Sculpture week 7

I was horrified to realise that my camera was still sitting at home. So while we were getting the materials out, I did a quick sketch of the arrival of the sheet of plywood -After that there was lots of information about choosing and using various types of wood - things I didn't learn at my father's knee (he was building houses after all, not making sculpture).

The 5-minute talk was on Bruce Nauman, born 1941, American, trained as a painter - who had the great realisation, "whatever I do in my studio is art" - and proceeded to do things that required complex thinking and simple execution. He often used sound and text - eg in his neon signs, and in an empty, dimly lit room full of whispers. Is looking at how words fill space a form of sculpture?

Here's one of his early neon works - "the true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths"and here's "15 pairs of hands" - it was interesting to realise that the plinths would have to be metal, and weighted, to support the cast bronze -
Then, to work on our "outdoor project" - I'm still changing mine. I'd brought in some samples of handmade paper joined with microtagsand other more ambitious shapes and sizes, waxed for durability and luminosity -all working towards the idea of a "house on stilts" - I'm still obsessed by the idea of using non-alphabetic languages, and ladders, but had a little sidetracking into houses on stilts (and igloos!) being places of safety as well as places to meet and communicate
While building a couple of examples, I came up with various things that might be used as legs - pencils, saw blades, paintbrushes, drinking straws, nails, plastic flowers (eg long stemmed roses) - and started thinking about how the qualities of materials, such as the bendiness of tracing paper that's been rolled up, might be used -
Here's the latest development -But this one (which I prepared earlier) is something to work on another time -

Women and land art

Revisiting yesterday's essay plan in the light of Olga's comment, I realised that not only had I omitted to define "land art"/"earth art", my chosen artists were all western white men. What about sites and artists not in or from the US or Europe? What about women?

Some women land artists come to mind immediately - Nancy Holt, best known for her Sun Tunnels (1973-6) - this is the iconic image, but have a look at others here -Mary Miss (Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys, 1977-8) -Maya Lin's wave fields (video here) -hmm, bit of a pause now ... no others come to mind ... bear with me while I do some research...

Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon (of "Christo and Jeanne-Claude" fame) - here's their Gates in Central Park, New York -Agnes Denes (Wheatfield - A Confrontation, 1982) - here's the 2009 version in London -Alice Aycock, with her "unerring ability to convey contradictory notions within a single sculpture" (NY Times, 1990). Her early proposals for earthworks are body-sized and body-related, and many of her early works paly upon fears and fantasies of burial. "Low Building with Dirt Roof for Mary" (1973) can only be entered by crawling; she wrote that "The sense of claustrophobia inside is increased by the knowledge that the exterior surface of the roof is covered by a mound of earth ([weighing] approximately 7 tons)." Cuban artist Ana Mendieta and her "earth body art" (using body to direct our attention not only to the landscape itself, but also to how it is experienced) -perhaps even Tacita Dean in her "Search for the Spiral Jetty" 1997 - one of a number of recent artists who have embraced the making of journeys as part of their practice - inspired by the way in which the siting of works in remote locations brought the journey to see them into the compass of the work (I'm quoting from Ben Tufnell's "Land Art", Tate Publishing 2006).

That publication also says "while earthworks constituted a male-dominated genre, in the field of body and landscape art a number of female artists were prominent". Mendieta we've briefly looked at; "both Miss and Aycock attempted to create 'real-time and real-space scenarios' through sculptural and architectural works that the audience might enter and interact with, thus creating a kind of stage for participation and experience."

So, to get to the definition of the genre - land art is about more than earthworks, it's about the experience of the land. It needn't consist of interventions - and often the "art product" is documentation.

Which takes me back to Olga's question: how would Aboriginal art fit into this? My first thought is that Aboriginal identity is so tied up with the land, and permitted art arises from those ties, that this would be better considered under essay question number 4: "Drawing on specific examples, discuss the ways in which historical and contemporary creative practitioners explore issues of personal/group and/or cultural identity." However this article mentions Yukultji Napangati, who "paints an insider's view of the land, conveying a deep empathy with place and emphasising the process of painting from within her lifetime experience of that place and its stories" - though to an outsider the painting is reminiscent of modern abstraction.The research also turned up some "land art"/"ecological art" sites in South Africa, and an Australian artist, Andrew Rogers, whose “Rhythms of Life” project is said to be the largest contemporary land-art undertaking in the world, consisting of geoglyphs (stone sculptures) in 12 sites around the globe -

Essay plan

Time to get cracking on writing “The ESSAY” for this term. I love doing the research and looking out for something interesting and hopefully new to say – well it will be new to me, if not to the lecturer!

My topic is: "The land is not the setting for the work, but part of the work – Walter De Maria, land artist. Discuss the role of context/location in relation to historical and contemporary art or design practice, referring to at least three examples.

At least three examples, and up to six. So, in as-they-came-to-me order: 1, Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field (New Mexico).

2, Dani Karavan’s Ma’alot (Cologne).

3, Richard Long’s mud paintings, for example the Heaven and Earth trigrams in the first room of the recent show at the Tate.

4, something by David Nash – maybe his wooden boulder -

And passing reference to Robert Smithson’s non-sites, James Turrell’s Sky Spaces, Chris Drury’s work (the dew ponds?), maybe even Andy Goldsworthy and Christo.

5, perhaps Claudi Casanovas’ Els Vencuts – no, too much of a historical monument – could you argue that it commemorates local heroes, hence that a sense of locality and history is part of, necessary to, the work? You could say that of Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial too – how does commemoration fit together with “the land” – can “the land” be a mental place, a shared history rather than a mapped or perceived geographical place? That’s going a bit deep for 2500 words – and why don’t I just take the easier, straight-forward route...

I’ll be touching on the idea of siting sculpture (rather than memorial objects) outside – especially in sculpture parks; of secular pilgrimage; and the origins of “land art” in that tumultuous time, the late 60s. (I was there! – but just waking up to art, via reproductions of Chagall in the area of the university library where I went to study. Nearby, though (in Vancouver), Robert Smithson was doing a Glue Pour.)

Process, materials, minimalism, these will get a mention. How do they get accepted as artists (and paid), and how does their work translate to the gallery situation...

That’s the plan. Coming soon – more information on the artists. But first I have to go clean the fridge, scrub the oven with a toothbrush, that kind of thing ...

Investment

In 1962 Andy Warhol made "200 One Dollar Bills" - part of a seminal series of silk screened canvases.
On 11 November it's up for auction at Sotheby's. The collector who's selling it paid, in 1986, the record price of $385,000 - now it's expected to fetch $8m-$12m. Not bad, for an artist who started as a commercial illustator.

Guy Fawkes night

The 5th of November is Guy Fawkes night - a signal for bonfires and fireworks - bang bang bang. This evening I was washing the windows (something that's been burning a hole in my to-do list) and watching displays now and then. And when there was a particularly spectacular one, it took too long to get the camera to capture it - it had finished. So - you'll have to imagine the fireworks in the dark space at centre top, above the grocery store (open till 11pm) and beside the flats over the betting shop (which has its sign lit up all night!). So nice to live on a lively street.

But usually the municipal firework displays are held at the weekend nearest 5th November - fingers crossed for good weather. Alarmingly, Halloween seems to be gaining popularity at the expense of Guy Fawkes....

Done and dusted

Taking the quilt pic with the "grown up" camera -
And sending off the photos, as well as the 20cm fabric sample -Getting the colour right on the photos was ... suboptimal. Never mind, it's gone to meet its fate. On to the next thing.

"Love book", page 2

As November is Art Every Day Month (what, you didn't know?? it's not too late, start now!) and as there is talk of a "book journey" challenge-type-thing on AQL, I'm doing a "love book" - cataloguing some of the everyday objects I love.

Page 1 was my yellow cups - rather a lame drawing and not colourful, not even drawn with a yellow crayon!

This morning while waiting for the kettle to boil I drew these favourite tumblers, and then found all the red scraps in a magazine that was conveniently to hand in the recycling bin -Annabel is spurring me on. She's in the midst of making numerous books. But I'm not competitive, oh no ... not at the moment ...

Looking at this at one remove (in a photo rather than "in real"), I think it needs a smooth coating of ... something ... to integrate all those bits of paper and make the surface resemble the surface of the glass object.

No idea what I'll add tomorrow - it'll be a surprise.

Strange sculptural objects

At the Natural History Museum on a rainy Sunday, amid the hordes of families queuing to see the dinosaurs, these objects in an alcove caught my eye -They're wasp nests made by three different species in Brazil. Here's a closeup -
Local wasp nests aren't so grand, but do have an interesting structure. On the isle of Skye, wasps build their nests in the heather, as shown here.

Of course wasps can be a pest in late summer, but nests should be left undisturbed - the entire colony will die out in the autumn and the queen will go into hibernation. Then the nest can be removed.

Core studies week 7

Back to classes after "reading week", starting with a morning of talking in groups of six about our "collection" and what we're heading towards as a project. That was really good - both seeing how other people were approaching it, and getting input on your own from different perspectives. I was amazed at how much work people had done both gathering their collections and working on them subsequently. The topics/starting points in my group were: gestures (women abstracted from famous paintings); mapping memories; received ideas; bioluminescence; comics. Helen took notes on all of them -
Also helpful was explaining yet again what it is you think you might be doing - "I know what I think when I hear myself talk". My "imagined interiors" (not "imaginARY"!) are quite difficult to explain. Partly because they are mysterious to me, I can't put into words what it "is" about them - which means, I don't know what I'm thinking! Not sure if this state of confusion is a good starting point for a coherent project. It's certainly something to struggle with; isn't struggle supposed to be a vital component of art?

In the afternoon we sat working on our projects, somehow -- which for me meant covering sheets of paper with mark-making -- not surprisingly, most of my marks looked like stitches.
I'm going to be translating these onto clay for textures, eventually. It was a peaceful, restful (somewhat pointless??) thing to do, while the tutors were having one-to-ones. My own one-to-one identified the need to consider scale, the possibility of illusion, the idea of a labyrinth (not excited by that...), and whether the finished form could be common objects with non-visual dimensions. I'm letting all that slush around in the subconscious.

These rubbings (bits of paper placed underneath; the stencil provides boundaries and spacing) relate to the current sculpture project
and this is yet another worksheet - the project keeps evolving. It's time to actually make it -
After class, meeting Lisa in a pub on Great James Street, in the 18th-century district near Grays Inn Road - you may have seen it in Brideshead Revisited?
and to a talk about the Chord artwork. The talk was held in the Camden Local History Archive in the library on Theobald's road - a great resource!

Daimler collection, Berlin

One of the highlights of my visit to Berlin (a month ago) was the "Drawing Sculpture" exhibition at Daimler Contemporary, which is on the 4th floor of this old building - the survival, it seems, in the modern morass of the Potsdamer Platz area.The Daimler corporation (they make Mercedes cars) has lots of art in their various buildings; this gallery is open 11-6 daily, with free entry. The collection specialises in 20th century abstract art. The Drawing Sculpture show presents a selection of works on paper, about 60 works by 28 artists dating from about 1960, "staging dialogues between classical Minimalist positions from the 1960s and international contemporary art" (says the leaflet).

A complete list of artists: Leonor Antunes, Eva Berendes, Hartmut Böhm, Monika Brandmeier, Christo, Katja Davar, Gia Edzgveradze, Ulrike Flaig, Adolf Fleischmann, Marcia Hafif, Lasse Schmidt Hansen, Rita Hensen, Georg Herold, Oskar Holweck, Claude Horstmann, Markus Huemer, Robert Longo, François Morellet, Rupert Norfolk, Silke Radenhausen, Eva-Maria Reiner, Jan Scharrelmann, Oskar Schlemmer, Jan J. Schoonhoven, Auke de Vries, Andy Warhol, Georg Winter

During the two hours of Saturday morning that we spent there, Erika, Wendy and I saw only two other visitors. Some of the sculptors in the photo below are by Dutch sculptor Auke de Vries; the red drawing that Erika is looking at is a response to music, but I can't remember either the song title or the artist, only that she started at top right - which you'd have to read the label to know, and which does make a difference in how you look at/understand the work.
In "the lawn from behind", use of thread (stitching) is entirely appropriate - everyone handling a piece of embroidery automatically turns it over, and here the artist has anticipated that - and made you think about the grass growing, probably?
Another great thing about this exhibition was the labels - an informative, readable paragraph (in English as well as German); I photographed them to re-read and think about later. Photography, without flash, was permitted.

Eva-Maria Reiner's Scherenschnitt (2001) was fascinating, enlivened by the coloration brought about by the natural lighting on the right and artificial lighting on the left. (Crisper photo here.)
These works "which she started in 2000, are based on a different way of handling the human body's volumes and outlines. The Scherenschnitte start y measuring the circumference of parts of the body, and these are also listed in the title of each particular work. The number of individual body part measurements fixes the number of strips of paper to be arranged one behind the other. The circumference measurements then define a circle. Reiner calls these circles 'first circles'; they are cut out of the pieces of paper. A mathematical formula then produces a meanvalue for other circles, and cuts are made in the paper on this basis. Thus three-dimensional, irregular body forms are reduced to a disciplining and exemplary system. Reiner's morphometrics exist on the narrow ridge of two-dimensional drawing and three-dimensional relief. The absence of real physical volume creates the mutually involved presence of body and space - via the views into the holes and the realtionsip of the paper layers to the architecture surrounding them."

Also fascinating was Silke Radenhausen's "Arabian No 1" (1996-2003)- "canvas, laundered, colored" -"In technical terms, Silke Radenhausen's 'topological cloths' come under the heading of the relief but add moving surfaces which result from cutouts in the canvas and circles, triangles, squares or ellipses sewn in. The works relate to Owen Jones' book 'Grammar of Ornament' which - arising from the encyclopedic 19th century thinking - propagated the availability of the form concepts of different cultural spheres on a massive scale. The artist defines and shows the ornament as an autonomous object whose shape appears to support the dogma of Minimal Art: a mathematically precise, pure object form instead of spatial illusionism. And yet semantics of material and shape return to Radenhausen's work: her material/sculptural treatment ventures to touch on the spheres of decoration, of crafts and thus of traditional feminism."
In the background is Georg Herold's "Ohne Titel" (2002) - "one of a series of showcases in which Herold places all kinds of objects like balloons or technical devices. Load and support of the simply made work are so finely balanced that the shelves and contents, despite that rough material quality, seem very fragile. The grouping of the pumice stones follows the physical laws of gravity, friction and elasticity. The material form captures an element of movement, and also includes an imaginary sequence of events in space and time. "Gebogene Latte V sets higherto unsolved problems of virtual representation to work in a highly coarsened form. The media mix makes it a hybrid, 'coarse-grained' object, whose origins got lost in the zero gravity space of a monitor surface [Bildschirmoberflaeche]."

Probably my favourite piece was Dark Text (2006) by Claude Horstmann.
The label says: "Claude Horstmann's working material is language. She collects words from newspapers and magazines, when travelling by bus or from conversations, and then works them into new, independent texts and represents them visually through the medium of drawing. Horstmann's inspiration for Dark Text was the little slips of paper in Asian fortune cookies, where she was particularly interested in the interface between widespread objectivity and sudden subjectivity. "Everyone knows that it is pure chance what sentence you find in these cookies, but everyone hopes at the same time that they will contain a grain of personal truth. I am interested in the moment when the text opens up this field of ways of reading lying between objectivity and subjectivity, between common property and something special. The aspect of relativity is particuarly relevant to the question of when and how a sentence becomes meanningful or not." (Claude Horstmann) The sentences crossed through with a broad, black paintbrush illustrate these two planes: the text is concealed, like its meaning, which has to be discovered individually."

A small room painted grey showed some of the "loveliest" works - drawings by Marcia Hafif (American, born 1929, known for her "pigment paintings"). At that point I wasn't taking too many photos because my camera battery was getting low. More on her work in a separate post.; here you can see "January 1972" - an example of the mark-making on large sheets of paper that she did regularly. Here is an essay from the catalogue of her 2003 exhibition.Here we learn that in 1972 "Marcia was drawing vertical pencil marks, as a kind of meditative exercise into standard black drawing books. She started at the upper left corner and worked systematically down the paper. Then she began to use words instead of lines, but words semantically unrelated to each other. She tried not to make sentences or phrases, used no punctuation, left no margin, line breaks were contingent on reaching the right hand edge of the page. You saw a wall of penciled words."

The Daimler collection also comprises sculptures in the vicinity of Potsdamer Platz - by Robert Rauschenberg, Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, Nam June Paik, Auke de Vries, Jean Tinguely, Francois Morellet, Marc di Suvero.

On 10 February, should you happen to be in Berlin, there's a talk about the sculptures: "the architect Roger Baumgarten, who supervised the building of the Potsdamer Platz under Renzo Piano, will tell us about the integration of the sculptures into the city. All the different aspects of how the sculptures' locations were chosen, the technical challenges involved and the pieces' artistic significance will be presented in detail."

The exhibition is on till the end of February 2010.

Ceramics by Claudi Casanovas

Claudi Casanovas creates often large-scale sculptures from a variety of clays and media. Their forms and textures evoke rocky landscapes and geological phenomena. The show at Gallery Bresson was of "Camp d'urnes" - field of urns, named after the urnfield of the pre-Iberian, Indo-European civilizations in Europe.The urns are made from a conglomeration of clays of different colours, formed around a "nucleus" and dampened into a block 25-40 cm in size. After firing, the blocks are divided in the middle with a hammer and chisel,exposing the empty nucleus within.
He says: "I imagine them all together in a space in nature, as if from an ongoing archaeological excavation"; his ambition for them is "to make you disregard beauty and give meaning to life."

He spent two years making a monument against fascism - Als Vencuts - commissioned by the town of Olot, in Catalonia, from 15 tonnes of clay - the block is 6 feet high. Before leaving the gallery I skimmed through the book about its making - the clay needed to be kept frozen while it was being worked, and then the structure used for freezing was turned into the kiln. Freezing and shattering form blocks of dense, massed forms. Firing was a technical achievement and everyone was relieved when it actually worked! See many photos of the various stages here.

A 2003 article discusses his statement that "each piece is a silence". The author concludes that there is a need to contextualise the work of silent makers, although their silence can itself provide a context [this serendipitously feeds into my current essay topic, on context]. Some thoughts are offered concerning the silent presences of natural objects such as stones, rocks and mountains and how these might affect us, drawing comparison between Casanovas' Blocks (see one below) and Chinese Scholars' Rocks.
Textile artist Sew Lawty finds "raw physicality and yet stillness in his work - read more of her thoughts on it here.
He has also made etchings - this one is 60cm wide, others are up to 2m wide -Etching plus block, from a show in Denmark -