#LiveArtHistory W4: World Making

This week we explored ‘world making’ – where art both constructs worlds and creates a narrative or commentary about the world. We saw different ways of tackling the 2D aspects of flat planes to imply 3D space – with geometry, lines and grids in the Renaissance and with oil paints creating light to solidify subjects bursting out of 2D space, in the Baroque. We considered Mondrian’s refusal to accept this melody and illusion; stripping away shape and shading and texture in favour of flat paint in primary collars. Reality squared. Pollack’s definitely 2D dripped paint canvas, however, draws the viewer into the implied 3D, immersing in a something, an ‘other’, to experience. And thus we see how the artists create specific conversations with their ‘public’ – engaging – challenging – puzzling – distancing - immersing…The conversation created as much a revelation of the world view as the paint and light and canvas.

This week – Drum Roll - First Compulsory Assignments

The courses offers a Track A option – to produce an artwork; or B – writing; or both. In each case the whole assignment requires the preparation and submission of the piece PLUS peer review of three other pieces. If you do both A and B, you will have to peer review six other pieces in total. I chose to do both assignments. Both options were taken from Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of assignment (New York; Paper Monument, 2012). MUST GET THAT BOOK!!

Track B: Thick Description - required us to spend an hour with a work of art – being with it – recording thoughts and perceptions not just of the artwork but of its surroundings… After an hour we were required to organise our thoughts and write a 300-400 word essay, list or narrative.

Mostly it’s brown paper: spending an hour with a primitive portrait of my mother

I live half the week in the country not able to get to a real gallery till Monday, when I hope to see Hannah Hoch’s collages in the Whitechapel Gallery in East London, UK. I wanted to do this exercise with a real picture and not an image on the screen. I wanted to be with a real picture – and to see and feel that experience: to learn to really see a picture by being with it. So I chose a primitive portrait of my mother that I have hanging in the front room – and that was drawn by a friend of the family who is a self-taught artist. I thought that the sitting with the picture would be a meditation experience and that I would learn a lot from it… but again – only if it were a real thing. So even though this picture might not be classified as art by many – it is art to me – and it is real – so this is what I did.

The thick description:

The picture is about 12 X 6 inches on heavy cheap brown paper. It is pasted onto white paper and set within pale yellow card within a light wood simple frame. It is a head and shoulders portrait of Jeanne Marie Victorine Dierrieckx Sinfield – my mother. This picture seems to have captured her at about the age of 69 (1995) – but it is unsigned and un-dated – although I know the artist was Anita Melloche. 

The outline is sketched in with heavy soft black pencil which thickens as the hair is sketched in: unruly as if just back from working in the garden. The pencil outline is filled in with only three colours; water colour crayons of red, brown and white – they sketch in the hair, face, eyes and a red and white striped top. 

My mother would have hated the picture as un-flattering and not life-like; but whilst it is not exactly what she ever looked like – it really is ‘her’. It has captured her eyebrows – those slightly fine, thin eyebrows of old age. The eyes below are a bit doe-like, a bit cartoonish – not ‘real’ at all – but they have her direct gaze – and are somehow brave, strong – full of character. 

The character is also there in the closed mouth, the calm. The face is slightly at an angle looking to the right of the frame, her left. The left side of the portrait feels more three dimensional than any other bit of the picture – due to the white highlights that bring shape and substance – and push out that side of the face from the two dimensional plane. 

Mostly the whole picture is created by the brown paper; the very few bits of black, red, white and brown crayon create the illusion of the head, hair, face, shoulders and top by laying very few lines on the brown paper: carving the face from the paper. 

The background is simply brown paper; no contextual setting. The most in-filled sections are the hair and the top – but even there – brown paper peeks through adding another colour and another dimension to the portrait. The most amazing thing for me was seeing for the first time how much brown paper makes up the face – and I thought: it is mostly brown paper – and it is my mother. 

Ways of seeing

To spend this hour with a painting was both moving and illuminating. I definitely saw it differently by spending this quiet focused hour with it. At first I just sat and looked and looked – describing things to myself. After 30-minutes I started to sketch the picture and annotate. After that, I painted the sketch – using that painting as another way of analysing the painting itself. Then I free wrote a response – briefly looking at my notes. I could not get in all the information that I had noted down. When it was as edited as possible, I pasted it into the Module Box – and found that it was still 200 words too long. I managed in the end to get it down to 399 words! Dead chuffed with this – and I hope I take these eyes to the Whitechapel Gallery on Monday.

Track A: World in a Box: Using any means, materials or style – we were asked to put together a collection of objects and a means of displaying them. We could operate in 2D as well as 3D – we could make the objects or find them – we could create a narrative or not – it could just be what it is. We had to think about how to display them – and then how to frame them in the photograph.

I like to create spaces around the cottage that are curations or artworks designed to tease or please the eye – to create a look or feel or experience… So I thought that I would photograph and present one of these small spaces. Unfortunately I could not cut the photographs that I initially wanted to up-load (technologically challenged) – and so was only getting a third of whatever world I wanted to share. In the end I worked with this limitation, uploading a picture that would be de facto cut in the Module Box – to create the frame I was after:

Schwitter’s Bedroom: The Buddhist Temple

Schwitter treated his studio as a collaged art spaced – bit like my approach to my home – so a cool title was born. The submitted piece is just the left side of the above picture - just over a third and just under a half of the total width. This cut emphasised the contrast between the Buddhism trail up the bookcase - and the bloody detective fiction that frames it.

End: The Assignments this week were really engaging and thought-provoking. I learned a lot about looking, seeing – and really seeing. Activities that I want to bring into my real world teaching… (Oh and I got 14/15 for the quiz – and I DO KNOW what Baroque is – but obviously did not describe it well enough on the day L )

Artmooc week 7: Don’t mention the critical appreciation – and last lessons for practice

This week was the last week of #artmooc: week 7. We thought that all we would have to do this week would be to peer review at least two other Collections; *if* we had produced a Collection of our own. You have to earn the right to peer review. And then – they threw a critical evaluation at us! We had to find a piece in a real gallery or online, research it – and write our own critique. Well there was a new challenge indeed – not least because I had booked a couple of days’ vacation – and away from the Internet – so I did not see how I could get this task done.

Anyway – I sat down with Wikipedia – and I got going…

# 12: You can use Wikipedia for research

So I chose a piece of sculpture that I loved – and Googled it – and there it and the artist were on Wikipedia… So I made notes – followed links – and made more notes. My trick is key word, pattern notes – not taking down whole chunks of information – but snatching points of interest. When I had one A4 side of paper complete with what I thought were good notes, I stopped… I did a quick free write upon my sculptor and his piece just to get some words down on the page – and to prime my brain for the real writing that was to come. Later that week, back in contact with the web, I sat with my notes and numbered the different points that I saw in there from 1-13… then opened my free write, ‘saved as’ version 2 – and I wrote in one go the first draft of my critique. I put together a draft ‘background’ and ‘influences’ part of my piece from my notes – following the order of my numbering. Then I wrote my critique of the sculpture itself. I re-read and tweaked - and because of the time scale - and the target audience - I stopped. If I had been doing this as a piece of University writing, I would not have stopped at one source – and definitely would not have brandished Wikipedia around like a flaming banner… But I thought that it was all okay for this piece and this time limit.

So – instead of shunning Wikipedia – perhaps we should set a timed writing exercise that allows the use of Wikipedia – so that people can experiment with notemaking – thinking – researching – writing… and then allow them to take away their drafts and improve with additional research?

Below is the piece that I wrote… and below that some last videos from Penn State upon art and creativity and metaphor – and that I will also use in my practice later on.

A critique of Richard Serra’s Fulcrum, Liverpool Street Station, London, UK

By Sandra Sinfield

Fulcrum 1987, 55-foot free standing sculpture of COR-TEN-Steel outside Liverpool Street Station, London, UK. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Serra accessed 08/07/13)

Background

Serra is an American minimalist sculptor and video artist – and I am writing a brief critical consideration of his piece, Fulcrum, which is constructed from three nearly-60-foot pieces of COR-TEN-Steel learning against each other. COR-TEN-Steel is also known as mild steel – and it differs from Stainless steel in that it will oxidise and rust. This steel therefore will interact to some extent with the elements; it does not just impose on a space – but also interacts with it, changing slightly over time, as does the space itself.

Serra was born in1939, San Francisco. He had a Literature background and studied painting on an NFA programme at Yale, 1961-64, with Brice Morden, Chuck Close, Nancy Graves and Robert Mangold. He supported himself by working in the Steel Mills (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Serra). He studied under and was influenced by Philip Morton and Guston Feldman. In 1963 he wrote ‘Interaction of Colour’ with Albers. His early sculpture was in unconventional fibre glass and rubber and was abstract and process-based. He would also work in lead, creating pieces by hurling molten lead spheres at a wall.

Influences and Connections

Serra is part of the Process Art Movement the antecedents of which are ritual and ceremony (Ibid). Process Art is connected with Performance art, Installation Art and with Environmental Art. It is predicated on the principal of ‘intentionality’ – which is not about having control over intended outcomes, but upon the acceptance of the mind’s ability to create. Art is about the doing, about the journey and represents a pure form of human expression. Serra has cited as an influence William Basinski’s ‘Disintegrating loops’ and the notion of ‘being destroyed’ (Ibid)

Process Art can be seen in the acts of gathering, sorting, collating, associating and patterning – and in the initiation of actions and proceedings. Serra’s work has been compared to Dadaism and also to the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollack (Ibid). The performance of the artist in the production of the art work harnesses the body’s movement, initiates improvisation and celebrates the realisation of the random.  Serra is known as a pioneer of LARGE, site-specific sculptures/installations designed to challenge our perceptions of a space and of our own bodies as we move around the spaces he creates (Ibid).

From 1969 Serra experimented with cutting, propping and stacking lead and timber to create sculptures held in place by their own weight (Ibid) moving on to large steel sculptures in the 1970s. The elements of his minimalist COR-TEN-Steel structures are produced in Germany and installed by Budco Enterprises, a Long Island Rigging Company with whom he has maintained an extensive working relationship (Ibid).

Wikipedia cites as influential upon Serra’s work Marshall McLuhan’s (2005) Marshall McLuhan: Theoretical Elaboration Vol 2.; where McLuhan elaborates on the complex network of relationships between people and objects. It also cites the modernist novel, Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 which is said to concern itself with the ‘waste’ in language, focussing on the power that negative space has to determine outcomes (Ibid). In this light, Serra’s minimalist steel constructions could be said to expose the essence of a space or of our relationship to that space by eliminating all the non-essential elements of the piece. In its simplicity it could be said to embrace the Japanese aesthetic of Ma, negative space (Ibid).

Fulcrum

I chose to write about Serra’s Fulcrum before I had researched the piece – basing my choice upon the fact that it is a public sculpture with which I have had a long term ‘relationship’ and which has moved me in very real ways over time.

Fulcrum is a piece of Installation or Performance Art placed just outside Liverpool Street Station, London, UK. It is not an ephemeral piece, as with the works of Christo and Jean-Claude, though it is magnificent in scale. Fulcrum is not transient – nor self-effacing. It will not disappear after some moments leaving only a memory in the minds of some – or access to photographic records to re-kindle the event and its pleasures… Fulcrum is huge and steel and permanent. It is imposing – and some might say brutalist. It could be accused of rendering ‘man’ insignificant and humble. It could be said to be paying homage to the train station it is contingent to – or ‘the city’ and finance – which is just a short walk up the road…

However, this is COR-TEN-Steel and it weathers with age. It rusts and mutates and changes. Perhaps if Fulcrum is making a comment then upon big travel and big finance, it is that all is mutable – all turns eventually to dust. It could be said to mock that which thinks itself so powerful – so in control of our world.

And whilst Fulcrum creates a huge cathedral like space, unlike a cathedral which imposes GOD and god’s will upon ‘man’ – this space allows anyone to walk in and around and under. You can lean inside against a wall and gaze up at a small patch of grey or blue sky and just dream for a moment – swept away as though in a wood or upon a mountain. Ironically, this vast piece echoes or recreates a Goldsworthy moment in the midst of the urban. It should not be possible that something this huge and brutal could do that – but it does. In this vast piece you can be for a moment Lost in the City – and connected with the air and the sky – perhaps with the rain. You can be in a very different mental and physical space to that created by monolithic architecture and monitored-access Malls. *This* space grants a moment’s reverie. This space welcomes everyone – and allows them to be – to connect with air and sky (if they choose) – and to be different.

You might hide in Fulcrum to have a solitary cigarette (there is no smoking allowed in doors anymore) and in this space you are not shunned – you are not a pariah – just a fallible human being – allowed to be. Some people complain that Fulcrum is used occasionally as a urinal… but even that is human – and perhaps offers some refuge and respite to a homeless person when no one and nothing else will. And the transgressive act will soon be cleansed by the rain – no permanent damage done – no terrible crime committed.

When I first spotted this enormous and strange piece outside the station I used to walk swiftly by – it was obviously ‘art’ and therefore not for the likes of me. Just being ‘art’ set up a wall – a ‘do not touch’ feeling… Over time, Fulcrum itself dispensed with all that – and enticed me in. Here it was in fair weather and foul – to be walked in and under and around – and it took my breath away. I felt privileged to be allowed to experience this wonderful, huge thing. This sculpture. This art. And the more I could ‘take it for granted’ – the more it drew me in and gave me space to be. I truly love this piece. It is huge and brutal – but it is welcoming and human somehow. It imposes – and it welcomes. It stands guard – but it embraces. I love that we the people are accredited the wit and wisdom to appreciate and inhabit such a wonderful sculpture. I cannot imagine that these cruel, neo-liberal times would ever again take a risk of producing this and letting it loose amongst the public; I am so glad that Fulcrum exists – and that I got to inhabit, experience and be within it.

(Word count circa 1330 - sadly – only source is Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Serra - accessed 08/07/13.)

Finally Penn State offered us some good bye videos and I’ve put the links to them here for they are thought-provoking – and this way I can use them in my practice later on:

Liking mistakes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BBPIvZm7YEo

Personal reflection by potter/tutor and the human element of art – and of teaching…

Drawing as thinking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5FylcQ0zI90

I especially love the first example where he persuades people that they can risk drawing, by drawing with his foot! That’s one up from ‘blind drawing’ – will try that next time!

How do you grade art?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5cYNTvU6jz4

Objectivity and subjectivity in art… The four Cs – craft: how it’s made, technical virtuosity – but more than that…– creativity – the idea behind it – for example Duchamp’s found objects – remember the horror at the fountain/urinal… content – composition… and the more we know, the more we will see.

Throwing a snowman – metaphors in art

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WffFZB7blFE

Creating metaphors to engage children in pottery – but that did bring the pottery alive… Everything an artist makes is a metaphor: something that references something else; which can be brought alive when we ‘notice what we notice’.

Can you teach creativity?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bcpfjw8EmWA

Thinks that you can teach creativity – especially if we let go of the concern of coming up with the wrong answer!

What is art?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyE9zCcFv7Y&feature=player_embedded#at=15

Collection of Faculty giving their quick fire answers to the question…Magic – coming to know different things – and knowing them differently…

Advice for the young artist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJYqL3h7BtA&feature=player_embedded

Think about what frightens you the most – then do that… Embrace failure again and again and again…

I have really enjoyed this MOOC - and I've enjoyed reflecting on this MOOC and blogging about my experiences. I hope that any readers out there have enjoyed this as well - and I'd love to hear your art and/or your MOOC experiences...