Xanthe ADAD1001

[camillablome]

PROCESS- group assessment

After researching other artists work, we have decided to manifest our assessment of value and critique of the fashion industry in the form of a ‘subverted’ fashion show.

Everyone in the group collected old rags from around the house, an idea that Joe used for his previous assessment. When we gathered as a group, in order to challenge the traditional fashion show, we decided that as opposed to us wearing the rags we would make the audience dress us. We also decided that it was going to become a performance piece with music and dance.

We were concerned that this performance piece alone would not be able to successfully communicate the conceptual idea behind the work, so we thought we would add a video element that would play proceeding the performance. We all collected snippets of different elements of the fashion industry including catwalks, sounds of price haggling and scenes of fighting over clothes.

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Statement— Assessment 3

Influenced by the theme ‘value’ our group (jade, Hannah, joe, Camilla, and Xanthe) sought to examine ideas of superficiality and how mass production and over-consumerism can decrease value.

Our work is challenging how we assign value in a postmodern fashion industry, where we use rags in juxtaposition to the couture and expensive brands featured in our video back dropping our performance.

We were influenced by the artist ‘Rare Candy’ in which they look at clothing by perverting the norm. In the performance aspect we asked the audience to ‘clothe us’ by putting an odd combination of clothes on in abstract ways.

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Glitch Class Task:

Today we explored the theme of glitch through the use of the panorama filter on our phone. By moving too suddenly and not staying still we were able to disrupt the movements on the Inage and create glitching effects. I think this movement and sense of failure in the images was successful and it was interesting to create abstract images through the use of the mirror that seemed to disrupt reality.

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Can creative acts be rebellious when rebellion has become canonised in art, design and media histories? What would a contemporary creative rebellion look like?

Due to the canonisation of rebellious art within the conscience of contemporary artmaking, to a great extent, creative acts are limited in their ability to shock audience and provoke new reactions. Extending upon my first assessment task, I sought to further create a sardonic and comedic response to the irony of rebellious art in that it ultimately institutionalises that which is meant to oppose the institution itself.

In assessment one, my artwork was largely inspired by Damien Hirsh’s large-scale pill sculptures. I sought to take the ides of a “placebo” literally and construct a regular prism net of a medical packaging that aims to “target relief from guilt” that an audience might encounter when viewing injustice presented by some rebellious art. To extend upon this in the second assessment task, it was logic for me to explore the consequential effects of taking the Placebo tablet, which manifested into the idea of an “overdose” on Placebo.

To a great extent, the physical act of making and constructing was a way to generate solutions or experience realizations that developed by conceptual artmaking. My first experiment sought to simply shrink down the my Placebo package into smaller copies, to explore the notion of mass-production of this ineffective drug. However, I quickly realized through this process that I wasn’t developing the question around rebellion or my artmaking through this simple act of replicating and rescaling. The material basis of artwork discovered by chance after scrolling through websites of anatomical medical sketches and finding an autopsy report. I liked the idea of an intimate and quite gruesome interrogation and invasion into the individual post-mortem as a way to exemplify the theoretical and holistic implications of overdosing on Placebo.

I heightened my use of hyperbole and black humour from the first assessment task to exacerbate the desensitised and nullified state the individual is rendered in. Drawing on artists like Kinsco Toth who use fabrics to reconstruct organs and other research sources like the Gray’s Anatomy textbook, I committed myself to researching areas like the parietal lobe of the brain, the operations of the heart, and eye problems like photokeratitis in order to have evidence of medical truth behind my artwork. I find that this factual and quantitative evidence examining the effects on the body creates a satirical juxtaposition to the highly conceptual basis which most rebellious art is founded on, particularly around the desire to provoke emotions for the sake of a reaction. Perhaps this stark contrast will even humorously tempt some audience members to view my work with having slight truth around the effects of overdosing on Placebo may result in these medical conditions and ultimately death.

Due to my process of selecting various organs or parts of the body and examining them, this greatly impacted my sense of presentation, where I collected various sketches and diagrams to create a more morbid and humorous atmosphere. This milieu is further seen in the report that again employs satirical phrasing around the nature of rebellion.

It is through a practice-led art making approach that I have been stimulated to examine the notion of rebellion in more abstract and creative angles. However, I have still kept the same underlying notion that the canonisation of rebellious art has ultimately withdrawn itself from enacting physical and even memorable change due to an overstimulation of ideas or empty imperatives. My artwork is important because it poses the question around whether a rebellious artwork may simply and ironically be a rebellion against rebellion itself.

Bibliograhy:

“Autopsy Diagrams/Paperwork.” Military Health System, www.health.mil/Military-Health-Topics/Research-and-Innovation/Armed-Forces-Medical-Examiner-System/Armed-Forces-Medical-Examiner/Autopsy-Diagrams-Paperwork.

Drake, Richard L, et al. GRAYS ANATOMY FOR STUDENTS. ELSEVIER INDIA, 2017.

Read, Emma. “My Blog.” My Blog, Blogger, 12 Dec. 2017, emlouise1398.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-three-rs-at-start-of-this-project.html.

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Assessment 2: Change in direction and updated progress beginning of Week 9

Whilst I wanted to create a physical body as the main artwork of my assessment, it was after doing the in-class experiment where I replaced the figure with Jade and received some feedback that I was able to realise how physically manifesting my idea into a human form may not convey my concept across as well. I am concerned that it is too explicit and won’t as effectively create a sardonic tone that I was able to achieve last time through writing satirical phrases on the placebo package.

Moving forward, I think it would be best to persist in my idea of anatomical drawings, so I can label parts of it and again employ a sardonic tone. A drawing of the heart pictured above is an example of this initial drawing.

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Assessment 2 Progress:

Continuing the idea of a ‘morgue’ as indicative of one’s desensitization after confronted by ‘rebellious’ art, I was thinking to explore this by constructing physical body. This body in the images above was actually used by myself and jade and Annie in the SART1002 course for a group project exploring the crippling impacts of fast fashion on the world around us and some communities. However, I think that I could draw on this idea and create another body that will extend the notions I explored in my first assessment.

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Research:

Kinsco Toth’s artwork of a reconstruction of a heart in transparent stocking. I liked the sense of construction associated with the natural form and heart, especially the use of wire showing through. It would be interesting to manipulate this idea and fill the heart with empty pill capsules to show the over consumption of the placebos. Moreover, I could construct the heart from a placebo packet that I made in assessment 1.

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Class Activity: Value

In this class experiment I sought to look at the value of someone in society who has ‘overdosed’ on the idea of placebo focused on in my first assessment. I look at how the body has become desensitized and ‘deadened’ by such over stimulation of rebellious acts. I wanted to create a morgue-like effect.

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Restaging Marina Abramovic’s- a minute of silence

Restricted by the time it takes to actually eat the mandarin, we recreated Abramovixs work with a food twist. This enhances the intimacy and vulnerability.

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Experimentation—

In this experiment I sought to encapsulate the idea around ‘mass produced’ rebellion, in which an over stimulation of such artworks can create a desensitised population. By shrinking my first assessment to a small A6 size, I tried to create this effect. Moving forward, it might be interesting to do lots of them in stacks.

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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J0FowEAZ6co

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Brainstorming for next assessment

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Assessment 1: Final Work in Presentation ‘Placebo: targeted relief from guilt’

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Assessment 1- Final Poster

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Assessment 1- Statement

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Assessment 1- Experimentation For my poster, I am seeking to experiment with the A2 form and materials. To do this, I want to create a net of a rectangular prism such as the Nurofen package above. I would attempt to cut it in a way so that it can fold into a box replica.

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Assessment 1- Research

In my stages of research, I came across an article on the website ‘Frieze’, which included many artists’ responses to the question around whether art is a tenable tool to spur tangible change. Below, I have pasted a section of American artist Walead Beshty’s response. I found it particularly interesting when he accentuated the irony of some art rebelling against institutions when they themselves depend on it to project critical opinion. Moreover, the audience is positioned to feel some sort of accomplishment in actively visiting such gallery exhibitions, however may not be moved to the extent of enacting social change. 

Walead Beshty (Artist):

In the face of crisis, art often reverts to the false promise of institutional inclusion, for it claims, albeit tacitly, that the institutional voice can speak for the excluded: the very failure that gives rise to protest. In the moments that necessitate protest, the voice of art is insufficient at best and oppositional at worst: for, the institutional system through which it speaks is the very thing that protest questions. When art masquerades as protest, it undermines its own capacities to expand perception; but, more troublingly, it nullifies protest by creating a false representation of it, institutionalizing that which is opposed to the institution itself. The former is relatively harmless – it just results in mediocre art – but the latter is insidious, since it forecloses the pathways that only protest can open up, offering a placebo where real action is required.