Monday 30 November 2009

Joe Minter's African Village in America





Joe Minter's African Village in America





images from:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/deepfriedkudzu/sets/72057594086704951/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_art

I have found a blog entry written by someone who visited Joe Minter's African Village in Alabama:

http://detourarttravels.blogspot.com/2008/10/joe-minters-african-village-in-america.html


African Village in America
Joe Minter (1935-)
Birmingham, AL
Visionary environment
Private property, visible from the street
Created: 1989 - current


" Joe Minter's "African Village in America" is located in southwest Birmingham, Alabama, in the lot next door to the house where he and his wife Hilda live. Behind their house and environment is the sprawling segregated cemetery, Shadowlawn, where his father is laid to rest. We walk the cemetery, and Joe gives me a lesson in the legacy of Birmingham's civil rights movement. (He was at the Kelly Ingram Park in 1963 when fire hoses and dogs were violently turned on the peaceful protesters.) He worries that those hard fight lessons are being lost and his home is a powerful reminder to all that stop.
Painted a brilliant blue, and despite its chain-link fence enclosure and its pathways of wooden planks and metal siding sheets - the home and environment are intimate and densely packed with both lush plantings and sculptures. Signs reminding, and teaching, the visitor of the contributions of African Americans in America.
The brightly painted tin and wood constructions, mixed-media pieces made of found objects-dolls, old car parts, chains, and cast-off boots-and placards painted with statements from Scripture and the Civil Rights movement. All are dominated by huge silhouettes of abstract metal and wooden shapes, many recalling human forms that loom against the sky. Underfoot are pathways of rusted metal and found lumber (punctuated by fire ants...be forewarned.)
As we walk the sculpture garden environment, Joe points out individual pieces that tell the story. Discards, tossed away scraps, echo the message of man's cruelty towards his fellow man. But also springing up with the same intensity of their colors, are monuments to hope and compassion. The sculptures frame Minter's home, occupy the carport on the house's other side, pack the garage behind it, and even in another house across the street, Minter's messages fill the yard and porch.
It was a special treat when Hilda and Joe invited me into their densely packed home to see a dvd created about the African Village in America. (He also wrote and self published a book of African American contributions and his reflections.) I left just as the sun had set, knowing that this was truly a blessed day.
"






IGNORE THIS: FOR LATER

http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/lee_nikki_s.php



Finnis:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Finnis



http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Finnis&x=0&y=0

Tuesday 24 November 2009

Olivia Plender

Okay. So getting into the next unit.
Learning agreement is stressful on top of extremely mixed messages about my work.
This is an artist that Jason gave me to look at. Within the theme of 'communal living'.
On this list also, is Mai-Thu Perret (who i will write about)
and Ann Lowe who i can find nothing about on the net. again, one to consult the library about.

I spoke to Jason about my work and presented my crazy idea for the event/festival i would like to hold in the summer. -hence the 'communal living' bit.

And I'm still mixed up about whether i (want) to carry on the work that began to evolve at the end of the last unit as i got a really low grade.

BUT I'm mainly stuck on how these things go together..







Olivia Plender

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Olivia Plender (born 1977) is an artist based in London.

Plender was born in London. Her work is based on drawing and references pulp novels, magazines and comic strips.[1] She is best known for a project entitled The Masterpiece (2002 onwards), an epic hand-drawn comic book about the life of a fictional artist in 1960s London.[2]

Plender was co-editor of Untitled Magazine from 2002 until it closed in 2008.[3]

She studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design between 1995 and 1998.


Thanks Wiki.

But really, I can't find much about her. I think i need to get to the library.


Saatchi Gallery Says:

Inspired by the works of Övyind Fahlström, Olivia Plender uses the format of the comic book as an alternative mode of distribution for art, capitalising on its inexpensive accessibility as a means to challenge cultural ideals. This exhibition of templates from her ongoing The Masterpiece series is an expansive critique of originality; the drawings themselves are conceived as a by-product of artistic process, and not the actual art itself.

Appropriating her title from Emile Zola’s novel about Cezanne, Plender’s The Masterpiece 4 explores the concept of Romanticism, authoring a complex fiction examining the concept of artist-as-genius. Set in 1960’s London her protagonist is an archetypical painter, tortured by his creativity, exploited by a cruel world. Invited for a weekend in the country, the plot unfolds as a Byronic epic cum Hammerhouse horror, delving her champion into a world of psychedelia and occult as a metaphoric parody of artistic strife.

Drawing her references from a wide range of sources, from 19th century technical manuals to b-movie film stills, Plender’s graphic narratives are designed with the stylised glamour of pulp fiction covers; her disconnected images intertwine as surreal pastiche, adding a psychological complexity to her illustrated story. Rendered in pencil on paper, these original drawings provide a rare insight into the concentrated intimacy of Plender’s process, reflecting an obsessive passion worthy of her heroes.

Aidas Bareikis


http://www.thehappylion.com/index.php?exhibitions=040410_040515
textisfrom^

"The Happy Lion is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of new works by Aidas Bareikis entitled “The World Belongs to Nobody but Me”. As if awakened from a sleep of reason, Bareikis' figures emerge as the inhabitants of a subconscious fraught with the implications of both a ferociously decadent past as well as the promise of an eternally tormented future. Far from being menacing however, the figures convey instead, a sense of grotesque jubilation, of lonely but comic monsters.
In the tradition of artists such as Dieter Roth, Bareikis is an archiver of throw-away items. His constructions are made entirely of things found discarded on the street or purchased at ubiquitous 99-cent stores, flea markets and thrift shops. He chooses objects that “look weird but also betray a certain cruel exploitation in their purpose or in the way that they were manufactured”, Bareikis states. In addition, these objects are not only selected, but altered in some way. Obsessed with notions of alchemy, Bareikis subjects his collections to a succession of trials by fire or other transforming treatment, including (but not limited to) chemical, pressure and exposure. In many cases color is achieved through the introduction of food-based organic materials such as coffee and soy sauce.
Humanity's struggle with its history as it leaps into the future seems a pervasive aspect of Bareikis' work.

Contemporary anachronisms are collected and transformed into a tableau of orchestrated chaos.


Bareikis surveys the detritus resulting from consumer culture, environmental decay and decomposition alongside the philosophical and emotional limbo modern society can produce.

The artist has confined his creations to a perceptual purgatory, between a world of excess and exploitation and one of conscience and intent. As well, Bareikis re-asserts that it is the artist role, not only to produce work that excites the eye, but also to expose the monsters created by the human condition.
Aidas Bareikis was born in Vilnius, Lithuania in 1967 and graduated from the Vilnius Art Academy in 1993. He came to America the same year and completed the MFA program from Hunter College in 1997. He was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and has been the recipient of a Soros Foundation Grant. Bareikis has had solo exhibitions at Leo Koenig, Inc., the Zacheta Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland and at the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius in Lithuania. In addition he has participated in shows such as “Generation Z”, and “Greater New York” at PS1/MOMA “Crossing the Line” at the Queens Museum, in New York City. Aidas Bareikis lives and works in New York City."
additional work and words relating to Aidas Bareikis:
http://www.leokoenig.com/artist/workview/441/5632/1

Tuesday 10 November 2009

Loop Guru?

http://www.last.fm/music/Loop+Guru


I can't say that i will ever get into this band, but I really love the description that LastFM gave them.


Loop Guru
:
More succinctly, Loop Guru are a protein shake for your head. In the blender are the literary works of William Burroughs, the films of Satyajit Ray, the philosophy of spiritual leader Ram Dass, the music of Brian Eno and the astral landscape of a Phillip ‘K. Dick novel.

Monday 9 November 2009

Reading and Reading and Reading

I have bought (yet more!!!!!!) books. This time from Amazon. They're on their way now.

Generation Me
-yes it's American. But i have found that that's what I'm so very interested. And here in the UK, don't we have the same sort of issues but to less extremes? Kind of watered down America. But I always think of the US as an 'anything goes' kinda place and I don't think the same about the UK. Maybe these presumptions come from not knowing a lot about either.
ANYWAY this follows the generation that comes after Generation X - ie. the one I'm part of. And i would like to see what has supposedly contributed to the attitudes of people today.

The Bohemian Manifesto
I have posted about this earlier. It looks fascinating. I wanted to do some reading up on a 'counterculture' even though i suppose it's not so much a concentrated thing anymore. It's almost merely a personality component.

And

No One Belongs Here More Than You

Which is a book of short stories by Miranda July, the director of Me And You And Everyone We Know. which is a film I really love. I read the small extract available from amazon's 'look inside!' and it seemed as mesmerizing as the film did.
so i bought the book for a penny. (plus P&P)


The other day i spent an hour in the second hand book shop in Winton and purchased:

Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller ...looked fascinating. I'm really into reading the books that were banned back in the day and seeing them in the light of the present. See Also: Valley of the Dolls - Jaqueline Susann

A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess ....yes an obvious one but i have yet to read it.

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald ....ditto. read an extract in school and it's been on the list since then

Metamorphosis and other stories - Kafka ...and again.But apparently i should really give this a go said a variety of people

and The World According to Garp by John Irving -- for my friend Joe. Must Post.


all of these for a tenner. buying new things is silly, a tenner would have got me 1 and 1/3 of a new book..!

Sunday 8 November 2009

I am reading Tropic of Cancer

Henry Miller

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
Henry Valentine Miller

Born December 26, 1891(1891-12-26)
Yorkville, Manhattan, New York City
Died June 7, 1980 (aged 88)
Pacific Palisades, California, United States
Occupation Writer, painter
Spouse(s) Beatrice Sylvas Wickens (1917-1928)
June Miller (1928-34)
Janina Martha Lepska (1944-52)
Eve McClure (1953-1960)
Hiroko Tokuda (1967-1977)

Henry Valentine Miller (26 December 1891 – 7 June 1980) was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional. His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn and Black Spring. He also wrote travel memoirs and essays of literary criticism and analysis.

Saturday 7 November 2009

It seems that

there are no bizarre subcultures left. Or if they are they are further underground. but even considering this, why would they be driven so underground? the only reason i can think is to gain exclusivity.

It seems that so much is accepted now that people can deal with subcultures and infact don't mind anymore. It's almost as if there is a group of people doing something that isn't the norm or could be questioning it and someone will say 'oh look. there is those people doing that thing that those small groups of people do. That's weird. BUT you know, we should let people get on with what they're doing. it's good that they have a club to indulge this sort of thing within.'

and of course acceptance is amazing. when there wasn't any, the media ganged up and tried to educate the masses and turn them against the subculture which ultimately meant war and death.

But the edge is definitely gone.

Definitely.


UPDATE: 8thNOVEMBER
okay, i know Wikipedia said it. But! I'm only interested that someone said it before me
how fucking incredible:

In some ways, Generation Y have become seen as the ultimate rejection of the
counterculture





there we go. that's really fascinating to me. I think that if i am to be including myself in Generation Y or Generation Me or whatever the hell it's supposed to be called, then of course I'm going to want to know what it's like to be included in this. Why are we like we are. And should I really be questioning anything having being brought up in this big wave of putting oneself first? the answer is really in the latter part there. YES i should be thinking about me. because this generation has been told that the self is more important than being patriotic or conscious to anything non-consumer.

Friday 6 November 2009

Keith Tyson (plus recent developments.)


So! Yesterday I had a really mind easing tutorial which dissolved quite a bit of stress. Later on in the evening my back and shoulders began to ache weirdly. Maybe they were so tense that the previous weight being lifted was too shocking to bare and instead they ached because they missed the tension.

Anyway. The nicey nice thing is that i no longer feel like i'm performing for the course. I now feel like i can pursue what ever i want and use the course as an environment in which to do so.

Less second guessing, more conviction.
I think i'm easing out of the ruse of obligation with my work and into what i want to do. Which is exciting.





ANYWAY:

Simon showed me this artist called Keith Tyson who won the Turner Prize in 2002.
(I should really read more about the Turner Prize and that.)
Looking through his overly interactive website, it was brilliant to see another artist with a decent variety of practice. And the volume is incredible. He just produces so much work. The amount of exploration that is evident is exhausting....! BUT this is the natural way in which he thinks.

It has really made me consider what an 'outcome' or finished piece of work is. In the case of Tyson, a few pieces of his work don't reach a conclusion, they are an exploration into.


I think the reasons i have been so preoccupied with finding conclusions in my work is just the natural wont of, in relation to my identity crisis, and also because through out GCSE and A level, it was encouraged. Towards the end of a project, you collect together all your influences - artists and original props for observational drawing, you then smoosh them all together and design your final piece. After you draw it up, label each part and tell everyone where you got the idea from! - imagery of meat = Francis Bacon, -mechanical components = Paolozzi, -reference to bodily parts = Chadwick fuck, i've been doing this for almost 5 years. There is only the smallest amount of original creativity. Mainly, it's lifting and spreading around influence. Which has meant that I've learned to make valuable links here and there, and to remember a lot of artist's names...but it seems that as part of the curriculum for art, i have just been squeezing ideas out of existing ones, rather than investigating things i'm really interested in. Or something like that.



UNFINISHED

Thursday 5 November 2009

ALSO

I think that putting words like 'FRAUD' and maybe even BULL SHIT GURU into my work are counter productive. And they serve to destroy me a little bit.


Everyone is so much more optimistic than I am. Especially when it comes to being optimistic (optimism: hopefulness and confidence about the future or successful outcome of something.) in areas concerning me. Where has this come from? Where is my conviction and hopefulness and confidence.

What did your mother say

(Squirrelling for next project)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemianism

http://www.bohemianmanifesto.com/nouveau.htm


to be continued...

Wednesday 4 November 2009

http://www.researchpubs.com/news/enews34.php look at this.



WINSTON SMITH COUNTER CULTURE tv show.

GREEN DAY ALBUM COVER


COUNTERCULTURE as said by Wiki.


Is this what I'm doing?

This is from a conversation i had via msn with a friend. about my work. I have edited out the scarce replies ( I think maybe he regretted asking me, haha ) And tidied up the spelling. i might amend it to make it a little more coherent.





I am really interested in how a lot of people are living 2nd or 3rd hand, through the things they read in magazines, on the Internet, in books, or see in films or on TV. i think that too many people are experiencing life second hand rather than actually living it fully aware.

i count myself as one of those people

and parallel to this i have found myself in the middle of an identity crisis

and these things are definitely linked

it could have been that living this way cause the crisis

i think there are more degrees to this not living life first hand thing too, that i don't count myself in...

like computer games and being slaves to advertising and that

so, whilst in the thick of this, i have realised that a lot of the things that i like and dislike are beginning to define me

the things that i collected as the starting point for this unit we references to a variety of different things that were pulling my interest all over the place. film, literature,philosophy etc

and whilst these aren't tangible things that are defining me, they are still second hand reference

anyway. i started to brainstorm a final outcome idea that would serve all the references i wanted to pull together, but also satisfying the need to meld all of these different things together to make a representative thing from

-i definitely think that i have been trying to crush all these different aspects together to find conclusions and to make larger entities from them, as maybe an extension of myself - as in, having an identity crisis means not feeling as though i have a definite outline

so i was going to make a big quilt and sew separate patches together - on each patch, a different quote or theory or part of a film would be stitched to another, in an effort to draw all of this together using the language of patching up


but the entire quilt would be referencing the Existential Blanket Theory from the film I Heart Huckabees -where everything is connected

but at the same time (and this goes back to my previous work on making pods for humans) the quilt can be used to wrap one individual up and cocoon one person in a separate compartment from everyone else.

and that would be the significance of making a quilt

however i became unhappy with the progress of this and have really given in to my want to make t-shirts

which is quite a flaky thing to do

but i feel that my work can go in this direction for a reason

in reference to my idea of a 2nd or 3rd hand set of information or morals or ideas

i was thinking about what the visual aspect of my work could be

and i became interested in the idea of an Encyclopedia aesthetic

where encyclopedias often have images from all over the place -some are photographs some are illustrations but they're normally never matching as if they're old images where the copyright was either really easy to obtain or had run out


i want to put the images I'm creating onto t-shirts

mainly because i want to learn the skill of silk screen printing

but also

because i think that t-shirts are a fascinating platform for art

and they would be the new concrete poetry for our generation

well, the images are going to be these different ideas crushed together in image form

jack said 'why can't these people be expressing you' -instead of themselves

which means it will be a 7th hand image by the time it's slapped on a t-shirt

but also, it will be a second hand expression

because i made the shirt

okay...like

if i find a photo of a statue in a book

I'm looking at this book which is a mass produced item

which came from an original compiled book

where the photo was sourced from somewhere -maybe taken specifically for the book, or maybe found when the copyright was out or what ever

the photo is a photo of a statue

and the statue was probably made from a drawing

and the drawing was of, say a woman wearing some roman woman attire

and the drawing would have had to be posed for

which would be a re-creation of and event or idea

that's just a fun one because it's a statue

but say it was a drawing of a flower

in a book

it's very removed from a real thing

and that's the justification for the imagery I'm using

Basically

i want to get the idea of melding a film and some philosophical theories across BUT! they don't have anything tangible

so I'm using images that are far removed in a way

if you think of an encyclopedia

it has all these different things compiled

but it's mainly text and diagrams etc.

but then if you think of one of those tacky souvenir tea towel for, say Scotland, and they put everything that's to do with Scotland -typically, all together on one tea towel

i want the feeling of the encyclopedia

but with the crushing together of the whiskey bottle and the bag pipes and the yappy dogs wearing tartan hats

at the moment the thing i want to put on, has little meaning :)

and yes i have regressed a little

the t-shirts make a lot less sense than the quilt

however, i think the quilt needs to be an accumulated piece

and i just don't have the time to make it before the quilt

and with the t-shirts, i have the space to learn a skill and make a visually engaging(on aesthetic level) and functional thing