My Research Blog @joshua-crowe - Tumblr Blog

#Artists #Daniel Canogar

Some Art Essays online

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle -

http://www.antiworld.se/project/references/texts/The_Society%20_Of%20_The%20_Spectacle.pdf

Michel Foucalt, Of Other Spaces -

http://www.vizkult.org/propositions/alineinnature/pdfs/Foucault-OfOtherSpaces1967.pdf

Bernard Stiegler, Suffocated Desire -

http://parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia13/parrhesia13_steigler.pdf

#Essays #michel foucault #bernard stiegler #guy debord

Gerhard Richter

The most impressive and fascinating archive of found imagery by an artist.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2003/dec/09/photography

#Artists #Gerhard Richter #Atlas

Mikhael Subotzky & Patrick Waterhouse Nominated for for their publication Ponte City (Steidl, 2014)

Ponte City by Mikhael Subotzky & Patrick Waterhouse

One of the nominations in the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, currently being shown at the Photographer’s Gallery.

I thought it was not only an interesting body of work, but also well-curated. It seemed like a thorough analysis of this landmark of urban decay, which has become so symbolic. They seemed to have cut through the mythos of the place and traced its history more objectively through a number of perspectives and stories. We are presented with a multiplicity of different viewpoints. I liked the archival material on the walls. These nostalgic photos and official documents become mysterious and mystically charged somehow, when presented in this way, and their fragmentary appearance becomes an allegory for the partial, fragmentary nature of memory itself. My favourite pieces were the huge free-standing light-boxes that resembled the building itself. On one side was a collection of TV images, from a variety of different shows it seems. I love large archives of mass-media imagery. Removed from their context, they often seems ridiculous and funny or even strange and uncanny.

#photographers gallery #deutsche börse photography prize #Michael Subotsky #Patrick Waterhouse #Ponte City #Exhibitions

Richard Patterson

Richard Patterson is an English painter who combines painterly abstraction and gestural brushstrokes with photorealism. He often starts with a photo of a toy (the toy Minatour is a recurring one) and he’ll cover them with paint, photograph it, obscure areas of the photograph with paint and then meticulously copy the whole thing in flat uniform photorealism. The resultant images have this kind of tension between the areas of ‘cool’ photorealism and the ‘hot’ streaks of thick paint depicted in the painting. The way he paints paint and the irony of meticulously replicating loose gestural brushstrokes in this way reminds me of the work of Glenn Brown, like his piece We’ll Drink Through it All This The Modern Age, 1993 which is a smooth, flat photorealist translation of a Frank Auerbach painting. I find his work to be an interesting exploration of the relationship painting and photography.

#Artists #Richard Patterson

Andrew Grassie: New Hang

New Hang was a Tate exhibition that was put on in 2005. It included 13 small egg tempera paintings by Andrew Grassie, which depicted an imaginary Tate hang, including a variety of works from their collection. The paintings were positioned in the very space which they depicted, but the rooms in reality were empty save for the paintings. In fact, I learned in an Artist Talk he gave last year that the imaginary hang never actually existed - artworks were photographed in situ on or two at a time and then the photographs were combined afterwards. The exhibition only ever existed in the world of the paintings. I find this work fascinating because it creates this doubling of space, and there is a juxtoposition between the imagined space within the paintings and the actual space they’re situated in.

For More information, visit the Tate website -

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/art-now-andrew-grassie-new-hang

#Artists #Andrew Grassie #Tate Britain

Cory Arcangel interviewed by LuckyPDF

#Artists #Cory Arcangel #Luckypdf

Remembering is a tricky, unstable business. This hour: a look behind the curtain of how memories are made...and forgotten.

Toilet Humour: Toilets in Modern Art

In 1917, Duchamp, under the monicker R. Mutt, submitted his most infamous, revolutionary and influencial piece to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition: a signed urinal titled Fountain. Ironically, while the toilet once stood for a rejection of the notions of ‘high art’, it has now become a recurring motif in Modern Art, and is thus now a well-established part of the high art lexicon. As a subject, it has been explored by a variety of artists to create work that ranges from light-hearted and humorous to unsettlingly abject*.

*The term abjection literally means ‘the state of being cast off’. The abject is a complex psychological, philosophical and linguistic concept developed by Julia Kristeva in her 1980 book Powers of Horror. She was partly influenced by the earlier ideas of the French writer, thinker and dissident surrealist, Georges Bataille. Kristeva herself commented: ‘refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live’. In practice the abject covers all the bodily functions, or aspects of the body, that are deemed impure or inappropriate for public display or discussion.

The abject has a strong feminist context, in that female bodily functions in particular are ‘abjected’ by a patriarchal social order. (Tate Glossary definition)

#toilets #Artists #Gerhard Richter #Wilhelm Sasnal #Andy Warhol #Sarah Lucas #Alfred Hitchcock #Danny Boyle