Week 4- Anish Kapoor

Week 4- Anish Kapoor

Celebrated for his gigantic, stainless steel 'Cloud Gate' sculpture in Chicago’s Millennium Park, Anish Kapoor is changing the cultural environment with his public works.

1.Research Kapoor's work in order to discuss the ideas behind 3 quite different works from countries outside New Zealand.

'Cloud Gate' is a a piece located in the AT&T Plaza in Millennium park in Chicago. It is a massive highly polished steel structure that reflects the surrounding city scape and is shaped like a bean. The work was inspired by the form of the element mercury in its liquid form (see image). The work speaks of an almost seperate reality in the middle of an urban thoroughfare.

'Svayambh' is a structure made of Vaseline, paint and wax which gives the impression is has flowed on train tracks into the other room of the gallery at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes and Munich's Haus der Kunst. The piece has a start contrast to the pure white walls of the gallery, and is quite messy, almost like a stab at the pretentious cleanliness of art galleries.

'Marsyas' is a giant sculpture resembling a big red double ended trumpet that was made for the Turbine Hall. The structure was made so that the entire sculpture cannot be viewed in its entirety from any one position, so the sculpture was made to be experienced as many "discrete encounters". The work is named after Marsyas the satyr from Greek Mythology who was flayed alive by the god Apollo.

2.Discuss the large scale site specific work that has been installed on a private site in New Zealand.

“I am interested in sculpture that manipulates the viewer into a specific relationship with both space and time.” –Anish Kapoor, Tate Magazine, July 2007

Anish Kapoor's "The Farm" is located right here in New Zealand in the Kaipara Bay just north of Auckland. It is designed to reflect and distort the images of the surrounding landscape and to withstand the high winds that blow in from the Tasman Sea. It is made of red polyester fabric and steel. It is shaped quite similarly in my opinion to his work 'Marsyas', but almost looking more rural or wild then its predesessor.

3. Where is the Kapoor's work in New Zealand? What are its form and materials? What are the ideas behind the work?

Most of the answers for this part can be found under question 2. The ideas behind the work are about the viewers perception of space, time and reality. It is designed to make the viewer question their perspectives of these.

4. Comment on which work by Kapoor is your favourite, and why.

I'm going to have to say the cloud gate is my favourite, its so visually appealing, I really want to visit it to run underneath it and see how distorted everything looks in the reflections. I've always loved houses of mirrors and mazes and stuff, so something about it just intrigues me.

Youtube has some excellent footage on Kapoor-take a look at Anish Kapoor at the Royal Academy!!

sunday, august 1, 2010

Week 3 - The Walters Prize 2010

a) Saskia Leek
b) Fiona Connor
c) Dan Arps
d) Alex Monteith





This week we will be visiting the Auckland Art Gallery to view, research and write about the artists selected for the Walters Prize 2010. Discuss the work in the gallery with your tutors and other students and answer the following questions.

1. What is the background to the Walters Prize?

The Walters Prize is highly regarded as the most prestigious award in New Zealand contemporary art. It is awarded biennially and is named after artist Gordon Walters. The award comes with the chance to travel to New York to exhibit their work at the famous Saatchi and Saatchi gallery, aswell as $50,00.

2. List the 4 selected artists for 2010 and briefly describe their work.

Saskia Leek's 'Yellow is the Putty of the World' is an oil painting depicting what appears to be a house on canvas.

Fiona Connor's 'Something Transparent (please go round the back)' is an installation set up using plastic wood and acrylic. It is an eerie display almost like a maze of plastic and has a ghostlike feel to it.

Dan Arps's 'Explaining Things' is a series of works using mixed media including newspapers. On a side note, for extra information I watched his interview on the art gallery website, and not only was it unhelpful, this guy was seriously boring.

Alex Monteith's 'Passing Manoeuvre with Two Motorcycles and 584 Vehicles for Two-Channel video' is quite aptly and slightly unoriginally named, as it features as its namesake implies, 2 motorscyclists lane splitting during gridlock public holiday traffic and passing 584 vehicles by traveling between rows at speed. It has both video and performance elements.

3. Who are the jury members for 2010?

According to the Auckland Art Gallery website, the jurors are:

Jon Bywater - Programme Leader, Critical Studies at Elam School of Fine Art, The University of Auckland.
Rhana Devenport - Director, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth
Leonhard Emmerling - Visual Arts Adviser, Goethe Institute, Munich, Germany, former Director, ST PAUL St, AUT University
Kate Montgomery - Director, Physics Room, Christchurch

( http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/whats-on/events/2010/july/the-walters-prize-2010 )

4. Who is the judge for 2010 and what is his position in the art world?

The judge for the 2010 Walters Prize is the highly respected former-director of London's Tate Modern, Vicente Todoli. Todoli's destinguished career includes being the artistic director for The Valencia Institute for Modern Art aswell as successfully curating renowned exhibitions of contemporary artists internationally.

5. Who would you nominate for this years Walter's Prize, and why? Substantiate
you answer by outlining the strengths of the artists work. How does this relate
to your interests in art? What aspect of their work is successful in your opinion,
in terms of ideas, materials and/or installation of the work?

Personally I would nominate Alex Monteiths's 'Passing Manoeuvre with Two Motorcycles and 584 Vehicles for Two-Channel video' for the award this year as I believe hers to be the most original and successful of the entries. I really enjoyed watching her interview also as she was by far the most entertaining when describing her work, not trying to make up bullshit to justify secret meanings behind her work anywhere near as much as other contestants (I wonder if its too late to enquire whether we're meant to keep language in these blogs PG? bit late I guess). Her work shows 2 masked nameless motorcyclists riding cycles with the liscence plates blanked out 'lane splitting' during Aucklands famous public holiday gridlock traffic. Having driven through gridlock traffic only to see some smug motorcyclist or scooterist whizzing down the middle of the lanes of traffic is not only infuriating, its an experience almost every Aucklander can relate to. It's like the big bloke cutting infront of you in line at McDonalds, it pisses you off, but the bloke has more muscles then he does brain cells, so theres not much you can do about it, only with cars and motorcycles, by the time you realise theres a cyclist lane splitting, its too late to swing your door out for a last minute clothesline (not that I've ever done that, as my lawyers would have me write here).

As you only really "Get" art when you can relate to it, I believe this is a very strong piece. It's also a very daring performance piece as the danger to these cyclists is very real, with the chance of hitting a car or last-minute-swung-out car door is very high. The riders names have no been divulged, I assume as to avoid prosecution for both riders and artist, which I think is also another strong point, the secretive element behind it all.

6. Comment on other blogs from your ALVC group to agree or disagree with other people,always backing up your answer with clearly stated reasons.

monday, july 26, 2010

http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/whats-on/events/2010/july/the-walters-prize-2010

Week 2 - Hussein Chalayan

Hussein Chalayan is an artist and designer, working in film, dress and installation art. Research Chalayan’s work, and then consider these questions in some thoughtful reflective writing.

1. Chalayan’s works in clothing, like Afterwords (2000) andBurka (1996) , are often challenging to both the viewer and the wearer. What are your personal responses to these works? AreAfterwords and Burka fashion, or are they art? What is the difference?

Not all clothing is fashion, so what makes fashion fashion?

I must be missing something here, I don't see the 'challenge' in Afterwords. It just seems like the sorta fashion item you'd see on a catwalk. Personally I don't really get nor desire to understand much about fashion, being a male who's dress sense barely outdoes that of a snazzy caveman, it's not really my cup of tea, however looking at Afterwords I don't see anything but a fashion piece. Burka on the otherhand speaks to me almost about the contrast and progression of fashion throughout the ages, or that of western civilisation and eastern civilisation; the scantily clad bikini wearers of california contrasted with the full body gowns of eastern countries. It almost seems like the contemporary art of the fashion world, however the line between fashion and art isnt so easy to distinguish.

Hussein Chalayan, Burka, 1996

Hussein Chalayan, Afterwords, 2000

2. Chalayan has strong links to industry. Pieces like The Level Tunnel (2006) and Repose (2006) are made in collaboration with, and paid for by, commercial business; in these cases, a vodka company and a crystal manufacturer. How does this impact on the nature of Chalayan’s work? Does the meaning of art change when it is used to sell products? Is it still art?

Just like you could say there are artistic elements in fashion, I believe it would be fair to say that you can have artistic elements in advertising. While some would say it detracts from the meaning of the piece that it was paid for and collaborated with by big companies, I think that ultimately that is better then the piece not having the funds and ending up not getting the message across. To me its like someone handing you a new fancy paintbrush and saying in exchange, make me a picture. I think to an extent however much art can be used to advertise products, I don't want to see it head in a direction that TV and Movies similarly have, in that to be able to finance the final outcome, product placement has been littered around the piece itself. Could you imagine the Mona Lisa holding a can of coke?

3. Chalayan’s film Absent Presence screened at the 2005 Venice Biennale. It features the process of caring for worn clothes, and retrieving and analysing the traces of the wearer, in the form of DNA. This work has been influenced by many different art movements; can you think of some, and in what ways they might have inspired Chalayan’s approach?

Hussein Chalayan, still from Absent Presence, 2005 (motion picture)

The first image that came to my mind from "caring for worn clothes, and retrieving and analysing the traces of the wearer, in the form of DNA" was some form of CSI:Clothes, that the mistreatment and abandonment of these previously loved clothes was something of a crime and the previous owners are being tracked down forensic style. Even the image seems like it, with the clothes lieing on an operating table and someone peering in anxiously, so you could almost say her work had been influenced by the recent pop culture boom in shows such as CSI and Law and Order, with forensic work and crimes and the such. However in terms of art movements, you could say its almost like a surrealist work, the idea of clothes being treated like people in an ECU seems like something I would dream of, something crazy and nonsensical from the back of my mind.

4. Many of Chalayan’s pieces are physically designed and constructed by someone else; for example, sculptor Lone Sigurdsson made some works from Chalayan’s Echoform (1999) and Before Minus Now (2000) fashion ranges. In fashion design this is standard practice, but in art it remains unexpected. Work by artists such as Jackson Pollock hold their value in the fact that he personally made the painting. Contrastingly, Andy Warhol’s pop art was largely produced in a New York collective called The Factory, and many of his silk-screened works were produced by assistants. Contemporarily, Damien Hirst doesn’t personally build his vitrines or preserve the sharks himself. So when and why is it important that the artist personally made the piece?

I personally think there is an importance in the artist actually making the work themselves, its one thing to create an idea, but not actually creating the piece yourself doesn't seem right in my mind. Art to me is an expression, and its not the same if someone else is expressing it for you. Especially in the cases of Hirst where even though often the only contribution to a piece he has is signing his name to it, and all the credit of the piece goes to him because "he came up with the concept" I believe is compelete bullshit. Personally I think the artist is the one that creates the work, the person who thought of the idea has almost nothing to do with it, more like a starting point for the real artist.

wednesday, july 7, 2010