Tacita Dean

This is the interview that was shown on a different floor to the projection. She talkss deeply about her work and process so we gain an understanding about the production and development of her work.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lefvPUYGvi0

London Tate

I went to London this weekend and went to the Tate Modern for the first time. There were some really interesting exhibitions on at the Tate including a massive film installation by Tacita Dean, documentary photography and interactive exhibitions.

The work by Tacita Dean as part of 'The Unilever Series' was a giant 13m portrait projection in the Turbine Hall, using 35 mm film which she had experimented with, chopped up and taped back together, added colour to, rewound amound other things. There was a short film on one of the upstairs floors about what she had done which was really interesting. She wanted to make a portrait film without actually uses images of people as we typically know portraits as. I found this short film interview with her really interesting as it gave more of an insight into what she had done and how she had done it. When I saw the giant projection again later on in the day I had more of an appreciation of the concept behind it. It was fascintating to see the way she worked and developed this idea, seeing the process she went through, working vigorously on her own for hours. The experimentation with the film in the chopping up and reordering meant that she did not always have a plan of what she was going to do, this made it more exciting as she did not have a set plan she had to stick to. In the interview she talked about how she often gets accused as being nostalgic for using 35mm film as appose to digital. Although she says, 'Keep film and digital as two seperate medias. I am not nostagic as what I am doing is of now. Nostalgia is when people look back to a better time, I get accused of being nostalgic a lot but I'm not'

Photography: New Documentary Forms is an exhibition of political photoraphs, observational photographs everyday life and events from around the world including Iraq, The Congo, Beirut, Ukraine among other places.

Boris Mikhailov photographs Ukraine through the time of Communism and the Soviet Union. Some of the images were shocking and revealing of this complicated time, I found the photographs very interesting as there were many contrasting images within them. For example, the photograph below second from the top on the left of the soldier holding a pink flower. The soldier is a sign of war, conflict, power in his uniform yet he is holding a pink flower and smiling at the camera, seeming soft, a total contrast in the reality of what may be happening seconds after the photo is captured.

Guy Tillim captures events in The Congo around the time of election in 2006. He captures a time of conflict of unrest in a time of social and political change. The photograph below of a woman dressed for gain peoples attention and vocalise her views in about the events occuring. She waves a stick in the air as a striking gesture towards the crowd, the scene is one of chaos.

Akram Zaatari

Lecture 5; Marxism and Art

Lecture 5; Marxism and Art 25/11/11

Marxism is;

• A political manifesto leading to socialism, communism and the 20^th century conflicts between capital and labour.
• A philosophical approach to society, social sciences focusing on social and human behaviour.

What is Capitalism?

• Control of the means of production in private hands.
• A market where labour power is bought and sold.
• Production of commodities for sale.
• Use of money as a means of exchange.
• Competition/hierarchy; makes people compete and clash.

The way a society is organised affects the way you think about people and the world.

Materialism; not to be confused with the meaning we associate with it as that of people who are obsessed with buying goods. Marxist meaning comprises of the base which is the economic factors, forces of production, materials, tools, workers, skills etc. Relations of production i.e., employer/employee, boss/worker. Superstructure is the social institutions and the legal, political and cultural.

‘The history of all hitherto existing society us the history of class struggles’

Marx Communist Manifesto

Art directly reflects the idea of production; Marxist.

Base produces the content and form of the Superstructure.

Men control the means of production; therefore producing more women as sexualised in the media as it is male dominated.

If you are born into a Capitalist society then you are going to think in a Capitalist way. School teaches you to be controlled, preparing for later life of work. Grading produces competition.

Marxist thinking;

• Marxist reading of the government running the country is that it is not the government but in fact a bunch of rich people with a lot of power and control.
• Marxist reading of religion would say that the whole moral reading of say, Christianity, to be good/hardworking and then you will be rewarded in heaven because everything will be worth it, would say that it is not good or worth it because you are dead.

Ideology;

1.       System of ideas or beliefs e.g. beliefs of a political party.
2.       Masking, distortion or selection of ideas to reinforce relations through creation of ‘false consciousness’

Certain sets of beliefs disguise reality. The ruling class makes the view of the few seem like the view of the many.

Pierre Bourdieu ‘A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste’

• Aesthetic judgement is a social facility
• The Kantian ‘pure aesthetic’ is stylised and mystifying account of the particular experience of the bourgeoisie.
• Aesthetic senses and associated lifestyles define themselves in difference to one another ’taste is first and foremost  the distaste of the taste of others’

If you like art you generally are middle/upper class. Working class have to learn the middle/upper class behaviour in galleries/museums etc. Artists of the past were only really wealthy people, lucky and luxurious. The style of art was dependant on who bought it.

This is presented in the painting ‘Charles Townley and his friends in his library at Park Street in Westminster’ by Johan Zoffany, 1781-83. Zoffany was paid to paint Townley in a certain way to show what he has/owns, his wealth.

Also presented in ‘Mr and Mrs Andrews’ 1750 Thomas Gainsborough.

Robert Andrews is just married and wants to be painted in the surroundings he owns. Berger would say he just wanted to show off his control and capitalism. The painting presents an ideology as there are no workers shown in the image when they would have in fact been there in reality. Link to the National Gallery.

‘The Hay Wain’ 1821 John Castable.


He tries to express the glory of nature. A materialistic reading of the image would be that the painting was made for a rich landowner and he will have had to paint in a certain way to please the client. At the time of the painting there were riots because working class people were being prevented from owning land. The painting disregards what the reailty of the time was and what was actually happening. He paints workers going about their day when they were in fact revolting. He creates a false ideology to please his client. Artists had to suck up to the upper classes and climb the social ladder. It is displayed in the National Gallery in London.

Auctions of Artworks were only for a certain type of person who could afford the price of the work, to pay an extravagant price for something that is not a necessity, a luxury to show off their wealth. How do we determine what they are worth? Some people are not necessarily paying because they love the artwork but simply that they want something that is a fixed commodity and an investment, disregarding the work itself. The art becomes an exchangeable object.

Damien Hirst ‘For the Love of God’ 2007.

Here, Hirst is just trying to make an expensive piece of artwork that is not really art. This presents the bankruptcy of art.

Conceptual Art

• What can art do to challenge this system of art being made for financial exchange? And not for the love of it.
• Anti-Capitalist gesture; a form of art that’s impossible to commodify.
• The art world did however find a way to do this in the form of book editions.

Hans Haacke ‘MOMA Poll’ 1970.


Around the time of the Vietnam War. One of the main investors behind the gallery supports a war that the public don’t want. Some of his shows were withdrawn.



'Information', an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970, claimed to be the first conceptual art exhibition mounted by a U.S. museum. The artist Hans Haacke posited this SYSTEM as art: a query, a response algorithm, and its visual feedback.
Question:
Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon's Indochina policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in November ?
Answer:
If 'yes'
please cast your ballot into the left box
if 'no'
into the right box.

'Ballots' were dropped into either of two plexi-glass ballot boxes [visitors chose "yes" twice as often as "no"].
New York Governer Nelson Rockefeller was a member of the board of trustees of MOMA and planning a run for the U.S. Presidency at the time.

-Extract from this website

Relational Aesthetics

• An emerging practice
• Bringing people together with no commodities exchanged, no money or financial gain
• Seek to set up relations where the real relations of people are exposed
• Artist and Audience connected and talking, a conversation engaging and connecting with the artist

Santiego Sierra goes to third world countries and pays for people to have things done to them or do things. E.g. stand in cardboard boxes. Exploiting conditions where people will debase themselves revealing their desperation for money.

1999, he paid boys to stand and have a black line drawn down their backs.

Victor Burgin ‘What does possession mean to you?’

Lecure 4; Critical Positions on the Media and Popular Culture

Lecture 4; Critical Positions on the Media and Popular Culture 11/11/11

• Cultural Studies and Critical Theory
• Critically define ‘popular culture’
• Contrast in ideas of ‘culture’ with ‘popular culture’
•  Interrogate the social function of popular culture

What is Culture?

• ·         A particular way of life
• ·         Works of intellectual and especially artistic significance
• ·         General process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development of a particular society at a particular time

Raymond Williams ‘Keywords’ 1983

Definitions of Popular

•  Well-liked by many
•  Inferior kinds of work
• Work deliberately setting out to win favour with people
• Culture actually made by people themselves for people
• 'Mass’ produced

Inferior or Residual Culture

• Popular Press vs Quality Press
• Popular Cinema vs Art cinema
• Popular Entertainment vs Art Culture

Caspar David Friedrich (1809)‘Monk By the Sea’

Question life and existence, the expanse of the universe.

Jenny Harrison’s ‘Sea and Shy in Watercolours’

Could make you think like Friedrich’s painting, more in-depth, but we don’t. We are informed of what is high and what low culture, what conveys deeper meaning is.

Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane 2005.

‘Folk Archive’, exhibition made by the people for the people.

Belfast City

There is a culture of painting on the side of buildings with political themes and commentary by people who are not necessarily trained artists.

We cannot judge other cultures with our own cultural standards as we are all so different and don’t know cultural histories.

Who decides what is worthy of being in an art gallery and what is not?

What happens when culture of the people/popular culture become sucked into higher culture?

E.g. Graffiti invented in Brooklyn in the 70s. Now has developed into a high/acceptable art form with famous artists such as Banksy, but what makes his graffiti ’high art’?

E.P Thompson 1963, ‘The Making of the English Working Class’

An influx of Urbanisation create emerging class divisions.

Bourgeoisie

Working class and upper class are separated through class divisions. The working class develop their own entertainment and form of culture. They create their own activities and growing class identity. This development becomes a threat to those in control of society, the upper class. This made the working class have the right to vote.

Matthew Arnold (1867) ‘Culture and Anarchy’

This book was written in response to this growing working class culture. Culture polices ‘the raw and uncultivated masses’, anarchy will be created by the rise of the working class. Cultural theories a reaction to this threat.

F.R Leavis and Q.D Leavis wrote books together and were married.

‘Mass Circulation and minority culture’

‘Fiction and the Reading in Public’

‘Culture has always been in minority keeping’

Anxious about the growing working class voice and challenging the upper classes.

Equate popular culture to drugs and attack it, justifying their knowledge and higher culture/importance.

Frankfurt School- Critical Theory

An institution of social research 1923-33.

Research projects into popular culture from a left point of view. It was shut down by the Nazis and had to relocate to New York in 1933 until 1947. After the war it moved back to Frankfurt. New York presented to them the future for Germany and its society; they did not like what they saw. They saw Popular Culture as a sort of car manufacturers; people buying and selling meaningless rubbish. They were confronted with this culture in America of mindless repetition.

‘All Mass Culture is identical’

The products follow convention and are predictable such as in Rom Com films.

Mass Culture and its psychological effect; coding and instructing people on how to think, making people dependant on this culture and products and manipulating their opinion. This culture distracts from real life situations.

Che Guvera; a genuine revolutionary who overthrew capitalism. His image has been mass produced in popular culture by people who don’t know the history or what he did and his importance.

Adorno on popular music

Standardisation

Pseudo-individualism makes you think you are buying something individual although it is mass produced.

Music controls how you dance.

Lecture 3; Identity

Lecture 3; Identity 04/11/11

Zygmun Bauman- theorist.

How does identity work in the Digital domain?

Theories of Identity

Essentialism (traditional approach)

• That our biological make up makes us who we are.
• We all have an inner essence that makes us who we are.

Postmodern Theorist disagree; Anti-Essentialism.

Phrenology is to the term to describe the different parts of your brain and how they relate to the different parts of your personality.

Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909)

Physiognomy is the idea that you can read intelligence through the face shape and facial features. The idea that white facial features present higher intelligence than black. This is trying to legitimise racism.

'Christ carrying the cross' Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516)

Anti-Semitism, Nazi Germany; Jewish people presented as inferior.

‘Holy Virgin Mary’ 1996 Chris Ofili, 

Virgin Mary wearing blue, he paints Mary as a black woman, linking to his own African heritage. This painting was withdrawn from its exhibition.

Douglas Kellner, a Sociologist.

‘Media Cultures; Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and Post Modern’ 1992.

Pre Modern Identity, Personal Identity is stable and defined by standing roles. Institutions determined identity such as the church, marriage, monarchy, the state, government work.

Modern Identity, Modern Societies begin to offer a wider range of roles in the 19^th and early 20^th century.

Charles Baudelaire introduces the concept of the flaneur (gentlemen stroller)

 ‘Le Pont De L’Europe’ 1876 Gustave Caillebotte

 ‘Paris Street, Rainy Day’ 1877 Gustave Caillebotte

Post Modern Identity, people begin to choose their roles becoming more selective.

‘Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentlemen of leisure’ Thorstein Veblen 

George Simmel; Trick Down Theory. He suggests that being around many people causes them to become more introverted.

•  Emulation; lower classes aspire to dress similar to the upper class. This creates a fashion cycle, the upper classes stop wanting to wear clothes when lower classes begin to ‘emulate’ them causing fashion to constantly change.
• Distinction
• The ‘mask’ of fashion; people hides their class and who they are through what they wear.

Post Modern Identity

‘Dis course Analysis’

Identity is constructed out of discourses culturally available to us. Possible discourses; gender, class, age, race, nationality, sexuality.

Class

Pier Bouderv

Humphrey Spender, Mass observation, Worktown Project 1937

Photographic  Project observing everyday life and the mundane.

 ‘New Brighton, Merseyside’ from ‘The Last Resort’ 1983-86 Martin Parr

‘Ascot’ 2003 Martin Parr

‘Sedlescomble’ from ‘Think of England’ 2000-2003

Parr claims not to mock but does he?

‘Society reminds us of one particularly shrewd, cunning and pokerfaced player in the game of life, cheating if given chance, flouting rules whenever possible’ Baumann.

‘Highland Rape’ Alexander McQueen Collection draws attention to the name and is highly emotive.

British Star Genius, a fashion documentary.

Vivienne Westwood, Anglomania.

Las Vegas, national identities pushed together in one place.

Race/Ethnicity

‘No Woman No Cry’ 1998 Chris Ofili 

Questions what it means to be a black artist. Relates to the murder of Steven Laurence, killed because of his skin colour.

‘Captain Shit and the Legend of the stars’ 1994 Chris Ofili

'Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say’ 1992-3 Gillian Wearing ‘

Emily Bates, a textile designer/artist who created a dress inspired by Titian’s ‘Saint Mary Magdelene’ 1952

Gender/Sexuality

‘Everyone I have ever slept with’ Tracey Emin

Germaine Greer, a feminine commentator

Post Modern Theory that our identity is constructed through our social experience.

Task 1, Writing Task; Panopticism in todays society

Produce a written Analysis discussing something in our day to day lives which is Panoptic

Include; 

·         Faucodian terminology.

·         5 quotes from text by Michel Foucault.

Developing technologies and fashions such as a smartphones, consoles, and clothing could be considered a ramification of Panopticism. People ‘abandoning their statutory identity’ to follow form and fashion to have the latest gadgets and impress with dressing the way they think they should be viewed and presented, showing status and their knowledge of keeping up to date. There is an ‘omniscient power’ instructing people of how they should act, what they should buy and the way they should live. We can’t see it but it is there in advertising, shops, magazines, billboards, everywhere you look. We become a ‘disciplined society’ as we follow instruction about what is in fashion and what is considered to be in at certain times. We spend money to keep up appearance and are constantly looked at and judged by this set criteria. When shopping, many people see us but we don’t always see them, we are looked at and observed and we so the same to others. We behave in public situations the way we are indoctrinated to behave, shopping requires composure and patience which not everyone has but often pretends to have to keep in with behaviour which acceptable. We try clothes on; put them on the hanger and pay. We don’t run out of the shop with them, people who do this are looked down upon. We wait restlessly to hear about the release of new technologies such as phones and buy into them even if the one we have is perfectly fine and effective. Technologies speaks status.