Steph Stewart COFA1001/2

whatup

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Collaboration with half the class

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Collaboration

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collaboration

using a group of iphones/samsungs/other phones that continually grew

We recorded the general noises of the courtyard, replayed and rerecorded all the phones playing at the same time

We then interviewed others and asked them for their impressions of the sounds

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In class work I appropriated one of the free flowers at cofa to have the powers to change the moods of small bits of paper

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Concept Statement and Bibliography

 Concept Statement

In response to the statement: Desire has often been conceived in terms of a lack: we desire what we lack, and we move endlessly (and impossibly) towards the object of desire. Against this notion, Gilles Deleuze conceives desire as a constructive force: desire produces its own objects. Taking up this idea of desire as a constructive, creative, productive activity, consider art and design practices as ways of exploring the possibilities of desire.

I am exploring this constructive idea of desire in relation with Australian battery farms. I came to choose battery farms through my research into capitalism and globalisation. I was researching artists such as Choi Jeong-Hwa, who uses everyday objects to question what constitutes a Korean identity. I also researched into a controversial art dealer who was accused of setting up camps where Aboriginal people were exploited for their paintings. I also reaearched the international artist, Ai Weiwei, who’s work Sunflower Seeds focusses on the people that are at the end of the mass production line. The people of a town in Jingdzen, China, were employed for the tedious job of crafting ten million porcelain sunflower seeds. The work, was commenting on how China caters to the desires of the West. I saw a similarity in this work and my idea of the battery farms. A large corporation desires profit, and will source cheap means of labour. I found this small poem by Gerald Helleiner that I thought expressed this idea succinctly: The poor complain, they always do, But that’s just idle chatter. Our system brings rewards to all, At least to all who matter. Although the European Union has deemed battery farms illegal, they still continue to exist throughout Australia. The desire for the business owners to make a profit has resulted in the live hens themselves being treated as disposable objects.

There are certain aspects of the hens lives which have been tweaked and altered in order for the hen to produce eggs as quickly and cheaply as possible. Over time, there has been an accumulation of new technologies in order to assist in related duties, such as killing the chickens with motorised razors.

The traditional agrarian lifestyle of raising chickens has been intervened with so far that it is now almost completely avoidable to touch the chickens at all. This has been achieved by the implementation of new technologies.

I wanted to make a work that expressed the disposable object that the hens are seen as. I first made a clay model to represent chicken skin, but soon replaced it with rubber latex. The latex provided a translucency which represented the vulnerability of the skin much more effectively. I created a wire frame that was A4 in size, the estimated space that one battery hen will occupy in a factory farm. I created a clay mould with dimples pressed in to it, to imitate a plucked hens skins. The latex was then brushed onto the mould and left to dry. After it had dried and peeled off I attempted to attach it to the frame. The latex hung off the wire in a lifeless, interesting way, but the wire frame was too delicate to attach to the wall. I placed the box on a lamp to take the photos of the work. Originally I had planned to mount the box on the wall, with a small light inside it. The light that emits through the latex was supposed to have a look similar to when a torch is held up to a fertilised egg, and an embryo and veins are visible. This would have added to the vulnerable look of the work. However, the light shining through looked too bright and yellow. Next time I would have either dyed the latex, or changed the light bulb’s colour in some way.

I wasn’t completely happy with the first attempt, as I felt it was merely a presentation of the space that the chicken occupies, rather than a work that shows my concept. I then next used chicken wire to wrap around the latex chicken skin. The wire was intended to have an ominous presence, to look as though it was strangling the skin. It was meant to be a juxtaposition of the delicate, living flesh, and the machinery invented in order to imprison, control, and kill it. It was meant to represent how the factory farms have such a high expectation and demand for the chickens – once they are 18 months old, they are killed to make room for younger hens who can lay eggs at a faster rate.

For assessment 1, I was given the feedback that I needed to have more research in my next assessment. I think that unfortunately, this time, I have focused too much on the research as I believe my final work does not convey my ideas effectively.

Bibliography:

Animals Unleashed. 2014. Chickens. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.unleashed.org.au/animals/chickens.php. [Accessed 10 September 14].

Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 2008. Interview - John Ioannou. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2008/s2333833.htm. [Accessed 13 September 14].

Christopher, J. 2012. Wynne Prize 2012 Jason Christopher. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/wynne/2012/29184/. [Accessed 09 September 14].

Fortescue, E. 2012. Sculptor Jason Christopher showcasing works such as Fertility Totem Fetish at Salerno Gallery in Glebe. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/entertainment/sculptor-jason-christopher-and-his-hi-tech-fetishes/story-e6frexmi-1226370341985?nk=fba3da7a6d774665d5b346a7aa1fdcd7. [Accessed 10 September 14].

Gibson, Joel. 2008. Artists locked in ‘battery farms’, worker says. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/artists-locked-in-battery-farms-worker-says/2008/07/28/1217097148542.html. [Accessed 13 September 14].

McDermott, Quentin. 2012. Art for Art’s Sake?. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2008/07/28/2314182.htm. [Accessed 12 September 14].

[stephystewy1001]

I wanted to make the latex skin appear as it it was bulging out of a chicken wire cage. This is to represent how battery hens are given hormones that make them grow unnaturally fast, and also the unreasonable demands that the business place on the hens in order for their desire to make a profit. Every aspect of the hens life has been intervened with in order to force them to produce eggs cheaply and quickly. 

Originally I tried to make a wire cage, then put the skin on the outside of a balloon inside the cage and inflate the balloon to show the rapid swelling of the hens, but that failed miserably. 

I think in order for the wire to have a more ominous, intervening prescence the wire would have needed to be more thicker.

[stephystewy1001]

Draping the 'skin' over a frame

I created a wire box frame that had the dimensions of A4. The skin was draped over the frame, and illuminated from below. The latex gave a good transluscency, however the lamp I used was too yellow. I wanted a deeper red to emit from the box, similar to what you would see when you shine a torch into a fertilised egg and see the developing embryo inside the egg. 

I also thought the box didn't work too well because it just showed the size of the space in which the chicken occupies, and not how the natural lifestyle of the hen has been intervened with by technology. 

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Creating a 'chicken skin' 

Originally I started to flatten and mould clay to imitate a chicken skin. However it was too brittle for what I needed. I instead used the clay to create a mould to brush latex over. The latex would result in a skin that's much more delicate, giving the vulnerable effect I was after. 

The moulds I made were the size of an A4 piece of paper, which is the estimated space that each hen gets to occupy in a battery hen farm.

Alternating between a fine and a thick tool, I made dimples that would imitate a bumpy chicken skin that has been plucked of its feathers. 

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Now I'm researching actual battery hens in Australia.

Due to the high demands of consumers, hens are expected to perform round the clock to lay eggs. 

While European countries implemented a ban on battery hens in 2012, Australia still continues to use this type of housing hens. 

The chickens that are killed on mass creates a mass amount of waste - male chicks that are born have no economic value, so are either gassed to death or ground up alive. 

The above is a work responding to battery hens, by Jason Christopher.  

Jason Christopher looks at high-tech fetishes.  He uses 3D imaging software and materials including ABS plastic, perspex and stainless steel, that he sculpted with during his time working for the film industry.

The work was a finalist in the Wynne Prize in 2012. 

The faces of the chickens, the main eye catching feature of the front of the artwork, are ipads. The audience are invited to engage with the cute, quirky chickens, but to also hopefully think deeper about the meaning of the work.

The bodies of the chickens are made from stainless steel. The result is an an entertaining and highly efficient chicken. The purpose of a battery chicken is to be an efficient, cost, space and time effective way of producing eggs.

The conditions that the hens are placed in is horrible, so by including the ipads, the artist has offered a distraction from the issue. He says it offers the 'guilt free feeling that only technology can deliver.'

[stephystewy1001]

Further research into desire/globalisation/capitalism

The demands of the aboriginal art markets and supposed dodgy dealings, with the artists suffering.

The headline above is from a Sydney Morning Herald article from 2008, about an art dealer called John Ioannou who manages Aboriginal artists living in a community outside of Alice Springs. 

The article claims that the Aboriginal artists, many of them elders, are kept inside fenced areas in an art centre and are basically there to produce paintings, and not allowed to leave.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/artists-locked-in-battery-farms-worker-says/2008/07/28/1217097148542.html

In an interview with ABC's Four Corners in the same year, John Ioannou refutes all the claims made against him. He calls himself more of a carer than an art co-ordinator. He talks about how he has extended the art centre to include a seperate male and female section, installed air-con, provides food, blankets and heaters. 

Transcript from the interview: http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2008/s2333833.htm

John Ioannou has been ostracised by the major Australian institutions: AGNSW, NGA, Australia Council.  They won't deal with him because of the conditions that the artists live in.  John replies by saying that he is living in the aboriginal community, he has learnt their language and has been initiated into the community. He says that if those institutions really cared about the living conditions then they would come and visit. He says that those major institutions only visit about once every five years.

It's a really hard issue to research, it's hard to know what's the truth and hard to find more information on it. It does sound a bit dodgy.

There is a more recent article I found, in 2013, about Tommy Watson being taken away from his family and community in Irrunytju, by John Ioannou. Apparently he was taken to Melbourne to paint in secret. There were concerns for his welfare, and his family was trying to get him back. Tommy was recorded speaking to Johnny and it was translated by an independent speaker: "No. No. No. I want to stay with you. Me and you are going to be the only two that stay here." However, there are so many stories about how dodgy John Ioannou is. He claims that all of his artists get 50% from the sale of a work, but Tommy Watsons family say they are missing massive amounts of money.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/visual-arts/three-way-battle-over-western-desert-artist-tommy-watson-not-a-pretty-picture/story-fn9d3avm-1226762144842?nk=fba3da7a6d774665d5b346a7aa1fdcd7

The whole Aboriginal art industry seems to be associated with money, greed and desire for profit. People have seen that there is money to be made with Aboriginal art, and are exploiting it. I came across the term 'carpet bagging', which refers to outsiders moving in to an area to take advantage of a situation which they believe will yield them gain of some nature. The situation with John Ioannou has also been labelled a 'cash and grab' excercise, which is about exploiting the Aboriginal art industry while it's popular, without worries about the long term care for the communities.

In the years since this interview, there has been an introduction of the Resale Royalty Right, which is meant to ensure that any time a painting has been resold, the original artist will receive 5% of the selling price (when the painting is sold for over $1000).   At a gallery opening at the Boomali gallery in Leichardt, there was a speaker talking about the benefits of this law, saying how Aboriginal artists sometimes get paid a very small amount for a painting. The same painting is then resold through auction at much higher price, and the artist used to just get nothing. Now with the Resale Royalty Right, the artist can keep earning. The Right is affective up until 70 years after the artists death, so the 5% would be passed to their family.

I found researching all this stuff really interesting, but I would feel too awkward making an artwork that responds to this issue, because I am just some random white girl, who am I to make artworks responding to aboriginal issues?

[stephystewy1001]

Globalism, Desire and Capitalism

So, my assessment two artwork needs to respond to the original question about desire - being an assemblage. 

I'm going to combine globalisation as a major interconnected system, and the impacts it has on our desires. There is a poem written by a Gerald Helleiner, a Canadian Economist:

'The poor complain, they always do, but that's just idle chatter. 

Our system brings rewards to all,

At least to those who matter.' It brings to mind the image of capitalism - corporations becoming larger and gaining profits, while others suffer.

Ai Weiwei's Sunflower seeds is a work which addresses this issue.  First exhibited in 2010 at the Tate Modern, London, a total of 100 million handcrafted porcelain sunflower seeds covered the floor of the turbine hall. 

The seeds were individually made by artisans in Jingdzen. Known as the 'Porcelain Capital,' the town was originally responsible for creating porcelain for the royal family. By using its people to replicate such an everyday object, to be shown in London, Ai Weiwei addresses gloablisation, and how it results in China catering to the mass production  items to be exported to Western countries. The work also alludes to the deemed insignificance of the workers at the bottom of the ladder. The production of the seeds included a tedious 30 step process. The use of people rather than machines, shows how people on mass can be seen as cheap, disposable workers.

[stephystewy1001]

Further to Yanagi Yukinori's work, I was thinking more about globalism/globalisation because we had been studying it in another class.

Globalism: Describing a world that is made up of a networks of connections that span international borders.  It 'is best used to denote a multicentric, multiscalar, multitemporal, multiform, and multicausal process…the complex, emergent product of many different forces operating on many scales' - Bob Jessop, British Political Academic

Globalisation: Describes the acceleration or decline of globalism. It focuses on the forces, and the speed of these developments. It 'denotes the expanding scale, growing magnitude, speeding up and deepening impact of interregional flows and patterns of social interaction.' - David Held and Anthony McGrew

A South Korean artist, Choi Jeong-Hwa uses everyday objects to question a national identity.

An example of his work, Happy Happy, acknowledges the role of South Korea and its neighbours as the origin of the mass production of consumer goods.

He says, rather than the fine art works we see in galleries in South Korea, it is the everyday objects, the ‘colourful, shocking, rough, tacky and fragile’ that are most representative of his culture.

Gather Together was an exploration of the difference between art and trash. It was a gathering of plastic bottles and other garbage collected by the millions of people who attended. It was hung outside the stadium that was showing the 2009 Seoul Olympic events. When it was dark and the lights illuminated the plastic bottles, it gave the trash an aesthetic beauty. 

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Failure / Unexpected Results

Sometimes I worry that an idea I have might turn out shit. It ends up with so many works existing only in my head, until they are forgotten. Our tutor, Mel, has been trying to teach us about the importance of documenting everything we do.

One cool example of a work which has unexpected results is Yanagi Yukinori's World Ant Farm. Ants are set to work in transparent boxes, dyed with sand to represent flags from various countries. The boxes are all connected by transparent tubes. As the ants tunnelled through the boxes, the desired effect was an intermingling of coloured grains of sand, resulted in all the boxes displaying a muddled colour, rather than individually identifiable flags. However, during the exhibition, people who were concerned for the welfare of the ants noticed that many of the ants had died in the exhibition. The ants died before they could achieve the desired result.

This occurrence gave the work another meaning - that the ideal effects of globalism are not always the outcome. 

The ants, which were meant to be a symbol of order and work, had rebelled by dying. 

[cordeliablaze-blog]

1. I desire a Hermes birkin bag in my life time - Cordy

2. In the end it will be trash. - D

3. The bag has disintegrated into just a useless handle - steph

4. It results in nothing - lucy

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Responding to each others desire drawings

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Week 5: Desire

Creating a wearable object

Our group was looking at the artist Jonny Niesche. His works are flat paintings, but the artist is interested in the relationships between the work and the body of the viewer.

This relates to what we've been studying in my Beyond Modernities class - phenomenology, minimalism and site specific installations.  In Richard Serra's Tilted Arc, the heavy steel stretched across Federal Plaza, New York. The work forced the nearby workers to deviate from their usual route. 

In our group, we were discussing the rules of a gallery, how we get up really close to artwork to see fine details, but we never touch the works. From that conversation we started talking about social boundaries between strangers - one will usually respect anothers personal space in public. For example, if you were on a bus, the window seats are all filled before someone will occupy the aisle seat and sit next to someone. You wouldn't touch someone on a bus unless the bus was completely packed and you couldn't avoid it. 

For our wearable object, we all connected ourselves a little distance apart with string. we then used string and rubber bands to restrict our movements - we could only stretch our limbs partially,  we were stopped before we could touch the person next to us. The work was a visual representation of the social boundaries which most of us are dictated by daily.

[stephystewy1001]

A2 Poster responding to the question about desire

I created an interactive poster where you can create your ideal partner. I used acetate so you could swipe left and right through the different options of eyes, hairstyles, legs, etc. The swiping action refers to touchscreens, particularly the Tinder 'dating' app. 

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Desire as part of an assemblage.....

According to Giles Deleuze, we don't desire one object on its own, we desire the whole context. an example of this in my life would be the shabby chic trend that is popular where I live - Sydney's northern beaches. My mum wanted me to buy her the lamp above as a present, it's nautical themed and available at this beachy homewares shop.

If I told Giles that my mum desired the lamp, he would say that it's not just the lamp, it's the whole context of the lamp: -having furniture that looks vintage, scrubby and white washed -living on the coast near the beach -surfer lifestyle This made me think about little kids when they constantly ask 'why'.. if I kept questioning myself about something I desire, I could get to the root of a deeper desire

[stephystewy1001]

Annotated Bibliography

Gilles Deleuze: 'D' for Desire

I figured this would be the best place to start research. It's an interview with the philosopher which is mentioned in the question.

Gilles Deleuze is in total opposition to Freud and the psychoanalysts, he calls their ideas a 'fucking joke.' The psychoanalysts are concerned with the singular, without taking the whole context into consideration. For example if you have a problem, it can be related back to the father, or the mother, or the phallus, etc

Gilles talks about his book 'Anti Oedipus' and outlines the three major differences between his ideas and the psychoanalysts, in terms of desire:

1. The pschoanalystics believed the unconscious is a theatre infinitely played out in our head, with characters. Rather it is a factory, which is constantly producing 2. Delirium: not concerning the mother or father, we delire more broadly about the world about the world 

3. Desire always establishes itself and constructs an assemblage - constantly putting several factors into play. Whereas psychoanalysis ceaselessly reduces us to a single factor - e.g. mother or  father. Deleuze says that psychoanalysis remains ignorant of the multiples.

I am starting to understand the concept more now, i've now been wondering how this accumulation occurs in our minds. It would be a bit overwhelming for it to constantly gather new information. Where is it sorted and kept?  I need to do some more research to understand it fully before I can develop my own ideas