A series of pictures from the film noir influenced Killers Kill, Dead Men Die album taken by the famous american photographer Annie Leibovitz for an issue of Vanity Fair
Film Noir inspired photography
A series of pictures from the film noir influenced Killers Kill, Dead Men Die album taken by the famous american photographer Annie Leibovitz for an issue of Vanity Fair
Film Noir - Inspiration for Video Art
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as stretching from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. Film noir of this era is associated with a low-key black-and-white visual style that has roots in German Expressionist cinematography. Many of the prototypical stories and much of the attitude of classic noir derive from the hardboiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Depression.
Altermodern
Flávia Müller Medeiros
Irka 2007
Book of 36 pages in edition of 800
Image courtesy Gasworks. Photo: Matthew Booth
Tate's fourth Triennial exhibition, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud who co-founded the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, opens at Tate Britain in February 2009. It explores a new concept, defined by him as 'the Altermodern'. The term describes art made in today's global context which is a reaction against standardisation and commercialism.
Sam Taylor Wood
Sam Taylor-Wood makes photographs and films that examine, through highly charged scenarios, our shared social and psychological conditions.
Taylor-Wood’s work examines the split between being and appearance, often placing her human subjects – either singly or in groups – in situations where the line between interior and external sense of self is in conflict.
Russian Art
Above: Images of Ilya Kabakov and Andrei Monastyrsky
The Moscow Conceptualist, or Russian Conceptualist, movement began with the Sots art of Komar and Melamid in the early 1970s, and continued as a trend in Russian art into the 1980s. It attempted to subvert socialist ideology using the strategies of conceptual art and appropriation art.
The central figures were Ilya Kabakov, Andrei Monastyrsky and Komar and Melamid. The group also included Eric Bulatov, Dmitri Prigov and Viktor Pivovarov.
Bai Yiluo
Bai Yiluo works with the combination of Eastern and Western Ccultures, how they can run together and how they can ruin each other. His work are ofthen very time consuming.
Feng Zhengjie
Mao-lyn Monroe
Feng Zhengjie
Kitsch Mao No. 12
Acrylic on canvas, 2002
Feng Zhengjie paints with inspiration from Pop-art and the "pop-world" with billboards and advertising. The figures always have a alienish or superhero look.
Chinese art in the 1990s
Above: Work by Yue Minjun and a reference of the iconic photograph of Marilyn Monroe. Minjun work consist of self-portraits which relates to the Chinese philosophy but put it into relation of the western commercial world. Always large scale paintings and always smiling faces.
Conceptual art in China first began to appear in the mid-1980's, as manifest in the Xiamen Dada Movement. Shanghai artists also became interested in the ideas that challenged traditional artistic practices of sculpture and painting. By the time of the 1989 China Avant-Garde Art exhibition, art on canvas was no longer what aroused the most interest among the art-going public. Rather it was conceptual works and related news events that impacted on the cultural psychology of the time.
The environmental works of Gu Wenda, Xu Bing and Lu Shengzhong; The installations of Huang Yongping, Song Haidong, Zhang Peili; the performances of Xiao Lu, Zhang Nian, Wu Shanzhuan; were all representative of this period; omens of the transformation from Modernism to Contemporary art that was to take place in the 90's.
Subsequently Political Pop art and Cynical Realism emerged in the early 1990's and, in as much as these works tended to suite exhibition organizers in the West, artists associated with these movements appeared predominantly in international exhibitions.
By focusing on broader social issues and cultural concerns very much within the realms of world discourse, these exhibitions reversed the slide toward commercialism that had begun among more traditional paint mediums and gave a new look to visual art in China.
Anthony McCall
Anthony Mc Call is a British artist , born 1946, who overlap different art forms such as film, sculpture, installation, drawing and performing.
Mc Call’s earliest films were documents of outdoor performances and they were different in the way of minimal use of elements , for example fire. This was during the 70’s when Mc call was a key figure in the AvantGardeLondon film-makers co-operative.
It was in 1973 after Mc Call moved to New York that he developed his “Solid Light” film series, which were projections that show the sculptural qualities of the beam of light. In darkened, haze-filled rooms, the projections create an illusion of three-dimensional shapes, ellipses, waves and flat planes that gradually expand, contract or sweep through space.
In these works, the artist sought to deconstruct cinema by reducing film to its principle components of time and light and removing the screen entirely as the prescribed surface for projection.
The works also shift the relationship of the audience to film, as viewers become participants, their bodies intersecting and modifying the transitory forms.
At the end of the 1970s, McCall stopped making art. Over 20 years later, he provided a new dynamic and re-opened his ‘solid light’ series.
This time using digital projectors rather than 16mm film. Through his involvement in expanding the notion of cinema, which enabled a more complex experience of projection.
You enter a dark space, but there is no sound. The digital projector is silent, and there are now two of them, located above you, with the projected figure, also now double, on the floor at your feet.
Over the 16 minutes of this projection, you tend to observe the tracing on the floor more assiduously than you do with a horizontal piece like Line.
In order to tease out the logic of its configuration in time, a logic that also defines the moving veils of light that fall from above--though you know this correlation more than perceive it.
Two figures is an ellipse that contracts and expands while the other figure, a wave, travels toward it; there is also a line that rotates through the wave, complicating both forms. At the same time, a very slow filmic 'wipe' connects the two figures such that the one is always eclipsing the other, making breaks, which produce apertures in the veils of light, and forging connections, which produce closures, in the process. Gradually, too, you see that, in the course of a cycle, one figure turns into the other ellipse becomes wave and vice versa. This is the experience of 'Between You and I' (2006), one of the six vertical projections installed at Hangar Bicocca.
Jenny Holzer
In the 1990s contemporary artists experimented with new media, such as video monitors to connect with modern audiences saturated by a media-oriented culture.
In America during the early 1980s Jenny Holzer turned to some of advertising’s more pervasive tools, including electronic signage, to reach out to people who do not go to galleries and museums. She used the Spectacolour board that was then used on Times Square in New York City, where she flashed a series of short, provocative messages. In another installation Holzer wrapped her signboards in a continuous loop around the three-floor spiralling interior of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. The words moved and flashed in red, green, and yellow coloured lights, surrounding the visitor with Holzer’s unsettling declarations such as “You are a victim of the rules you live by” and disturbing commands as “Scorn Hope”, “Forget truths” and “Don’t try to make me feel nice”. Apart from incorporating new media into the work of art, the way of using text in that way was taking a new turn on how the artist expressed herself.
Installation Art
Installation artists often work with video, either using the video monitor itself as visible part of their work or projecting video imagery onto walls, screens or other surfaces. A pioneer video artist is the Korean-born, New York-based Nam June Paik, who proclaimed that just “as collage technique replaced oil paint, the cathode ray tube will replace the canvas”.
Ilya Kabakov was born in 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine and has a background of studies in art, painting, sculpture, architecture and graphic art. It was in the beginning of the 1950’s that Kabakov finished his studies and began to do illustrations for children’s books but also personal drawings.
Turning point when meeting Robert falk wo painted in a style of “cezannism”.
From painting and drawing Ilya Kabakov’s work became more and more conceptual; during the 1970’s. This was new to the art scene in Soviet and quite revolutionary coming from the free art scene in Paris. The conceptual ideas that Kabakov had was developed in to a group, including his friends and colleagues, they got the name “Moscow Conceptualists”. Together they experimented with the construction of Russian conceptual art.
Today Ilya Kabakov is living and working in Long Island, New York and is known worldwide as an installation artist. Before his first installation he created fictional albums, of which he created a total of 50 pieces. His fictional albums were stories about a character who most of the time managed to overcome the banality of everyday existence, for example “a small man, possessed by big ideas”. In this work, which is called “Ten Characters”, Ilya Kabakov show ten stories of different men, about their life, thoughts about their life and what they had done with it. The ten different characters explains Ilya Kabakov’s perception of the world and this work was shown by illustrations which was almost childlike in their style together with text that had a deeper more serious tone and almost cynical meaning. Ilya Kabakov has explained that he treat these fictional albums as a type of domestic theatre.
The Unhung Painting, 1992
The concept:
The concept for The Unhung Painting installation lays in the problem of something being “ready” – “not ready” and the phase where that is determined. In comparison to everyday life where we can easily see if a table is ready or not ready because it is still being put together, or if the main course is ready in the way it’s cooked or if it needs some more time, it is not as easy to determine that in the so-called art of the modern. In old paintings from let’s say the renaissance the completion was already set before the artist made the first brush stroke. The final product was clear from the start. In the days of Impressionists or of Henri Matisse and the Fauvism, the perception of a ready/finished painting was not as clear any longer. The borders between the finished and the unfinished got even more blurred out in the movement of Fluxus.
There can be two genres in Installation art one being the “total installation”, which includes elements of ordinary as everyday reality, the other genre is “open installation” where the border between this real space and the “artistic” space is infinite. So within total installation this uncertainty of borders definitely creates a problem of the ready not ready term. But what if one appreciated the effect of anticipation of the process instead of concentration on the problem of not to be ready.
Ilya kabakov takes his idea of this problem and express it through the construction of a “not ready “, installation. There is also a reference in the concept coming from Kabakov’s experiences of Soviet, where one can find many examples of buildings that have been under construction so long that they start to fall apart before it is finished. When living in surroundings like that, it is more likely that becomes your reality, the “not ready” is the normal.
The problem of art being ready or not ready could also be pointed out for the whole perception of what is and what isn’t art today. This put the viewer in a tricky position as well in the terms of seeing something that one can be certain of is a finished work of art, or if the experience if it is clear that the work isn’t finished. Would that bring a disappointment to the experience or could it possible increase the interest since one would actually see the work in progress? The later could transfer the thoughts to Performance Art where artists invited an audience to see the work in progress.
Description of the installation:
In a room at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne where the wooden floor is painted red and the walls are damp and boring looking as those of a basement, there is a large painting leaning towards the wall. Even though this does not at all seem like a place for any painting to be placed. The room is only lit up by two bare light bulbs which puts the room in a semi-darkness. The other three walls in the square room are covered with commentaries of people’s opinions about the painting, whether it is going to be hung to the wall or just about what they think is going on in the room. This forms a row of textual sketches placed, each and every one of them in a frame.
On the floor around the large painting there are instruments for the job scattered around, a hammer, pliers and screws. There is also a stepladder next to the painting. An obvious response to this scene would be that the painting was meant to be hung up but something came in between, maybe it was lunchtime and the people responsible took a break? Even if that was not the case, the “normal” reaction for the viewer would be that this space was undone, a concern about someone not fulfilling their duty or a feeling of not being certain of what is actually happening or what is supposed to happen.
Is the painting being hung up on the wall or is it being removed from the wall and the room? The painting itself becomes second in importance. The resemblance of the painting is a mass of details, houses and trees, carefully and well drawn which implies that it is not really a modern painting that will be appreciated as groundbreaking of any kind. When the concentration is focused upon the painting one will notice the written text on the bottom half of it.
I can’t tell if it is a story, a sort of article or just someone’s words about different places and persons.
The viewer takes all this in and questions the comments on the walls, why this room is a closed space with a door that blends in with the colour of the walls and the circumstances around the painting. Maybe there is an answer hidden in there somewhere but I believe that Ilya Kabakov intended to give the viewer an opportunity to stop and think of the present while it is happening instead of just rushing from A to B, from not ready to ready, whether it is a good or bad thing.
Alice Anderson and Chiharu Shiota
Two female artists that are drawing on childhood experiences to create fantastical exhibitions weaving together notions of time and identity are Alice Anderson and Chiharu Shiota.
The woman is trapped in the tower. She cannot be seen but we know that she is up there, waiting remembering. From a tiny window, her glossy red hair cascades down the tower’s white walls across the floor. Circling around sculptures, photography and film about forgotten children and broken dolls, these coiled piles of synthetic hair in artist Alice Anderson’s latest installation, 'time reversal' suggest an enchanted lair- a nest, or a trap. This very different work has been filling Soho’s Riflemaker Gallery during the month of March.
Just a few streets away Chiharu Shiota has an exhibition at the Haunch of Vension. The Osaka-born artist is renowned for ensnaring gallery-goers in fantastical female worlds by weaving yarn around totems from memories and dreams- wedding dresses, burnt pianos, and old toys and even sleeping women. With their spooky, compulsively realised work sporting abundance of weave, these neighbouring artists offer bewitching meditations on time and identity.
Uprooted at a young age, Anderson cites her parents’ split as a seminal moment on her path to becoming an artist. Her mother is French-Algerian and her father is English, a combination she means never worked. Therefore her mother took her away from England and asked young Alice never to mention England or her father again. Though ears later Alice Anderson came back to London to study at Goldsmith's. Her skin is pale ivory and her long hair is red. A colour she sais is also the one for her drawings, as for the internal body, of love, of sex, of pain, of violence, of sacrifice, of shame, of anger and of lipstick.
In 2006 Anderson turned herself into a doll with help of Madame Tussauds. The resulting scaled-down of the artist features in the photography series Master Puppet, holding marionette strings while Anderson clasps it to her chest. In an attempt to be rid of the double’s uncanny influence Anderson put the doll in a glass coffin for her 2008 “Spectres” show at the Picasso Museum near Cannes.
Shiota also dealswith a yen for her lost childhood while attempting to broach the mysteries of dream worlds. In revealing performances, she has presented herself asleep, allowing onlookers to share a moment that is both intimate alienating.
Having moved from Japan to Germany in 1997, Shiota has also had to deal with displacement. For an earlier work, In Silence, the artist set light to a piano, then cocooned its charred form in black yarn. This violent act had its roots in a traumatic childhood experience, when she found a similar burnt piano in the fire-ravaged house of her neighbour. Dialouge From DNA, a project staged in Poland, Germany and Japan, invited local audiences to share their memories through donated shoes. Scores of items- from old high heels to novelty slippers- were collected, each bearing the imprint of someone’s journey through life.
At Haunch of Vension, Shiota is mining the spiritual as much as the bodily, with old windows stacked to the rafters to form a cavernous, church-like environment. Salvaged from building sites in Berlin, they tap into the secret history of the city. The idea was that when one look at the disregarded windows it could be like imagining the people who looked through the window from East Berlin to the West. For both artists, time’s web entangles, its threads collapsing as we try to grasp them. I admire their way of using the space in such a clever and interesting way.
Rebecca Horn
Rebecca Horn is obsessed with mechanical things, masks, movements of things, ballet dancers, beauty. She likes to work with the element of surprise and uses a lot of colour pigment, or like the piece she did in the Guggenheim museum with milk that dripped down from the ceiling in the atrium.
Rachel Whiteread- First female winner of the Turner price
Whiteread uses negative space of object to create new shapes which is a reflection of positive and negative. She is a British artist and finds inspiration in descriptions in stone and often repeat her usage of transparant materials in her work.
Shirin Neshat
Shirin Neshat Grace Under Duty, 1993
Shirin Neshat works with film video and photography. She comes from Iran and is a visual artist. Her works includes overwrited photographies with for example text over a face. Her work is about the position of women in the Arabic world.
Kara Walker
Kara Walker creates illustrative art and makes it look like childrens books. her work is about black people in America and the country's history with slaves.
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