(Re)Production Seminar

Lecture continued, also raising questions and sparking conversation:  Impact of Marxism. Died in the 19th century so can't really hold him responsible for things happening in the 20th century. Artists who have familiarised themselves with communist art

Soviet socialism - socialist realism insists you shouldn't be messing around with styles and abstraction, readable and accessible by as many people as possible. 

Contemporary art - do what you want use what you want be influenced by what you want.

Activism and critique - dada practice in Germany 1920-30s photomontage critiquing and dismantling ideaologies weapon against fascism. Hannah hoch - gender, ideology, beauty, desirability, bodies, objects. KennardPhillips exploring activist notions capital exchange value ideology way in which quite quickly abandon spaces like galleries interested in making work in different kinds of contexts. Print media and manipulation of images. Confronting materiality and ethical issues.

Ethical responsibility. 

Politics in our practice? Responsibility to make art. Communicate politics. Political being and creative being cannot not coexist. 

Do you see your work having social responsibility and social action. Artists responsibilities include being able to address issues that regular people don't want to talk about or can't express their opinions.

Not a responsibility it's a chance to express

Is advertising an art? Does it decrease the value of the art? Where is the art situated - in a gallery more value than a billboard?

Barbara Kruger was an advertising executive before becoming an artist. 

In industrial situations people make things that will never belong to them. Immediately snatched away from you. Paid to do that, not enough. 

When you make art is it a part of you. How would it feel to sell that piece of work 

Middle ground of reproduction- rene Magritte - made identical copies and sold both - both originals which was the first one? Does it matter? 

How to price work? Labour, material worth, has no real use so no use value. Really expensive art has nothing to do with labour or cost.

How much is your work worth? What is its use value? Intellectual value.

Idea of making object that never will belong to you - Updated - working in a call centre, the thing you are giving away is not even a real object - The commodity evaporating infront of you 

Production / Reproduction KF

Debates and approaches Benjamin was interested in.

Marx - communism. The Communist Manifesto, 1848. leading to whole set of countries living under communism

Situate yourself as an artist as a social being, part of an economic, cultural network about lived experience. Traced back to ideas Marx is thinking about. 20th century built around struggle and liberation. Fall of the berlin wall - key moment.

Materiality, experience, action. "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the idea is to change it" compelling things to say about the world around us.

what would happen if we able to produce in a way that keeps us connected to who we are.

Base and superstructure model - if you want to understand our world you have to understand the material process within it

Shift from feudal culture to capitalist culture, shift from modernism to post modernism

Critiquing. The people who make things and people who own them - distinction between workng class and middle class. Labour - certain classes rewarded only in the most pivotal way. Factory owners middle class, ever richer 

In the west, relitavely few things are being produced. Produced far away, dont have to think about it

Considerable amount of what Marx has written still relevant now.

Captial is very clever as hiding the relationship - eg sweat shops

Use value vs Exchange value - how fit for purpose vs how much can i sell this for. Increasing profit margins, maintaining sales. eg watches £3 watch vs 17k Rolex

Art and political commitment. Society for Young Aritists exhibition, Moscow, 1920

Rivera and Leger, Picasso - communist ideas and artists

Production and Reproduction JS

Key text - Walter Benjamn: period of change in technology and the impact on art. fundamental text in fine art. how the means of reprouction changes the meaning of art. opens with a quote - our whole notion of fine art was developed in a time that is long gone. but still our idea of what a work of art is derives from that. conflicting ideas in our heads. technical changes around 1900

Google images: photograph is of the same painting, but the image we see is not identical. what is the difference of looking at an original piece of art and a reproduction. texture is lost in reproduction. particularly when we look at a screen, everything is the same size. everything is reduced to something that is the same

Painting of a photograph, reproduction. is the photograph a reproduction in itself? 

Kiefer's work is large scale, uses materials to add texture and make the piece heavy - cannot see this from the image of it on a screen

Steve McQueen, Queen and Country: Last Post, 2003-2009 work is an actual reproduction. wanted to use photos of soldiers who died in the war on stamps, royal mail did not allow it

Photography, sees what the eye could not. Blow-up, 1966 - discovers a body in an blown up image

how film has changed the way we look. Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times, 1936 - moving image made up of stills. registration of the subject captured on film. digital technology means we are no longer passive spectators of film and narrative. can pause and look at that moment - not meant to stop it - meant to view it as a continuous thing.

Reproductions in the National Gallery and the Tate gift shops. Taking home a trophy. Taking home evidence. How these images are consumed. Mouse mat of naked lady - raises issues

Why is the hand of the artist so important? links to the idea of commerce and value. not just about technique and skill value but also financial value. 

Cornelia Parker - The spider that died in the tower of london & A Feather From Freud's Pillow - value by association not by actual value of the work. 

Protests outside Tate and Nation Gallery - sponsorship of BP (tate) privatise cleaning staff (National gallery).

Aesthetics

Following the Aesthetics Lectures and Seminar I begun a little bit of research of my own as it is a topic that really intrigued me and a possible starting point for my essay.

Body Thematic Bibliography

I intend to slowly work through this list of thematic texts and bibliographies listed under 'Body'. I have started with ones relating to the skin as this is what I am most intrigued by at the moment.

Aesthetics Seminar

Essay: what informs your work

Use texts for each week if you find them useful - don't have to

Following on from the lecture:

Started by talking about Philsophical concepts of beauty. Aesthetics is a field quite central to art and art practice only recently those ideas have begun to be dismantled 

Still conventionally use the idea of being beautiful, as artists just as interested in things that are the complete opposite and challenge our ideas of beauty. Reverse of beauty - chaos, violence, collapse 

Dada anti art movement unstable and contradictory no dada thinkers seem to agree on anything 

Collage (Berlin dada art) cheap and quick and spontaneous 

Beautiful things are powerful 

Skill and materials 

Common ideas behind beauty is that it is eternal 

20th century people are drawn to things that are grotesque, monstrous

Notions around the monstrous: monster as a figure is terrifying frightening upsetting

Notions around the grotesque: excessive, comically ugly, swollen and over formed 

The abject: abjection, things which have begun to collapse, the difference in things become ambiguous 

Goya, Saturn Devouring One Of His Children, 1821

Times where you go that's awful but I want to look at it

As a society endlessly fascinated by murders - medicine museum, Berlin. Anatomical specimens, diseased organs, skeletons of deformed people

Showing something that is normally hidden, human thing of being curious 

Distinction between beauty and ugliness

By identifying what's ugly, can see what's beautiful 

John Peter Witkin, presented as a still life, black and white large prints, subject matter includes uncomfortable things, deformities, love or loathe him, divides opinion

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

Horror films, representations

Childhood memories, skin on milk, children have to learn what is good for them

Borders between things are complicated and ambiguous and anxiety things that switch one place to another. Fascination and repulsion

Clear sense of our own personal space, certain people that we trust 

Consider what I put into my mouth, it is a border. One minute that was an object now it is part of me, that border - fascinating ideas

The idea of PC

Understanding of classical beauty, filtered through the Renaissance discovery. Roman marble statues actuallty painted as real life, did not realise until recently there were traces of paint

Cubism and dada about disfiguring the cannon of beauty. Constructivism restoring that idea of beauty and taste

Why are things that repel us which we want to look away, as a culture why are we fascinated by them?

The 'formless': George Bataille seen by western art critics from 1960's onwards one of the most important physicists 

Borders of the body, issues around sexuality

Structure and order fall away no longer possible to identify

Harmony and order and organisation both fascinating and repulsive 

From the formless something new might be made

Ink blot tests - supposed to say what it is, why do we insist of reading form into it?

People become interested in moments of chaos - Eugene Atget, Ragpickers, 1913 these areas are gone now, buildings and flee market and ring road

Feet and toes are anxious and disgusting

Andre Boiffard, Mouth, Big Toe, Flypaper and Flies, 1929-30

Conclusive beauty:

Surrealism

Convulsive beauty is an erotic and sexual notion, one might connect objects and experiences in the world. Characterised as unexpected and jolts. Suddenly arrises. Inberween ness. Two opposit that shouldn't be in the same place.

Bipolar. Two things that pull in different directions. For a moment held in tension. 

Kitsch:

Seen as bad, fascist, Jeff Koons, questioning around kitsch

Is it still possible and relevant to have a concept of what beauty is, what constitues beauty. Ongoing question. Is it a problem if somebody finds a photoshopped girl attractive? Question bound up in that encounter is not with an object but as an image. Representations of women, not actual encounters.

Cannons of taste and beauty is somewhat decided by museums.

Notion of beauty is a redundant one. Attracted to the reverse of beauty. Easier to determine.

Our objects and images:

Butterflies - colour, nature, feminity. Cultural  we've assumed them to be beautiful. Not a threat, harmlessness

Displayed in a box, contained, captured. Do we look and feel the same about them while they're in nature or in the box.

Tempted to identify beauty with nature. 

Metamorphosis of insects eg butterflies 

Anxiety being redeemed, redemptions from violence and ugliness

Beauty linked to feminity? Subject to cultural ideas 

Ideal body shape - problematic idea

People have been taught in a way to associate feminity with beauty. Ignorant to forget the male

Power, control, wealth

Until recently all has been about male power controlling female beauty.

Covers of magazines: women's magazines women, men's magazines women.

In film and tv women are often shown naked, exposed, not so much the man

Anonymity to women painted nude. Female nudes use beauty to hide the pleasure of looking and enjoying. Widely painted by men, for men.

Early photography - female nudes. Anonymity is going. Pornography.

The Beautiful and The Sublime JS

Ideas of beauty conventionalised

What do we mean when we toss these terms around - beauty, sublime, pretty

In classical times the male form that embodied beauty - shifted during renaissance. Incarnation of beauty was placed onto the female form. Endless row of female nudes in our galleries

If our idea of beauty can shift from male to female can it shift from human to something else?

Aesthetics: not just about what we feel through our senses, not just a physical satisfaction has to go through the mind

Connection between beautiful and the sublime:

English obssession with gardens and countryside

other european countries do not share the same obsession

Does the sublime have it's origins in nature or the mind?

Longinus, On Sublimity - unteachable, related to genius, domination - masuline traits, although it originate in nature it is only in art it can be given its shape. Only possible through the work of genius.

Can it exist without language? 

John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath, 1853

pleasures of the imagination

mountains, wilderness, things that are infinite

Burke: not about spirituality, does not link the sublime with God. The sublime embodies this contradiction between pleasure and horror

Sublime is formless, beauty is bounded/framed

Beauty is what submits to us. Beauty associated with the female, conformed to ideas about women and feminity at the time, the sublime is masculine.

Immanuel Kant, The Analytic of the Sublime, 1790:

beauty: harmony, good proportions, perfection and appeals to senses.

sublime: is both rational and imaginative and appeals to the mind.

Cannot experience the sublime if you are female. have to be genius and male

Abstract concepts are gendered: the can be nothing female or effeminate about the sublime or genius

Sublime: you look at the sublime you are not in it

The symbiotic relationship between genius and the sublime:

James Turrell, Houghton Hall, 2015

Bill Viola, The Crossing, 1996

If the sublime is gendered where does that leave women artists?

Can we find a way to achieve the sublime? what a feminine sublime would look like? 

Or do we go complete opposite to that and go anti sublime?

Helen Chadwick, Meat Abstract, 1989

Who tells us what is taste what is beautiful