production this society uses the Bokanovsky Process (cloning) to produce "ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines". 

me and Katie

The recurring images surrounding twins and identity were particularly relevant to me as an identical twin. 

(The Savage's description of scenes at the hospital, pg 185)

"Twin after twin, twin after twin, they came - a nightmare. Their faces, their repeated face - for there was only one between the lot of them -...the ward was maggoty with them. They swarmed between the beds, climbed over, crawled under..."

"High, low, from a multitude of separate throats, only two voices squeaked or growled. Repeated indefinitely, as though by a train of mirrors."

Am I an I or a We?

e-how "How to Find Your Identity Despite Being a Twin"

Article about twins and identity-young age

some of the artists from my research

Jenny Saville

Ghada Amer

"Ghada Amer was born in Cairo in 1963; she now lives and works in New York. Viewing Amer's hand-embroidered paintings, with their delicate traceries of stray threads, involves a visual shift, as what appears to be a mass of abstract lines gradually comes into focus as highly ero

tic figures, displayed in a repetitive pattern. The work refuses to bow to the puritanical elements of both Western and Islamic culture, and what could be called "institutionalized feminism," with its own persistent myth of feminine virtue." 

Claude Cahun

"queried the notion of a single, knowable femininity and flaunted the artifice of both femininity and representation itself." Art of Reflection, Chapter 3

Frida Kahlo

 "I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best." 

Orlan

"The Reincarnation of Saint-Orlan, which started in 1990, involved a series of plastic surgeries in the course of which the artist started to morph herself with respect to some of the most well known historical paintings and sculptures. Supported by her Carnal Art manifesto, these works were filmed and broadcast in institutions throughout the world, such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Sandra Gehring Gallery in New York. Orlan's goal in these surgeries is to acquire the ideal of beauty as suggested by the men who painted women. When the surgeries are completed she will have the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the nose of Gerome’s Psyche, the lips of François Boucher’s Europa, the eyes of Diana from a sixteenth-century French School of Fontainebleu painting and the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Orlan picked these characters, “not for the canons of beauty they represent… but rather on account of the stories associated with them.” Diana because she is inferior to the gods and men but is leader of the goddesses and women; Mona Lisa because of the standard of beauty, or anti-beauty, she represents; Psyche because of her fragility and vulnerability within the soul; Venus for carnal beauty; Europa for her adventurous outlook to the horizon, the future." 

Franko B

Franko B 

is best known for his live performances, which he began to make in the mid-nineties. He has described these acts as focusing on the visceral “where the body is a canvas and an unmediated site for representation of the sacred, the beautiful, the untouchable, the unspeakable and for the pain, the love, the hate, the loss, the power and the fears of the human condition.” 

Karla Solano

Karla Solano

Karla Solano was born in Costa Rica, 1971.

She uses photography, film and installation to explore the body, especially her own as a subject. 

Her project "Skin" from 2003 uses close up photography to create the effect of her skin as a landscape. Thinking about skin as more than a protective layer and also as a personal history of her experiences. I like the way she has fragmented the 

skin from her body by photographing it so close that you can't really tell what part of her body you are looking at.

In some of her work Solano uses sewing into the skin

 which, when shown in film, creates a strange and disturbing image- the contrast between seeing the needle and thread pierce the skin and imagining pain but also being aware of the lack of sensitivity in the upper layers of skin and seeing no blood. 

The film "Home" shows Solano stitching an image of a house into the palm of her hand which ends disturbingly with her pulling out the thread. This is made even more eerie by Solano humming all the way through - creating a false sense of normality and domesticity - some of the songs she hums are familiar. 

http://www.karlasolano.com/images/gallery/videos/hogar.mov

Actions are reminiscent of seemingly contrasting activities of domestic sewing and self-harm, or body modification.

safety pins through the top layers of skin on my hand

National Review of Live Art

NRLA at The Arches Thursday 12th Feb

Third Angel

9 Billion Miles From Home

Performance- two artists are tied together through a pulley system and perform a ritualistic set-up process (filling a large circle with talcum powder dust) and then, after an explanation for the audience, each goes on a journey. We then get a description of what he saw and she answers questions about her experience ("How far are you from a moment of stillness?" etc)

The performance took about 1 and a half hours, reminded me of meditation- ritual, time consuming, focussed, thoughtful, self...

"We're going on a journey

  we're performing a ritual.

  We want to live in a big here, and a long now

  we want to let thinks take the time that they take.

  We are beginning to understand that we can't do that alone."

Eva Meyer-Keller

Handmade, shown in the foyer. 3 films of models representing weather catastrophes but made with everyday materials and placed inside a rotating aquarium- great reflections. 

"choreographic arts and crafts"

Billy Cowie 

The Revery Alone

3D film of female dancer on ceiling so that she seems to be hanging above the audience. Interesting what the audience will do to participate/view the work- in this case a room full of strangers, lying on the ground and wearing 3D glasses...