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Artscape – The A-Z of contemporary Art – Ep1 of 2 a-k – Andrew Frost presenter

Paint drips

  • What is art?  How does one navigate contemporary art.

  • ‘A bluffers guide to everything you need to know’

A –
Artists

  • Artists not defined by media – multi-media including computers, video, sound

  • Dale Frank, - painter – conceptual artist

  •  Julian Mahon (birds of paradise/with bottles of beer – display, plumage, masculinity –‘the male in the natural world is the one with the bright plumage’

  • James Angus – Shangri La – Sydney Opera house – sculptor – sculptors to reflect the place where they are places – e.g. ‘reverse hot air balloon’ – inside opera house’

  • Agatha Goethe-Snape – making lists of all the artists she could remember – the relationships between people, artists and history

  • Soda Jerk – videos from other people’s movies – After the Rainbow – digital collage – from The wizard of Oz – cut with

  • The medium changes to suit the concept

Artspeak – art jargon

  • Special knowledge –

  • Big noting

  • ‘in isolation from the rest of the world’ –

Art school

  • To learn techniques, history and art socialisation

  • Argument – do we need art school –

B
Biennale

  • 2 year art exhibitions – e.g.

  • Most types of contemporary art – not for purchase – funded by government and

Body –

  • Figurative painting

  • Body art e- e.g. bellybuttons,

  • Harriet Body – The Belly Series (months 1-3) 2010 –

  • Rene Norwe Conceiving the Maternal 2012 – stills of women’s bellies from bra to bikini pants. 

  • Body is cheap and vulnerable e.g. Dara Gill Untitled (rubber band portraits) 2010 – photos

C
Contemporary

  • Vague and contradictory – a name for a kind of art for at least the last 30 or so years

  • Painting, rock pile, video – eating – a single work may contain many mediums

Chinese Art

  • Tu Wei-Cheng Happy Valentine’s Day 2011 – video of marching soldiers and plastic toy soldiers etc.  Shen Liang This is a book 2007 – painting – like a story map.  Shi Jindian Blue CJ750 2008 – wire model of motor bike with sidecar. 

  • Are very popular – great prices – e.g. Zhou Jie CBD 2010, Cip Fei , Ai Weiwe Sunflower Seeds 2010, Zhou Xiaoku Renown 2007 – video

D
Drawing

  • ‘Drawing is at the centre of everything that artists do’

  • Some say its optional –

Doubt

  • What is good or bad?

  • Is it al

E
The Everyday

  • A recent trend – drawing on day to day life as inspiration for art – may lead to ‘boring’ videos of people doing everyday things

Exceptions

  • CA – not signed paintings

  • Not usually picturesque etc.  – but

Fake

  • Paintings in the style of – forgeries – but in CA – it may be an ironic or other ‘homage’

G
Galleries

  • Commercial, art museums, artist run spaces

  • Artist run spaces – are available for the up and coming artist –

  • Commercial galleries are ‘art shops’ – may not have prices listed (ask if you’re interested) – large commission

  • Art museums – all types of art – not for sale – permanent and temporary exhibitions – talks, tours, lectures workshops – big travelling exhibitions, competitions,

G –
Genre

  • Installation, video art,

  • Art fairs – dominated by painting (most saleable)

  • ‘Taste create markets, and markets create taste’ Karl Marx

H
History

  • Old art was representative – and hierarchical – in medium (painting at top) and subject history subjects at top,

  • Romantic era leaving the hierarchies behind – 19th c

  • 20th c – holocaust and other disasters of way – 200 million people died – radical approaches to making art – to reflect and comment on the world – anarchic – modern art started to lose its way

  • 1960s ‘the last flowering of modern art.  By the 1970s, it was almost exhausted’. 

  • Post – modernism – irony, pastiche, appropriation – the end of history? 

  • Deep nostalgia for 1960s and 70s – revisiting old art movements (esp. The modernist era) in an attempt to define the social reality of the 21st c. 

  • All is revisited – post modernity

I
Ideas

  • The nature of the aesthetic experience

  • How we interpret the translation –

  • Tom Polo Disappointed with everything (not everyone) 2011 – neon lights

  • Bill henson’s photography

  • Aesthetics – is the response to beauty, ugliness, provocation (not always anger, or in your face)

  • Catherine Nelson Sydney Spring – seduction waterlilies

  • Juan Davila – gay porn in paintings to satirise modern culture

Installation

  • Justene Williams Milk seeped in bread and rocked the leg 2012-2013

  • Fiona Hall Give a Dog A Bone 1998 – cardboard boxes with yellow objects lined up like shelves on a wall + a painting/photo of a man draped in a quilt?

  • Darragh O’Callaghan and David Sudmalis Aphasia 2012

  • Trevor Richards 2013 – geometric paintings on white walls, plus the whole floor as geometric tessellated art work. 

  • Mile Nelson The Coral Reef 2000

  • There are no limits

J
Junk

  • Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro Wohnwagon (flatpack – Past Times) 2006-2007

  • Jimmie Durham Still Life with Stone and Car 2004 – crumpled car with huge rock in passenger compartment. 

K
Kitsch

  • The over-common – may show us time and place – e.g. the asian beauty on leather

  • Annett Bezor – takes these asian images and makes them into new works – Tension 2 2002

Good art is debatable –

Episode 2 – L-Z

Ideas of philosophy and science and directs them into art

Is generic, but is always evolving into many forms.  Artists are those who make art. 

L
Like

  • Asked to make a preference – is it good?  Understanding is about more than like/dislike

  • Patricia Piccinnini Sphinx 2012 – Ghost , Vanitas 2012 – spend time with a work discover what the work is about

Laughter

  • Brown Council The one hour laugh 2009 video of 4 people in coloured dunces caps laughing. 

  • Kate Mitchell I am not a joke 2008 – video of artist sawing a circular hold in the floor while she stands within the circle

M
Modernism

  • Artists testing the limits of materials, representation

  • Began 1850 – ended 1970s

Market

  • ‘The Art Market” – the primary market – galleries, secondary – auctions – after the initial sale. 

  • Monetary value does not show intrinsic value – desirability drives the monetary price

  • Cultural value is something else – bad art may get sold for ‘way more than it’s worth’

Materiality

  • Moving shit around – substituting junk material for

  • ‘The state or quality of being material’ 

  • James Angus Red I-beam Knot 2012 – materiality may mean the materials used in an art work.  

  • Belem Lett

  • Also to define e.g. film grain, the look of a video

  • David Noonan, Untitled 2012

  • Bianca Chang Form in white (Rotation 1V) 2012 – paper file rotated inside card circle, Peaks 2012

  • Daniel Von Sturmer Painted Video (Sequence 4) , 2009

  • Claire Healy & Dean Cordiero T + 79_black 2010 – lego bricks built into wall – making an image/painting

N
Notions

  • A widely abused term ‘This work questions notions of...

  • Meaning they are exploring conceptions of...

O
Other

  • Art world ideas inherited from philosophy – the subject is about the artist depiction a contrast between the artist’s subjectivity and another sense of ‘otherness’  - meaning – the exact opposite of ourselves – can we speak for this ‘other’ – is this another way of making a statement about ourselves (e.g. Kylie’s series on Pakistani workers in the UAE?)

  • Tom Lloyd Here is Everywhere 2012 – an unsettling, The Styles of Elements, Rivers Edge (both 2012)

P
Photography

  • Dates back to 19th c

  • E.g. Catherine Nelson – Sydney Spring 2013

  • Polly Borland Untitled xx1x 2010

  • Jackie Ranken Flying Birdcage 2013 – Moeraki Rice Cookers

  • Rosemary Laing (Aboriginal heritage) Flight Research #5 1999 – artist in long white dress suspended in sky above Oz landscape

  • Destiny Deacon Adoption 1993/2000 – Dark baby mini-dolls dressed and undressed in patty pans. 

  • Julie Rrap Persona and Shadow: Sister 1984 – knocking painting off it’s perch

  • Polixeni Papatetrou – Winter Clown 2002

  • Anne Zahalka Karo, Performer 2009

  • Reportage, photoshop montage, street photography, formal portraiture, phone ‘happy snaps’

  • An excess of photographic images

Post-modernism –

  • Dif from post-modernity – which is the condition of the contemporary

  • Post-modern – 1970-1990s

  • Post-modernism – a period and a style – marked by – appropriation, quotation, irony, pastiche –

Q
Queer theory

  • Video of two naked men inhaling each others’ breath from a white balloon – very intensely looking into each other’s eyes. 

R
Representation

  • Representing the world, filtered through an artist’s imagination

  • Is uncertain – not, currently about literal copying of the real world. 

S
Serious flaw

  • Art is compromised by commerciality – does this render it invalid? 

  • But may not be ‘commercial’ inherently – if it then becomes ‘saleable’ is it then compromised?

T –
Theory

  • Ca – Critical theory – a philosophical approach to culture that seeks to confront the social, historical and ideological forces that produce and constrain it. 

  • Phenomonology, post-structioralism, post-colonialism, neomarxism and feminism 

  • ‘If a work of art needs an essay to justify its existence, then it’s probably not working.’

U
Urban art

  • E.g. street art – stencils, posters, graffiti, yarn bombing

  • Street art – a combination of guerrilla art and political agitation... by white middle class artists (wouldbe outsiders) – some becomes lasting – in galleries, or preserved as a tourise attraction. 

  • Urban aboriginal art –e.g Vernon Ah Kee Can’t Chant 2007, Tolerance 2005 – to differentiate city – urban aboriginal artists from those living the trad lifestyle.  Brook Andrew – Travelling Colony 2012 (set of brightly striped retro caravans in warehouse).  Ah Kee Annie Ah Kee 2008 (drawing)

V
Video art

  • Daniel Crooks Static No.12 (seek stillness in movement) 2009

  • Many technologies – many cameras –

  • AK Dolvin Looking Back –

  • Viewed on tv, in galleries, online

  • Steven Jones Homage to Nan Jin Pike

  • Daniel Crooks Train No.10 (onward backwards) 2012 –

  • John Tonkin – These are the Days 1994 – mesmerising loops  - paper sheets falling in slow motion – e.g. the gifs of HPV on Tumblr. 

  • Shaun Gladwell Storm Sequence 2000 – artist on skateboard, slow motion, beside stormy sea (Sydney – Bondi?) Tangara 2003

  • Sue Healy Will Time Tell? 2006 (streets of Japan)

  • Grant Stevens Crushing

  • Nina Toss The Language Between Us 2012

  • Heath Franco Your Door 2011

W
Women

  • More art students and art – fewer are commercially viable artists, but many more than men in the gallery business and other areas of the art world. 

Wine

  • The exhibition opening

X

  • The X unknown

Y
You

  • The person who admires, makes, or buys

 

Z
Zeitgeist

  • The art of the present moment – quickly changed

Contemporary Art

  • Art is more than mere decoration

  • Retain Critical faculties – keep mind open

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