"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."
Friday, 8 May 2009
Wednesday, 6 May 2009
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
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
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.)
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