#mondaylecture

20/2/17 lecture by Ali Standing

Automatism

In brief, automatism is where a surrealist artist creates artwork without thinking of what they are drawing. These drawings are created by the artist just moving their hand around across the paper. The below example of “automatic drawing” was created by André Masson in 1924. Masson developed the technique in the 1920’s and it is themed on Freud’s idea of free association.

There is a game that we played as children called “exquisite corpses”.  We played at the start of the lecture that is another example of automatic drawing. The idea is that you create a character with different people drawing different sections of the figure. Once someone has drawn the head, they fold the page and hand it to the next person who draws the body. Having being passed around the group there will be a picture of a character which is said to be “automatically” drawn.

Eroticism

The human body as always been an interesting subject for artist and for surrealists, they had a particular interest in the highly eroticised female body. Unlike other artist looking at the human form, surrealists scrutinised the body by dismembering, desecrating, and eroticising them.

In Salvador Dali’s painting, The Great Masturbator (1929), you can see the distorted female form which is said to embody his sexual deviancy and his fear of locusts.

The Uncanny

Most surrealist work has an unsettling aesthetic that looks strange and unnatural. The uncanny is a Freudian term that refers to the feeling of discomfort from looking at something familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

The first example “Photography” created by Elliot Earls in 2008 is basically depicting a disfigured body. This uncanny look gives us that unsettling feeling that the Freudian term describes.

The uncanny has also made its way into contemporary advertisement as seen in this 2014 anti-smoking campaign. This advert is particularly dark as it’s meant to provoke disgust as well as an unsettling feeling.

Metamorphosis

This is where one or more changes to something can create an unsettling feeling. An example of this is the rotting flesh instead of tobacco from the anti-smoking advert or the fur cup created by Meret Oppenheim in 1936.

The Surreal Landscape

Before surrealism, landscape painting had changed dramatically with artist creating work with fictional colours and experimental processes. Surrealism took this further by creating landscapes that depicted a human’s subconscious mind. They often featured interesting and distorted objects like Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory (1931).  

This week our lecture was on comics.  I’m not really that big of a comic book person, my experience being limited to tin tin.  But I still found certain aspects of this lecture very interesting.  I found it really funny that in the 1950’s a was was started on comics that could corrupt the innocents who read them.  This was mainly lead by Fredric Wertham.  Comics that did this were accused of a ‘seduction of the innocent’ and a comics code authority was put in place, marking which comics where suitable for consumption.  I also found it really interesting that Mike Diane became the first person to be convicted and jailed on obscenity charges in 1994 ... can't do much for your prison cred to be arrested because of your comic

this Monday we went to the video games exhibition at the v&a.  the bit which I found the most interesting was the section on the ethical issues within video games. Sex, diversity, women in games and violence where all talked about on a big screen by a panel of artist and journalists who are all involved within the video game sphere.  Afterwards, we spoke about violence in video games and whether it is ok  morally, because although nobody actually gets hurt, you could say the same about rape games - and that definitely is not in the grey area that killing seems so be.  I found this really interesting because it reminded me of Aristotle's virtue ethics vs mills utilitarianism (in shorthand very simplified terms my a level philosophy teacher would gasp at: the sort of things you do make you the good or bad person you are vs whether something is ok if its causes more pain than pleasure) I'm going to research into this more 

this Monday I went to a lecture on essay structure as this is what I really struggled with in the. last one, as well as with the bibliography and Harvard style referencing, this time round I'm going to go to a few help sessions in the library to make sure all my points are adequately explained

I also have yet to decide what question to do as I am struggling to think of examples I would use for them.

 Citizen Designer. How can and why should illustration and/or animation be used in forms of political activism? Discuss in relation to 2-3 specific examples of illustration animation being used in campaigns for social change.

Or 

7.

Spatial Design

. How can illustration and/or animation intervene in public 

space? Compare 2examples of site

specific work that create spaces 

which invite particular forms of social interaction, debate and 

I also really like these illustrations of the moon changes by Erchard Ratdolt.  These drawings are in a graphic form.  The purity of the grid what in innovation in the printing world.  I think that they are really delicate and lovely historical  representations of scientific illustration. 

another thing I found interesting about the lecture was the reference to how the eye can sees certain shapes and lines with properties that are all prescribed, we can feel their values.  This was referred to as visual literacy.  Geltalt Psycology argues that when we see things the brain fills in gaps.  We are constantly associating things with other things as our visual system actively fills in.  Rudolf Arnheim talks about the psychology of our perceptual forces within art that tell us about qualities of work, for example when we can see that something isn't central on a page. I found all these theories quite philosophical so I did abit of research.  Turns out Kant has a lot to say... but to summarise he argues that as humans we have a culture as seeing things as ‘disembodied’ for example hand, foot leg head.. but actually all these things are connected and there is no definite cut off for either, “all judgments are functions of unity among our representations” (Kant, 1781 I think what this means is that we have a habit of putting things into boxes.  Our mind uses representations of things which seperates concepts and objects.  So for example, when we see our circle, our mind jumps to a representation of a circle, we might think of a time where we touched a circular object, smooth, continuously the same all along.  Our mind makes the jump circle:calmness, unity, undisrupted.  I think that this is a really rambley was of explaining , but I think this idea of representation is very important in visual communication.  

this Monday in the lecture we focused on the history of scientific illustration.  I found the conparisons between what drawing and what photographs can achieve quite interesting, however I found that my favourite imagery was made not in the interest of concrete science, but instead as a representation of forms. they were referred to as ‘some account of photographic drawing... without aid of an artists pencil’. I liked the idea of a medium that is not influenced by the artist but instead the subjects (in this case plants) being used.  It feels like a piece of work that is objective from the artist.   I found these photograms really ethereally beautiful, and they remind me of cyanograms that I once made.  this has made me want to make some of my own, and I'm going to explore what materials are needed to create these