frances danckert

IN SUMMARY

I’ve learnt a lot from this unit over the course of this semester. Looking back on my first post and my reflections on what I was expecting and what I wanted to learn - one of the main things was being able to recognise good design and have the toolset to be able to analyse exactly what makes it good.

Coming into this course I had an understanding of art history, having studied Theatre Design and Fine Art in the past. But I’ve thoroughly enjoyed taking this knowledge base and being able to build on it with the context of design history as well as art history. I’ve found that it’s really broadened my view and perspective on the influence of design and art and how those two worlds meet and influence society together. I’ve also found that doing this research has made me take further advances in my art and design process - I particularly loved the Italian Futurists and the exploration of abstraction of form. I’ve been experimenting more with inks and different tools other than a paintbrush or digital art. (image above is a combination of brush pen, fine liner and bamboo reed pen)

Project 3 Ask Me Anything has been my favourite thing to research, not just on the subject matter of Bird in Space, but the surrounding ideologies and the idea of challenging traditional methods of art and design - the importance of knowing the rules so that you can break them in an informed way. I think this makes it more impactful.

I’ve enjoyed being challenged in areas of Photoshop and general framing of composition and also making sure that your idea translates properly over to the design - this is the area that I hope to continue to improve on most throughout the rest of the year. 

MAURIZIO CATTELAN’S GOLDEN TOILET IN THE TIME OF TRUMP

America is a sculpture by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. An example of satirical participatory art, it is a fully functioning toilet made of 18-karat solid gold. It was stolen in 2019 from Blenheim Palace, where it was exhibited on loan from the permanent collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Enter Cattelan’s “America” (2016), the 18-karat gold, fully functioning toilet that was installed at the Guggenheim for nearly a year in a long-term, sculptural performance of interactive art. Like all of Cattelan’s most complex works, this sculpture is laden with possible meanings. There is the art-historical trajectory, from Duchamp and Manzoni to more contemporary artists like John Miller and Wim Delvoye, that traffics in scatological iconography. The equation between excrement and art has long been mined by neo-Marxist thinkers who question the relationship between labor and value. Expanding upon this economic perspective, there is also the ever-increasing divide in our country between the wealthy and the poor that threatens the very stability of our culture. Cattelan explicitly comments on this fact by creating what he called “one-percent art for the ninety-nine percent.” The gold toilet—a cipher for the excesses of affluence—was available for all to use in the privacy of one of the Guggenheim’s single-stall, gender-neutral bathrooms. More than one hundred thousand people waited patiently in line for the opportunity to commune with art and with nature.

It was mid 2015, when Cattelan first proposed the sculpture. Donald Trump had just announced his bid for the presidency. At this time, it seemed inconceivable that this business-mogul, the man in the golden tower, could actually take a place in the White House. When the sculpture went on show at the Guggenheim on September 15, Trump had been in office for 238 days. Days and a term marked by scandal and defined by the deliberate rollback of countless civil liberties, in addition to climate-change denial that puts our planet in peril.

That Trump is synonymous with golden toilets was proven not at the Guggenheim but in a recent satirical pop-up “exhibition” in midtown Manhattan staged by Trevor Noah of the Daily Show that he called the “Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library.” In addition to framed tweet storms, visitors were treated to a “tour” of the Oval Office, where they could don a Trump wig and pose with an, albeit fake, golden toilet.

Cattelan’s America is a searing social commentary and critique on the state of affairs in society today - though it may be crafted from millions of dollars worth of gold (18karat solid gold), it actually works as a great leveler. Cattelan himself said “Whatever you eat, a two-hundred-dollar lunch or a two-dollar hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise.”

WHAT’S NEXT?

Maurizio Cattelan came out of his self-imposed, five-year retirement from the art world just in time. His work has always been prescient, sometimes uncannily so. His life-like wax portrait of Pope Paul II in full papal regalia lying inert under a felled meteorite—La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour) (1999)—presaged the sexual abuse scandals of the Catholic Church. AC Forniture Sud (Southern Suppliers FC [Football Club]), a performative piece from 1991 in which the artist organized an Italian soccer team exclusively comprising North African immigrants, coincided with the establishment of a xenophobic political party in Italy. What Cattelan couldn’t have predicted was the unprecedented number of refugees that would land on Italian shores seeking asylum, or the rising tide of hatred and fear now sweeping Europe in response.

Cattelan’s 2007 sculpture, Ave Maria, is also shockingly anticipatory. The work is composed of three white male arms protruding at an angle from a gallery wall, their precise positions and overt repetition unmistakably evoking the intense choreography of the “Heil Hitler” salute (despite the religious inflection of the title). The fact that the appendages are wearing business attire—a sign, perhaps, of the unabated rise of corporate power—frighteningly suggests today’s normalization of neo-Nazi ideology here and abroad.

- Guggenheim 2019

1-3)  La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour)

4-5) AC Forniture Sud (Southern Suppliers FC [Football Club])

I’ve been finding it pretty hard to get any work done the past couple of days. It’s hard to focus on something like uni that now seems bordering on trivial whilst the world seems to be literally going up in flames. The death of George Floyd and the rioting going on in America has made me take a step back and check my privilege. I’ve been listening to Marvin Gaye’s 1971 album What’s Going On - and it makes me angry and upset at how relevant it still is, 50 YEARS later.

 I recognise that I’m able to live my life without fear of being stopped in the street and killed at the hands of a corrupt and prejudiced police system. I am able to live day to day without thinking about the colour of my skin. I am able to go to work and study everyday without the fear that one of my friends or family members may not make it home, at no fault of their own.

I’ve been taking time to sit back and try to deconstruct my white privilege and unlearn certain inherent racist tendencies that society has bestowed upon all of us (non POC). I have started reading these books above so that I can use them as tools for positive change. 

Now is the time to be angry, now is not the time to be silent. Now is the time to confront, challenge and unpack our white privilege. 

We have been born and raised on a land that is NOT our own. We have been living in a society that favours the colour of our skin and lays down an easy path for us. This is not the case for our Black and Brown friends and allies, here in Australia and around the world. We are living in a world that is built on systematic racism, and owe it to generations of lost BIPOC lives to do the work ourselves and unpack our privilege, inform ourselves and learn how to show up. It is uncomfortable, and it is essential. 

Racism is on our doorstep, it is in our homes - no police officer in Australia has EVER been held criminally responsible for an Aboriginal death in custody; Australia has a higher incarceration rate of indigenous people than America does of black people. 

Zine Layout Exercise - Free Style

Boiling the design down further with fast, fleeting, movement based drawing exercises. I used Indian ink and a traditional Chinese bamboo reed pen - really cheap, you can customise them to create whatever shape nib you want and they’re great for working fast. 

Bird in Space was included in the famous 1936 exhibition at MOMA called Cubism and Abstract Art, which came over from France.

Customs agents kept it and wouldn’t let it out, because MOMA was claiming it as a work of art, and they didn’t believe it - they thought it had some industrial use and therefore could be taxed.

MOMA maintained that yes it WAS a work of art and it should not be taxed - it continued to be held at customs, and there was a little bit of a court case about it. The court papers suggested that it may be in some way of a propeller, or a piece of a propeller.

This really does speak to the radicality, and I think looking at it now from a contemporary standing point, that we forget, of just how abstract this is.

Experimenting with form and slowly playing around with abstracting the form of Bird in Space. I’m using a raw Sienna watercolour pigment and Indian ink with brush pen. My finalised interview questions will be:

1. What does the notion of power mean to you?

2. You’ve exhibited in and have been observing the art world for decades. What are your thoughts on the influence of perception?

3. You’re considered to be the embodiment of flight. Do you identify with this representation?

4. Looking back on your time spent on earth over the past century, what trajectory do you see art moving forward in?

CONCEPTUAL PUNK

Comedian, Maurizio Cattelan

Comedian is a 2019 artwork by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. The work, created in an edition of three, consists of a fresh banana taped to a wall with a piece of duct tape. Two editions of the piece sold for $120,000 USD at Art Basel Miami Beach to significant media attention. The third was eaten.

I LOVE how much chaos and absurdity surrounds Maurizio Cattelan’s works. To me it seems to be a new wave of conceptual punk emerging in the all too pristine & elitist art world. Debuting at the sickeningly exclusionist Art Basel Fair in Miami Beach in 2019, Cattelan literally taped a banana to a wall. 

That’s it. A banana. On a wall. With some duct tape.

People didn’t know what to do with it. They went a bit wild. Critics started stressing the details of the duct tape being grey, as if to try and cling on to some physical string of evidence that this was in fact, art. Comedian sold to a private collector for $120,000 ($178,000 AUD) - for a fruit. Cattelan was deliberately pushing the boundaries of conceptual art and making a biting social commentary on the way that the elite monetise art in our current society. He was making a statement on the vulture-like tendencies of art dealers, being able to “sell shit to fools” - Cattelan’s words.

As crowds were swarming around the mockery, performance artist David Datuna enters centre stage, peels it right off the wall, and eats it. 

Cattelan is acting out the tragicomedy of the contemporary artist. When Marcel Duchamp chose “readymades” such as a urinal or snow shovel, no one thought they had financial value – most were thrown away without a thought. Today’s museum versions were recreated long after the fact, when Duchamp became a hero to the conceptual art movement in the 1960s.

Nowadays, art can’t get away from money. That’s all anyone wants to know about it, and dada gestures are part of the capitalist miracle. Lo, this banana is worth $120,000 because ... well, just because. It’s the idea that is valuable, not the banana, insists the Perrotin gallery. Are you so stupid that you can’t see that? Every satire – including someone eating the banana – becomes another bit of added value.

COLLAGE

Here’s my collage activity from class - I cut into old issues of National Geographic, and layered with paints and other mixed media.

I often find in my work I work best hands on, I like to work really quickly and not really think about the process too much whilst I’m in journalling and experimental stages. I started off this exercise working on another collage that just hit a dead end because I was thinking too hard about what I considered a “collage” to be in a traditional sense. I ended up throwing that away last minute (I’ve attached that failed one as the third image) and ripping out the old man sitting on the chair (image 1) and the couple in the street (image 2).

I quite like how it’s actually only one sourced image and the rest is made up by textural and painterly additions. For the first composition I grabbed some watercolour and inks and dumped some water on the page and swirled the black and raw Sienna pigments around the page. They dry really quickly (thanks Pēbēo Colorex inks I love you) so I was able to cut around the man’s figure, glue him down and then get some white acrylic paint with a really dry bristle brush and work that over the top to give it a faded, textured finish.

ANDY WARHOL & THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

some more images from the famous peeling banana record  - The Velvet Underground & Nico, in record and cassette (80s release) 

Warhol’s innovative album cover featured the image of a banana covered by a banana-skin sticker that fans could pull back to reveal the flesh-colored fruit underneath. Written on the album cover above the banana was the invitation to “Peel Slowly and See.” This interactive and artistic sensation would forever be a trademark for the band as well as for Warhol.

“The symbol has become so identified with The Velvet Underground … that members of the public, particularly those who listen to rock music, immediately recognize the banana design as the symbol of The Velvet Underground.” — Lou Reed

PUNK & THE INFLUENCE OF THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

The Velvet Underground and Nico changed the nature of punk music and aesthetic, with their combative music and lyrics, diving deep into topics such as heroin, sex, bondage, dominance, more heroin - they became a building block for the punk movement.

Andy Warhol is listed as the only producer on the album, and for what was once a record known for its terrible sales, The Velvet Underground & Nico is now incredible sought after. The production of the record was held up for nearly a year, widely accounted for Warhol’s production delays on the now-famous peel away banana. The banana required a special printer to print it, and the record label Verve records agreed to wait, hoping that Warhol’s art and influence would help sell the record. It’s now considered to be one of the most famous album covers in rock history.

MAIASTRA

The bird was a central theme in Brancusi's oeuvre. Over a period of at least thirty years he completed twenty-seven sculptures of birds in marble and bronze

His first bird, Maiastra, 1910-12 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York: Katherine S. Dreier Bequest) was inspired by the legendary Pasarea maiastra (Master bird), a magic bird in Romanian folklore famed for its radiant plumage and marvellous song, a messenger of love who guided and protected Prince Charming in his search for his Princess.

Brancusi returned to the theme again and again, each sculpture prompting refinements in the next.

From the comparatively naturalistic Maiastra — with its majestic demeanour, outstretched neck and open beak — of which he made seven variations (three in marble, four in bronze) — through a series of four variations (two in marble, two in bronze) which he called Golden bird (L'oiseau d'or), the form becomes more attenuated, taller, absorbing the head and neck in a swelling urn of marble.

Finally, in 1923, he established the form of Bird in space, which exists in sixteen versions (seven in marble, nine in bronze) an aeriform blade of marble or polished bronze soaring upwards in such equilibrium that the sculptor was obliged to anchor it by inserting a metal rod running internally from the narrow footing up into the body of the sculpture.

The black and white marble Birds in the Gallery's collection are Brancusi's final marble versions of Bird in space, and the black marble version is the tallest he carved; from each a bronze was cast.

(source NGA)

Images 1-2 - Maiastra 

Image 3 - Brancusi’s atelier on the Impasse Ronsin, Paris

Image 4 - Brancusi in his atelier, 1933 – 1934

Image 5 - Golden Bird 1919/20 (base c. 1922)

First of all - Look at it!!! It’s just... perfection

Ok. So. Some early stage line of questioning I want to go down:

- Essence of streamlined flight and movement

- Being stripped of all features - does it still feel like a bird?

- How would it feel about the trajectory of space expedition today? flight - travel - space - transcendence - pushing boundaries - transcendence of the material plain

- Do consider flight and transcendence in a spiritual manner? Do you hold the same spiritual beliefs as Brancusi?

- Anchored point but in flight - investigate the struggle and duality of that concept

-> how does it feel about that? solid polished brass mounted on marble

- Look into multiples (16 Birds in Space) and the science of perfection

* First image is actually not a Bird in Space - it is a photograph of Brancusi with his sculpture La jeune fille sophistiquée ( Portrait de Nancy Cunard), a unique sculpture conceived in Paris in 1928 and cast in polished brass in 1932, comes from The Collection of Elizabeth Stafford who, with her husband Frederick Stafford, acquired the work directly from Brancusi during a visit to his studio in 1955. It has remained in their collection ever since.

An extraordinarily rare and important work, it is the only existing example in brass of Brancusi’s stylised portrait of the Anglo-American heiress and writer Nancy Cunard. The work (estimate on request) retains the artist’s original hand-carved marble base — a factor of immense significance given the importance Brancusi attached to materials, and the interplay between his sculptures and the pedestals upon which he placed them. (Christies 2018)

‘The work stands as a unique example of Brancusi’s ability to convey beauty through sheer simplicity and perfection of line’ - Alex Rotter, Chairman of Post-War and Contemporary Art, New York. 

The photo was taken in Brancusi's studio, Paris, 1928.