mercredi, mai 30, 2007

Seminar 30/05/2007

I have not been to many of the masters' seminars, but I've benefited a lot from the ones that I've been to. I think it's a really good opportunity to get to know other's projects and interests, and also their styles, since I do not talk much to them personally. Having said so, I feel I am a completely different person when doing a public speech/performance. I guess the bottom line is my self-consciousness in fear of being unable getting the attention; and when on the stage where I am granted such focused attention, I do enjoy it -- though, only after a certain time of preparation.

Most people do have a lot to say and do have a body of research there, yet some do not realise the fact that it's only a 20-minute seminar, and only so much can be put in it. The only way is to work on the structure and practice before actually giving the seminar -- for that I am grateful of the help from Liyen, and the discussion we had helped to get my head around the whole research process too. So I guess it's true, as what Liyen's suggested, it's just telling stories and giving introductions. And I do agree, for that it helps the audience's understanding of your work and generate discussion. Often people are so immersed in their own research and put on this full-on in-depth lecture which is a good learning experience too, but hard for those who have not been researching in the same field to digest all information in 20 minutes.

So, here is the complete content of my seminar. I will have to look back to it and further my research soon. My apologies for not fully referencing the whole writing, etc.

Best Viewed in IE
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Greetings.
Today, I am going to give a general outlook of my interests in some specific areas of painting and the developments of which. Emphasis will be put on the development of abstract painting after the influence of minimalism.

Coming from a painting background, I am also aware that we live in an era of critical theory. As we know that the different aspects of painting have been looked at again and again closely; as a result, some artists tend to be more excited about using new media nowadays. In an art world dominated by critical theory and new forms that speak to that theory, what are the values of painting for the contemporary visual arts curriculum?

My research this year is based on a concern for painting. In this seminar I propose to give an introduction on some of the difficulties that painters have been dealing with, also, I will give a more in-depth overview of the works of Daniel Buren, to show how he carries his practices throughout the years.

Firstly, I would like to start with a quote by Donald Judd taken from the book "Specific Objects." He says that:

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Three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of the problem of illusionism and of literal space, space in and around marks and colours - which is riddance of one of the salient and most objectionable relics of European art. The several limits of painting are no longer present.

Donald Judd
"Specific Objects," reprinted in Complete Writings: 1969-1975. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. New York: New York University Press, 1975. 184
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What I find interesting is that Judd started his career as a painter, yet he points out one of the foremost limitations of painting – space; and suggests that sculpture (or other 3 dimensional art forms) conveys better. Surly anyone working within the field would have been aware of painting's limits; for example, its dimension, space, colour and representation. But is Judd's suggestion of moving away from painting the only way to progress a practice? Many artists who are aware of the limits of painting still work within the domain to try to push the boundaries. My interest is to take on the limitations and explore them in my way.

In the next slide, I will give some examples of works that work toward the same goal. To show that if Judd was right, or that he simply shows ignorance that there are also several limits to negotiate within painting.

- - - - - - - - - - Slide2 : Limits to Negotiate Within Painting- - - - - - - - - -

Here I have chosen 3 major limits of painting as I've found them to be within my research, though they might need some refining later on; and for each I have selected an example that negotiate with such limit.

1) Structure: (& Reduction. Surface, support, framing, dimension, space)
When we speak of the formal properties of a painting we think of a covered surface on a support that set within a frame. And what is set within the frame concerns perspectives, composition, thus dimension and space. The minimalist's approach to reduce these elements culminates in various endpoints, including monochrome and geometry.

-Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950-
This Jackson Pollock's action painting constructs a new kind of autonomy. The part-to-whole relationship and unity suggest a re-articulation of painting. The elements and aspects of Pollock's paintings are polarised rather than amalgamated. This construction of a new kind of autonomy provokes painting with questions less of its reduction than of its structure.

2) Technique: (Variation; use of different formal elements and tools)
In the history of painting, various techniques have been created to perfect representation (e.g. perspectives), or to introduce a different way of seeing (e.g. cubism). According to Hubert Damisch*1, technique is to be understood as both 'thought and invention.' The different strategies taken by various painters to explore the limits of painting contribute to the invention of numerous techniques.
-Claude Viallat and Daniel Dezeuze-
Here we have the knotting of Claude Viallat and the cutting of Daniel Dezeuze to show their different approaches to construct painting. As opposed to minimalist's industrial methods (which represent a counterimpulse toward the generalising of technique, and this counterimpulse coincides with a displacement away from the privilege of painting as a medium into an array of other spaces and mediums), the works here demonstrate that painting as a discipline remains capable of sustaining technique as a measure of its thought and invention.

3) Series: (Extension; Repetition; Fragmentation)
Serial practices elaborate decisive ways of thinking through the work's exposure. (If we look at each work in the series as an "instance" and it shows that anything we term a work has an identity that is already displace to, and by, the "instance" of the work’s exteriority in and as its essentially seriate dispersion, a dispersion that places its "medium" in question. and their implications for painting.)

-Polly Apfelbaum, Eclipse, velvet and dye, dimensions vary with installation, 1996-
There are a number of different ways to seriate a practice, here I have chosen a work by Polly Apfelbaum. It represents one piece in a series of variations in the display of the work or its architectural context. This implication of serial practices open further questions of the relation of the work to its structure, and thus ways of inquiring how, in light of its structural articulations, a work can be dispersed and not "reduced."

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Next I will present a movement that took place in the late 60s. Based on a concern for art, and painting being its primarily form, Buren teamed up with 3 of his contemporaries and formed the group BMPT.

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+ 1966 – 1967
+ Initiated by 4 artistes: Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier, Niele Toroni.

Group BMPT tries to make "paintings as paintings" on the concepts of creation and painting. Each of the group member practices a repetitive gesture deprived of any artistic base and wants to supply only what the work presents.

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Example of the members' works:

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-Olivier Mosset. Untitled, 1966. Acrylic on canvas. Carré d'Art – Museé d'art contemporain de Nîmes-
Mosset repeats identical black circles on white surfaces.






Parmentier paints large horizontal bands delimited with the adhesive tape in order to remove any overflow of the brush.
Both Mosset and Parmentier practice a repetitive gesture with a simple form that is void of any subjectivity.


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-Niele Toroni at work. Les murs, un autre regard, installation Nice, 2005-
Toroni uses the mark made by a brush of a particular width as the motif on the canvas with regular interval.
I would like to point out that each and every mark made by the same brush is unique. If we could refer this back to the point made on Serial Practice earlier, each and every mark thus presents an instance. And it's by repetition and through the display of the context that the whole practice is complete.

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- - - - - - - - - - Slide6: Stripes Paintings by Buren- - - - - - - - - -






(left image)
-Daniel Buren. The Rotating Square In and Out of the Frame, 1989-










(right image)
-Daniel Buren. The Missing Square, 1989-


Buren uses vertical stripes in a uniform and repetitive way while leaving the same interval between the lines so as to create a perfect legibility.
In this slide we have 2 stripe paintings by Buren. On the left "The Rotating Square In and Out of the Frame" we see that he uses the simplest form of strips to create movements within frames. In the piece on the right "The Missing Square", Buren has taken his strips in frames to create a puzzle-like effect, and the way I see it, he also seeks an active involvement from the viewer.

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One might argue the legitimacy of painting being the medium to question the making of art. Here I would like to put the emphasis on seeing how painting opens beyond itself by virtue of the limits that define it and onto a field it reveals as both relational and contingent, exposed to, and so capable of exposing, the institutional and cultural limits within which it claims its presence.

- - - - - - - - Slide7 Wall of Paintings by Buren - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-Daniel Buren. Murs de peintures, 1966–1977. Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris -
(Flikr: Beair)
Buren's idea that "every act is a political one*2" applies here as a response to the minimalist’s requirement of maximum space in between the works. Here the paintings are hung in the style as if they were in the 19th century, and each work requires equal attention.

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- - - - - - - - Slide8: Accidental Buren - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

(Flickr: Beathe)
Buren's interest in the physical components of the work, such as its surface and support, lead to the exploration of material and ideological aspects of artworks that are usually not visible, revealing what conventional paintings tend to hide. He treats painting itself as the subject of painting, and what he's done here is taking his stripes and displacing them in a non-art context.

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-Daniel Buren, Les Deux Plateaux , 1986. Palais Royal, Paris-
(Flickr: robert_562)
This in situ work was done in 1986 in the great courtyard of the Palais Royal, in Paris: "Les Deux Plateaux", more commonly referred to as the "Columns of Buren". This work provoked an intense debate over the integration of contemporary art and historic buildings during that time.

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-Daniel Buren. in situ Place des Terreaux (1992, Christian Dreve). Lyon, France-
(photo: hsiaohui)
He is known best for using regular, contrasting maxi stripes to integrate the visual surface and architectural space, notably historical, landmark architecture.
(Christain Dreve is the architect)

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(photo: hsiaohui)
His signature stripes of 8.7cm in width coloured and alternative white work as an expansion of the act of looking. The stripes ultimately did not reduce the meaning of the work, instead led to an expansion of the ability to see within the field of the visible. In this sense, Buren's practice has always involved a particular approach to the physical environment and context.

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-Daniel Buren. Le Temps D'une Oeuvre , 2005. Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon, Biennale de Lyon d'Art Contemporain-
(Flikr: dalbera)
This piece explores the collaboration with light, thus space and time. Each day the gallery attendant would take off random coloured pixaglas to reveal the original lighting of the exhibition space. This may seem like a work done by a different artist, yet we can still see that he's incorporated his stripes in this work.

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-Daniel Buren. Plus grand ou plus petit que ? 2006. Château de Tours, France-
(Flickr: zokapi)
Here that's another example of an exhibition that I've been to. In this slide we see the exterior of a castle in the city of Tours.

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- - - - - - - - - Slide14, 15, 16: Interior - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -








-Daniel Buren. Plus grand ou plus petit que ? 2006. Château de Tours, France-
(photo: hsiaohui)
The interior, ground, first, and second floor.

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We see with the later works that Buren has incorporated the idea of inside-outside into his practice. Yet all his works, from his unauthorised paper stripes glued on Parisian billboard in the late 60s to his more recent in situ interventions in the public space, discard conventional assumptions about the formal qualities of artworks, and present visual elements that alert the viewer to the characteristics and function of the space.

- - - - - - - - - - - Slide17 Buren's Statement - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
la pratique est tout processus de transformation d'une matière première et la théorie lui est essentielle; la théorie est une forme spécifique de la pratique, s'en distinguant par son caractère scientifique.
Louis Althusser, « Pour Marx »

It must be clearly understood that when theory is considered as producer/creator, the only theory or theoretic practice is the result presented/the painting or, according to Althusser’s definition "Theory: a specific form of practice."
Daniel Buren
5 Texts. New York: John Weber Gallery, 1973

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There is freedom in what Buren has done, and that enormous freedom comes from an utter understanding of the limits of painting. I see imposing limitations as a method of working, as opposed to not knowing them, and thus not dealing with them. For that the limitation is the condition for painting's connection with the world, so also for its critical force. (As Painting, 87)

The reason why I want to explore the genre of painting is that I see a positive relationship between critical theory and the practice of painting, and have witnessed painting's capacity to reconsider its own structure. Many artists like Buren have experimented painting within their own institutional and cultural contexts; and I believe within the contemporary context, there are issues to be explored.

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Notes
  1. Huber Damisch writes Pollock (1959): "The invention takes place, at the decisive moment when the painter raised this process, dripping - which after all had been only a means of 'padding' (remplissage) - to the dignity of an original principle for the organisation of surfaces."
    Damisch, Hubert. "La figure et l'entrelacs," Fenêtre jaune cadmium, ou les dessous de la peinture. Paris:Editions du Seuil, 1984. 76
  2. "All acts are political, and whether one is conscious or not, the presentation of one's work/production does not escape this rule"
    Buren, Daniel. "En Regard," Les Ecrits, Tome3. Bordeaux: CAPC, 1991. 208-9
Super Readings That Have Helped Me Greatly in Constructing This Seminar:
  • As Painting: Division and Displacement. Ed. Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon, and Stephen Melville. Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts, the Ohio State University, 2001.
  • Melville, Stephen. "Counting/As/Painting." Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon, and Stephen Melville. 1-26
  • Philip Armstrong and Laura Lisbon. "As Painting: Problematics." Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon, and Stephen Melville. 27-54
  • "Daniel Buren." Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon, and Stephen Melville. 86-9
  • Nadaner, Dan. "Painting in an Era of Critical Theory." Studies in Art Education vol.39 no.2 (Winter 1998): 168-82
  • Crimp, Douglas. "The End of Painting." October vol.16. 1981: 69-86
Further Readings:
  • Buren, Daniel. 5 texts. New York: John Weber Gallery, 1973. (FA 759 B952)
  • ---. Reboundings: An Essay by Daniel Buren, Followed by 7 Plates and & Diagrams. Brussels: Daled & Gevaert, 1977. (FA 759 B952r)
Online Readings:

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samedi, mai 19, 2007

Private Crossing

Drathen, Doris von. "Private Crossing," The Vortex of Silence: Proposition for an Art Criticism Beyond Aesthetic Categories. Charta, Milano: 2004. pp.83-92
UoA Fine Arts Library 701.3 D767

DESCRIPTION OF THE BOOK (taken from the book jacket)
German art historian and critic Doris von Drathen has here produced a collection of 24 texts on 24 of the world's famous contemporary artists. In it, she proposes nothing less than a new method of art criticism: an anti-criticism that goes above and beyond aesthetic categories, and against the colonization of art.
For Doris von Drathen, aesthetic categories are inadequate for engaging the freedom of contemporary art. This internationally esteemed art historian and critic uses an unconventional approach to break the strictures of existing systems and ask a simple question: if art represents one of our most precious means of seeing and understanding the world, then why do we accept formal and normative commentaries that abolish what is quintessential -- the image itself and its emotional impact? In her monographic essays, Doris von Drathen has developed a new methodology that embraces the gaze of the beholder, examining an individual artist's practice as an intrinsic universe and respecting the art object as an entity of otherness.


Jean-Marc Bustamante (1952)
1952 Born in Toulouse
1990 - 1995 Professor at the Rijksakademie Amsterdam
1996 Professor at the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris
Lives and works in Paris


Martin Buber's story about a little boy having a totally different perception on his habitual act of stroking his favourite horse shows the realisation of the breach between the experienced and the narrated world arises a self-consciousness that separates the self and the outside world. Dislocation caused by the lost of unity (the naive vision of the world) forces oneself to enter into emptiness and void. Viewed in these terms, the work of Jean-Marc Bustamante reveals quite different and dramatic dimensions to what it is generally regarded as enigmatic, remote and emotionally distant.

Bustamante's focus of interest is how an image that he carries within him and that changes in relation to how he himself changes; he describes the inception of his creative process as "a moment when I am at one with myself." In LP I 2000, a tableau from the Swiss series he produced in 2000, shows Bustamante's depiction raises ways of seeing and formulating composition and in doing so leaves the audience feeling in a loss of orientation. It seems as if a secret is kept unrevealed in the images of Bustamante's photographs -- his work often suggests a transactional space that engage the audience in a way that exposes both the artist and the viewer.

The titling of his photographs was also called into discussion during the reading group session:
In order to appreciate the wholeness in Bustamante's work, should the titling of the work be considered as a way of viewing? The way Bustamante titles his photographic work seems like a system adapted the index of a library card, it thus suggests that the work is in a series. 'Coded' titles acted as mute, objectified, and intensify information in the work, and is empty of narrative. Yet we also wonder if the 'coded' titling creates more powerful effect than 'untitled', as the title suggests no orientation and thus no focus for the viewer to follow -- it somehow signals "do not respond to the title."

I find the almost zero depth perspective in his L.P. series a significant difference to painting in the construct of image making. And not only the titling seems like codes, but the leitmotif of a transitional pictorial space caught between different worlds leads us to believe that cryptanalysis as a means of creating dialogue...

Keywords for follow-up:
conceptualism / subjectivism / romanticism
photography, installation, painting, sculpture
How are things perceived out of memory?

Further reading on Bustamante:


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Hemer's Paint Lust at Full Thrust


André Hemer
Paint Lust at Full Thrust


25 May 2007 - 16 June 2007
Preview 24 May 17h30-19h

Vavsour Godkin Gallery
2nd Floor 35 High Street,
Auckland New Zealand


André Hemer is a Christchurch based New Zealand painter whose paintings have widely been exhibited throughout New Zealand and overseas. During the Auckland Art Fair (18-20 May 2007), Hemer's works would be represented through Vavasour Godkin (Auckland), and 64zero3 (Christchurch).

Hemer's solo show at Vavasour Godkin "Paint Lust at Full Thrust" presents Hemer's latest paintings. . Ooo, I'm excited!!

for further information place refer to the artist's website - André Hemer

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mardi, mai 15, 2007

The City in Pieces

Burgin, Victor. In/Different Spaces : Place and Memory in Visual Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
UoA Fine Arts Library: 701 B956i

DESCRIPTION
(taken from http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/6720.html)
Recent discussions about the culture of images have focused on issues of identity--sexual, racial, national--and the boundaries that define subjectivity. In this context Victor Burgin adopts an original critical strategy. He understands images less in traditional terms of the specific institutions that produce them, such as cinema, photography, advertising, and television, and more as hybrid mental constructs composed of fragments derived from the heterogeneous sources that together constitute the "media." Through deft analyses of a photograph by Helmut Newton, Parisian cityscapes, the space of the department store, a film by Ousmane Sembéne, and the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Andrè Breton, and Roland Barthes, Burgin develops an incisive theory of our culture of images and spectacle.

In/Different Spaces explores the construction of identities in the psychical space between perception and consciousness, drawing upon psychoanalytic theories to describe the constitution and maintenance of "self" and "us"--in imaginary spatial and temporal relations to "other" and "them"--through the all-important relay of images. For Burgin, the image is never a transparent representation of the world but rather a principal player on the stage of history.


7 The City in Pieces - 2/05/2007 Reading Group Discussion
This chapter introduces us a history of architectural space: from that of the Italian Renaissance period to the disappearance (or, displacement) of space in the contemporary world.

Starting with Walter Benjamin's One Way Street which shows us a romantic personal engagement with space and that links us to the history of body-city representations in the Renaissance. The famous drawing by Leonardo da Vinci demonstrates the "well-formed man" whose outstretched limbs contained perfectly in a circle and a square, which urges that buildings should display the same harmonious relation of parts to whole as Vitruvius found in the human body. Thus the human body is not only seen as the origin of the building, but of the entire built environment -- this could be found evident in the writings of Alberti that "the city is like a large house and the house like a small city," and "every edifice is a body." A corporeal city needs not geometry or mathematics, for that man is the measure of all things.

However, major changes in representations of space and space of representations that took place in the early twentieth century shattered a certain space, a space Lefebvre defines as "the space of common sense, of knowledge, of social practice, of political power..." Urban modernisation blurs the distinction between interior and exterior, i.e. private and public, by using steel and glass to build transparent walls. The concept of the membrane that Lefebvre supplies suggests a possibility of coexistence, and that brings us to look more closely on the psychoanalysis of space.

The development of cities is based on need, and the priority has shifted from the representation of 'surface' to that of 'interface.' Today, our conception of space has gone beyond what our eyes can ascribe, and as a result, one can no longer find balance between physical and psychological space...

And is that it?? I came out of this writing totally confused as to not knowing the point of this essay and with a fear of what may (or may not) come next. The essay takes us through a history of the concept of the concept of space, and leaves the questions unresolved in a uncomfortable way -- "Today, the autistic response of total withdrawal, and the schizophrenic anxiety of the body in pieces, belong to our psychocorporeal forms of identification with the teletopological puzzel of the city in pieces."

And may I also add that the group discussion left me more confused than ever! Is the purpose of a reading group simply expressing one's feelings (direct responses to certain passages in the reading) without much reference to any other support material? A chat session would do just that. The point is though, I just need to chat more.

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Kamiyama Artist In Residence (KAIR) Program



Offers visual artists a residency in Kamiyama for a period of about 40 days in early autumn (September?)

Kamiyama? So I did a bit of research on it and found out its exact location: 日本国-四国島-徳島県-名西郡-神山町.. though still pretty confused... My geography is hopeless, all I see is this sushi party platter... Hmmm...

"art-i-japan.com" Survey for International Artists
http://art-i-japan.com/Questions.htm
... The "i" in "art-i-japan.com" stands for information, and eyes (eyes for the arts and the world). The sound "i" also means "love" in Japanese. We hope that "art-i-japan.com" can be a site to send our love to you, all the artists, and the world...

(got this link from Madame Seiko. Danke Seiko)
So when I was tryinf to fill in this questionnaire online the other day I got a bit stuck on the loving-Japan part... I mean.. even spending almost all of my life in the pacific rim, I know virtually nothing about this country... Or simply I am not an international artist!

I've actually never been interested in Japan, though supposedly every Taiwanese is to some degree Japanised -- the overwhelming influence before 1949 and media boom after 1987. Grandpa received Japanese education and witnessed the political turnover -- must had been a bit difficult I guess since I often heard his small complaints on the KMT party from time to time.

In any case I think I really should get to know Asian Art (things happening in Asia, artists from Asia, etc.) more, since in New Zealand, though geographically close, chances of seeing good Asian art are nearly impossible...

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lundi, mai 14, 2007

Auckland Art Fair


18-20 May 2007
Don't know exactly its significance
my say is that it has little
Yet who wouldn't want to be involved
If only its events and functions were
less pricey
120NZD entry to the elites' world
Perhaps I should just waitress there and see
what art they have to say and sell
the word 'vernissage' sounds
so much better than 'opening'
But
isn't it just an opening?


Vernissage is a French word that refers to the final flourishes made to a painting before public viewing. The word has evolved into a term which refers to the opening night of a significant art event. The Auckland Art Fair Vernissage gala party is just that."
whatever it is, it seems to have little to do with me
yet I still wish to go to the fair

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lundi, mai 07, 2007

What say you?


The latest installation piece, piece of shit that is


Crit Session 4/05/2007


An installation consisting of 2 horizontal lines of 6cm-square painted surfaces in the Elam Mt St Foyer that suggests the merging of 2D and 3D experience of space.


Is it site-specific?

From the first glance one may relate this work to the conceptual and minimalist explorations of space in the 70's, yet there is little evidence that this work is made specifically for the installation space. Rather, it seems more space-specific than in situ -- the squares are places where they are as a result of a brief investigation of the site, and they can be placed anywhere else in the same fashion. It is only when viewing the work from a distance one sees an effect of the line defining the space or setting a boundary. In this case the use of colour seems totally arbitrary and thus shows a lack of conscious artistic decision-making process.


How important is colour in this work?

The use of vivid colours in the work does attract the audience's attention and stimulate visual sensation to the experience of viewing. However, when one comes closer to the work and try to read into each square surfaces, one often feels confused or distracted -- for that each painted surface has no specified content, thus they appear to be hard to focus. The squares seem more like off-cuts of big paintings rather than carefully composed by the artist, which again shows a lack of artistic consciousness. Colour in this work, as a result, appears to be a fetishism of paint and has little effect on the exploration of painting/sculptural space in this work. It is totally unnecessary.


What can improve the work?

Though the squares may act as signatures of the artist, the whole work is void of personal engagement except the labouring from the artist. This can be dangerous if the artist relies on the physical input of the work but not the critical. Many aspects of this work seem ambiguous as to the presentation and what issues it provokes. The most interesting moment of this installation is when the line of squares goes over the surfaces of objects in the given space, i.e. a table. The line somehow dematerialises the surrounding objects and creates an illusion in the three-dimensional space. This would be a plausible direction for the artist to work toward to.


Contemporary artists that can be of reference are Matthew Ritchie, Jessica Stockholder, and Frank Stella.

Many thanks to Peter, Lisa, Fiona, Akiko, Trenton, Ben, Karena, and Kah-Bee

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