Thai Bride

Thai Bride, 2012

This was taken in a GP practise room in central Nottingham near St Anns. St Anns is a notorious part of Nottingham, a local profoundly said there is no such thing as community until there is war. Site specific art - by cocept is an overwhelming dickish and hispter thing to start introducing, but at the heart it makes so much sense. You can read an Ai Wei Wei at the tate, with prescribed dialogue - but transfer it to the twenty lane wide motorways of Beijing and by natural magic - pure whisper. This piece went from place to place, sponging and prostituting itself to it's surroundings.

Dangerous thing to work 9 - 5, even more stupendous to work beyond those hours. So I have quit my art couse at Nottingham University - I quit some time ago. Right now, I wish not to return because the beauty of immortalizing your soul to essentially a robot/business minded cunt in a fashion office breeds the ugliest of things into something real. Clause. If i tell myself that I am encasing my bag of worms in mud, one day this crepid ball will fossilise. And no fossil is ever the same.
I deal with merchandise, the allocation, the setting up, the installation diary - zero creativity involved. Just bare knuckled sprititual depravity - if you believe in that kind of thing. The office is the saddest place in the world. This is by far my most depressing post.

Blogging. Good for you.

Yayoi Kusama: Reviewing Tate Modern's Retrospective (a long review)

Sponsored by Louis Vuitton: it would be difficult not to predetermine Yayoi Kusama’s Tate retrospective as aesthetically superfluous however the experience has left me enriched if not a little congested. The excessive nature of the show resonated early, the entrance of giant dotty inflatables and the plasma tv which rotated a seven minute biographical film of Kusama generated a swift platform for the audience to read Kusama as a lyrical genius. Tate has wall space, a lot of it, that allowed for a pictorial timeline of Kusama’s recognized work, in addition to this poster of sorts we have the benefit/luxury of a bit of retail before we go see some art. Several shops leading up to the exhibition provided visitors with books, mags, household merchandise and prints – this early ladling of dot iconography and biographical context creates several impressions that doesn’t just supplement a personal context for the audience but it augments our vision, we idle underneath the larger than life balloons as we idle through that first entrance, welcome to Kusama’s world…

Tate’s retrospective encompasses over sixty years of endeavour, this exhibition seeks to highlight the artist’s moments of most intense innovation staged as a series using fourteen rooms that unfolds over time curated by Frances Morris who focuses on
‘the moment of genesis of each idiom, showing them as they emerged … and the full creative energies. Some of these rooms show self-contained installations while others include individual pieces.’

I think that means we will be presented with the obsessive wonders of Kusama that will be categorized in consumable parts.

Tate, with it’s weapons unfolds the genius as it intends. Room one is a modest start with off-white walls, eight paintings from 1949 to 1955, the first painting which is effectively titled, Earth of Accumulation 1950 distils a sense of anticipation of creative dynamism. The first two rooms are devoted to Kusama’s early works, the second room taking more of an organic approach to display, with 34 framed pieces crammed in a relatively small room thus planting the seed of obsessive creativity.

Akira Tatehata conversation with Kusama reiterated her endless time spent alone, that this solitary act was monotonous but a way of release. Kusama has an illness of depersonalization and through this net paintings, kept her sane and untroubled. The straight and formal organisation of the paintings reinforced the complex and clinical process – we are expected to look upon the minimal space as disturbing yet graceful.

Self-Obliteration (Net Obsession Series) 1966

When Kusama left New York to return to Japan in 1973 she lost notoriety, this un-sustained acclaim meant the extra biographical facility was helpful. The accounts of Kusama’s life is given heavy prominence which breeds a voyeuristic journey through the extensive exhibition space, the sense of voyeurism expands, room to room, archive to sculpture. The glorious archives instead of hindering cement an intimate depth to the paintings, videos and installations.

Room 12, the ultimate staging has commenced - the audience has arrived at I’m Here, but Nothing 2000 – the therapeutic qualities of the Infinity Net paintings (room 3) and then the darkly sensuous stills of her Walking Piece 1966 (room 6), each room has led us farther into her hallucinations. Room twelve was a well lead step into the mind of Kusama, an ironically pleasurable tour of her self-perceived obliteration. The colours and fluorescent strength of the dots invades the space, the high ceilings and neutrality of the previous room strengthened the impact – we’ve stepped into something hauntingly beaufiful (yet futuristic). The wonder of the dark space and eerie domestic furniture overrides the contextually lost phallic forms of rooms four and ten.

Tate Modern has almost created a biographical walk-in 3d tour that conditions us to absorb the life details and life productions of Kusama in a voyeuristic craze. The finale light installation, much like I’m Here, but Nothing (2000) diminishes the observer into what resembles a galaxy - a space that requires no launching rocket, the artist has again through installation has innovatively brought her obsessional vision to it’s limit, creating environments which overwhelm the visual and cognitive apparatus of the viewer with her maniacal imposition of colour, shape and pattern (Rosyln Oxley9 Press Release). I couldn't round it up on my own.

Before I leave for Vietnam

Experimental Drawing on tyvet

Artist: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - Girl under Japanese Umbrella

This wouldn't have worked as a drawing. I love the colours and thick brush marks.

How Do You Want Me?

When Do You Want Me??

3d Project

Ira Cohen - This is Perfect Photography

Roman Holiday, Ira Cohen
Another of the Mylar Chamber images. The subject is Jhil McEntyre, one of his major muses of the period and the mother of his son, Raphael Aladdin. Below: Mischa Vetere Photographed by Ira Cohen.
I have some ideas, now I just need to stop feeling cold. Ira Cohen is visual magic.

3D Deadline

The Explanation

Hans Bellmer, La Bouche (Bell 37), 1936. This photograph was included in the Hommage a Hans Bellmer deluxe exhibition catalogue, Nov 26, 1975 - Feb 26, 1976, Galerie Francoise Petit, Paris.

Although there may be similarities, my work and ideas are not derived by Hans Bellmer. I have lazily googled his works and they strike me as tormenting but in an intriguing way. His works seems mostly sexual and I can easily interpret his suggestions as derogatory.

I will using red velvet react against the space and objects, the unique surface creates a visual texture, I feel it plays against light and the limps of the doll. The knives are there to add an overwhelming sense of foreboding.

The installation I have in mind for tomorrow works on themes such as anxiety, superficiality, pretence and aspiration. When I really narrow it down, it is a lot to do with alienation within a culture of what I like to describe as Phantom Aspirations and I think the reversion to fleshy tones (imitating real skin) is a means of questioning popular culture and aspirations. The fetishtic aesthetic taps into a sub-culture, a means to finding a belonging.
Adding on, I also feel the attempt to create a true likeness over the shop doll is like making a statement, a visual statement that declares a sense of anxiety and loathing at current structures and strong holds within society.

I wanted to portray the weaknesses of human desires, how aspirations are sexual and how sexual aspirations have become. This is best shown by the nakedness and fragmentation of the doll, lost and mislaid.

There is a strong orientation to the female psyche, it could be interpreted as provocative and weak – this piece I still hope is empowering because it shows a strong awareness of the lack of control.

Kusama, Peep Show, Castelline Gallery, 1966

The sixties looked phenomenal. A decade of sex, promiscuity, hope and anger. And the decade silicone breasts implants were invented.

Sketchbook Pages

Happy Hallowe'en

Three Dimensional Work: ‘Painters paint an appearance’ and I am an habitual painter. I’m slowly being enlightened, the beauty of sculpture is that it can create an encounter. I’ve been meaning to materialize on a 3-D idea of creating a super duper toy bear but now I feel my focus needs to possess more substance, the teddy idea would be more of a prop to an installation. I need a better supplement – the idea now is to work on a sculpture that’s plays on one’s encounter with everyday materials and objects.

Experiment number one: fracturing objects

Minds collaborated

Collaboration magic. SONIA ALMEIDA and MARTIN SOTO CLIMENT| after sharing images and respectives, the result of this stream of thoughts and exchange is reflected in the below. They play with found materials and the outcome is not a fruit of an oppressive premed but just a confrontation with what they had in their hands.

Easy for some.

Thanks Maria

New Term and Eras

This generation and the next will be the beneficiaries of post graduation blues, someplace, where adulthood fails a flexing surplus travels elsewhere.

This new term means three dimensional media and an attempt to shape again all that was built last year. Sculpture is so intimidating to attempt so why is the word so FLAT. I need to redeem myself......

I love a place called Annecy

Art:
There is an excuse for the lack of. I had to counteract the fact that I am pacing out of my early twenties with a summer of travelling, suddenly a lot of your vanity related melancholy trickles off.
Lake Annecy and lomography together is a bit magic.

Have you heard of RON ENGLISH?

Ron English Skin Deep: Post-Instinctual Afterthoughts On Psychological Portraiture @ Lazarides...
From 24 June Lazarides Gallery will present the first UKexhibition of paintings by painter, pundit and prankster, Ron English. Spanning multiple mediums, Skin Deep is anexploration of the intersections, discrepancies and synchronicities of personal mythologies on display in our public personas.
Painter, Pundit and Prankster Ron English presents Skin Deep. The exhibition presents multi-layered portraits of some of his most iconic characters, tracing the arc of their inner lives.
While paying homage to the great art before him, English maintains his very personal point of view, transforming the public to intimate and the universal to specific.
Using a mixture of imagery, medium and process referenced from great masters such as Warhol, Pollock and Picasso, combined with irreverent cherry-picking of populist totems from fast food to cartoons, English creates complex running narratives of his many alter-egos butting headfirst into the Grand Illusion, where unstated cultural norms are exposed and analysed

This Ron paints like a pop myth. I have an appetite all of a sudden.

My Studio Space - Final Presentation

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.