Core studies week 5

"Is all art political" was the opening question. Yes, once you consider the context, is the short answer - so, what is politics? what is society? Lots of discussion in this class!

One discussion was about a series of photos of 20th-century art works - groups were given one each -and a quote to consider along with the painting -
The categories for the analysis were: Form; Context; Meaning; Effect/Purpose. It's easy to forget to consider one category or another...

As each group presented the results of their deliberations, Ian filled us in on the background of the work and its times - Guernica, for instance, is a work reused in many political contexts -
and what a lot of history happened in the time between these two works by James Rosenquist (President Elect on the left; F-III [named after the bomber] on the right) -
(On his website, Rosenquist says of his shift in work in 1960: "I thought, how can I do a new kind of picture? I thought, if I can take a fragment of something realistic, and put the fragment in space at a certain size, I could make a painting where people would recognize something at a certain rate of speed. The largest fragment would be the closest, and the hardest to recognize. Therefore, I could make a mysterious painting." He was seminal in taking advertising imagery (he worked as a billboard painter after art school) onto canvas. His first solo show was in 1962.)

The class also included discussion of an article by Cornelia Parker on her film about Noam Chomsky, in which her questions, which he is answering, are edited out - leaving the viewer space to think, ie to supply the questions themselves.

The video of the show at Baltic art centre by Bob and Roberta Smith (an artist named Patrick Brill) was illuminating - "I have a slightly evangelical thing about art" he says, encouraging people to pull interesting things from the periphery of their lives into the centre.

There was time for a quick slide show including artists Mark Titchner (sculptural installations of slogans and rhetoric), Jenny Holzer (slogans around the stairwell of the Guggenheim), Act Up ( "silence=death" AIDS campaign), Grayson Perry (Golden Ghosts), Jeremy Deller (Battle of Orgreave re-enactment), Mark Wallinger (State Britain), Emily Jacir (interventions), and Sun Yuan and Peng Yu (Old Persons Home).

In the afternoon, introduction to the "statement of intent" we have to provide for our final project - the rest of this term we'll be working on a run-up to that project, assessed internally. Next term, the project (and our documentation - worksheets, research, SOI, and the SRJs - self-reflective journals) will be assessed by external examiners. Reality bites!