ART DISCLOSED

because no one else will tell you the meaning behind Duchamp's urinal

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Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin’s work is deeply personal, a self-confession, a manifesto on her life and experiences. Focuses on making art with the reality of something, instead of making a drawing or sculpture of the subject, Tracey displays the subject itself. As she once said, she knew she would never have the best drawing technique as her counterparts, only to realize later, that she, was the art itself.

The work that catapulted her from the British art-circles to international fame was My Bed, Tracey’s own bed, surrounded by cigarette butts, empty alcohol bottles and stained underwear; the reckless result of post-breakup depression. A work incredibly personal, brutal and honest, a view into a person’s period of life, a portrait of the ups and downs, the beauty and the flaws of Emin’s own life. Another notorious work by Emin was Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, a tent, stitched with 102 names of people she had slept with up to the time of its creation in 1995, making the spectator a voyeur in Tracey’s life, a work that was bought by Charles Saatchi, and later lost in a warehouse fire.

http://vimeo.com/79687251

In Why I Never Became a Dancer one can take a quick view into a dark part of Emin’s life-experiences, events that shaped her into what she has become, a story told by Tracey herself, of an experience during her teenage years. During the course of the video, one can feel the sadness and traumatic undertone of the story told, but in the end it results to be the complete opposite. A revenge, taking something bad and turning into good. 

Her work with neon displays simple and intimate handwritten texts by her, the content of the writings feel almost as subconscious thoughts that wobble through Emin’s mind, immediate texts of passions, love declarations, disappointments, fears, and insults.

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Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei takes a socio-political stand through his art, a man who fights to preserve the Chinese state, a speaker for what he believes is right, one who believes an individual should set an example in society, for him, the art practice should be a philosophy on how we should be living life, your every move and action is a statement of your own persona, and in his own words “Your own acts and behavior tell the world who you are and at the same time what kind of society you think it should be.”

For WeiWei the idea of mechanization inevitably results in a loss of individualness, his own work reminds the spectators the uniqueness of all around us, work that challenges our first impression, what may seem like ordinary is in fact an outcome of a deeply-thought process, and upon further contemplation, one can appreciate that in reality every piece of his work has its own individuality, each different in detail than the others.

He questions consumerism, he bitterly remembers the China he knew since a young age when in the hard political regimen the ideal was that everything from the past should be destroyed to create a new world, by taking antiquities of profound cultural value and turning them into new pieces which blatantly and almost satirically make fun of the cultural desires of modern age.

All of his works can be said to speak of the double morality and hypocrisy that surrounds himself and his country, a place where they tell you that you’re free, but when you go out too far, and start to question the practices the system imposes on you, the injustices and the blind-eye to events of tragedy, you immediately become their enemy, censored and punished. An consequence Ai WeiWei knows too well.

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Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly's work mixes sexuality, thoughts, and the dark desires of the inner consciousness in the form of drawings, scribbles and passages of poems. His creations were mostly created under a certain state of trance, sometimes in the night and in total darkness, during its creation the importance of the artwork was not based on the content, but the experience itself, in the end the piece would turn into a reflection of the artist's own moods, ranging from the peaceful to the aggressive, the ecstatic and the violent.

His technique relied greatly on the immediateness in which the work could be done; drawing was his most used choice, a method thought by him as a genuine and rapid way to capture the purpose. Viewing Twombly's creations is a walk through the corridors of his own mind, a stroke made by Twombly, was indeed never done by chance.