Art Practice

Interrogating Mediums:

search “materiality in art”:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/materiality (seems like a great book!)

https://northstreetreview.com/2016/04/15/on-matters-materiality-and-materialism-entanglements-with-art-history/ (great website@!!!)

” For many it was not enough for a film to deliver a political message; rather, a work should interrogate its own means and conditions of existence. Film brought with it assumptions about realism and a neutrality of intent, and yet it was a created, creative technology, born of and written into a much broader socioeconomic system. If the problematic social realities of 1970s Britain were to be explored and rewritten, then surely the means by which this reality was recreated on screen had also be interrogated and reconceived. ”

Lynda Benglis:

“ antagonistic processes of creative amalgamation and material degradation, figured through the works’ invocation of melting, dripping, and deformation. This ruin-like aspect of many of Benglis’s works reveals currents of classicism and romanticism running through her oeuvre, albeit deeply informed by feminist critiques of historical continuity and expressive individualism.

Exploring paper textures:

What is Dansaekhwa? Art Radar explains

On Art

On the Curatorial Practice

1. ‘The Keeper’

On Art

Cindy Sherman

Working exclusively as her own model for more than thirty years, Sherman endlessly transforms herself to address the complexities of identity through photographs that she controls as author, director, and stylist. A consummate performer, she captures every possible manipulation of her face and body on camera, coaxing the most nuanced expressions from her supple features, and refining every structural detail, from fingernails to props. Revealing myriad assumed identities, from fraught adolescent to suburban housewife to Renaissance aristocrat to modern-day social doyenne, Sherman continues to explore the inexhaustible range of social guises and psychological spaces that women have claimed throughout history.

Femininity

Sexual identity
Voyuerism
Oppression

Social historical circumstance: Central in the era of intense consumerism and image proliferation at the close of the 20th century, with the Mass media perpetuating divergent female archetypes that it has led to the erosion of the unified self.

Turning the camera on herself i roles and poses, called attention to the powerful machinery and make-up that lay behind the countless images circulating in an incessantly public, “plugged in” culture. Sexual desire and domination, the fashioning of self identity as mass deception

Themetic ideas:

Roles playing out contemporary life’s mediated personas and stereotypes in a range of personas, environments, and guises: from screen siren and pin-up to socialite and businesswoman that exemplify specific “femine attributes”. The PERFORMATIVITY of female sexuality therefore shows self identity as an unstable compromise between social dictates and personal intention and more specifically, the conception of femininity as staged within the conventions of the male gaze such that women become no more than the fetishised object of the voyeuristic gaze.
Through use of horrific and absurd imagery, succeeds in parodying archetypes to critique the artifice of constructions of identity, and also enacts the sadomasochistic dialectic in order to subvert the pervasive fantasies of women.

Medium:

Long assumed to be a medium that “mirrors” reality with precision, photography in Sherman’s hands simultaneously constructs fictional narratives/ invent a theatre of the self and its imaginative identifications and critiques the subject. In this sense, Sherman’s portrait photography functions, as a sign for the unstable nature of visual perception.
Recalling a long tradition of self-portraiture and theatrical role-playing, Sherman utilizes the camera and its tools: smakeup, costumes, and stage scenery, to recreate common illusions that signify various concepts of public celebrity, sexual adventure, and other socially sanctioned, existential conditions

The Body as the central locus of ideas, issues and yet meanings we attach to its representation is fragmented, decayed, artificial attributed to larger cultural implications

Eroticised feminine body

Comic use of the grotesque body

Horror, humor and grotesque pervade the treatment of the human figure and its surrogate: Humans with animalistic features signify carnality, irrationality and social parasitism, Gruesome manifestations of social decay/ scatological and violent scenes

1. plays with cliches of the grotesque as a mode of caprice and invention, evincing delight in her penchant for the morbid through the wit of their juxtapositions and exploitation of its artificiality to evoke

2. mines the comedic potential of the grotesque that parodies and therefore mocks the collective set of artistic, literary and theatrical conventions about the dark side of human nature

3. surrogates confounding the distinction between real flesh and artificial renditions: Genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, worlds ambiguously natural and artificial, creatures simultaneously human and animal and machine.

Untitled Film Stills, 1977-1980 Without doubt the most important series in Cindy Sherman’s early work, the sixty-nine Untitled Film Stills create a metamorphic world in which the subject invents a succession of more elaborately-constructed identities, complete with props and settings, but which are still not always necessarily entirely explicit. The subject’s jubilant “chameleonism” appropriates a range of different worlds: stereotypes from everyday life (the young housewife, the student etc.), but also literature, painting, and of course cinema (Italian Neorealism, or American film noir, for example). (…) The series’ success lies in the tension established by the artist between our immediate recognition of a reference or stereotype …and the creation of a space onto which the viewer can project his or her fictional imaginings and desires. Each scene is constructed for the viewer alone; the images are the precursors of a fictional narrative. (…)

Untitled Film Stills

1977 – 1988

Photographic records of self-performances as well as performative accounts of filmic images

Characters are unspecified; audience free to construct own narratives for the images.
Mood of melancholic disenchantment and alienation inspired by film noir, Photographs look like movie stills Filmic associations – impersonates various female character types from old B movies and film noir

Type 1:

Dutiful, reliable, trustworthy,loving women

Type 2:

Femme fatales – duplicitous, mysterious, gorgeous

The Protective Eye: the constitution of the body as an object

Performativity of sexuality staged conventionally via the protective eye shows how notions of femininity has been produced within the conventions of the male gaze, such that the subject becomes an object trapped inthe dynamics of fetishisation

Invoking desire for the woman depicted and the desire to be that woman- Implicated into participating in the oppressive erotics of voeyuarism

Implicates the viewer in the construction of identities- to link certain images to clichéd identities showing of the media to influence identity

Voyeuristic nature of works – psychoanalytical readings – confronts the image of the woman onscreen as the subject of the controlling male gaze & the object of masculine desire

Centrefold:

fetishism of youth and Innocence

These horizontal, large-format images evoke the double-page spreads of fashion or “adult” magazines, Appropriation of mass media modes to critique the media’s representation of women and to examine the perfomativity of the female sexuality for the male gaze.

Untitled #96

Description: Deliberately posing to exemplify innocence and naivete with legs tucked beneath, wool sweater that covers any cleavage or curves and graham skirt, embodying an ambiguously melancholic expressions that indicate romantic reverie, lying on a tiled kitchen floor a nod to domesticity

Suggesting a fetishization of youth and the perverse encroachment of the gaze on youth

Untitled #92

Crouching figure, Woman with look of anxiety, dishevelled – messy hair, smudged makeup,
Theatrical lighting – highlighting certain areas of the figure and throwing the rest into darkness Heightens the drama and impact
Hints at the presence of an unseen protagonist whom the girl is looking out
The higher vantage of the viewer who appears to be looking down on the woman, reinforces her vulnerability
focus on the protagonist to the detriment of the setting, props or background in her appearance, through the use of makeup, hair and clothes to the point where they become the setting into which the protagonist is introduced, suggesting performativity?

heightening our impression of a narrative in progress that something is about to happen creates palpable sense of foreboding and unknown terrors to exemplify vulnerability

Women embodying fearful or ambiguously melancholic expressions that indicate romantic reverie, or poses to convey terror as in the melodrama of a horror film which is equally as performative and artificial

Questions validity of culturally ingrained gender positions through Inviting female spectators to identify with conventionally male subject positions to reveals traditionally gendered positions and highlight the ambivalence of being both the victim and the perpetrator

Fairytales: and its related gothicisms

Subverts the sweet idealism of fairy tales to expose the perverseness: fantasy cohabits dangerously with elements of the macabre, pervading a quality which is the perversely intertwined with repulsion and yet strangely seductive

plays with cliches of the grotesque as a mode of caprice and invention,otherworldly creatures evoke phantasms from the world superstitions

Through the explicit use prostheses and dummies, All trace of realism is expunged in favor of the artificial and the non-human

images are sometimes unidentifiable in relation to particular fairy tales or traditional stories but invitations to the viewer to project his or her own memories or unspecified fantasies

Untitled #92, “Disasters and Fairy Tales” Series (1985)

Artwork description & Analysis: Part of the later Disasters and Fairy Tales series, this photo shows Sherman as a damsel in distress. Crouched on the ground, she fearfully looks away from the camera. With wetted hair and a tensed position, she appears as if she just walked off the set of a horror film. Sparse lighting centers the composition and lends an ominous tone to the entire photograph. Sherman successfully evokes one of the oldest, quasi-racist “cheap tricks” in the movie business, the setting up of a vulnerable female or private school girl (note the prototypical uniform of starched white shirt and plaid skirt) being preyed upon by some terrible, evil monster. The role goes back to Faye Ray’s “scream queen” in King Kong, Judy Garland’s Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, and countless other popular culture favorites in everyday comic book series, graphic novels, Broadway musicals, and others media of the mid 20th century. By freezing the image into a kind of sorry, secular icon, Sherman demonstrates how art may act as a visual “truth serum,” a force of social change by way of its ability to stop a viewer in his/her tracks and suggest how certain assumptions are culturally inherited, not necessarily “natural.”

Disasters

The body,as metaphor for the society and sign of social acceptance. besieged/ assaulted: objectified by surrogates, deformed,

revealing repressed side of us which we suppress in order to fit in as a social being thus critiquing the cultivated and socialised body promulgated by mass media
Drawing an analogy between images of excess and revolt and our contemporary condition of violence and apparent chaos

1988-90 Sex Pictures,

Untitled #264

abraS1ve, grotesque, and disturbing. Shennan hes on a bed m an atyp1 cal “Playm ate” pos e – reclmed, I egs open, and suggestive – yet her actual phyS1 cal compoS1tion 18 little short of homfymg. She has replaced her legs with those of a manneqU1n, has adorned a plastic vagma as well as breasts, and is we anng a re stricti ve, sadom aso chistic mask that only shows her eyes and a small amoont of her mouth. Behind her1n the far comer, looking 3 downward, hangs a frighteningly realistic human mask; below that lies a silver burlesque mask. Her right hand is poised on the bed to show off her red nail polish; she is wearing a gold crown atop her perfectly curled hair. Sherman combines the sexual and the grotesque into a fetishized form, questioning the basis of sexuality and of the objectified female-in-media

physical disintegration of the body in her work and her eventual disappearance from the pictures.

Produced in the politically charged climate of early 1990s during which issues of censorship and freedom of expression took on new prominence, Response to debates over what constitutes obscenity in art:::Instead of having sex, figures arranged in compromising positions such that though contrived, are genuinely pornographic/ Not exclusively pornographic, but alternate between obscene visions of the body and straightforward illustrations

Description: Her space is claustrophobic, the body little more than a tool of raw desire, while the accoutrements of “beauty,” such as hairbrush, skimpy panties, and the like, are strewn haphazardly around her.

What matters is not the action itself but of its disturbing dehumanization of sexual desire and thus the projection of our perverse sexual fantasies:: exemplifying how sex has been delegated to be carried out by plastic dummies whose obscene exhibitionism is horribly dehumanizing// Taking cues from the conventions of hard core pornography, Sherman’s use of genital prosthetics and fragmented mannequin parts to portray the body as monstrously sexualised- violated and violating, such that it loses all its sexualitty

Portrays, in a larger context, a troubling world, whereby transgressions: the phantasmagorical of every sort are permissible—

The assumed veracity of the photograph gives the image power: Once again, Sherman extracts certain conventions from their usual contexts, where they are often obscured by a host of attendant desires, and baldly reframes them as objects of intense, analytical attention. Sherman suddenly “makes strange” the everyday, or the familiar, in ways that suggest we often trod through our lives while sleepwalking.

1992 History Portraits

Sssuming characters of nobles, mythological heroes and madonnas depicted by court painter

Untitled #225

Spoofing the often awkward depictions of female anatomy in Old Master paintings, Uses fake breasts of astounding configuration, squirting out a trajectory of fluid

Theatrical and artificial—full of large noses, bulging bellies, squirting breasts, warts, and unibrows as augmentations to her body—the history portraits are poised between humorous parody and grotesque caricature to mock the sheer ridiculousness of the established western canon, confronting an ideological system , just as with the representational systems of the mass media

Sherman’s contemporary reinterpretation of a bygone era exposes the pervasiveness of perverse ideological, forcing the audience to reconsider common stereotypes and cultural assumptions.

References:

Click to access PresseinformationE.pdf

https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/cindysherman/gallery/6/#/2/untitled-177-1987/

On Art

Lucian Freud

Friderick Netische philosopher

The inevitable, preordained doom of human existence

Hopelessness of humanity and his own sense of futility

nihilism, existentialism,

disillusionment of the fallen ideal of Europe being civilized as exposed by the horrors of WW2, which demonstrated man’s inherent capacity for brutal savagery

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion

three writhing anthropomorphic creatures set against a flat burnt orange background
summarises themes explored in Bacon’s previous work, including his examination of Picasso’s biomorphs and his interpretations of th Crucifixion and the Greek Furies
crucifixion juxtaposed with no redemption because of Holocaust
distort/ contort anatomy, brushwork mutilate/ disfigure the figure—-existential crisis of self
bandaged motif being erotically charged
Of a gaping-mouthed, serpentlike figure perched on a stilt like limb
Picasso: organic form which relates yo the human image but is a complete distortion of it
The chthonic forces of the furies were fused with the tormenting flagellations of Christianity in three figures

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bacon-three-studies-for-figures-at-the-base-of-a-crucifixion-n06171/text-catalogue-entry

The chthonic forces of the furies were fused with the tormenting flagellations of Christianity in three figures

The left hand panel is occupied by the most human of the figures. Its nose and ear emerge from a mop of hair, and its neck is elongated from heavily rounded shoulders. It perches on a table-like structure, limblessly contained in drapery which flows off to one side. The delineation of the background space carries the focus to the right, and thus into the triptych. The body is carefully modelled by the deep shadow under the neck and this contrasts with the flatness of the background. This panel is the most thickly painted and cracking indicates the application of lean oil paint on top of a ‘fatter’ layer that was still drying; large areas of the orange appear to have darkened to brown over time. The composition goes up to a black border ridge on all sides which – taken with the weight of paint and the surface quality – makes it likely that another image was painted over. Preliminary infra red investigation[8] has only revealed a narrow horizontal band to the left of the figure and three verticals to the right of the head, but both are in areas of dense paintwork. Most evident in this panel is the use of chalk pastel (brown, orange and yellow) for the strands of the figure’s chestnut hair; this is especially delicate as no fixative was applied. Whether this reflected Bacon’s lack of technical training is not certain but it is notable that in 1946 he wrote to Graham Sutherland from Monte Carlo about the subsequent Painting 1946 (Museum of Modern Art, New York)[9]: ‘thank you so much for spraying the picture, I know all the magenta except the hands wants doing.’[10] The painting was in oil and about to appear in the UNESCO Exposition internationale d’art moderne, at the Musée d’art moderne in Paris in November;[11] unfortunately the fixative has lifted away the paint surface.[12]
Appropriately, the central panel of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion contains the most centralised image which is reinforced by the converging space. The body stands in an ambiguous relationship to its pedestal but turns its open glossy-lipped mouth and wrapped neck towards the viewer. A margin of board (visible when unframed) remains uncovered around all edges where there are a number of measuring marks which suggest a carefully conceived composition. Along the top edge, a green mark at exactly 10 inches (254 mm) from the right hand corner corresponds to the right side of the back wall in the image; the left side of the same area is the same distance from the left edge. By contrast to the roughly worked figure, the white paint around the neck has been thickly applied on top of the dry surface. Inspection under infra red[13] showed that it followed lines laid out on an earlier level, but the white is now fragile and cleaving from the layer beneath.

Influences:

appropriating images of screaming mouth:::: scream of the unconscious, evoking primordial instincts:::hypocritical portrayal of the human civilization being bestial, savaged:::::damnation of world
Picasso’s biomorphic forms
Geometric fragmentation of analytic cubism
crucifixion of Pop: sexually attracted ? to pop, father figure due to dysfunctional relationship with father
subvert reverential figure, corrupt:: silence during Holocaust

Foil for the private disintegration

To transform appearance into image: destruction and distortion to reconstruction

A feeling of suffering inextricable to the condition of living, and therefore the ferocity of life

Space

Typically claustrophobic space

Sets of chill neurotic mood

Pope:

Instinctuality of animal fear

worldly power melded in promiscous imagination into failing man

Crucifixation and animal deaths an act of mans behaviour : violence

Elements of popal regalia- purple soutane and skullcape, combined witj the still of mudered nurse from The Battleship Potemkin: the shattered pince-ez spectacles, screaming moutj

Suggestions of tubular steel throne through cursorily brushed in rectangular framework evoked trappings of room in mental hospital

Although seated on an elaborate throne, curiously insubstantial figure: explores private anguish of the public figure who despite outward trappings of power is impotent to control events.

At the end, collapses in convulsive hysteria

Skull

The ghostly image of body executed against a dark background in impasted grisaille suggests xray plate.

Skeletal forms enveloped in veil like penumbra seem to float in space

tentative cagelike structure suggests three dimensional space

Dyer:

Conflated his desolate sense of loss in a serie infused with greed and self accusation

After being so pompous he becomes completely pathetic. Reduced to nothing

Triptych- studies from the human body

Presents a disquieting mixture of identifiable elements and undefinble elusive nightmare imagery, powerfully evoking disturbing feelings
Two male figures coupling a theme explored from Muybvridge’s ohotograph of two wrestlers
Torn newsprint on steeply tilted floor denies the traditional convention of perspectival recession in favor of flattened, vertical space
A chilling blob of bloody ectoplasm quivers menacingly

Triple portait heads explored different facets of sitters appearance

Bland annonymous background, with only sharp vertical of doorway to contain compisitiol gives Ko hint of ambience

Brushstrokes:

He emerges from a dark blue black background, the cube like space arum rated by faintly drawn white lines, as in the Low couch on which he sits, with its yellow tubular raise defining the headrest.

Cursorily defined in outline

Semitransparent washes have shadowy qualities of X Ray plate

Invests figure with aura of vaguely sensed disquiet, formal Organisation if picture into strongly accented vertical panels.

The dark voids of lenses, collasping forms, air of menace and dissolution:::: death

Painting dyer in a variety of ingenious poses

Writhe in contorted pose

Spatial ambiguities abound, defy normal conventions of perspective

The bland undifferentiated lilac appears to negate space

The artist seems to topple off reg chair, and the strong diagonals of the steeply tilted floorboards add to feeling of catastrophe

Figures:

set figure on a tubular steel framework reminiscent of 1930s modern furniture.

Artist placed the figure in a fetal position, the posture for defamation and the position assumed in death. Such a pose is the entities is of the upright, classically inspired heroic stance.

Where the musculature of the flesh is modelled in a semi transparent tone. More insubstantial and shadowy, as if to suggest figure in movement.

Suggested lines

Figure appears caged and sealed in a windowless, anonymous space,

like some unfortunate inmate of an asylum

I tried to make the shadows as much there as the image, our shadows are our ghosts.

The suggestion of, cursorily brushed in

Diptych: study from a human body

Classical lucidity has enabled on the painter to fantasies metamorphoses of the females nudes so that a whole world of linear harmony and smoothly modelled roundness suddenly opens to him

The increasingly sculptural quality of late work, of paring down to essentials. In left panel, he focuses with clarity on male genitalia. The rounded male breast is wittily a parodied by the by the upturned breasts of the Denali torso. Both torsos are presented on pedestrians like pieces of sculpture, and against a hot orange red background, which intensified the erotic charge.

The format is a familiar one of two profile portraits balancing a full faced center panel, with a classical sense of symmetry and cohesion.

eleuze, the isolation of Bacon’s figures at the center of the frame is a way of cutting them out of any narrative relation that would ascribe to them a fixed meaning; the animal imagery reflects the blurring of the self and other; the triptych is a way of showing different aspects of a single form without reducing it to a common essence; and Bacon’s use of color is a way of escaping the hypostatizing effect of linear representation, instead rendering spaces and bodies as flows of mercurial energy (“Each dominant color and each broken tone indicates the immediate exercise of a force on the corresponding zone of the body or head; it immediately renders force visible.”)

box-like frame. This device, which was one of Bacon’s trademarks, underlines the sense of isolation as well as generating a claustrophobic psychological intensity.

The seated figures and their coupling are set against black voids and the central flurry has been seen as ‘a life-and-death struggle’. The artist’s biographer wrote: ‘What death has not already consumed seeps incontinently out of the figures as their shadows.’

On Art

Francis Bacon

articles:

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bacon-three-studies-for-figures-at-the-base-of-a-crucifixion-n06171/text-catalogue-entry

existential crisis of self, alienation of the 20th century, man as inherently capable of brutality and savagery, exposing the illusion of the civilized and enlightened Europe as hoax

Influences:

Nicholas Pousius’s 1629 painting

picasso’s biomorphic forms:: seemingly inanimate yet taking animate biographical ambiguous life forms

Image of screaming mouth: scream of the unconscious

Diego portraits of Pop Innocent X
Analytic cubism: geometric fragmentation,

sexually attracted to Pope: as a patriarchal figure which haunted his psyche linked to dysfunctional relationship with father, sexual struggles in works???

subvert the reverential figure of Pope

Authority of corruption: silent collaboration with nazis for holocaust

Three studies for Figures at the base of a crucifixion

these figures to the Eumenides – the vengeful furies of Greek myth, associating them within a broader mythological tradition.

The triptych summarises themes explored in Bacon’s previous work, including his examination of Picasso‘s biomorphs and his interpretations of the Crucifixion

The inevitable, preordained doom of human existence

Hopelessness of humanity and his own sense of futility

Reinvent

Foil for the private disintegration

To transform appearance into image: destruction and distortion to reconstruction

A feeling of suffering inextricable to the condition of living, and therefore the ferocity of life

Background:

Typically claustrophobic space

Sets of chill neurotic mood

WW2: certain now, of the des praying violence of life

Picasso’a distortions took on fresh significance

The chthonic forces of the furies were fused with the tormenting flagellations of Christianity in three figures

Each one, caught in violent motion, is stranger and at first sight less intelligence than one could possibly have imagined it.

Pope:

Instinctuality of animal fear

Crucifixation and animal deaths an act of mans behaviour : violence

Although seated on an elaborate throne, curiously insubstantial figure: explores private anguish of the public figure who despite outward trappings of power is impotent to control events.

At the end, collapses in convulsive hysteria

Dyer:

Conflated his desolate sense of loss in a serie infused with greed and self accusation

After being so pompous he becomes completely pathetic. Reduced to nothing

3 studies:

Of a gaping-mouthed, serpentlike figure perched on a stilt like limb

Picasso: organic form which relates yo the human image but is a complete distortion of it

Triple portait heads explored different facets of sitters appearance

Shadow boxing in balletic elegance

Bland annonymous background, with only sharp vertical of doorway to contain compisitiol gives Ko hint of ambience

Brushstrokes:

He emerges from a dark blue black background, the cube like space arum rated by faintly drawn white lines, as in the Low couch on which he sits, with its yellow tubular raise defining the headrest.

Cursorily defined in outline

Semitransparent washes have shadowy qualities of X Ray plate

Invests figure with aura of vaguely sensed disquiet, formal Organisation if picture into strongly accented vertical panels.

The dark voids of lenses, collasping forms, air of menace and dissolution:::: death

Painting dyer in a variety of ingenious poses

Writhe in contorted pose

Spatial ambiguities abound, defy normal conventions of perspective

The bland undifferentiated lilac appears to negate space

The artist seems to topple off reg chair, and the strong diagonals of the steeply tilted floorboards add to feeling of catastrophe

Figures:

set figure on a tubular steel framework reminiscent of 1930s modern furniture.

Artist placed the figure in a fetal position, the posture for defamation and the position assumed in death. Such a pose is the entities is of the upright, classically inspired heroic stance.

Where the musculature of the flesh is modelled in a semi transparent tone. More insubstantial and shadowy, as if to suggest figure in movement.

Suggested lines

Figure appears caged and sealed in a windowless, anonymous space,

like some unfortunate inmate of an asylum

I tried to make the shadows as much there as the image, our shadows are our ghosts.

The suggestion of, cursorily brushed in

Diptych: study from a human body

Classical lucidity has enabled on the painter to fantasies metamorphoses of the females nudes so that a whole world of linear harmony and smoothly modelled roundness suddenly opens to him

The format is a familiar one of two profile portraits balancing a full faced center panel, with a classical sense of symmetry and cohesion.

Aestheticism

box-like frame. This device, which was one of Bacon’s trademarks, underlines the sense of isolation as well as generating a claustrophobic psychological intensity.

On Art

Takashi Murakami

http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/takashi-murakami–november-29-2012

This exhibition, Takashi Murakami’s first in Hong Kong, explores one of the central dichotomies of his art—between joy and terror, his optimistic magnanimity as an artist and his pessimistic perspective on postwar Japan. Here, this dichotomy is symbolized by the stark contrast of bright smiling flowers and disturbing, menacing representations of skulls. Whether depicted as single iconic “portraits” or in complex clusters of virtuoso composition and paintwork that combine painstaking traditional artisanal techniques with the pop and fizz of manga, the flower and the skull stand as eternal motifs in the history of art and popular culture. Both oppositional and parallel, they are reminders of the fragile vibrancy of life and the inexorable passing of time.

A lightning rod between different cultural valencies (high/low, ancient/modern, oriental/occidental), Murakami has stated that the artist is someone who understands the borders between worlds and who makes an effort to know them. With his distinctive “Superflat” style and ethos, which employs highly refined classical Japanese painting techniques to depict a super-charged mix of Pop, animé and otaku content within a flattened representational picture-plane, he moves freely within an ever-expanding field of aesthetic issues and cultural inspirations. Parallel to utopian and dystopian themes, he recollects and revitalizes narratives of transcendence and enlightenment, often involving outsider-savants. Mining religious and secular subjects favored by the so-called Japanese “eccentrics” or non-conformist artists of the Early Modern era commonly considered to be counterparts of the Western Romantic tradition, Murakami situates himself within their legacy of bold and lively individualism in a manner that is entirely his own and of his time.

Murakami is also a curator, a cultural entrepreneur, and a critical observer of contemporary Japanese society. In 2000, he organized a paradigmatic exhibition of Japanese art titled “Superflat,” which traced the origins of contemporary Japanese visual pop culture in historical Japanese art.

2. http://www.artnet.com/artists/takashi-murakami/

Despite its outward playfulness, Murakami’s art acts as a cultural critique with subversive undertones hidden in its imagery. Born on February 1, 1962 in Tokyo, Japan, where he currently lives and works, Murakami has embraced commerce through the founding Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd., an artist management agency and studio. With his popular collaboration with the fashion label Louis Vuitton, Murakami has established himself as a pioneer of promoting art as a brand.

3.http://www.artspace.com/takashi_murakami

immediately recognizable for its popping, candylike colors and anime-esque aesthetic. Often featuring playful imagery like smiling flowers, oversized, blinking eyes, and Technicolor mushrooms, Murakami is truly the heir to Warhol in his ability to appropriate commercial, popular images inspired by anime and manga (Japanese comics) into high-quality pieces of fine art.

3. http://english.kaikaikiki.co.jp/artists/list/C4/

The paintings, sculptures, and balloons of Takashi Murakami are colorful and attractive, and accessible in their reference to lovable cartoon characters. Murakami uses his deep understanding of Western art(??) to integrate his work into its structure; working from the inside to portray “Japanese-ness” as a tool to bring about revolution in the world of art.

As an artist, Murakami questions the lines drawn between East and West, past and present, high art and popular culture. Not stopping with the production of artworks, Murakami shocked the world with his entrepreneurial collaboration with Louis Vuitton, when he challenged the divide between art and commerce.

As a curator, Murakami challenges our notions of history and culture. With his three-part Superflat exhibition which toured in major museums in America and Europe, he attempted to introduce Japanese artists, animators, cartoonists, etc. to an international audience, under the premise that such categories of creativity are not as rigid in the Japanese system, and might all be thought of as “art.” His final installationLittle Boy suggested a new interpretation of history through a political exposition of the A-bomb and post-war Japanese popular culture.

While proposing a rethinking of “Japan” to those both within and outside, Murakami maintains a strong commitment to promoting Japanese art throughout the world. Twice a year he holds the GEISAI festival in Japan for young emerging talent, and with his company Kaikai Kiki, supports and manages a group of young artists while preparing for his future endeavors.

4. http://www.thebroad.org/art/takashi-murakami

Murakami’s artistic practice is expansive, spilling into fashion, film, and other commercial areas, but his symbols and interests come from deeper impulses. For instance, Murakami’s use of mushrooms in his work deals with both popular drug cultures and historical concerns. Curator Paul Schimmel, for one, locates the artist’s fascination with mushrooms in a story his mother told him as a child about being born in a city “passed over” by the U.S. atomic bomb. (On the day of the drop, Murakami’s hometown had too much cloud cover and was avoided as a target.) Murakami employs mushrooms in DOB in the Strange Forest (Blue DOB), 1999, in which the artist coyly positions his alter-ego, DOB, in a complex Japanese landscape that is turning to menace. DOB shows resistance, a gesture that clearly indicates Murakami’s critique of culture rather than simply adding to its excesses. It is a powerful statement of how Murakami sees himself in regards to his Japanese culture. He is lost in the runaway madness of its history and decadence.

Social critique is even more pointed in Nurse Ko2 (Original rendering by Nishi-E-Da, modeling by BOME and Genpachi Tokaimura, advised by Masahiko Asano, full scale sculpture by Lucky-Wide Co., Ltd.), 2011. The work addresses bishoujo culture, which is roughly equivalent to “beautiful girl style,” a concept encompassing many features of otaku. Bishoujo is an exaggerated, unrealistic, and fetishized version of the feminine, often based on boys’ fantasies. Murakami’s offering is part cartoon, part naive adolescent wish, part pornography. The conflation of the three mixes into an erotically charged, but silly sculptural resolution. The work is the projection of an overinflated boy mind, which Murakami remarks has contributed to a sterilized and displaced adolescence that hinders Japan.

My arms and legs rot off and though my blood rushes forth, the tranquility of my heart shall be prized above all. (Red blood, black blood, blood that is not blood), 2007, is part of a series of Murakami drawings featuring the portrait of Daruma, the sage, grand patriarch of Zen art and founder of Zen Buddhism. Daruma is famous for sitting in meditation for nine years without blinking, facing the Shaolin monastery. He lost his arms and legs due to severe atrophy, and even today is a symbol fortitude and diligence in Japan. In this work, Daruma is locked in a soft, meditative gaze, heavily mannered in black with bursts of colorful highlights. The painting is quintessential Murakami, mixing the visual devices of pop art with deeper cultural undercurrents. My arms and legs…. is both a view of Japanese history and a critique of the contemporary. Despite the opportunity for sensationalism that the Daruma story opens, Murakami takes a deliberate, sober approach, cropping out gory details and replacing them with the face alone. The emphasis of the work is on meditation, on the slowness of thought, virtues rarely promoted in a hyper-saturated world of instant information. With one foot in that image-saturated world, Murakami steps away from it.

Flower Matango (b), 2001–06, takes pop culture as its starting point. Matango is a 1963 Japanese movie about a group of people stranded on an island of monstrous mushrooms. Murakami imagines his recognizable smiling flowers growing and twisting through the gallery space. Like the mushrooms in Matango, the flowers multiply and take over, a blizzard of pop. For Murakami, popular imagery is an aggressive spore that can neither be contained nor stopped. A version ofFlower Matango was exhibited at Versailles in France, its flowers allowed to spiral through Louis XIV’s home in much the same way as the decorative flowers of the rococo overwhelm the wallpaper and ceilings of the palace.

“To become a living example of the potential of art.” This is the burning force behind Takashi Murakami’s work.

enchanting balance to the way Murakami is able to allow the opposing thematic emblems occupy the same space.

Do the skulls appear less menacing when displayed in bright, inviting colors? Are the flowers more ominous when given a darker color palette?

. The sense of horror of skulls vanished.