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Jana Sterbak

Jana Sterbak is a Canadian artist best known for her conceptual sculptures that are made about and in relation to the body.

Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Sterbak immigrated in 1968 to Canada as a teenager with her parents. She attended the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art and Design) in 1973-74 and the University of British Columbia in 1974-75 before moving to Montréal to complete her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1977 at Concordia University.

It is worth noting the intense Czech culture that Sterbak was surrounded by and continues to appreciate, as strong enrichment references in her ironic and often pessimistic artwork. Coming from this background “it is not surprising, then, that the theme of constraint, imposed from within and from without, should have become a major preoccupation in her work”

Sterbak uses constraints for the body in her work, a common concern has been to wed the physical to the psychological, placing mind on an equal footing with matter. Many of her pieces use the human body to carry the desires and constraints of society and have involved fitting the body into some kind of outer garment. These works question the working of the will, suggesting that we may be freer than we want to be. The notion of empathy or ‘thinking in’ plays an important role in Sterbak’s work. Her installation ‘Golem: Objects as Sensations’ (1979-82) works on a number of levels, we can at least enter at one level. The work comprises of three framed prints and parts of the body cast in bronze and lead. The parts are laid out on the ground, like a spine, or a fuse waiting to come alive. In this state they can be perceived as offerings which represent the function of an organ in life or carry the deceased in afterlife, or of the Roman custom of reading the entrails. Sterbak was familiar with the phenomenon of phantom limbs, in which amputees continue to feel sensations connected to their missing limbs.

Golem’s representations of the body’s parts, inner and outer, refer us to what the body represents. Each organ, heart, spleen, stomach, has its own significance and is associated with a humour and with disease, with both life and death. The outer parts which are included, a hand, a tongue, a penis, an ear, a throat, relate to our body’s interaction with the outside world. This makes reference to Kristeva’s theory on abjection, the inner and outer boundaries protruding onto each other and threatening a human identity which in turn repulses the individual. These parts were first modelled in plasticine and it was only as Sterbak transposed them into metal, lead, then bronze, that she became tuned to the seriousness of the material. These materials have their own meanings too, their own density and gravity, with this we are brought to a consideration of the meaning of materials, which is an element in which I like to consider and reference within my work, materiality is an element that confronts my themes and identifies to the spectator about the of my work. Furthermore with Sterbak’s work the three photographs purport to re-present a penis in dry ice, a stomach in frozen mercury and a heart in radioactive fermium. These portraits of material take us beyond the object itself and into the atmosphere.

Sterbak investigate the human condition, dealing with themes such as power and sexuality, using a language that doesn’t fear experimentation, going from performance to art installation from photography to sculpture. Her art is always balancing between strong conceptual contrast and powerful aesthetics. The weird objects and clever contraptions produce an attractive series of works, they seduce and scare, making people think about the themes they represent. In one exhibition called ‘Human condition: the limits of our freedom’ her art goes from works produced in the eighties up until present day.

They paralysed body of a human being imprisoned by life with an uncertain identity is how Sterbak displays the people that are protagonist of her photos. Sterbak explained ‘For me it’s a matter of transforming ideas into forms, because having ideas is always very nice, but it’s not demanding, while transforming ideas into physical realities is something challenging and for me it’s a way of being in the world, of learning and getting new stimulation’ She goes onto say ‘So, depending on the different things that I produce, I need help and information. The research is the most interesting part. For me, creating is a learning process. Ideas evolve through the necessity to make them concrete, giving them substance and a shape. This informs me about issues that are not necessarily formal issues.’

What drew me to Sterbak’s work was her sculptural constraints that confine the body in her work. The various forms of cages that she creates and often attached to performers are humorous yet slightly sadistic. Sterbak depicts the body and stands-ins for it, in the form of furniture and clothing, to explore the relationship between the physical and psychological selves. The dilemma she presents is the struggle between one’s will to action and the inevitable limitation that impede independence. She stages this predicament within the body, exploring attendant issues of desire in works that are simultaneously sceptical and emotional. The most recent body contraption in the exhibition is Condition (1995). The sculptural element is a tail-like, metal appendage that can be strapped to one’s back. The accompanying video shows a man running around with the gadget, which acts as a burden and paradoxically a facilitator of movement, an extension of his body on wheels. Another absurd performance occurs in Sisyphus (1991). A large vessel made of metal rods accompanies video documentation of a man precariously poised inside a similar prop, trying to maintain his equilibrium while in perpetual motion. In the Greek myth of Sisyphus, a man is condemned in perpetuity to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it tumble back down before reaching the top.

I Want You To Feel the Way I Do….

There’s barbed wire wrapped all around my head and my skin grates on my flesh from the inside. How can you be so comfortable only 5” to the left of me? I don’t want to hear myself think, feel myself move. It’s not that I want to be numb, I want to slip under your skin: I will listen for the sounf you hear, feed on your thought, and wear your clothes. Now I have your attitude and you’re not comfortable anymore. Making them yours you relieved me of my opinions, habits and impulses. I should be grateful but instead… you’re beginning to irritate me: I am not going to live with myself inside you body, and I would rather practice being new on someone else.

#janasterbak

Rebecca Horn

I wanted to explore once again the artist, Rebecca Horn, I have reference Horn in my previous work, however her tension with transformative form within a space is still very enlightening. Horne is also referenced in Phyllida Barlow’s – artist proposal for the Tate by exclaiming Horne surprises the spectator with her form of sculpture by enabling the viewer to be physically active in how we look at both the object and the space in which the sculpture is located in and to be witnesses to an altered state of both.

Horn spent most of her childhood in boarding school. She rebelled against her parents by not taking the path of economics set out for her by them instead taking the path of the art and attending Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts. A year into her course she had to take leave because she contracted lung poisoning. Horn explains this time. ‘“When I made my first pieces, I was very afraid and also very sick. In art school I had caught serious lung poisoning from working with polyester and fibreglass. I had to spend almost a year in a sanatorium. After that for a very long time I was confined to a very small world and couldn’t communicate to anyone or anything. So I started drawing, writing little scenarios and sewing to make soft ‘body sculptures’ I so much wanted to have a dialogue with people, anyone, but I could only do this through my work.’ Experiencing isolation and becoming very ill empowered her to create sculptures and strange body extensions via soft materials. She could sew in her bed and started to eliminate feelings of isolation by her illness by communicating through her sculptured body forms that she made.

Since the 1970’s, Rebecca Horn has been creating performances, films, sculpture, spatial installations, drawings and photographs. Horn is a German artist; she rose to fame and importance after her works of art that extended the body into space, transforming the space that the piece is within.

In the first performances, the body-extensions, she explores the equilibrium between body and space. In later works she replaces the human body with kinetic sculptures which take on their own life. Her new works define and cut through spaces with reflections of mirrors, light and music.

The unicorn was a medieval symbol for purity, chastity and innocence. This work was designed for a performance by a friend of the artist. Horn wrote: ‘the performance took place in early morning – still damp, intensely bright – the sun more challenging than any audience… her consciousness electrically impassioned; nothing could stop her trance-like journey: in competition with every tree and cloud in sight…and the blossoming wheat caressing her hips’. This account emphasises both graceful movement and the element of self-exposure that is often found in Horn’s work.

Within the German language there is a distinction is the word body or Korper. One can refer to having a body or corpse as Korper haben; it gives reference to a living body or being a body. Horn recovered from illness in her youth like the artist Friday Kahlo experienced. Kahlo painted portraits documenting her physical and emotional struggle. Horn however placed her body (her material) into her work, creating a physical and mental realness and message through her body extensions and her own body.

Horn’s early works show the body being fitted with extensions to give the viewer/wearer the feeling of possible distance from distances that seemed impossible. The piece ‘Finger gloves’ is the creation of finger extensions and these are placed on the wearer. Horn describes the sensation of touching things at a distance as ‘sense data.’ These gloves would be helpful to someone stuck in their bed, like Horn was from being so unwell. This creation shows Horn’s frustration at the difficulty of trying to extend her actions. With this sculpture she tried to investigate how a person relates to the space that they are in. Ideas of touch and sensory awareness are explored in this work. Horn has described how wearing these gloves altered her relationship with her surroundings, so that distant objects came within her reach: ‘the finger gloves are light. I can move them without any effort. Feel, touch, grasp anything, but keeping a certain distance from the objects. The lever-action of the lengthened fingers intensifies the various sense-data of the hand; …’I feel me touching, I see me grasping, I control the distance between me and the objects.’ Implicit in the work is the idea that touching makes possible an intimacy between our own body and those of others. In Horn’s film ‘Scratching both walls at once’, she slowly and carefully walks the length of a room, with her finger extensions dragging and scratching the walls as she walks, the transformation of the room via the finger extension gives a visual transformation and a sound transformation. This sculpture creates a new, interesting way at looking at the space. In my opinion this transformative notion within a space a space is something I want to further and expand on within my work. These kinetic sculptures become an extension of the human body in their movement and appearance. The wearer can look quite monstrous and disturbing when wearing the extensions. They become something else when wearing the sculpture adding another element to the engagement of the performance.

This element, the extension and overall reference to the body was a component that I was drawn to when viewing Horn’s work; as it has become an interesting issue when exploring my own practice and the mechanics of my sculptures. Horn has inspired me to be more extreme in my designs and constructions. Her exploration will enable me to exaggerate my forms into more abstraction and hopefully extremer measurements and through this scale. This is an element that I wish to take on in my future work as I feel it will increase the viewing engagement with the audience and environment and also produce some interesting results aesthetically.

#rebeccahorn fineart research

Anish Kapoor

Kapoor was born in Bombay, India in 1954 and lives and works in London. He studied at Hornsey College of Art followed by postgraduate studies at Chelsea School of Art. He was a British based sculptor who became established in the international arena during the 1980s with a string of solo shows. Kapoor is probably most famous for his public sculptures that are both exploration in form and engineering. His work presents different scale. He employs a distinct set of materials from the traditional (marble, bronze) to the high-tech (stainless steel, fibreglass), to create his sculptural abstractions he explores psycho-perceptual phenomena with the morphology of the human body. In his venture of the sublime and the uncanny his work links and traces back to Abstract Expressionism to German Romantic painting and beyond.

One artwork from the Unilever series that I found very inspiring and has traces of my work amalgamated in it is Marsyas. This is a sculpture that was constructed in the Turbine Hall of the Tate. It comprised of three rings joined together by a single span of PVC membrane. Two are positioned vertically, at each end of the space, while a third is suspended parallel with a bridge. The geometry generated by these three rigid steel structures determines the sculpture’s overall form, a shift from vertical to horizontal and back to vertical again.

Kapoor began the project in January 2002, and realised that the only way he could tackle the extreme height of the Turbine Hall was to tackle its length. He approached the space as a rectangular box with a shelf (the bridge) in the middle of it. Human scale and the relationship of the viewer to the work was central to the thinking of this project. I have expressed this notion in my work, however I wish to further it more. How can my sculptural pieces that have relations to the body have an interesting viewing relationship with the spectator in this way? What feeling do you get from the work?

Kapoor made a wonderful statement about his work that I believe to very poetic by his regard to the environment reflecting on human bodies and vice versa. It is impossible to view the entire sculpture from any one position. Instead we experience it as a series of discrete encounters in which we are left to construct the sculpture as a whole. This element of different perspectives gained from different angles is an element that wish to induce into my sculptural work. My suspension techniques allow my sculptures to be seen differently from different angles which transforms the space and experience of the sculpture and viewer. The space is interrupted at times with different snippets of artwork all stimulated from one main form. I will critically analyse this element throughout my sculptural installations.

#anishkapoor sculpture encounters fineart