Communication Design - Week 10
This week during our lecture with Karen and Andy we looked at reasons and thinking behind design. And from this line of thinking we looked into design activism and the beginning of conceptualism. We looked at the idea that maybe it is the art system that contextualises the object and makes it art. I found this very fascinating especially as the art in the lecture got more and more bizarre, it left me thinking just cause we say it art can it really be so? So I did some further digging at look at the Tate website.
According to the Tate Website conceptual art is art for which the idea behind the work is more important than the finished art object. Conceptualism emerged as an art movement in the 1960s and usually refers to art made from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Above I’ve picked three pieces of art from the conceptual art series at the Tate museum and will endeavour to learn a little bit more about each piece in the hope of understanding conceptual art further.
Soul City (Pyramid Of Oranges)
This sculpture was created by Roelof Louw in 1967. This work is made up entirely of fresh oranges. Initially the stack of oranges was made up of 5,800 oranges. However as viewers look at the stack they are invited to take an orange from the stack and look at how the shape changes form. According to Roelof Louw “By taking an orange, each person changes the molecular form of the stack of oranges, and participates in consuming its presence.”
Small White Pebble Circles
This was a piece created by Richard Long in 1987. The pebbles made up five concentric rings of white on the floor. In the installation instructions that Long provides the museum with, he specifies the exact measurements and that all the pebbles should be distributed by hand. According to Long ‘the whole work should look balanced and circular’ . Richard Long had done a list of similar works like this and often described his work as where his human characteristics meet the natural forces and patterns of the world. A really interesting quote he leads with in describing this piece is “There are millions of stones in the world, and when I make a sculpture, all I do is just take a few of those stones and bring them together and put them in a circle and show you ... I use stones because I like stones or because they’re easy to find, without being anything special, so common you can find them anywhere ... It’s enough to use stones as stones, for what they are. I’m a realist.’ (Quoted in Richard Long: Walking in Circles, p.45.) Honestly his process kind of leaves me questioning the value of conceptualism, especially when he labels the materials with such disregard.
This is a photograph from Erwin Wurm’s series One Minute Sculptures that he produced in 1988. The individual photographs feature images of people – anonymous participants, engaging in unconventional and physically challenging interactions with everyday objects. Just as it eludes to in the tittle the poses are held for one minute. This was definitely my favourite piece that I came across under the conceptualism genre because of the logic behind it. According to Erwin Wurn he states that from looking at these photographs both the view and the participant of the image are required to “momentarily suspend practical rationality in favour of the grotesque and the improbable”. I loved the humour the pieces evoked and it was a uncontrollable interactive piece for viewers’
After some further research I am definitely beginning to grow a deeper understanding and liking for conceptual art and visiting the Tate museum is something definitely something I’d like to do on my bucket list! I really enjoy the interactive pieces but still have some questions in regards to the pebbles.
Images and information from: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/conceptual-art
