milledge2016

Inspired by Pamela Rosenkranz, I began exploring the human in relation to the non-human through how we as humans reproduce the natural (non-human). 

In Rosenkranz’s work she reproduced the human skin tone, however, I wanted to re-create something non-human but still natural, the rock. In reproducing the rock I wanted to, however, change its understanding and context to show the impact of human manipulation. I did this through creating a soft object based on one that is naturally hard. 

By creating something soft to represent something hard you begin to question human interpretation and how we unearth meaning and associations with objects. If the human is changing something natural into something man-made this also creates questions about the relationship between the two. Is it right to change te natural for human use? 

Claes Oldenburg is also someone who creates “soft sculptures” and thus became an inspiration in this small experiment. His works have also allowed me to consider scale and how different the experience of a “soft rock” could be if it was created in large (possibly interactive) scale. 

“Their soft, pliant, and colorful bodies challenged the convention that sculpture is rigid and austere, and their subject matter and colossal scale infused humor and whimsy into the often sober space of fine art.” 

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/oldenburg/ 

ASSESS 2

After assessment one I disregarded a lot of the materials I had been experimenting with such as these flower petals. I walked past them sitting there behind my tv the other day and stopped to take a photo of them because of how intrigued I was with how they have decomposed yet still maintained a sense of beauty and organic-ness.

glitch |glɪtʃ| informal

noun

a sudden, usually temporary malfunction or fault of equipment: a draft version was lost in a computer glitch.

• an unexpected setback: the only glitch in his year is failing to qualify for the Masters.

• Astronomy a brief irregularity in the rotation of a pulsar.

I decided to revisit the dictionary meaning of glitch after learning more about it conceptually. I no longer believe that glitch can be an unexpected setback, as glitch can be desired by some; it may even make something more interesting.

I started off assessment 2 by getting straight into experimenting with the ‘microchip’ I had in my poster from assessment 1. I was playing around with ways to bring this microchip ‘alive’ somehow, and after realising that I had no idea what I was doing, I went to the good old google and search how microchips worked and how to make a circuit out of them. I didn’t get much from my research but as I was researching I remembered I had some other electronic equipment (such as an LED light from when I was in high school).

I put a circuit together (to create light in the LED) along with the microchip but it came to a fail when the light didn’t come up and an awful aroma started to smoke out of it. That was a sign to stop it there.

Research

Thomas Bayrle 

Naked Lunch / Fire in the Wheat, 1970–2013. Wall paper. Courtesy Thomas Bayrle / Hans Widauer.

The work puts into perspective a system in which individual elements can only be defined by their relationship to other elements, through a process of fragmentation, constant shifts in scale and the interconnections between the micro and the macro. 

From image infiltration techniques to formal deviation or distortion.

http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/thomas-bayrle-4/  (12/9/16)

Blog post

I found a blog about the microscopic photography of a microchip. The photo has been taken and the saturation of the photo has enhanced to create a colourful scheme.

http://zeptobars.com/en/read/how-to-open-microchip-asic-what-inside (12/9/16)

Melissa Barron

Works with a lot of different materials in a ‘glitch’ format.

Screen Prints, acrylic ink, french paper (2016)

jacquard weavings (2010)

woven on a tc-1 jacquard loom. 

The human gaze has a power of conferring value on things; but it makes them cost more too. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value)

Often, arts value is located in an end product of some description: a painting, sculpture, installation, video work, documentation of a performance. Over the decades, artists have examined and challenged the locus of where we might expect to find capital in art.

Eva Hesse, Expanded Expansion, 1966 Fiberglass, polyester resin, latex

Eva Hesse, Studio works

Anna J: Seeing I am such a Hesse-o-phile I would be keen on something that really challenged the art object as the item that retained value/the endpoint, looking at art as process rather than er, stasis in something? So shifting the value of labour/studio work to forefront, rather than the work being the sole location of value - how you/can you redistribute that “value”……. So like Hesse’s studio works as they were kinda positioned after her passing, as unplaceable/un-categorical… or how Alina Szapocznikow i think is quite proto- with something like that ‘Photosculptures’ (Fotorezby)- we see the final work, a series of photographs, born out of the chance finding of the forms the artist realised in her own mouth with something as banal (both as a material and a process) as chewing gum.

Looking at Alina Szapocznikow’s ‘Photosculptures’ (Fotorezby)- we see the final work, a series of photographs, born out of the chance finding of the forms the artist realised in her own mouth with something as banal (both as a material and a process) as chewing gum.

In the accompanying text to the work, exhibited in 1971, Szapocznikow describes the making of the work in this statement:

“Last Saturday, under a blazing sun, tired from having polished for hours my Rolls-Royce made of pink marble from Portugal*, I sat down and began to daydream as I unconsciously chewed my chewing gum. Pulling these odd shapes out of my mouth, I suddenly realised what an extraordinary collection of abstract sculptures was passing through my teeth. It suffices to photograph and enlarge my masticatory discoveries to create the event of a sculptural presence. Keep chewing, look around you. Creation is found between dream and routine.”

(*NB the Rolls-Royce she refers to was a small scale model of a work she had been seeking commission for, a full size Rolls made of the most expensive pink marble from Portugal, her proposal titled My American Dream, and we quote “If there exists such a fantastic snob as who would order this work to be made and put it right on his private lawn to greet his guests and invite them for drinks on the marble seats, then my American dream will be accomplished.” Documenta curator Harold Szeemann challenged her to look for a financier, and although she came close, her ‘dream’ was never realised because of the grand cost making and transporting such a work.)

In this text, Szapocznikow contextualises her process as the most important aspect of the work. Presenting in the exhibition all three elements which define this work: the small Rolls Royce, the photographs and the text, she offers a dilemma to where exactly the value in the work is located, and the way it has been transmitted/distributed through the different elements: photography, sculpture, text. The major focus of the work are the chewing gum forms - which now appear to hold more value than the Rolls, because of the way she has captured their presence in photography and through her suggestion in the text.

But I guess this idea of what is considered lo and high would be a good one for the students and maybe even us - redrafting what is considered lo-fi and hi-fi right now, materials wise? Surely its changed since the 90s… 70s… 00s… by these materials and methodologies becoming so commonplace in art - Is this distinction a vehicle for critique anymore? A vehicle as good as any? Is it still relevant?

Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973), Photosculptures, 1971/2007 (detail)

just thinking off the bat.

Marian T: Wow I am dying at the Alina quote, thank you so much!

I like this transformative non stasis idea… the moving between, the lost location of form/art as we know it and are comfortable with.. i certainly have a ‘way’ of making work and would love to do a project that challenges that.

Perhaps making something valueless is actually in your last question.. to make something ‘irrelevant’. In conversation, presentation, curation, art statements, !!applications!! there is a push to distinguish the issues at play and show some sort of 'urgency’ in a work to support its existence.. I don’t know, I know that’s very general. I think this is a question of what does the irrelevant for look like and how can it be transformed, perhaps for a short time into something of 'value’..and them move/flow through that back to the average and undiscerning… could be interesting.. temporality is the form..

With all this transmission is the interesting thing to be considered I guess.

These notes of Anicka Yi I think are wonderful, nice ambivalent points about value and the history of viewing.

In the beginning I rarely thought about Greenberg—his legacy was not my problem. I didn’t go to art school. I am not the natural heir of the beneficiary of this modernist ideals. When I started to make sculptures, it was with the cliché spirit of breaking free of all that baggage (albeit somewhat naively). A will to explore freedom of thought and unsettled accounts of a world tied in knots. Now I sense, in art-historical terms, my work in many ways,  is in opposition to most of Greenberg’s tenets about the “pictorial” and “high” culture—but I never started out with this goal. ..All that hermetic formalism he espoused makes me feel melancholic—and not in a romantic way. As I’ve thought about it, his regime of vision feels downright fascist at times. I can’t speak for my generation, but I do think there is still the pervasive ocular centric, normative vision that abounds.

Anicka Yi, Death at Cleveland, 2014

Excerpt: Anicka Yi interview.

Arts transformative qualities can bring value to things and materials that would be thought of otherwise. Anicka Yi, who we looked at in week five (desire), questions the hierarchy and value of seeing in arts reception - hence working with senses that typically don’t share the stage with the visual - in particular: smell.

and the same track reworked and recontextualised by the inimitable SODA JERK (and probably much better) WATCH THIS!!!!!