Polly Apfelbaum. Ed. Bennett Simpson

Polly Apfelbaum. Ed. Bennett Simpson. Phildelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. 2003.
ISBN 0884541037
UoA Fine Arts Library 759 A641

"Interview with Polly Apfelbaum by Claudia Gould" (11-9)
\\\\titling of work\\\
"Daisy Chain", "A Pocket Full of Posies", "Peggy Lee and the Dalmatians" contrast with "Ice", "Bones", "Reckless"... etc. contrast in the aesthetic qualities: initial pop/bang/explosion of colour followed by the sense of minute accumulation, accretion, form layered upon form...
(((Pop is never innocent)))
My work is never explicitly narrative, so the titles are always indirect - sometimes they refer to the process, but they are often simply meant to be evocative - I think Duchamp said that titles were like another colour in the work. (11) Using film titles as colour references, etc.

\\\creating entertainments\\\
(((music is very evocative and emotional, but never literal)))
The difference between music and "entertainments" is, for Apfelbaum, that the emotional content is very literal in entertainments whereas in music it's "less intellectual and more intuitive, but at the same time it's very precise. (14)

\\\influenced by taste in film and music\\\
(((my taste is very eclectic)))
I think there's an analogy with what I do - taking little pieces and rearranging them.... I am drawn to the quirky and not always popular.. Many of the pieces work from very explicit rules, or systems, but often - in fact just about always - the system is invisible. I guess I like that kind of tension, between the intuitive and the formal, or the emotional and the controlled. (15-7)

\\\the power of colour and form\\\
(((there's no pure abstraction)))
there is always some reference outside - a connection to place, to memory or to popular culture... By keeping the content indirect, I try to leave space for viewers, so they can bring their own experience to the work. The idea is to make the work rich enough, dense enough, or complex enough so that there is always something unexpected that may come out of that experience. (17)

"Having It All: Polly Apfelbaum at ICA by Ingrid Schaffner" (21-43)
\\\a contrarian\\\
Polly Apfelbaum believes you can have it all and she is determined to realise the possibility through her art ... "Every single painting has 100 more paintings in it, his [Matisse's] million decisions and indecisions are the picture ... Apfelbaum's art appears free of anxiety and stress. But like Matisse's, it is based on a similar desire to embody the irresolute, especially the immateriality of colour ... Her work involves the activities and occupies the space of sculpture, but makes a contentious bid for painting, sculpture, and installation to occur all at once, and to be experienced simultaneously ... Apfelbaum's art has sparked talk about issues of appropriation and abstraction, the legacies of minimalism and feminism, and, most recently, the powerful pleasures to be had in surrendering to design and bringing in architecture. (21)
We can have it all: colour, drawing, structure, formlessness, systems, chaos, thinking, doing, painting, sculpture, geometry, mess. These things don't necessarily cancel each other out. Indeed, polarising them simplifies complexities, which are not only challenging to consider, but pleasurable to embrace. (40)

\\\colour\\\
Sculpture is about form, not colour, which belongs to the precinct of painting. In an essay called "Colour and Sculpture: A Capricious Affair," art historian Frances Colpitt elaborated: "The rejection of colour in sculpture stems from the Western predilection for purity. From Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) to Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), theorists have demanded that each art form be true to its essential nature, with the implications that colour belongs to painting and is superfluous in sculpture." (26- Frances Colpitt, "Colour and Sculpture: A Capricious Affair," Chromaform: Colour in Sculpture, University of Texas at Antonio Art Gallery, 1998, 7.)
Since the Italian Renaissance, artists, philosophers, and critics have argued over the supremacy of drawing (disegno) versus colour (colore). It was a mind/body debate, as well as a moral and class issue: akin to writing, line was the intellect, with all the privileges due enlightenment. Beyond words, colour was sensual, immoral, tricky, dumb. (Anybody can enjoy it.) (40)
"Yes, colour grounds the value of art in the bodily social relationship between the beholder and the object, not in the shadow realm of the disembodied idea. Think about it!" -- Libby Lumpkin, "Vive la résistance: Polly Apfelbaum's Vanitás of Painting," Reckless, Helsinki: Kiasma, Studio K, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998, 13. (40)

\\\Feminism & Abjection\\\
The art market, along with the economy, had crashed, taking mainstream heroes like George Baselitz, Sandro Chia, Julian Schnabel and David Salle down with it. The culture wars called for artists (especially female, gay, and non-white artists) to champion difference and to degrade the canon with critical bodies and subversive politics -- or at least confuse it with hybrid practices and shape-shifting works of art. (26)
Slinky and cheap, textured and tactile, crushed velvet treated with Sennelier dye, a French brand available in 104 colours that she [Apfelbaum] pours directed out of the bottle, has been her main material since 1992 ... Apfelbaum had been distilling throughout her transition from readymade or found sculpture. The mark of the hand is now signified by the stain of the dye and by the gesture of arranging pieces of fabric on the floor. (29)

\\\stain\\\
In Apfelbaum's work, the stain isn't simply repulsive or taboo. It's smart, sensual, and full of feeling. Apfelbaum calls this sculpture "a beautiful mess." It operates equally as a critical and as a constructive object. (30)

\\\the question of rules\\\
Gilles Deleuze: "Folding -- unfolding no longer simply means tension -- release, contraction --dilation, but enveloping -- developing, involution, evolution." Instead of a system of oppositions and ruptures, Deleuze imagines one composed from continuities, which he elaborates elsewhere as elastic, affirming, flowing, and horizontal. (43)


"Polly Apfelbaum: 'I wanted the work to be... as sexy and hallucinogenic as possible.' by Irving Sandler" (49-53)
"I am interested not so much in attempting to invent new categories but in operating promiscuously and improperly -- poaching -- within fields seemingly already well defined." Her aim, as she said, was to "twist" these categories "into a different form." -- Polly Apfelbaum, "Statement for Chain, Vol. 2, one page typescript. (49)
Daisy Chain (1989): composed of found objects, simply juxtaposed, significantly titled, and exemplary of the post-Duchampian practices that were prevalent throughout the 1980s. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp's readymades and Andy Warhol's remades at a time when appropriation art was everywhere in the art world.
Ashley Bickerton, Sherrie Levine, & Haim Steinbach: appropriating newly-minted objects to make art that critiqued commodity culture.
Ann Hanilton, David Hammons, Donald Lipski, & Nancy Shaver: transposing things patinated by human touch and time, to convey cultural memory and a sense of loss. [with which Apfelbaum's use of the found object allied] (21)
Colour is notably absent from Apfelbaum's take on this work. Daisy Chain copies the printed set of shapes and their configuration in the form of raw wooden elements, laid out in rows upon the floor.
Pink Dalmatians (1992): She began to control her marks. "The pieces are dyed and cut out, then set on the floor, ordered and arranged to make more forms. The assemblage of pieces mobs through the space like an organic growth... Much of the work consists in directing its flow, organising and looking for new organisations in the liquid movements of fabric and stain." -- Polly Apfelbaum, "The Night," in Polly Apfelbaum, San Francisco: Walter/McBean Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute, 1997. (50)
Shaping each velvet swatch by hand is critical. With Matisse's cut-outs as a precedent, Apfelbaum said, "Cutting is drawing, almost." Scissoring into dyed fabric enabled her to draw directly into colour. (50) Decoration and handicraft materials and techniques are historically identified with women's work, which feminists rightly considered art ... Apfelbaum views her artistic enterprise as a quest for beauty. After all, the purpose of decoration is visual pleasure .. It is commonly thought that art that is pleasurable is or has to be mindless. Not so in the case of Apfelbaum's floor reliefs. In providing a conceptual component, she bridges pleasure and cerebration. As Wesley Gibson observed: "Here, beauty is intelligence, and intelligence is beauty." -- Wesley Gibson, "Reviews: Polly Apfelbaum," New Art Examiner, March 2001, 54. (51)
Apfelbaum's abstraction signifies her concern with "high" art. At the same time, she looks for inspiration to popular culture, notably in her material ... The diversity of interpretations that Apfelbaum's work evokes is such that at the same time you are reminded of "high" abstract art and popular culture, you are put in mind of lily pads, landscapes seen from on high, and other natural phenomena... her work is open to myriad readings. -- David Pagel, "A Supersaturated Return to the Spirit of the Punk Era," Los Angeles Times, May 10, 2002, Sec. F, 26. (51)
The underlying content of Apfelbaum's work is the tension between the structured and the unstructured. Her aim, as she sees it, is to compose an initial order, then to welcome disorder - or the unknown - and finally to order it. (52)


"Let's Twist Again by Tim Griffin" (59-60)
Bones (2000): The tubes are totemic, with their basic forms and serial layout; at the same time, they are completely, even uncomfortably ordinary, resembling so many rolled-up rugs on the ground. Embedded in their repetitions is the implication of manufactured items, but the pieces are obviously handmade, richly marked with the artist's trademark mottled patterns of coloured dye. This signature aspect draws the pieces away from the context of minimalist sculpture toward painting, taking potential artistic references off the floor and onto the wall. Evoking the formal purity of, say, Helen Frankenthaler's staining technique, whereby she allowed her paints to seep into canvas, these traces of the artist's hand invite closer inspection ... The majority of the piece is, in fact, wrapped up and completely out of view, enfolded within the layers of would fabric. Bones shows and withholds at once. (59)
Apfelbaum produces work in which two basic factions - whether medium, art history or popular culture - are at odds yet bound together inextricably, so that, as in Bones, the implications wind continuously outward and inward ... her works often have consisted of coloured strips and spots organised into patterns on the floor, invoking Jackson Pollock. But Apfelbaum has rendered Pollock's performative mode into a motif. The drip remains in place, but now registers as flat fabrics saturated with dye; and what was once the gestural trace of the creative subject is now organised according to a formal system set up by the artist. Indeed, any sense of "action" is displaced from artist to the viewer who must navigate the space shaped by the individual works. In this vein, Apfelbaum further closes the gap between painting and sculptural space, as the act of looking becomes more resolutely corporeal, more physical. (59-60)


The Color of My Fate (1989-1990)
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_1_92/ai_112131277/pg_2 http://citybeat.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A90962
http://citybeat.com/2003-12-10/art.shtml http://www.irhine.com/index.jsp?page=home_cac012504 http://contemporaryartscenter.org/exhibitions/apfelbaum

Donald Judd: Sculpture Prints Furniture

Judd Donald - Sculpture Prints Furniture

Donald Judd Sculpture, Prints, Furniture. Centro Cultural de Belém, 1997.
60's Abstract Expressionism in the United States
Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl André, Robert Morris, and Sol LeWitt --> Minimal art

Greenberg v.s. Judd
Judd's "specific objects": simple geometric forms purged of any traces of illusionism, metaphor, gesture of anthropomorphic references. His object's engagement with both the wall, floor and ceiling broke the traditional association of the wall with painting and theatre, and his rigorous engagement with scale, symmetry, volume and architectural space linked his art strongly with architecture. (5)
Judd's work subverted traditional notions of artistic creativity, which involved hierarchical relations between different elements. Instead, he used concepts such as gestalt, unity and indivisibility to realise his specific objects, each of which was conceived as a whole, with its own clearly-defined scale. With these primary structures, developed in repetitions of unitary, identical and symmetrical elements, Judd created a new lexicon. (5)

purity & forms
open & closed volumes
plain or coloured plywood, Plexiglas or metal.
space, scale & material.
painting & architecture

Judd, Donald. "Selected Writings". Donald Judd Sculpture, Prints, Furniture. Centro Cultural de Belém, 1997. 11-21

"Jean Arp". Arts, September 1963
part & whole relationship
example of Arp's sculpture: One of the most interesting aspects of Arp's sculpture [...] is that a good piece is a whole which has no parts. The protuberances can never clearly be considered other, smaller units; are not secondary units. This lack of distinct parts forces you to see the piece as a whole. The perception of wholeness dominates the impressions of its parts... (11) "Kenneth Noland", Arts. September 1963
& Norland's painting: Painting has to be as powerful as any kind of art; it can't claim a special identity, an existence for its own sake as a medium. If it does it will end up like lithography and etching. Painting now is not quite sufficient, although only in terms of plain power. It lacks the specificity and power of actual materials, actual colour, and actual space. (12)
"Specific Objects", Arts yearbook, 1965 The new three-dimensional work doesn't constitute a movement, school or style. The common aspects are too general and too little common to define a movement... (13)
In the paintings of Pollock, Rothko, Still and Newman, and more recently of Reinhardt and Noland, the rectangle is emphasized. The elements inside the rectangle are broad shapes and surface are only those which can occur plausibly within and on a rectangular plane [...] A painting is nearly and entity, one thing, and not the indefinable sum of a group of entities and references. (13)
Three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of the problem of illusionism and of literal space, space in and around marks and colors - which is riddance of one of the salient and most objectionable relics of European art. The several limits of painting are no longer present. A work can be as powerful as it can be thought to be... Obviously, anything in three dimensions can be any shape, regular or irregular, and can any have relation to the wall, floor, ceiling, room, rooms or exterior or none at all... (14)
Materials vary greatly and are simply materials -- Formica, aluminum, cold-rolled steel, Plexiglas, red and common brass, and so forth. They are specific. If they are used directly, they are more specific. Also, they are usually aggressive. There is an objectivity to the obdurate identity of a material. Also, of course, the qualities of materials -- hard mass, soft mass, thickness of 1/32, 1/16, 1/8 inch, pliability, slickness, translucency, dullness -- have unobjective uses. (15) A painting isn't an image. The shapes, the unity, projection, order and color are specific, aggressive and powerful. (16)"

Don Judd: an interview with John Coplans
Originally published in Don Judd, Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, California, 1971
yea, kinda boring the interview. not much point made.

Review: Hal Foster
Originally published in ARTFORUM magazine, 1978
Rosalind Krauss wrote of a Robert Morris piece, 'the specific configuration of the work is not allowed to become a figure seen against the "ground" of the object's "real" structure'. (Artforum, November 1973) When a box is aligned with the wall, it may have more to do with the illusionism of painting: each box, like a canvas, is seen as a natural extension of our own visual field. (44) Sculpture that is Minimalist in origin must face the brand of "theatre" applied to Minimalism proper by Michael Fried (Artforum, Summer 1967). To Fried the Minimalist object is theatrical insofar as it imposes as a presence, a presence that provokes a situation between viewer and itself. This he spurned as not self-critical. (45) Not only does Minimalist sculpture have a physical presence, i.e. command a situation or theatre, it also speaks to a metaphysical presence, i.e. to a plenitude, not an "exhaustion", of gestalt, forms, ideas, etc. (46) Rosalind Krauss noted, Judd used forms that seemed given, forms that were somehow a priori. This was done in order to delimit (or disguise) intentionality, what she called "the intention-laden grammar of process", and the presence implicit therein. To Krauss the idea was to make meaning "a function of external space" as opposed to a function of internal space, that metaphorical realm where the operations of the constitutive mind occur. She saw the break with the 'Cartesianism' that was the ground of "Western illusionism". (47)

Donald Judd's Equivocal Objects Prudence Carlson
Originally published in ART IN AMERICA, Brant Publications Inc., January 1984.
As always, Judd's new boxes, whether single or arranged in series, are emphatically self-referential objects that wed form, material and content and that, as a consequence, "exist between mind and matter, detached from both and representing neither" (Noted in Lucy R. Lippard, "Cult of the Direct and the Difficult", Changing, New York, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1971, 116). hmm, pretty repetitive about Judd's practice. no need to note more i guess.

Chinese Traditional Style Dress, etc.

The patter of ancient dress were classified into two groups:
"Coat-and-skirt" worn mainly by women;
"One-piece" by men.

Stringent rules are made for the colour of ancient dress and adornment:
Yellow is the most valuable colour as a symbol of centre;
Green, red, white and black symbolise the East, the South, the West and the North respectively.
They are the pure colours applied by the emperors and officials. The common people could only apply the secondary colours.

Patterns:
The geometrical patterns, pictures of animals and plants were widely adopted on ancient dress and adornments. Before Shag (商) and Zhou (周), patterns were primitive, succinct and abstract.
After Zhou (周), compositions of the patterns became more balanced and symmetric. The attention to composition carried on through Tang (唐) and Song (宋).
From Ming (明) and Qing (清), most patterns became more realistic. The depictions of flowers, animals and mountains-and-waters were true to life.

Variety and consistency in clothing were roughtly established by the era of the Yellow Emperor (黃帝) and the Emperors Yao and Shun (堯舜) (about 4500 years ago); sophistication and refinement of clothing in the Shang (商) Dynasty (16th - 11th century B.C.) were demonstrated in remains of woven silk and hemp articles..

Darker colours were favoured over lighter ones in traditional Chinese clothing, so the main colour of ceremonial clothing tended to be dark while bright, elaborate tapestry designs accented. Lighter coloured clothing was worn more frequently by the common people for everyday and around the house use.

The Chinese associate certain colours with specific seasons:
Green represents spring;
red symbolises summer;
white represents autumn;
and black symbolises winter.

External - elegance
Internal - symbolism

colours & their meanings

The Meaning of Colours
Many reactions to colour are instinctual, universal and cross cultural boundaries.
"Colors also convey messages that go beyond ethnic, racial, or gender boundaries. According to a 1997 survey by Cooper Marketing Group, Oak Park, IL,
power is represented by the color scarlet red for 25% of respondents, black for 17% and bright violet blue for 13%. More than 55% of those surveyed
chose one of these three colors out of 100 colors. Fragility was most represented by pale pink (27%), white (9%), and pale lavender (9%)."

Other associations with colours are specific to a culture or regions. Mixing appropriate amounts of different colours however can neutralise inherent negative cultural connotations.

Web design which achieves successful marketing results is sensitive to the cultural, instinctual and iconic meanings of colour in relation to the product being promoted and considers the cultural backgrounds and gender of the targeted clientele. Avoiding the extremes of sheer garishness and boredom, effective design displays symphonic colour arrangements of shades, tints, tones and complementarities to tantalise and maintain interest. Adding textures too can alter colours - a roughly textured surface makes a colour seem darker, while a smooth surface lightens the same colour.

Colour trends may defy instinctual, cultural and iconic constraints - for example, the recent craze for vivid lime green. As Jill Morton says: "Psychologically, the 'anti-aesthetic' colors may well capture more attention than those on the aesthetically-correct list. History clearly demonstrates that this has been a prevalent trend in art since the turn of the 20th century, when Dada's urinals and snow shovels put an end to the era of Matisse and French Impressionism.

Red
European : Danger (stop signs), love (hearts), excitement (for sale signs)
China : Traditional bridal colour, good luck, celebration, happiness, joy, vitality, long life, summoning, the direction South. Chinese saying goes "when something is so red, it is purple" - red purple brings luck and fame.
Japan : life
India : Purity
Eastern : Joy (with white)
Hebrew : sacrifice, sin
Christian : sacrifice, passion, love
USA : Christmas (with green), Valentine's day (with white)
South Africa : Mourning
Australian aboriginals : the land, earth, ceremonial ochre
Cherokees : success
Hopi : the direction South
Romans : Red flag signified the onset of battle
Celtic : Death, afterlife
Feng Shui : Yang, Fire, good luck, money, respect, recognition, protection, vitality

Red : Energy, strength, passion, eroticism, cheerfulness, courage, element of fire, career goals, fast action, lust, desire, blood, vibrancy, driving forces, risk, fame, love, survival, war, revolution, danger, aggression, strength, power, determination, emotional intensity, sex, provoking, dynamic, stimulating, courage, bravery, good-tasting, force, leadership, drama, excitement, speed, heat, warmth, violence, attention, generosity, romance
Red stimulates metabolism, increases respiration rate, perspiration, appetite and raises blood pressure. Red is a strong masculine colour.
Red tends to promote images and text, making objects appear larger and closer, though less than yellow coloured objects. Bright red can be annoying if used over large areas and is useful as a iconic colour to encourage people to act quickly eg. on buy or click here buttons. An apetite stimulant, red is useful for promoting products associated with energy ... drinks, cars, sports and games.


Care is need using red in proximity with green ... as the old adage goes: 'Red and green should not be seen without something in between'.
Mixing bright blue and bright red is also not recommended ... the combination is very tiring on the eye.

Light red : joy, sexuality, passion, sensitivity, love, indecision
Dark red : willpower, rage, wrath, tenseness, vigour, anger, leadership, courage, yearning, malice, wrath
Maroon : Yang, indecisiveness


Pink
European : Feminine colour, baby girls
East India : Feminine colour
Japan : Popular with both sexes
Korea : trust
Feng Shui : Yin, love

Pink : Romance, love, friendship, femininity, truth, passivity, good will, emotional healing, peace, calming, affection, emotional maturity, caring, nurturing, sweet tasting, sweet smelling, ethereal, delicacy.
Pale pink : sweetness of youth, fragility
Vibrant pinks : high spirits, energy, youth


Orange
European : Autumn, creativity, harvest
Netherlands : Favourite colour (House of Orange)
Ireland : Protestants
USA : Halloween, cheap goods
Hinduism : Saffron (peachy orange) is a sacred color
Feng Shui : Yang, Earth, strengthens concentration, purpose, organization

Orange : warmth, energy, balance, enthusiasm, vibrancy, vitality, expansiveness, flamboyance, excitement, business goals, property deals, ambition, career, goals, general success, justice, legal matters, selling, action, attention-grabbing, the sun, friendly, inviting, intense, joy, strength, endurance, steadfastness, tropics, quick movement, wealth of the mind and knowledge, charity, growing things, fascination, friendliness, happiness, beginnings, heat, creativity, autumn, determination, attraction, success, encouragement, courage, earth, mental and appetite stimulatant, emotional lift, assurance, social force, health, warmth, attractiveness, cheerfulness, mood-lightening, uninhibited, independence, amiability, constructiveness, self-assuredness, cheap, low-budget, fun kids colour, youth
In restaurants, as orange is an appetite stimulant, orange decor encourages sales. Less passionate than red, orange still increases oxygen supply to the brain, stimulating mental activity. Popular amongst youth.
Orange backgrounds help images seem closer and larger, but avoid over-use. Useful for highlighting important elements, promoting food products and toys.
"As we turned our sights to orange, substantial research (including the data gathered at The Global Color Survey at www.colormatters.com and the Pantone Consumer Color Preference Study; dated June 1996) documented that orange is one of Americans' least favorite colors. ... In 1991, Forbes called attention to orange's mundane associations in its December 23 article, 'Does orange mean cheap?' Yes, it does."
Dark orange : autumn, deceit, distrust
Red orange : desire, sexuality, pleasure, domination, aggression, thirst for action
Bright orange : tangy citrus, health
Pale orange : apricot, coral, peach and melon are sophisticated


Brown
Colombia : discourages sales
Australian Aboriginals : colour of the land, ceremonial ochre
Feng Shui : Yang, Earth, industry, grounded

Brown : friendships, special events, earth, materialistic thoughts, hearth, home, outdoors, inexpensive, reliability, credibility, comfort, endurance, stability, simplicity, comfort, longevity, intimacy, tranquility, masculine, nurturing, contentment, strength, sensuality, productivity, passivity, fertility, generosity, dirt, substance, practicality, hard work
Brown is too low key if used broadly without texture or another color to enhance it. Useful for promoting food and outdoor products for work and play.
Reddish-brown : harvest, autumn
Beiges and tans : Yang, sophistication, neatness, conceals emotion
Copper : passion, money goals, professional growth, business productivity, career moves
Coffee browns : sophistication, richness, robustness, panache


Gold
World-wide : Success, high quality, money
Feng Shui : Yang, Metal, God consciousness

Gold : wealth, god, winning, safety, masculine power, happiness, playful humour, prestige, wisdom, love of spirit, meaning, purpose, awe, spiritual love,
quests of the heart, desire for power, mystic powers, higher mathematics, sciences, attainment, concentration.
Gold and navy (credibility) are the best combination for selling to men and the second best for selling to women.


Yellow
European : Hope, joy, happiness, hazards, cowardice, weakness, taxis
Asia : sacred, imperial
China : Nourishing, royalty
Egypt : Mourning
Japan : Courage
India : Merchants
Buddhism : wisdom
Feng Shui : Yang, Earth, auspicious, sunbeams, warmth, motion

Yellow : sun, intelligence, light, accelerated learning, memory, logical imagination, social energy, cooperation, organisation, breaking mental blocks, sunshine, joy, happiness, intellect, energy, cheerfulness, optimism, purity, enthusiasm, warmth, honour, loyalty, mental force, clarity, perception, understanding, wisdom, dishonesty, betrayal, jealousy, covetousness, deceit, disease, weakness, caution, cowardice, follower, curiosity, mellowness, confidence, humour, dreams, creativity, desire to improve, action, idealism, optimism, imagination, hope, summer, philosophy, uncertainty, restlessness, glory, enlightenment
Yellow stimulates mental activity, generates muscle energy and attracts attention - it is the colour most visible to the human eye. Thus yellow objects move to the forefront. Students who study in yellow rooms do better in exams. Cheerful yellow can be used to promote food especially in combination with other fruit and vegetable tones, children's and leisure products and is best used as a highlight. With overuse, yellow can be disturbing and promote anxiety. Babies cry more in yellow rooms. Yellow against black denotes a warning ... the sting of the bee.
Yellow is not a practical colour to use when selling expensive items to men ... they perceive it as an untrustworthy and childish ... and avoid yellow if you
wish to evoke safety and stability. Care is needed with shades of yellow as they can lose their warmth and appear dirty.
Dull yellow : caution, decay, sickness, jealousym aging
Light yellow : intellect, freshness, and joy
Ivory/cream : quiet, pleasantness, calm, understated elegance, purity, softness, more rich and warm than white


Green
China : Exorcism, green hats indicate a man's wife is cheating on him.
Japan : Life.
Islam : Hope - the cloak of the prophet was thought to be green, virtue - only those of perfect faith can wear green.
Ireland : Symbol of the entire country, Catholics
European/USA : Spring, new birth, go, safe, environmental awareness, Saint Patrick's Day, Christmas (with red)
USA : Money
Feng Shui : Yin, Wood, growing energy, refreshing, nurturing, balancing, harmony normalising, healing, health, peaceful, calming

Green : earth mother, physical healing, monetary success, abundance, fertility, tree & plant magic, growth, food, hope, personal goals, resurrection, renewal, youth, stability, endurance, freshness, nature, environment, tranquil, refreshing, quiet, hope, immortality, health, healing, good luck, renewal, youth, jealousy, inexperience, trees, grass, vigour, growth, harmony, responsiveness, generosity, safety, envy, misfortune, quietude, compassion, renewal, moderation, nurturing, diplomacy, calm, contemplation, joy, love, abundance, balance, self-control, inexperience, hope, good omens, soothing, sharing, dependability, friendliness
Green lowers blood pressure, relaxes the nervous system, calms and soothes the mind, stimulates creativity, and is an appetite suppressant. Green is easy on the eye and can improve vision. Images set in green backgrounds seem farther away. Green is popular in most cultures.
Useful as a marketing colour for organic, healthy and natural 'green' products.
Dark green : money, ambition, greed, jealousy, heaviness, prestige, promotes concentration
Yellow-green/lime green : sickness, cowardice, discord, and jealousy, nausea - don't use this colour for promoting food products as it's an appetite depressant.
Olive green : peace
Avocado : 60s and 70s refridgerators
Blue greens : most accepted colour group across gender lines


Turquoise
Ancient Persians : warding off evil eye
Turquoise : calming, emotional healing, protection, refreshing, sophisticated
Turquoise is equally popular with men and women. Mixes well with pale pinks and lavenders for a feminine look. Create a retro scenario
with turquoise and pink or art deco by combining it with white and black. Combined with grey, silver, terra cotta and tans, it produces a
southwestern USA look. With orange or yellow, it creates an innovative, fresh image suitable for sports-oriented sites.
Light Turquoise : feminine
Teal : sophisticated


Blue
European : soothing, "something blue" bridal tradition
Cherokees : defeat, trouble
Iran : mourning
China : immortality
Colombia : soap
Hinduism : the colour of Krishna
Judaism : holiness
Christianity : Christ's colour
Catholicism : colour of Mary's robe
Middle East : protection
Worldwide : 'safe' colour
Feng Shui : Yin, Water, calm, love, healing, relaxation, peace, trust, adventure, exploration

Blue : good fortune, communication, wisdom, protection, spiritual inspiration, calmness, reassurance, gentleness, fluidity, water, sea, creativity, peace,
calming, higher thoughts, mystery, sky, formality, travel, devotion, progress, quiet wisdom, freedom. betterment of humanity, love, trust, loyalty, intelligence, reassurance, artistry, compassion, inner strength, devotion, depression, sadness, tranquility, stability, unity, truth, understanding, confidence, acceptance, conservatism, security, cleanliness, order, comfort, cold, technology, devotion, harmony, depth, faith, heaven, piety, sincerity, precision, intellect, sadness, consciousness, speech, messages, ideas, sharing, cooperation, idealism, sincerity, empathy, relaxation, affection, inspiration, friendship, patience, contemplation, infinity, harmony, non-threatening, dependability
Some believe blue slows the metabolism and suppresses the appetite. As it does not require the eye to focus, images and objects recede in blue backgrounds.
With overuse, can create feelings of cold. Although also popular with women, blue is the predominant favourite colour of males and is suited to web sites involving and promoting technology, medical products, cleanliness, air, sky, water, sea and automotives. Blue is the favourite colour of more than half of the world's people - it is the colour least disliked by most cultures.
High impact designs can be created with combinations of blue, red and yellow. Combinations of light and dark blues can create feelings of trust.
Pale Blue : ethereal, delicate, calming, health, healing, tranquility, understanding, softness
In combination with pinks and pale yellows, creates the image of spring.
Aqua : freshness, pristine, vigour, movement, dramatic, confidence, strength, individualism, eccentricity, humour, fearlessness, festivity
Royal Blue : richness, superiority, cold
Dark blue : depth, expertise, stability, credibility (especially with gold), intellect, wisdom, corporate colour, warmth, knowledge, power, integrity, seriousness, knowledge, health, decisiveness, law, order, logic, dependability, serenity
Combining dark and lighter shades of blue creates a conservative and sophisticated look.


Purple
Thailand : Mourning
European : Royalty
Catholicism : Mourning, death, crucifixion
Feng Shui : Yin, spiritual awareness, physical and mental healing

Purple : influence, third eye, psychic ability, spiritual power, self assurance, hidden knowledge, dignity, high aspirations, royalty, spirituality, nobility, ceremony, mystery, transformation, wisdom, enlightenment, sophistication, cruelty, arrogance, intuition, dreams, unconscious, invisible, telepathy, empathy, imagination, deja vu, universal spirit, spiritual connection, deeper truth, nobility, wealth, extravagance, dignity, independence, magic, creativity, energy, self-confidence, ego, ambition, fame, luxury, big profits, richness, sensuality, elegance, contemplation, meditation, majesty, lesbianism, Wicca, New Age spirituality, paganism, conceit, arrogance, nausea
Almost 75 percent of pre-adolescent children prefer purple to all other colors, making bright purple effective for promotion of children's products. Light purple is useful for feminine designs. Excessive exposure to purple may cause people to become sullen, withdrawn and ill-at-ease with their surroundings. Purple is a polarising colour - people either love it or hate it.
Lavender : Yang, sexual indecision, malleability, romance, nostalgia, feminity
Dark purple : gloom, sadness, frustration, royalty, richness
Mauve : Yang, world consciousness
Violet : Meditation, creativity, concentration, quietness, creative force, beauty, inspiration, artistry, music, chivalrous love, excellence, ethereal, sensuality,
responsibility, sacrifice
Blue purple : mystical
Red purple : sensual, quirky


White
European : Marriage, angels, hospitals, doctors, peace, milk
Japan : Mourning, white carnation means death
China : Death, mourning
India : Unhappiness
Eastern : Funerals
Feng Shui : Yang, Metal, death, mourning, ancestal spirits, ghosts, poise, confidence

White : spirituality, goddess, peace, higher self, purity, virginity, reverence, simplicity, cleanliness, humility, precision, innocence, youth, birth, winter,
snow, good, sterility, cold, clinical, sterility, clarity, perfection, innocence, virginity, goodness, light, fairness, safety, positivity, faith, coolness, charity, successful innovations, union, self-sacrifice, holiness, feminine divinity, pristine, chastity, positivity
All white rooms can be uncomfortable with a stark atmosphere. White is useful for a background or accent colour as it highlights other colours. White is perceived by the eye as a brilliant colour.
White can indicate simplicity with high-tech products and safety and cleanliness with medical products.


Silver
Feng Shui : Yin, Metal, trustworthiness, romance.
Silver : glamous, distinguishment, high tech, industrial, graceful aging, telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, psychometry, intuition, dreams,
astral energies, female power, communication, goddess, ornate riches, sleekness, modernity
To create a high-tech look, use silver with other colours. Silver works well combined with gold and white to promote a feeling of control and power.
Silver and other reflectors are strong eye attractors and are associated with life-giving water.


Grey
Feng Shui : Yin, Metal, dead, dull, indefinite

Grey : security, reliability, intelligence, staid, modesty, dignity, maturity, solid, conservative, practical, old age, sadness, boring, practicality,
professional, sophisticated, durability, quality, quiet, conservativeness, gloominess, sadness


Black
European : Funerals, death, mourning, rebellion, cool, restfulness
China : Colour for young boys
Thailand : Bad luck, unhappiness, evil
Judaism : Unhappiness, bad luck, evil
Australian Aboriginals : colour of the people, ceremonial ochre
Feng Shui : Yin, Water, money, income, career success, emotional protection, power, stability, bruises, evil

Black : protection, repelling negativity, binding, shapeshifting, power, sexuality, sophistication, formality, elegance, classy, wealth, power, mystery, fear, evil, anonymity, unhappiness, depth, style, evil, sadness, remorse, anger, underground, modern music, space, high quality, bad luck, formality, reservedness, dignity, elegance, secretiveness, fear of the unknown, night, emptiness, dirtiness, sophistication, strength of character, dramatic, authority, prestige, grief, anger, reliability, strong, classic, strength, anti-establishment, modernism, serious
Black is an excellent technical colour and it assist targetting a sophisticated high-end market or a youth market to add mystery.
Over a large area, black can be depressing. Though black backgrounds can enhance perspective and depth, they diminish readibility of text. Useful for web sites for art and photography to help other colours to vibrate

Reading Group Report: Painting's Critical Force in Our Times

In the reading group meetings for Critical Studies each person contributed a reading of his/her own interest to be read and discussed by group members during the four meeting sessions. For the interdisciplinary nature of the course, we encountered a variety of subjects of the readings submitted[1] – subjects ranged almost arbitrarily that would have had seem like a jumble of titles and compositions. Some interesting conversations took place during the discussion; yet generating in-depth debates within the given timeframe requires a thorough comprehension of most fields in the arts. After a sound investigation and re-reading of the articles submitted by members of the group, I have come to realise that despite the range of topics, there are fundamental issues in the practice of art that concern us all.

In this report I will first give an overall look of my interest in the works of Daniel Buren and his dedication to theorising the practice of art through his bands. Buren's surprising long career working in situ is not a success by luck; I will shed light on how he has contextualised the bands, and from there relate to other practice of similar nature. One of the readings in the group I find most relevant to Buren's practice is Jane Rendell's Art and Architecture. In her book Rendell introduces the term "Critical Spatial Practice" to title the specific kind of practice that operates outside of the galleries' physical limits. Much like Buren's work, such practices often have strong attachment/reference to social reality. Also, from Victor Burgin's The City in Pieces, we get a better understanding of the developments of the concept of space – focused on the psychological approach, exposing the intervening relationship between physical and virtual spaces. Relating it to art-making, many artists have looked at the ambiguous in-between areas and incorporated new technology that encourages the participation in the process. The analogy made between film and painting by Walter Benjamin (Harrison, 513-4) gives a good comparison between the so-called "new" and "old". I would, to end this report, argue that painting as one of the primarily art forms has the ability to accept, adopt, and transform.

During shift in social structure as a result of urbanisation in the 1960s, many social movements took place including the student revolution in Paris in May 1968. Buren as an active artist in Paris at that time decided to make only works in situ, always using 8.7 centimetre-wide vertical stripes, alternating coloured with white or transparent. This format had not been assimilable to the codes of art. The anonymity of the bands suggests that the creator is no longer the owner of his/her work, and it is not his/her work, but a work. The bands have a consistency that ensures the exposure to be viewed in different places and at different times; and the repetition of the bands shows that there is no perfectibility.

The system that Buren employs does not direct attention to the bands; rather, the bands are produced, placed/displaced to be looked at. In an accompanying essay to an exhibition of his painting at Yvon Lambert in early 1971 titled Critical Limits, Buren's interest in the Althusserian notion of a "theoretical practice" could be found evident [2]; yet for him, the act of painting precedes writings and goes beyond them. It is an act of a political one: when he pastes fabric or paper stripes in public places, paints bands in the wall space between art works in a gallery, raises flags outside of a museum on the streets, he is referencing the act of painting to its historical context. He believes that every artist is obliged to pass over the sociological aspect of the proposition before him/her due to lack of space and considerations of priority among the questions to be analysed.

When we look at how Buren's bands came about, we might be intrigued in what may have seemed to be a purely conceptual and minimal practice to be deeply rooted in the significance of painting. Cézanne has been a central reference to Buren whose revolutionary contribution to painting in abandoning illusionism and representation. He poses questions on the possibility of treating painting as painting – that is, as painted, or as paint itself. This concern for painting is an acknowledgement of painting's physical limits, namely, its subject matter, support, frame, dimension, etc. What Buren has done with the creation of his signature stripes is to explore how peinture (art of painting) as opposed to tableau (covered pictorial dimension) opens beyond itself by virtue of the limits that define it and onto a field that exposes the institutional and cultural frameworks that it takes its presence.

One of the foremost limits of painting is dimension, i.e. space. Buren's in situ works incorporate the stripes as a visual tool with architectural structures that extend both painting and architectural spaces. Yet it is not only a visual attempt to work on sites – often, site-specific works focus more on reformulating the ways in which space is understood and practiced. There is a branch of practice that is set in an interdisciplinary terrain that deals with urban condition, both critically and spatially. Jane Rendell presents the term "Critical Spatial Practice" (2006) to name this branch. She points out that in the 1960s and 1970s numerous social and art movements were informed by an interest in architecture and public space. Since then, the discussion on the urban condition within different academic disciplines has created an in-between place for art and architecture for the aspects of the spatial, the temporal, and the social. Exhaustive background of the developments of the concept of space can be found in Victor Burgin's The City in Pieces. In this essay Burgins analyses on urbanisation in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Henri Lefebvre are elaborated. He notes that major changes in representations of space and space of representations that took place in the early twentieth century shattered a certain space, a space which Lefebvre describes as a psychological one [3]. From an architectural perspective, one of the most visible changes of style is the walls made of steel and glass. Lefebvre supplies the concept of the membrane (Lefebvre, 175-6) which suggests a possibility of coexistence – the coexistence of inside and outside, of private and public – in other words, urban modernisation blurs the distinction between such boundaries. As for Benjamin, walls of steel and glass construct the image of the modern, and that porosity, transparency, light, and free air are the essential components that represent the twentieth century (Benjamin, 292).

Buren's in situ installations in historical sites offer a genuine insight into engaging and contextualising the spatial and social functions of painting as a practice of art. These functions, explains Rendell, are different from the architectural functions of sheltering or responding to social needs. "Art offers a place and occasion for new kinds of relationship 'to function' between people. (Rendell, 4)" Les Deux Plateaux installation in the courtyard of Palais Royal in Paris is a good example. This work completed in 1986 provoked an intense debate over the integration of contemporary art and historic buildings during that time. This work, then, has become a platform for conversations between the conventional and the contemporary, the authoritative and the questionable, as well as between art and architecture. From a conventional painting point of view, the stripes in its two-dimensional form are capable of conveying the three-dimensionality of the given space.

Buren's increasing use of transparency in recent years has consolidated the function of the membrane. The installation Plus grand ou plus petit que ?(Bigger or Smaller?) in the Castle of Tours, France (see images) harmonises the confines of art space and public space on such a scale that once approaches the work, one begins to wonder whether it is the castle that exposes the work, or the work that exposes the castle; and which has more influence over the other. This relationship people create in the production and occupation of art and architecture makes it not only a work made to be seen but to be experienced. The application of painting (including also the stripes and transparencies) has permeated the physical architectural configuration through the castle's historical bourgeois significance into a change of ownership from that of the private to the public; hence to a state that seeks active social engagements.


1.
Daniel Buren.
Plus grand ou plus petit que ? 2006.
Château de Tours, France
Photograph : hsiaohui, 2006.
Glass windows on each level are tinted in red, yellow, and green consequently from top to ground floor.



2.
Daniel Buren.
Plus grand ou plus petit que ? 2006.
Château de Tours, France
Photograph : hsiaohui, 2006.
Floor and walls are fully painted in the colour themed on the entire level. Occasional stripes appear around edge of the windowsill



3.
Daniel Buren.
Plus grand ou plus petit que ? 2006.
Château de Tours, France
Photograph : hsiaohui, 2006.
Public occupation has given a dynamic aspect to this work.

Since the age of modernisation, the advance in technology has had the most remarkable development. Today, our conception of space has gone beyond what our eyes can ascribe – such as the invention of fast-speed vehicles that distort our concept of distance; radio and internet that alter our ways of communication; television and cinema that confuse our perception of reality. As a result, one can no longer find balance between physical and psychological space. Benjamin's analogy comparing the cameraman and the painter[4] concludes that film offers a more significant reality through permeation with mechanical equipment. Mechanical reproduction of art has made it accessible to a wider audience, yet art that is meant for the masses loses its critical force, for that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. While celebrating the expansion of perception of space brought by modernisation, what we cannot ignore is the danger of getting lost in interface due to the excess of information. How, then, should the practice of art in our times function its critical apparatus?

Compared to the mass media, for Benjamin, a painting has always had an excellent chance to be viewed by one person or by a few. However, from what I have presented with examples of Buren's works and introduction on Rendell's Critical Spatial Practice, painting as a practice of art is apt at public engagement as well as maintaining its critical force. Although in the current atmosphere of critical theory, painting seems to be an ambivalent subject, for that it is set within its own physical frames and limits. I would argue that critical theories based on language and semantics cannot be the sole determinant of a work’s meaning and significance. I identify with Rendell's view on critical theory, that it is reflective rather than objectifying. Thus the critical force is the level of ability to transform rather than describe the work/practice. Apart from Buren, there are other animated artists who exercise similar practices – practices that arise from issues in painting and extend to embrace collaboration. For example, Sarah Hughes' largely ephemeral installations that explore space through pattern, combining the traditional motif of the paisley and the formal devices of Op Art, recent installations trace sources high and low, the overlapping and intersecting conditions of production and of use. Michael Lin Min-Hong borrows flower patterns from traditional Taiwanese fabrics to make large-scale installations that invite the viewer to share the space of art and architecture in socially contemplative ways. Lin's installations act as vernacular interactions where the hierarchical structures of painting, culture, museum practice, and social exchange are mentarily subverted. Polly Apfelbaum wanders through the ambivalent space between painting, sculpture, and installation by creating dyed fabric laid on the floor that deals with the relativity of time, feminist issues, and complexity in what appears to be simplicity. Katharina Grosse's combination of painting with architecture and sculpture produces an immersive experience, in which her work physically encompasses us rather than solely hanging on a wall. All of these examples show that the perception of space can be critically provoked by certain practices of art. I believe in what Rendell defines as the function of art [5], and painting as one of the primarily art form/practice is still capable of sustaining it.



Notes
[1] The group I was assigned to consists of the following members and the readings from each individual are indicated below:
N.C.
"Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 1936." Art in Theory 1900-1990. An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Blackwell, 1995. 512-9
A.D.
Heiser, Jörg. "Emotional Rescue." Frieze. Issue 71: 70-5
B.D.
von Drathen, Doris. "Private Crossing." Vortex of Silence – Proposition for an Art Criticism Beyond Aesthetic Categories. Milano, Italy, 2004. 83-92
F.G.
Krauss, Rosalind E. "The Destiny of the Formless." Formless – A User's Guide. New York: Zone Books NY, 1997. 235-55
S.H.
Rendell, Jane. "A Place Between." Art and Architecture: A Place Between. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006. 1-12Ibid. “Collaboration.” 153-61
H.H.
"Daniel Buren." As Painting: Division and Displacement. Ed. Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon, and Stephen Melville. Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts, the Ohio State University, 2001. 86-9
A.S.
Burgin, Victor. "The City in Pieces." In/Different Spaces – Places and Memory in Visual Culture. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996.
[2] Buren's statement in the essay: "The following text results from a specific practice or work which is meant TO BE SEEN. This text is only the demonstration, presentation of this work, and not its theory. It could be considered as an illustraction of the work in question. It is dictated by the work itself and it not an abstract and purified image of some future project." (Armstrong, 87)
[3] Lefebvre: "Around 1910 a certain space was shattered. It was the space of common sense, of knowledge [savoir], of social practice, of political power… the space, too, of classical perspective and geometry […] bodied forth in Western art and philosophy, as in the form of the city and town." (Lefebvre, 25-26)
[4] Walter Benjamin in his essay of 1936 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction makes an analogy with a surgical operation to compare the different approaches to healing a sickness between the surgeon (hence, the cameraman) and that of the magician (hence, the painter) to which he infers that while the magician maintains a natural distance between the patient and himself, the surgeon penetrates into the patient's body.
[5] "… art is functional in providing certain kinds of tools for self-reflection, critical thinking and social" (Rendell, 4)



Bibliography
Brennan, Stella Brennan. "Pattern Recognition: The Art of Sara Hughes." Art New Zealand. Issue 112, Spring 2004.
Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften vol.5. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1772; quoted in Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 303
Burgin, Victor. "The City in Pieces." In/Different Spaces – Places and Memory in Visual Culture. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996.
Crimp, Douglas. "The End of Painting." October vol.16, 1981. 69-86
"Daniel Buren." As Painting: Division and Displacement. Ed. Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon, and Stephen Melville. Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts, the Ohio State University, 2001. 86-9
von Drathen, Doris. "Private Crossing." Vortex of Silence – Proposition for an Art Criticism Beyond Aesthetic Categories. Milano/Italy, 2004. 83-92
Heiser, Jörg. "Emotional Rescue." Frieze. Issue 71: 70-5
Krauss, Rosalind E. "The Destiny of the Formless." Formless – A User's Guide. New York: Zone Books NY, 1997. 235-55
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell Publishing Limited, September 1, 1991
Michael Lin. Ed. Ivy Cooper. Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2004.
Nadaner, Dan. "Painting in an Era of Critical Theory". Studies in Art Education vol.39 No.2 winter, 1998. 168-82
Rendell, Jane. "A Place Between." Art and Architecture: A Place Between. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006. 1-12
Ibid. "Collaboration." 153-61
"Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 1936." Art in Theory 1900-1990. An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Blackwell, 1995. 512-9

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:

• "Où est Jean-Marc Bustamante ?" MAP 04
• Klapka, Ronald. "Renvoyer le spectateur à lui-même, à sa place dans le monde." remue.net. 3 février 2006.
  Je suis chaque jour blessé de voir que, dans un pays dit civilisé, l’art contemporain n’intéresse que si peu de gens. - Bustamante
  (Seeing that, in a so-called civilised country, only such few people are interested in contemporary art hurts me everyday.)
  
• McGee, John. "Jean-Marc Bustamante: Private Crossing." Metropolis Japans No.1 English Magazine

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.