We continued with the worksheets based on the Barthes "Plastic" excerpt. I'd brought the fused plastic from Jo Budd's workshop several years ago - several were "bags with nothing in them" so I started gathering some facts about plastic bags -
In 2008, 9.9 billion were used in the UK - so many! - but that was down 26% from 2007. The 3.5 billion NOT used would have stretched to the moon and back twice, or around the earth 44 times. Even so, we use 166 per head of UK population. (In this household, that's a change of bin-bag every day. But those bin-bags are mostly full of other plastic, the packaging...)Globally, a trillion plastic bags are manufactured each year - 1,000,000,000,000,000. Lots of them end up "blowing in the wind" - indeed windblown bags are so prevalent in Africa that a cottage industry has sprung up harvesting bags and using them to weave hats, and even bags. I also looked up the types of plastic - PETE, HDPE, PVC, LLDPE, PP, PS - but am still unclear on what can and can't be recycled, and why.
Here we are, working away on various ideas, which extended from "poisonous" colours to melting to replication to what happens when plastic isn't there -
Back early from lunch, I found an art magazine in the cutting-up cupboard and after pulling out a suitably inspirational picture for everyone in the class, found some relevant articles and new artists that might feed into my plastics theme - Dmitry Gutov searches for trash that he welds onto grids of long metal rods to show "the future of the past"; Zhao Liang has filmed rivers of effluvia, plastic bobbing brightly (see one here); and Jeppe Heim's "360-degree presence" is a steel ball with sensors that slowly destroys the room it's exhibited in. You can just about see it at the right, below. It's shown in an article on political minimalism, a title that puts me off rather, and there are many artists mentioned Monica Bonvicini, Kendal Geers, Nebojsa Seric-Shoba, Teresa Margolles - as well as "the godparents of this new generation of artists", Dan Graham, Hans Haacke and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. 
Also in the afternoon we were introduced to the concept-based images of Mark Tansey, which deal with the problem of how to be "representative" in an art world that doesn't like it. He starts with collages of black/white images, draws over them, photocopies, draws some more -- then turns them into 6-8 foot oil paintings. They need looking at closely and thinking about, and also some background knowledge - for instance, that Picasso and Braque called each other "Wilbur" and "Orville", like the Wright brothers, because they got modern art off the ground (that painitng is shown here). And have a look at "Triumph over Mastery" here- that's the Sistine Chapel being painted. Tansey's"wheel of language" is an interesting way of generating ideas.
Also in the afternoon we were introduced to the concept-based images of Mark Tansey, which deal with the problem of how to be "representative" in an art world that doesn't like it. He starts with collages of black/white images, draws over them, photocopies, draws some more -- then turns them into 6-8 foot oil paintings. They need looking at closely and thinking about, and also some background knowledge - for instance, that Picasso and Braque called each other "Wilbur" and "Orville", like the Wright brothers, because they got modern art off the ground (that painitng is shown here). And have a look at "Triumph over Mastery" here- that's the Sistine Chapel being painted. Tansey's"wheel of language" is an interesting way of generating ideas.
1 comment:
Hello Mane.
About plastic bags, Migros and Coop are on the way to not give or sell plastic bags anymore. Long ago, everybody use to go shopping vith his ohne bag.Not throught ? Who gave this bad habit to relay on shops 'bags !
But the way you use them in art patchwork, it is just smashing !
Bises. Béatrice.
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