Weekend Task

So I have the order not to spend this weekend eating frozen ready meals and watching free dvds. So... Egon Schiele

Mock Presentation

I am intending for my studio wall to be presented like this, I'm ruining the surprise a little but my frame still hasn't arrived for my glossy print so my attempt to simulate the staging hopefully means tomorrow will be less of a train-wreck… I have toyed with other arrangements but I feel there is some balance here.

Speaking in general terms - On Feminism

Gender oppression has changed its colours, from auburns, to psychedelic, to neons and now to high definition.

“Feminism, a dated term but don’t be afraid of it” – I would happily categorize my art as feminist art, if it denotes empowerment to female sexuality. However, I would hate to stop there.
My work is about exploring the self, gender, aesthetics, physicality, consumerism, capitalism, the physcosexual and society. To conclude a feminist as an equal-rights-protesting-man-hater is not only lazy but boorish. Feminism has not had deserving accolades. Take Modernism, modernism has cultivated its strands, Abstraction, Minimalism, Dada, Post-modernism etc. the volumes of academic literature obsessing in these developments has been consumed by the art world but Feminist art and its strands have had little honours.
Feminism is a constant battle; the actual fight entails a kind of tribute to historical art genii and the sorrowful ambivalence of female dominance/participation in all the definitive movements that have ultimately shaped art today. It is difficult for me not to think of movements now in a very nonrepresentational way. Today, Post-modernism and conceptualism has found a way to detach itself from the open and municipal, in fact the great 50 influential have endorsed fine art to be incoherent, elitist and supressing. Movements like Stuckism is forlorn against the Saatchi and Serpentine, Intentism, a new movement that reverts the power back to the artist looks set to be like Stuckism – in a way that gender issues have been flouted for abstracted self-expression in the forms of coloured squares and geometric forms.
Is the feminist wall self victimizing? The iconic Marina Abramovich declares herself NOT as a feminist artist. Should we question the feminist fight? The battle of the underdog is wearisome, in the consideration that the first feminist art movement flourished in the late 60’s, the fight for equality has no end. Gender oppression has changed its colours, from auburns, to psychedelic, to neons and now to high definition. Feminism needs a contemporary intervention as it has come in a single handed form; Tracey Emin. In the fight to expand, to enrich female artists there should a freedom of expression but our own freedom to oppress, criticise and tyrannize is also empowerment. Francis Bacon depicted modern man lost in tragic existence and until women can authorize an existential crisis, that is accepted equally to a man’s existence then that is when feminism will be a dated term.

Studio latest

This is how my studio space is looking now.

'Women in charge' seminar/meeting tomorrow at 12:30 with artist Bob and Roberta Smith. Not how I would usually spend my annual leave.

Hoanna Frueh: Making a mess: women's bane, women's pleasure

'The modernist myth of genius constructs the artist as a man lauded for making a mess: the avant-gardist 'messes' up canons of beauty, and his habits and sex-life 'mess with' bourgeois conventions. Modernists 'mess' conflates the aesthetic, the erotic, and this visual. Within modernist discourse and moden life, the woman artist who 'makes a mess' has not experienced success rqual to en's. This is because tidiness has been and remains a norm imposed by culture on women.
The erotic is pleasure in its many forms. The erotic exists in genital sexual gratification, but operates much more expansively in recognition of plenitude and in development of wisdom regarding satisfactions unadulterated by pain, hostility, shame, or frustration.
Pleasure in these terms is neither utopian not Pollyanna-ish.
It is an urgent instinct beneath the cultural burden of belief in pleasure and pain as necessary correlates and feminist theories.
So problematising women's desire and pleasure as to suppress their ability to represent, let alone trust, their own pleasure, thus squelching an erotics of experience.
That images substantiate reality and reality substantiates images means that both women's lives and art reify the pleasure/pain model. Yet some women's art has substantiated pleasure, for pleasure is necessary to human well-being and social transformation.
I rip the discursive fabric and repiece it differently for pleasure and healing.
...culture-t-large believes make women women: masochism, victimage, and hysteria. In modernist discourse, women's feminity is a necessary and aberrational condition: feminity is a mess and a monstrosity.'

Ref
Women artists and modernism. Edited by Katy Deepwell.
Page142 Joanna Frueh, Chapter 9

Blank

PAWNJules, BLISSETT, Oil paint and cotton on faux leather, 2011

Animal's Castle

Jules, Animal Castle, Digital Collage 2011

Stuckists: Enemies of Art

Bank Holiday hangover. I knew I should have posted this yesterday. I went to Archway’s Launderdale for the Stuckists Enemies of Art Show. There was something alfresco about the show, a breather from installations that could pay off your yearly mortgage, unfussy (borderline messy) and honestly motivated.
Paul Harvey and Ella Guru made the show but the ‘emotional landscape’ wasn’t manifested like I was expecting. The wholesomeness of the paintings, the apparent intention of the show did its work for the lack of emotional charge. I have little care for a 10 year old’s poster paint handiwork and I was actually running from the badly composed weepy figuratives, they were almost dialing for your sentiments - the words ‘organized fun’ springs to mind.
I was really excited about the show because their manifesto is inciting in a very good way , I’m pro anything that encourages honourable painting but the works didn’t correspond to their strong manifesto. I will still visit their next show, it was endearing but maybe I was expecting a very great deal. Grand spaces and luxury installations seems to be conditioning, it is probably all the facility attractions (i'm not at all adverse to a latte in between gallery rooms and eco power hand dryers) but when a gallery starts behaving like a Westfield shopping Centre, that is what it will become.

Lynn Hershman Leeson

Lynn Hershman Leeson, Olympia: Fictive Projections and the Myth of the Real Doll, 2007-8, silicone RealDoll, chaise lounge, 35mm slide projector, fabric, curtain rodEdouard Manet’s 1865 painting.

“Olympia,” shocked the art world by depicting a prostitute whose unabashed gaze was part invitation, part dare. Lynn Hershman Leeson provocatively restages Manet’s notorious artwork in her installation Olympia: Fictive Projections and the Myth of the Real Woman, by featuring a custom-designed sex doll. Incorporating Manet’s scandal, this work reveals cultural predilections toward displaced desire. Revealing a range of historical re-interpretations, the projected 35mm slides sample internet images and expose residual artifacts.http://www.iheartmyart.com/post/478035708/lynn-hershman-leeson-olympia-fictive-projections

RESEARCH: WOMEN ARTISTS AND MODERNISM

From this, modernists are not concerned with difference, they see art as homogenous. No value is placed on gender politics. So when imagery and feminized art is portrayed... it is 'foolish, feckless and thin. '



LYNN HERSHMANN, DEEP CONTACT, THE FIRST INTERACTIVE SEXUAL FANTASY VIDEODISC, 1984-1989
image from Media Art Net

Ed. Katy Deepwell, Manchester University Press, 1998
Susan Platt. Chapter 5, Pg 83. Elizabeth McCausland: art, politics and sexuality

McCausland (1899-1965) wrote emotionally charged articles on contemporary art during the 1930's that call for the modern artist to be immersed in society.

The 'American Action Painters' as characterised by Harold Rosenberg were celebrated for being active in terms of moving paint around a canvas.

Clement Greenberg: issues outside of artwork were seen as violating its 'purity' (addressing political issues compromises art).A recent example, 1993 Whitney Biennal. Critics dismissed the first Bennial as having a significant representation of women and people of colour and not, coincidentally, politically engaged art. Arthur Danto, for example, declared that it was 'mawkish, frivolous, whining, awful and thin'. There was no analysis of the political issues.

Canonical separation of art from politics basically forces artists to remain as part of a powerless 'Other'.

'Apolitical' art is a political position that diminishes the power of art and artists.

Houston Baker callls it 'an assumed supremecy of boorishly, racist, indisputably sexist and unbelievably wealthy Anglo-Saxon males'.

Post-structuralist females see its definition as 'construction neccesary to a highly political and successful cultural production of a highly privileged subject position. Modernist self-fashioning is accomplished... over and against a feminized and devalued other.

I can't spell but I can give you cosmetics advice

Reality killed the absent. Jules, Heidi.

Pink Symptoms

Jules, Pencil on paper with pink effects, whilst watching Masterchef, 2011

Sketchbook

Ella Guru. Stuckist Painter. Easter Consumption

RESEARCH (locked out of the house and a McDonald's down the road - might as well)

MALE ONN

Shanghai Artist MALEONN


Perhaps three of his best. A bit of a photoshop freak, he practiced as a short film maker first. Craig Scott Gallery represents Maleonn the 'reigning fabulist producing lyrical digital fantasies'.

Image 1, What Love Is, Image 2, Master and Slave, Image 3, Days of Cotton Candy
www.craigscottgallery.com/?sec=2&artist_id=6

RESEARCH NOTES - Unframed Practices and Politics of Women's Contemporary Painting

My conclusion is that this is basically an intellectualized Stuckism but instead refers effectively to gender issues and not the institution as such (the lines got very blurry there). Postmodern conditioning and all it's incoherence absent here. Can't be dealing with that.

UNFRAMED PRACTICES AND POLITICS OF WOMEN'S CONTEMPORARY PAINTING, edited by Rosemary Betterton, I.B Tauris & Co Ltd, 2004 - explores the current state of making and thinking about painting by women. It aims to reclaim a space for different practices of women's painting and to assert that these are important if we are concerned with the current meanings of both art and gender.

• Painting has ceased to be central to current critical debates about contemporary art in the western world
• Gender issues that have been foregrounded by women's movement over the previous 30 years are deemed irrelevant to the making of new art
• The twin peaks of postmodernism and post-feminism, however ill defined, appear to have overshadowed any serious consideration of the contemporary practices and politics of women who paint
• Sterile set of oppositions such as traditional or new media, abstraction and realism, feminist or non-feminist Marsha Meskimmon suggests are simply inadequate to contain the complexities of contemporary practice by women
• Groundplans exhibition in 1989, with nine women painters
• There have been sporadic attempts to address the relations between women, painting and feminism over the last decade, there has been no sustained critical analysis of women';s painting and i remains, as Fran Lloyd commented, 'one of the most undervalued sites of feminst practice in Britain'. (Llyod 2000: 37) Part of the reason must go back to the sustained critique of painting as a reactionary masculinist discourse by feminist artists such as JUDY CHICAGO and critical theorist like Griselda Pollock since early 1970's
• Many women artists at the time rejected painting in favour of less 'tainted' media such as performance, video or installation
• issues of racial and cultural identities are histories are crucial, for writers like PARTOU and ROSA LEE, their respective Iranian and Chinese identities are an implicit factor in their work, alongside gender and generation. The attention given to the specificities of race and place, to culture and identity, marks this kind of painting out from the modernist assumption of a universalized aesthetic or a postmodernist play of signifiers detached from histories and politics - the 'play'
• Why do I, as a feminist, still invest desires and pleasures in painting? I think the answer lies less in question of political content and more in issues of gendered spectatorship and embodiment. By evoking my sense of being a carnal subject, a female subject in a fleshy body, painting can begin to articulate complex pleasures and displeasures attached to looking and being as a woman. It is the material qualities of paint, its ambiguity and resistance, over and above the signified meaning of a specific painting
• Pitfall of feminist criticism that asserted in the past - destruction of visual pleasure was in itself, a feminist act.
• Practices... BARB BOLT explains, paintings can be understood, in C.S. Peirce's term as 'dynamic objects', that is they exceed pure signification and can be understood as bringing something new into being
• Bolt argues, paintings are not merely images, but materializations that can have an insistent presence as objects, which is why a slide or photograph is never enough
• For Lee as for Bolt, painting is a means of an engagement with and a bringing into something that has previously not existed, rather than a re-presentation of a pre-existent event
• Lee identifies characteristics that exceed the purely visual and relate to somatic senses of touch, rhythm and gesture, as well ad different kinds of rhythm. Roger Fry, ' not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent. They aim not an illusion but at reality'. For Lily Bruscoe, as for Eva Hesse, the act of making art is 'absurd' or 'impossible'.
• Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, the act of painting is figured as 'bound up with some sort of love. As its close painting finally emerges as a response to "emptiness" ... It is a practice, in which some sort of retrieval is attempted'. (Rowley 2003)
• Partou, this may be a desire to retrieve the self or to move beyond the bounaries of self towards forgotten others in the works of SUSAN HILLER, LUBAINA HIMID and PAM SKELTON
• Painting; it is an ongoing and relational (two key shifts) painting as a system of signs within semiotic analysis to a concept of painting as having an indexical relation to the world
• Bolt 2003 (second shift) towards an understanding of painting as an inter-subjective process: 'a practice of co-emergence involving the play of objects, bodies, materials, technologies and discourse' (shifting away from being solely an 'object')
• 'Personal is political'. For REBECCA FORTNUM, this involves using her art 'as a way of reflecting and understanding [her] place in the world'. The question of what it means to produce work as an embodied, sxed, raced, classed and historically situated subject is implicit. Marsha Meskimmon points out, both the embodiment of subjects and the situatedness of knowledges have been crucial concepts in recent feminist theory.
• the studio: For Partou, it is by 'a naked female body stating herself in paint' that she can challenge the male rtist's right to monopolise the symbolic space of the studio.
• Partou 2003. In exploring what it means to paint from - and with - a female body, she renders explicit issues of gender, nudity and the assumed identity of the artist.
• By reasserting her own socially gendered I/eye, Partou does not simply occupy the body and space of the male artist, but displaces him in a 'political and intimate' project of self-representation as both the subject and the object of her work. Her series of self-portraits resists fixed ontology; anti-definition. Looking at paintings unfold over time and, is materially situated. (Fortnum 2003).
• hyper-masculine

Stuckism

THE STUCKIST (est. 1999)
An anti avant garde movement. I don't always won't to pronounce the profoundness of paintings and the prejudices of postmodernism - I am a Stuckist of sorts I will say in place. I'm reading about this Stuckist movement and I agree and but I don't preach.

19-04-2011 Last night I was watching Marina Ambromovich on youtube. Even though she epitomises postmodern bullshit I love how she dictates a divine figure of herself, she has a real artist spirit but it's ringfenced in nauseous performance art . There is something very sickly about performance, unless its funny. Imagine if Abramovich painted again...

Post It

Studio Journal

Studio from February to early March. I swapped walls and it suits my project better to have the window behind my piece . I didn't capture April unfortunately, I did intend to.

MAUREEN O'CONNOR

ARTIST: MAUREEN O'CONNER,Thinner Than You, Steel 1990

'' It is about a woman as depository, as container. Men ejaculate inside the women. This is clothing, so it could represent her interior as a pocket."

Contemporary art without it's obstuseness.

Dolce Villasimius

Cagliari, Poetto, Villasimius. April 2011

Thought it would be rude not to share...

Impersonal

If in the disbelief that abstraction is a form of expression then do you believe in stuckism? If confessional art is too sentimental then where do you draw from... Geometry?? Jules, Sketchbook pages

Artist: Rosenquist

Like a forewarming of a shallowing pandemic.

Discovered Rosenquist on the fifth floor of Tate Modern. Good Find.

Ai Weiwei

STILL MISSING

Current: Aesthetic devoid

JULES, PROPERTY OF series, digital photography, 2010

Aesthetics is the taste, intuition, style, moment and consequence - it's the aesthetics that makes us individuals in this practice. For creative development (not just on the grounds of technique) it is an important element for us amatuers and should not be institutionally passified!

Luther Blissett

36mm

Watercolour Sex

Watercolour and Ink on paper, 2011

Copy Cover Readymade

Watercolour on paper, 2011

Ai Wei Wei

Godfather

Boo Ritson, Godfather, Archival Digital Prints, 2006, The Saatchi Gallery

I think I first came across Boo Ritson in Art Review magazine. I am a big fan of her technique, she uses standard household paint and generously decorates her models which she exhibits through photographic portraits. Her process creates a seedy likeness to oil, grease and slime which sparks those connotations as we read her works. Ritson’s means encourages a playful correspondence with identity in the vacuum of American culture. With a surreal poignancy, she ultimately confronts a futility in representation and reality of one self. FUCKING amazing.

John so-slick Stezaker

Image 1: John Stezaker, Pair IV, Collage (2007, Whitechapel Gallery London)

Image 2: John Stezaker, Untitled (Rose), Collage, (1982, Whitechapel Gallery)

Private collection exhibited at Whitechapel until 18th March 2011.

These collages shit all over the my ones below. Massively.

Sketchbook Pages