Sarah Sze: Afterimage  (https://vimeo.com/274657192)

'I’m interested in the idea of how something is seared into your memory. We have all of this information… How does something stick with you?'

An interview between Dorota Czerner and Alexander S. C. Rower- discussing Sosnowska’s sculptures (http://contemporarylynx.co.uk/monika-sosnowska-at-the-atelier-calder-an-interview-with-dorota-czerner-and-alexander-s-c-rower-president-of-the-calder-foundation)

DC: Can you go into more detail about how Sosnowska’s site specificity works in the Atelier Calder?

ASCR: Sosnowska’s sculptures are intimately tied to the environment in which they are conceived, sampling from preexisting architectural elements to create a looking glass that manipulates and exposes the physical and cultural dimensions of a space.

At the Atelier, Sosnowska has created her sculptures using Calder’s enlargement process, a classical approach that utilizes maquettes in order to realize large-scale work. The studio and its expansive surroundings served as an incredible source of inspiration for my grandfather’s monumental works, so it’s exciting to see how this environment has also influenced Monika throughout her residency.

DC: At this point, can you elucidate on what precisely is Calder’s “enlargement process” and how does it differ from the way other sculptors approach monumental work?

ASCR: Many contemporary artists conceptualize monumental works through digital renderings or technical drawings. Monika has a more classical approach, which is similar to Calder’s, in that she uses a maquette to visualize the final work.

Calder’s father and grandfather were both well known, classically trained sculptors. Watching them make plaster models prior to working in more expensive materials like bronze or marble had a great impact on him. Once he conceived the possibility of enlarging small sculptures, he began to sketch his ideas in sheet metal, drawing on, and cutting directly into the material. He used these maquettes to test the strength, form, and scale of the work, often enlarging them to intermediate sizes before moving forward with the final sculpture.

DC: In your view, is there an intuition of “object identity” which transcends scale? (For example, a musical passage in a very high register can be duplicated at a very low register but retains only a very partial perceptual identity.) Do you want the pieces on disparate scales to dramatize difference through the “pun” of their “sameness” or do you see their pairing as producing an aesthetic structure purely in the relationship of scale? Is there a fundamental threshold difference in experience between a shape enclosing a large volume and the same shape enclosing a small volume? How do you think about the qualities of experiencing volumes across scale thresholds? 

ASCR: The transcendence of scale in Sosnowska’s sculpture is akin to the possibilities of a musical passage. A piece of sheet music is essentially a set of guidelines for a musician. If a score indicates an A-note and a musician plays it correctly, an A-note will sound from the musician’s instrument, for example. However, it’s unlikely that any two musicians would ever play the same piece of music exactly the same way. The human element in music transcends the precision of the musical instructions. And so it is with Sosnowska’s work. Her maquettes contain a set of possibilities for what a larger version of the same work might encompass. And yet they also contain an object identity all their own.

DC: Do the sculptural qualities of these works derive from their architectural metaphors? Do those metaphors qualify various curvatures, fragmentations, asymmetries, or abrupt discontinuities in the works as inflecting architectural viability? Does this dissonance project particular expressive or conceptual messages, and/or references?

 ASCR: Without implicitly borrowing from architecture, Sosnowska’s work would have a very different agenda. It is through her art’s identification with architecture that it develops an uncanny autonomy, the driving force behind each work. Since many of the sculptures are defamiliarized objects and structures from our everyday urban experience, each carries with it a myriad of memories and associations, both personal and widespread. However, there is certainly a sense of renewal in the work, especially as it relates to the communist architecture.

DC: Speaking of the architectural metaphors, let us focus on the notion of the labyrinth, one of the artist’s recurrent themes. (I’m thinking in particular of the project for the 2007 Venice Biennale, in which Sosnowska compressed the steel skeleton of a Communist-era housing block.) Do you think that a maze as an architectural metaphor for a loss of dynamic memory — with its inherent impossibility of movement, confusion of the dead ends, etc. — goes beyond the cultural amnesia haunting this generation of Polish artists? Do you feel it is something universal?

 ASCR: Although the work is entrenched in the Eastern European experience, Sosnowska uses this history to address something that is much more universal. Her use of the “labyrinth,” particularly in her corridor pieces, creates an anonymous space for contemplation and uncertainty, a space for waiting. By constructing this within the larger structure, she opens the space to a variety of new possibilities. I find this to be rather optimistic.

DC: How do you personally relate to the labyrinthine structure of the digital era, the continuous transference of memory, being both on the move, and being at a loss? — Is this something that attracted you to Monika’s work in the first place?

ASCR: Something that I love about Calder’s work is that it forces you to slow down and look carefully. It takes time to watch a mobile move through space, and the anticipation that builds while waiting for its movement is exhilarating.

Monika’s work operates in very much the same way. By amplifying an element of architecture and altering it, she’s able to create a sculptural interior that requires acknowledgement of the space around you, and you become very conscious of how your body relates to it. In an age characterized by excessive choice and exposure, the contemplative experiences that these artists have created are invaluable.

DC: Can you elaborate on what “parasitic structures” might be? (or, perhaps cite a concrete example from her earlier work.) — Is there an element of such a parasitage in the presentation?

ASCR: I think that there has always been an underlying element of parasitage in Monika’s work. By extracting particular elements from a space, she imbues each work with autonomous life, transforming the utilitarian into the post-functional, purely sculptural. Her sculptures inhabit their own spatiality, seeming to live off that of the host site.

What’s fantastic about the presentation at the Atelier is that Monika has chosen to use it as an opportunity to reexamine her earlier work. She’s created new maquettes of works that were originally produced in 2005, and presented these alongside fresh works and other, significant found objects. The installation portrays an artist’s personal journey. Visitors are confronted with objects that would not normally coexist in the same scale, resulting in an immersive, disorienting experience. In his late career, when he was largely focused on the creation of monumental sculpture, Calder also sometimes revisited his earlier work, mining maquettes made in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties for inspiration to create on a larger scale. So in this way, elements of Monika’s process are not unlike Calder’s.

Bruce Nauman, Green Light Corridor, 1970.

Painted wallboard and fluorescent light fixtures with green lamps, dimensions variable, approximately: 10 x 40 x 1 feet (3 m x 12.2 m x 30.5 cm).

Nauman enforces the contrast between the perceptual and physical experience of space in his sculptures and installations. Looking at the brilliant colour emanating from Green Light Corridor (1970) prompts quite a different phenomenological experience than does manoeuvring through its narrow confines.

"Nauman began making his corridors in 1969; the first was built as a prop for a video, yet he soon introduced them into gallery settings, allowing the audience to walk down them, and, in so doing, put in their own performance. These pieces are simple, gypsum-walled walkways, into which the artist sometimes introduces lights, video cameras and monitors, or speakers; some were too narrow walk down; others were wedge shaped.

[...]

Put in extreme terms,” writes Plagens, “he’s the lab scientist and we’re the rats. Nauman’s nicer than that, though. We volunteer to go into the gallery or museum, we volunteer to enter those corridors with ample width and tempting monitors, and we are free to leave any time we want to. Nauman seldom, if ever, makes us close a literal door behind us. He forgoes explicit instructions to the viewer in favour of the de facto action-limiting proportions of the corridors.”

(https://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2014/july/21/how-bruce-nauman-turned-corridors-into-artworks/)

“Bruce Nauman defies the traditional notion that an artist should have one signature style and a visually unified oeuvre. Since the mid-1960s the artist has created an open-ended body of work that includes fiberglass sculptures, abstract body casts, performances, films, neon wall reliefs, interactive environments, videos, and motorized carousels displaying cast-aluminium animal carcasses. If anything links such diverse endeavours, it is Nauman’s insistence that aesthetic experience supersedes the actual object in importance. Perception itself—the viewer’s encounter with his or her body and mind in relation to the art object—can be interpreted as the subject matter of Nauman’s work. Using puns, claustrophobic passageways with surveillance cameras, and videotaped recitations of bad jokes, he has created situations that are physically or intellectually disorienting, forcing viewers to confront their own experiential thresholds.

[…]

Nauman enforces the contrast between the perceptual and physical experience of space in his sculptures and installations. Looking at the brilliant colour emanating from Green Light Corridor (1970) prompts quite a different phenomenological experience than does manoeuvring through its narrow confines. Lighted Performance Box (1969) provokes another experiential situation. As a rectangular column, it resembles the quintessential unitary Minimalist sculpture, yet the square of light cast on the ceiling from the lamp encased inside alters one’s reading of the piece: the sense of a hidden, unattainable space, one that can only be experienced vicariously, is evoked. Thus, the performance alluded to in the title is only a private, conceptual act, initiated when viewers attempt to mentally project their own bodies into this implied interior place.”

(https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/Bruce-Nauman)

Cristina Iglesias, Untitled (Alabaster room),1993
"Untitled (Alabaster Room) features three sloping canopies composed of thin, translucent sheets of white alabaster supported by an iron frame, which are hung from the gallery wall just above head height. As in so much of Iglesias's work, ambient light and space are as fundamental to the work as the physical materials themselves. Here, the light produces a softly suffused glow through the alabaster membranes, at once imbuing the canopies with a sense of immateriality and subtly altering the beholder's perception of the space delineated below them. 

Cristina Iglesias creates large-scale, minimal structures that articulate a delicate balance between the physical and the visual. Characteristic of her work are imposing forms made of concrete, iron, or aluminum, juxtaposed with intricately etched surfaces (often worked with rich waxes and patinas) and sumptuous materials such as glass, alabaster, and tapestry. Concerned with form and space as they occur in nature, Iglesias in effect creates her own pared-down, sculptural landscapes. Her roughly hewn yet sensitively modeled freestanding sculptures, though of generous proportion, are nearly all constructed on a human scale, and her compositionally varied architectural appendages generate a dialogue with the surrounding space, beckoning the viewer to circumnavigate them. Iglesias describes her work as "pieces that are like thought, places from which one sees, spaces that fall between reality and image, between presence and representation, spaces that speak of other spaces."" 

(https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/works/untitled-alabaster-room/)

"Cristina Iglesias, whose work explores the need for intimacy within the built environment. For Iglesias, architecture is a second skin which mediates the relationship between inside and outside, public and private, and ultimately nature and culture. Using concrete, iron, alabaster, stained glass, and textiles, Iglesias constructs shallow shelters that rely on existing architectural elements of a given space. By introducing these elements as architectural figments and fragments, Iglesias’ extensions and alterations often suggest a beautiful in-between or a temporary but quite consciously introduced nowhere in the middle of somewhere. Too gentle to constitute a rupture, too formal and restrained to invite fanfare or mourning, Iglesias work has instead opted for an intelligent, sober poetry that offers a peace of mind with a piece of place."

(http://renaissancesociety.org/exhibitions/407/cristina-iglesias/)

 Elenora Agostini

Royal College of Art

Portraying the tottering precariousness of 'home', as place and idea, Agostini asked her family to balance household objects on top of each other. Titled 'A Blurry Aftertaste', the black-and-white images are at once familier and austere. - Article from Wallpaper.

Wednesdays

(https://www.rca.ac.uk/students/eleonora-agostini/)

Richard Wilson

(https://edinburghfestival.list.co.uk/article/10035-turning-point-richard-wilson/)

"British artist Richard Wilson has an uncanny ability to distort and transform simple objects or materials into surprising and disorientating creations. To date, his reconfigurations include filling a room to waist height with oil, creating a giant rotating section of a building façade and suspending 1200 car parts to a gallery ceiling. As a pioneer of installation art in the 1980s, Wilson’s preference is for large scale phenomenological interventions into which the viewer can become fully immersed, sometimes deliberately risking their safety along the way.

[...]

In fact, the contexts of Wilson’s projects have a profound effect on their perception. ‘What I actually do is tweak or undo or change the interiors of space and in many instances actually enlist parts of the building as part of the sculpture,’ he says. ‘And in that way I unsettle or break people’s preconceptions of that space.’ But arguably the most powerful setting for ‘20:50’ was its first home in London’s harsh wasteland, where the oil surface seemed to reflect a melancholy industry in decline, in comparison with other slicker spaces which focus more on the spectacle of an upturned world.

Indeed, much of his work does seem to suit the gritty urban nature of abandoned or worn-out sites. ‘Turning the Place Over’, for example, was recently commissioned as a flagship work to celebrate Liverpool’s year as European City of Culture 2008. Wilson used a derelict building as his starting point, from which an 8m diameter disc from the building façade was cut out and mounted on a central spindle which, when placed on a set of motorised rollers and reattached to the original building, allowed the section of facade to turn completely inside out. It is a dangerous and dramatic work, and all the more powerful given the run-down quality of the building."

Do Ho Suh: Bridging Home, London

"Do Ho Suh’s architecturally scaled installations are informed by his personal experiences, that recreate specific domestic spaces that he has resided in, expanding on his ongoing investigations of memory, notions of home and migration, cross-cultural displacement and integration."

Robert Smithson, Leaning Mirror, 1969

"The dirt dispels quietly against the cold hard concrete floor. Growing out of the ground, taking on an organic state in such an inorganic environment. The dirt is not smooth, but instead grainy and rough with intermixed stones that one would find scattered about in front of a construction site. Not the glossy, fine dirt one would expect to be housed in a “sleek” contemporary art museum. Leaning Mirror (along with Smithson’s others) sticks out among the works in the museum, as it possesses a certain raw unfinished quality. Upon first sight, one might assume that the piece is incomplete. With only two basic components, a slanted mirror and a heap of dirt, there is a straining for larger gratification from the materials provided. [...] One of the other reasons I truly felt enamored with this piece’s mystery was due to the lack of response it got from the majority of viewers."

(https://confluence.gallatin.nyu.edu/context/interdisciplinary-seminar/grasping-reflection) 

Robert Smithson, Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis), 1969

Perec, G. (1997) Species of Spaces, London: Penguin

This book served as a new perspective on familiar spaces. He contemplates the  ways in which we occupy space and depicts the commonplace items with which we are familiar with. Similar to 'The Poetics of Space' it serves as a meditation to the spaces we occupy, the witty commentary offers a fresh perspective on they why we live. 

Bachelard, G. (1994) The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press

This book was an interesting investigation to illustrate our perception houses, memories and dreams. The metaphor language served me in a way of mediation by questioning all things we think are fluent to us. No space is too big is too small tone filled with your thoughts, with particularly emphasis on interior domestic spaces . The Bachelard way manifests his soul in his poetry is mirrored in the way people treat their homes, he views the home as the most intimate space filled with soul in the form of memories. In Bachelard’s enchanting spaces, “We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”

The Ned Kelly series

The idea of creating a helmet was sparked from Sidney Nolan's famous paintings of Ned Kelly. This idea of homemade amour made by a criminal, strongly liked in to the narrative of Ned Kelly but almost crime in general.  

(https://nga.gov.au/nolan/)

"Sidney Nolan’s 1946–47 paintings on the theme of the 19th-century bushranger Ned Kelly are one of the greatest series of Australian paintings of the 20th century. Nolan’s starkly simplified depiction of Kelly in his homemade armour has become an iconic Australian image. Highlighting these works makes the point that Australian art is part of the world, with its own stories to tell. This dual emphasis of connectedness and distinctiveness in relation to culture and place is integral to Nolan's Ned Kelly series. [...] The series weaves biography and autobiography together, but we can only guess at the details of the autobiographical dimension. The narrative is strongly present, beginning with a scene–setting painting which shows an empty landscape lit by an eerie light from the horizon. The paintings take us through the main events of the story of Ned Kelly and his gang – the shooting of police constables at Stringybark Creek, the ensuing police chase, the activities of the police spy Aaron Sherrit, the siege of the hotel at Glenrowan and the trial which ended in a sentence of hanging for Ned Kelly." 

Anish Kapoor: sculptures that explore space and mirrors

Kapoor’s exploration of infinite space, originally experienced in When I am Pregnant, has progressed and further permutations can now be seen in his striking exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery, in Central.

He continues to explore the notion of endless space, the void, as he pointed to in the Boston show, “The idea of place has always been very important to my work. A place that is, in a sense, original. I mean, by the word original, to do with ‘first’, and I think that is to do with centring oneself – allowing a thing to occur specifically rather than in general. A lot of my works are about passage, about a passing through, and that necessitates a place.”

Splitting the gallery is Vertigo (2006), a standing slab of concave/convex stainless steel positioned in the middle of the exhi­bition. Its highly polished mirrored surface replicates feelings of vertigo: walking towards it gives an uncanny sense of magnified closeness and a temptation to fall into the work – or fall down.

Mirrors are seductive, and Kapoor’s sculpture is a narcissist’s treat. The attraction of self-admiration, however, wanes. The viewer’s attention “passes through”, and up and down the gallery as Vertigo’s sightlines give new angles of changing reflected light and space.

Mirror (Black) (2014) is a large circular concave wall-mounted sculpture that best displays “the skin, the outermost covering” that is, Kapoor explains, “for me the place of action. It is the moment of contact between the thing and the world.” This blackest-of-black objects silently sits on the wall and mirrors everything in its vision. The mirrored effect quickly oscillates between the precision of a hyperrealist painting and a close-up clip of psychedelic cinema.

The stainless-steel Right Angle Triangle Twist (2016) offers another reality that complements the mirror effect. “The spatial questions it seems to ask were not about deep space but about present space … and they seem to be very active, to be in various states of becoming,” Kapoor says.

(https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/arts-music/article/2025651/anish-kapoor-sculptures-explore-space-and-mirrors)

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npWIH3lhofI

Anish Kapoor

(https://www.artdependence.com/articles/symbolism-in-art-anish-kapoor-mirrors/)

"For Kapoor, whose work plays with the boundary of solid form, of the art world and the everyday world, mirrored surfaces represent the perfect reminder or our own place in the art world. With soft, curved surfaces and biomorphic twists, his Cloud Gate work draws hundreds of visitors every day, all ready to snap a photograph of their distorted image in the shiny surface of the giant sculpture and to watch their identity morph and adapt as they move around the object. Kapoor’s use of the mirror is at once personal and at the same time disorientating. We literally see ourselves in his work, but not as we have seen ourselves before. His work invites us to touch, to feel and to experience a different world, a world which is unique to us and simultaneously shared with those around us. Kapoor literally holds up a mirror to the complexity of our understanding of our identity and our place in the world."

Kapoor influenced the ending of. my project drastically, even though I had been using the material of mirrored paper thoughtout, it wasn't until I read about Kapoor and watched some videos of how people or the envrionmnet interact with his work. My site specific investigation lead to to have the environment relies/ have a relationship with the sculpture. The relationship of making and displaying the piece is the same or different locations. I made the sculpture are home and then assembled in it the studio, therefore creating this sense of alienness between the piece and the room. This unfamiliar tension adds to the visual confusion looking at the mirrored shards. 

Infinity Mirror Rooms

(https://hirshhorn.si.edu/kusama/infinity-rooms/)

https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/first-look-kusama

"The Passing Winter 2005 is a sculpture comprising a cube positioned on two thick panes of glass, which are arranged to form an x-shaped pedestal. The cube, which is also made of glass, has an interior and exterior lined with mirrors, and its sides each contain three circular holes of different sizes arranged in varying compositions. Viewers are invited to look through these holes to the inside of the box and in doing so can see the circular shapes that are cut into the cube’s walls reflected infinitely across its mirror-lined interior. This gives the impression of an indefinite, ever-receding space in which the reflected circles seem to float. The spectator might also see reflections of other viewers peering in through holes in the box’s other sides. The cube’s mirrored surfaces cause its appearance to alter with varying environmental conditions: the reflected dots inside the box take on different colours depending on the colour of the surrounding room, and the reflections alter in brightness depending on light conditions."

(https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/kusama-the-passing-winter-t12821)

I remember visiting the Tate a while ago when they were exhiboiting Kusama's 'The Passing Winter' and looking in to the holes in the box into a sea of confusion , not knowing your up from down. The use of mirrors suggest a reflection not just on the artists comments but on art itself, allowing it to look at you while you look at it. 

Websites visited 

• https://www.victoria-miro.com/artists/33-sarah-sze/

• https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern/display/materials-and-objects/sarah-sze)

• https://vimeo.com/274657192

• https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/monika-sosnowska-13098

• http://contemporarylynx.co.uk/monika-sosnowska-at-the-atelier-calder-an-interview-with-dorota-czerner-and-alexander-s-c-rower-president-of-the-calder-foundation

• https://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2014/july/21/how-bruce-nauman-turned-corridors-into-artworks/

• https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/Bruce-Nauman

• https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/works/untitled-alabaster-room/

• http://renaissancesociety.org/exhibitions/407/cristina-iglesias/

• https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/blog/2050-1987-richard-wilson

• https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/blog/360°-illusion-v-2018-jeppe-hein

• https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/blog/sky-mirror-blue-2016-anish-kapoor

• https://www.rca.ac.uk/students/eleonora-agostini/

• https://edinburghfestival.list.co.uk/article/10035-turning-point-richard-wilson/

• https://www.sculptureinthecity.org.uk/artwork/8th-edition/

• https://confluence.gallatin.nyu.edu/context/interdisciplinary-seminar/grasping-reflection

• https://www.diaart.org/collection/collection/smithson-robert-leaning-mirror-1969-2013-026

• https://www.stedavies.com/decondition-yourself-from-social-conditioning/ 

Galleries/exhibitions visited

• Darren Almond
  Time Will Tell 
  White Cube Bermondsey

• Christine Ay Tjoe
  Black, kcalB, Black, kcalB
  White Cube Bermondsey

• Léon Wuidar
  White Cube Mason's Yard

• Space Shifters, Hayward Gallery 
• Tate Modern 
• Sculpture in the City
• Condo galleries 

 Wider reading 

• Perec, G. (1997) Species of Spaces, London: Penguin

  (https://monoskop.org/images/b/b0/Perec_Georges_Species_of_Spaces_and_Other_Pieces.pdf)

• Bachelard, G. (1994) The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press

  (https://sites.evergreen.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/88/2015/05/Gaston-Bachelard-the-Poetics-of-Space.pdf)

Interview: Rudolf Frieling on The Art of Participation [2]

Rudolf, let’s start by my asking a very basic question: what is an “art of participation”?

That is my question as well, and really the question we are exploring with this exhibition. We know what it means to participate in politics or school, and sometimes know what it means to participate in a work of art if we get clear instructions. However there are some projects where it is unclear what exactly is asked of you, or you can only find out by actually doing something. The work requires your input and your act of contribution.

But the term can also mean an open situation. The idea of “the open work of art” goes back to a 1962 book by Umberto Eco, in which he reflects on developments within contemporary art and music where the results of the artwork were not predefined, but rather could change over time, or change by interpretation. He said, in the whole history of art, the act of looking is a kind of interpretation; it’s always different and each one of us sees art in a different way. In this exhibition, we’re interested in ways people can contribute to a work not only by looking—but also by interacting, participating in a group dynamic, or contributing to an artwork. We go, in other words, beyond the viewer.

What does it mean in this context to contribute or participate? Is it a physical action or something else?

Let me give you two examples that are quite physical. The artist Lygia Clark is a pioneer of what we would call today relational aesthetics. I believe she invented the term “relational objects” –objects that relate to people, to each other, or to a group of people. One example is a net made of rubber bands. There are no specific instructions for use, but together with other people you can test the possibilities of the net. You can stretch or play with it, in a joined, cooperative initiative. By doing this with others, you are dependent on the dynamics of the group; this could lead to something very deeply felt and intense, or it might not even work; for example, if you can not communicate with anybody.

Another example is Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures. Wurm offers a series of tools and objects which you use by following instructions—and these tools are exhibited as if they were sculptures. However, the artwork is not the set of objects on the white platform, but the moment a visitor performs the sculpture according to the instruction. You have basic material and the instructions are clear, but it is not so easy to do. Balancing a series of objects against a wall with your body is physically challenging. And performing the sculpture will look different with every single visitor, so there’s always a new sculpture being performed. What I like specifically about this work is that the sculpture is only temporarily enacted. We think of sculpture as something very solid, an object, and then we think of performance—of theater—as acted on a stage. Here these two concepts are mixed.

Lygia Clark’s work seems obviously relational, it requires multiple people, but these One Minute Sculptures require only one?

It’s too limiting to think that participation is about only two people interacting, or one person performing. Participation also means that you watch others and others watch you, but as you do so you become aware of the potential that you might also do it, or not do it.

Ok. So why should we participate?

It’s a very fair question: why should I participate in the first place? There are a number of works where this is open–instructions as concepts for example–but there are also works where there is nothing to see unless you become part of it. There is a work, called Delayed, by a German artist, Matthias Gommel. You just see two headphones with microphones attached to them, suspended from the ceiling and facing each other; this is a situation for two people to talk to each other. Obviously, just watching it, you can’t hear, and what you do not hear is that the mode of communication is delayed to an extent that the participants continuously interrupt each other and start talking at the same time. This is a very simple situation, but when you actually do it it’s a different experience. Likewise, you can watch someone perform a sculpture and that is fine, but doing it yourself will give you a different understanding of the piece.

Even when you’re faced with instructions that perhaps you cannot perform, you can try and realize the limits you are facing. It’s something I find very interesting about the art of participation: it can provide a very deep sensation, almost a sensual experience, but can also provide a sense of failure.

I always think of participatory art practice as somehow messy or uncontained; spilled out all over the place and you don’t know what’s going to happen. How can a museum be messy, or uncontained? It seems beyond institutional comfort zones.

Well, the fact that a museum of modern art has a mission to document and show a range of contemporary art practices means that we need to address all aspects of contemporary art-we need to address the participatory nature of the work—the openness of these works or even what you call messiness—and we need to think about how to do it in a sustained way. Some of the works challenge the way a museum operates, an example would be 1st Public White Cube, by Blank & Jeron, with Gerrit Gohlke, where you will be able to bid on Ebay for the right to make an intervention into an artwork. For us working at SFMOMA, it’s certainly posing a lot of questions in terms of the value of the work, if you can actually pay to get your work into the museum! But this is one of the important reasons a museum of modern art should do such a show—testing itself—while also fulfilling its job of recognizing and acknowledging the history of contemporary art. Another question is, how much does this kind of practice suffer from being transported or displaced into an institution? How many works are out there that can function successfully in a museum over a length of time, and what does that mean for our procedures?

And of course there’s a question about works that perhaps can’t be absorbed into or presented in an institutional context at all.

Well certainly we were looking for works that would work out over a length of time; however we are also including work that is performative by nature. We have a New York artist duo called MTAA who are proposing a performance that is voted on by the public in every single detail. The voting public decides collectively on the title of the performance, on the location, on the props, on the length of time, on the content, on every single item of the performance … and at the end of the show MTAA will then do an actual performance interpreting a script that has been written, in a way, by the public.

How do people participate in the MTAA project? Do they vote in the gallery?

They can vote in the gallery; they can also vote online. We will have a special display in the D-Space on the second floor where you will be able to see the state of affairs. E.g., people have already voted on the title, we know the performance will happen in the gallery, or in the atrium, or in the elevator, and then on the basis of that you can decide how to cast your vote for the next detail. Voting perhaps is not a very creative way of participating, but the way that the choices are set up is quite interesting, and the way the artists will then have to interpret the result requires a lot of creativity on their part. For instance, what if they’re asked to perform for 24 hours, but the museum is only open for 8 hours?

What will the museum do?

I don’t know at this point. This is also posing questions for us working in the institution. We’re now required to adapt or participate in a different way as well, and this is being done with the help of artists.

Victor Nunes 

"Artist Victor Nunes combines every-day objects with simple illustrations to turn them into pictures of faces, animals and other playful scenes. His images invite us to look at the world differently and find creative images in our surroundings.

Nunes’ art is a great example of pareidolia, which is our propensity to give meaning to random objects (like in this post about seeing faces in random objects). It’s the reason why we associate a smiley face with a human face and why some of Nunes’ pieces of popcorn or bread resemble faces to us.

It’s a very natural reaction to have, and it’s a fun creative spark to run with. Quite a few artists have created similar works where they explore the things that they see in everyday objects – Tineke Merink photographs random locations and adds illustrations to them, and Javier Perez does the same with smaller objects." [3]

I find his work really fun and humorous by using inanimate objects come to life and engage in conversation with the viewer. it also requires one to have the eye to spot random scenes/images out of random arrangements of objects. This reminds me of cloud watching and how you can see anything in them. 

"The Way Things Go builds on modern art's investigation of the space between high art and the everyday. The film was shot in a stark warehouse, and automobile tires, garbage bags, and plastic water jugs take center stage, rolling, twisting, and exploding in what seems to be an unbroken, thirty-minute sequence of events. The film is an absurdist feat; Fischli and Weiss's devotion to detritus injects a burst of humor into the high-minded seriousness of the art world."[https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80908]

Personfied sculptures 

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities.^[1] It is considered to be an innate tendency of human psychology.

Personification is the related attribution of human form and characteristics to abstract concepts such as nations, emotions, and natural forces, such as seasons and weather.

Both have ancient roots as storytelling and artistic devices, and most cultures have traditional fables with anthropomorphized animals as characters. People have also routinely attributed human emotions and behavioural traits to wild as well as domesticated animals. [5]

22/11/18

Clark Goolsby 

"Hands up who can’t get enough of this sculpture by New-York based artist Clark Goolsby? At Rest is composed of several hands cast in resin, hung up together using colourful string. Clasped together in this way, they are ambiguously evocative of praying hands, or hands offering something, or even hands severed from the human body altogether, like a momento mori symbol. They have a human-like quality and the sensation of touch is palpable, but their pale white colour suggests the contrasting state of death. 

Goolsby’s work emphasises the physicality of the body. This 18 foot skeletal figure – entitled Dead Man (below) – is likewise suspended from the ceiling by string, hovering above the ground in a zombie-like state. Its monstrous size and cadaverous appearance suggest Goolsby’s interest in the exaggerated physicality of the human form.

These works were recently exhibited at Los Angeles’ POVevolving Gallery. ‘Overall the whole show is about death and the fragility of life,’ explained Goolsby. ‘I am specifically interested in how we maintain optimism in a world that is so full of potentially life ending situations. I have been using the Dead Hand and many other symbols as metaphors for reflecting on these ideas.’"[8]

Clark Goolsby Collage Art: Spontaneous and Unexpected [9]

You were born and brought up in California and now you are staying in New York, two places miles apart yet throbbing with life. How has the growth of an artist and a human being been affected by this?

Well, actually where I grew up in California was a pretty small town. By the time I was in high school, I was really looking to be somewhere that had a little more going on. I think being in a small town without much to do made me very hungry for culture. I really thrive on being in places, like NYC, that have so much inspiring stuff going on. It’s impossible to live in a city like this and not be inspired.

What are the inspirations that you look forward to for developing a theme for your artwork? Do you plan extensively before execution of each of the pieces? What role does spontaneity play?

Right now I am very fascinated by gradients, and I have been exploring ways to create them, and am working on some new pieces that will feature them in a more prominent way. I usually have a vision for new work, but rarely do any extensive planning (i.e. sketches etc.) Every piece I make goes through a lot of spontaneous and unexpected changes as I make it. For me, art making wouldn’t be much fun if I was just executing something pre–planned. I like to go into the studio and not know what’s going to happen that day.

Are the vibrant colours used for your work are a conscious choice for depicting the story of an artist? Do you have any particular project that you are very fond of?

I love colours. I think I would get very bored if my work didn’t use colour the way it does. The use of colour is definitely a conscious decision and is important to a lot of the themes in my work. I just finished a new piece for a show at Mirus Gallery in San Francisco that used a lot of rainbow gradients that I airbrushed. I was pretty stoked about how it turned out. As I said earlier I’m thinking a lot about gradients, and this piece really got my mind going.

You have started exploring the sculptural forms more. How is the experience overall? Has there been any challenge that you have faced and proud to have overcome specifically?

I love sculpture, and it is a newer exploration of my studio practice. Overall it takes much longer for me than painting, but I guess that makes sense. A painting is only two-dimensional. Much like all of my work sculpture is always about learning and trying new things. I feel like every sculpture I do is series of problems that I have to figure out solutions for. I think, for me, the biggest accomplishment for sculpture has to be Dead Man. I’ve never worked so long (1 year) on a piece. It felt great to see it finished and installed.

Many of your sculptures and sculptural installations like ‘Dead Man’, ‘At Rest’ show the forms to be suspended. Why is this fascination with balance?

I think you hit upon the exact word: balance. Much of my work is about balancing ideas that are very opposite of each other. There is an impermanence to suspended objects. It’s like they are between two states, or defying gravity. I feel like a suspended object cannot permanently remain that way, and there is an inherent tension in that.

Describe your sensations at the most intimate moment when the artist in you is one with art?

I think there are two moments in my art making that are really the most rewarding. The first is in the process. I’m just naturally a very inquisitive person, and I love exploring new ways of creating art. Much of my work may feel visually similar, but I am constantly learning new ways to create it. The second moment is the completion of a new piece. I was reading something once where Jeff Tweedy said there is no greater moment than to sit back and look at something that literally didn’t exist five minutes ago. I think that’s a pretty accurate description. My wife’s family has a lake house in New Hampshire, and that is always a great break. Whenever we go there it is just so relaxing. Good food, amazing nature, super quiet. My favourite book at the moment is probably Forty Stories by Donald Barthelme. I discovered him fairly recently, and his writing has just completely blown me away. He is a true original. I could never pick a favourite for music (there are too many), but I’ve been listening to a lot to the Max Richter remix of the Four Seasons by Vivaldi. It’s really fascinating because the record sounds so modern, but it is still all classical instruments. I am a total food nut… one of my main obsessions is a little sandwich place in Williamsburg called Saltie. I probably eat there once a week. They just came out with a cookbook that I highly recommend.

This sculptural installation is called "Dead Man" , this anatomical art is competing on the fragility of life and the inevitably of death yet in an optimistic attitude with the rainbow string The hanging Skelton is rather thought provoking and made me view the modal as a cage, almost suggesting that a sense of freedom in the afterlife, the chains/restrains of modern life. His untraditional approach and ideas are inspiring and I love the way the piece is suspended from the ceiling and positioned int he middle of the floor, allowing the viewers to walking around the piece, have it at knee level- almost like a funeral and a body being in a coffin. The figurative model is recognised as the human form, but the geometric shapes transcend it to represent the fragility of life. I was particularly interested in his work for his exploration of materials, the wood and the string, unity of rigid and flexible- reminiscent of how the body holds itself together. 

Daniel ramos Obregón 

"This project has taken as a starting point the concept of "Outrospection" initially introduced by philosopher Roman Krznaric, where he proposes that in order to know oneself one must live towards the outside, it is by experiencing life that one discovers and shapes oneself. I have appropriated his concept while relating it to out-of-body experiences more commonly known as astral projections, by seeking to represent -in a metaphorical way- the mind being projected inside out of the body as a way of self-expresion and representation. 

The collection has been hand crafted out of porcelain body casts, gold plated brass metal frames that encompass the body, hand turned Colombian kingwood handles and vegetable-tanned leather harnesses." [12]

Art-Sheep Features: “Outrospection, The Body And Mind” by Daniel Ramos Obregón [13]

"As philosopher Roman Krznaric said, in order to know oneself one must live towards the outside. This is how one experiences the life they discover and shapes oneself. This saying was the starting point of Colombian designer/fashion artist Daniel Ramos Obregón’s project “Outrospection”.

This concept of “living on the outside” was literary translated by Obregón, as the artist created a series of beautiful minimal replicas of body parts and photographed his model, Lukasz Przytarski, interacting with them. The porcelain pieces are plated with brass metal frames, while  their handles are crafted out of Colombian kingwood. The artist relates the making of this series to out-of-body experiences more commonly known as astral projections. This work is an exploration of how to “represent -in a metaphorical way- the mind being projected inside out of the body as a way of self-expression and representation.”

Obregón investigates various forms and levels of the “self”. His range of work is consisted of experiments on the constructions of people’s physical identities. Outrospection is a prototype, a first attempt on discovering your own body through external models of your own body parts. A process of seeing your own self as both an out-of-body mental and physical experience.

Aesthetically, Obregón’s result showcases an artistic style, that despite its simplicity in material and exhibiting means, is an intense combination of sculpture, installation and photography. “Through my current work I wish to explore the limits within the interdisciplinary relationship between fashion, sculpture and performance arts from a conceptual, aesthetical and fully wearable point of view,” he writes on his site."

   This project was inspired by the concept "Outrospection", which plays with the idea that in order to know oneself, one must live towards the outside. it speaks to me that observing yourself from a perspective that isn't your own allows you to experience and outer body experience. 

I love the idea of wearable sculptures, and the bodily reference is engaging and interactive for the audience. The clay produces this static element to the body parts, despite the body being a beacon of life, he clay makes it seem frozen in time and stiff. This paradoxical nature with in the pice interests me and inspired my own work, the straps allow the audience to participate- its an interesting contest having the conscious human body interest and be covered up by the clay sculptures. 

27/11/18

Fragment of Long Term Memory: Surreal Sculptures by Yuichi Ikehata [14]

Decomposing sculptures of the human body using clay, wire and paper by Japanese Artist Yuichi Ikehata. Based on the concept of memory as fragmentation, Ikehata photographs the sculptures and merges them with self-portraits that "puts audiences in the ambivalent position of not knowing what is real and what is not.”

"Fragment of Long Term Memory (LTM), an ongoing photographic series, conveys an unrealistic world through fragments of reality. My understanding of reality comes from its moments of beauty, sadness, fun, perfection, and those days when nothing special happens. Many parts of our memories, however, are often forgotten, or difficult to recall. I retrieve those fragmented moments and reconstruct them as surreal images. I gather these misplaced memories from certain parts of our reality, and together they create a non-linear story, resonating with each other in my photographs."

Powerful, futurist and disturbing, hauntingly representative of human decay

His series ‘Fragment of Long Term Memory’, combines  reality and fiction. The fragmentary nature of our memory is fascinating and this is clearly translated in the human body made of wire, clay and paper. His work offers the audience a change to reflect which, to me, I the interaction offered.  

“Many parts of our memories… are often forgotten, or difficult to recall, I retrieve those fragmented moments and reconstruct them as surreal images. I gather these misplaced memories from certain parts of our reality, and together they create a non-linear story, resonating with each other in my photographs.” [15]

"Each sculpture is frozen in a state of unravelling or partial decomposition, their skin flaking off to reveal the structure beneath, as if they were real bodies caught at the edge of an explosion. According to Ikehata, this disintegrating imagery reflects the nature of forgotten or repressed memories."[16]

Allyson Vieira

Using contemporary building materials, standards, and tools, Vieira’s work interrogates the relationship between form and material across eras. As history itself is recycled, relocated, and rebuilt through the succession of societies and the passage of time, forms and motifs are repurposed, creating new pedigrees and lineages that reverberate the signs of the past. At the same time, the structures we inhabit, quotidian trash, and raw materials comingle and compress into the literal bedrock of successive generations.[17]

The work of Allyson Vieira simultaneously evokes the ancient history and the recent past behind her objects’ creation. She often works in plaster, its smooth, white surface calling to mind the monumentality of classical marbles and architectural fragments, while showing signs of the processes through which it was shaped. Bas-reliefs seemingly plucked from fallen empires are molded in the shape of the artist’s fists and fingers, her fleeting gestures captured in the hard material. Plaster, a material whose sole purpose is to take other forms, is especially suited to her explorations of history and reference, but so are the plastic bottles and coffee cups—a thoroughly modern marker of this epoch—that she renders in delicate gouache. [18]

Phaidon’s Frieze NY interviews – Allyson Vieira [19]

What are you doing at Frieze? “On the lawn near the north entrance of the fair, I will present a new outdoor sculpture made of baled post-industrial plastics (plastic sheeting and thin foam) compressed into striated, half-ton, cyclopean building blocks. Lying on their sides in a loose line, the blocks will lean on each other in a natural repose, suggesting a collapsed architecture.”

Why are you doing it? “Compressed bales of plastic have attracted me as a building material for years because they suggest the massive scale and solidity of ancient construction, so I’m excited finally to have the opportunity. But, even though they evoke ancient materials in reality these blocks are a 21st-century commodity, a new raw material, an American industrial waste product, collected and baled into blocks for sale by the pound. The blocks I'm using are most often sold to processing plants in China and shipped there all the way from New Jersey, over 7,000 miles as the crow flies, but who knows how long the sea voyage is. Once there, the bales are down-cycled into a lower grade plastic. That plastic is then processed once again and made into cheap consumer goods. Those are then shipped all the way back to the US for sale in big-box stores. The man I bought my bales from said this grade of plastic is mostly used to make decorative picture frames. I became fascinated by this strange cycle of material transformation that both feeds on and feeds into disposable consumerism.”

What does it mean? “This is a question that is impossible to answer. I don't know any artists who make work with a single specific meaning. An artwork should provoke questions not answers. There is no rubric for understanding it. It should exist only in the grey areas between positivist poles and should be able to hold multiple 'meanings' simultaneously. How could it be interesting if it didn't? One person might see this work as a critique of the present, another about the possibility of the future, another about seeing ourselves in the past. I'm not intending to make a judgment about these things. I think of my work more as a series of conjectures or postulations with no fixed answers.”

How does it fit in with your practice? “I often think about cycles of materials and the persistence of elemental forms and structure in architecture and sculpture over time. When considering huge swathes of time, the quick changes drop away. Big gestures and physical facts, such as gravity, remain.

"Using generic, contemporary waste as a building material to create a simple architectural form evocative of a ruin can straddle the liminal moment of the present. For me, the idea of 'now' is like that of 'zero'; both are unknowable because they exist only as theoretical pivot points between the 'real' negative integers of the past and positive integers of the future. So, if the present does not really exist, I can only observe the past and speculate about the future.

"I often think about the relationships between the building materials and sculptural materials of the past, of matter and created vast concentrations of previously non-existent materials. Think of how much material makes a city, and how different that material is from what lies around it. We all know that thousands of years from now our cities will stand as ruins. But in tens of millions of years our cities will not even be ruins, they will be geological strata, crushed and compressed under eons of planetary-scale heat and pressure. What new stone, created from the metamorphosed remains of human civilization, will form the building blocks for the next ascendant species—if it is one that is inclined to build?”

Who are the artists who have inspired you or whose work you admire? “I often find myself drawing a blank when I get asked this question. I might come up with a few artists I've been thinking about that day but forget the ones who have influenced me for years, or vice versa. Hubert Robert, the late 18th, early 19th- century French painter of ruins has always fascinated me with his uncanny ability to negotiate the past, present, and future within his paintings. Of course I think about land artists like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer. But mostly I spend a lot of time looking at cities, old and new. Buildings under construction in New York rise like mushrooms after a rainstorm; the continuous real estate boom creates a constantly shifting geography. But my favorite thing is walking through the ruins of empires from millennia past; those should keep everyone's hubris in check.”

The Flesh of Things: Matthew Smith [20]

"Matthew Smith puts artwork and the way it is experienced on a false track. Leaving behind its capacity for signification, the work becomes an anonymous, unrecognizable thing that dazzles and disorients the viewer. The thing presents a bottomless form, its “flesh”, the object/work’s struggle with the impossibility of revelation. Pushed out beyond its limits, at the far edge of a question to which there is no answer, the work thus finds it is doomed to infinite interrogation…

Things are Thin was the name of a 2007 solo show at London’s Store Gallery by English artist Matthew Smith. Perhaps no title could better exemplify the ambiguous, paradoxical relationship, in all of Smith’s work, that links and separates the object/piece and its rendering as a “thing”, the object/piece and its permeability. To trace a driving theme that could help penetrate the impermeability of these objects that have the appearance of “things”, I think Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “flesh” might be useful. “Flesh” is taken to mean the unshakeable relationship of inherency involving everything which presents such a stratified layering of co-implication that any hypothetical classification becomes impossible. “Flesh” implies an anonymous matrix that holds together, in a completely heterogeneous state, everything that is frozen in an image, everything that runs counter to appearances. Moving from the object as appearance to the thing as apparition: could this be the system of virtuality that operates in Smith’s work? The object unwittingly slips between different levels of its impossible demarcation. All that is left is the retreat into thingness, meaning everything that prevents the object from standing out. The object’s surrender to flesh, manifested in the movement that burrows into it, digs it out as a thing, releasing it from its spirals of reference. All of Smith’s work is pervaded by this metamorphic tyranny, this parasitic despotism that assails the object at its root, immediately dispossessing it of its hermetic seal of circumstantial evidence. What we call “evidence” could be, to borrow a topos from Hitchcock, a “MacGuffin”. This is the term used by the English director for an object that is an integral part of the narrative, yet reveals itself to be a misleading device that focuses attention on something which has nothing to do with the film’s “real” intentions. The viewer realizes he has followed a trail that has turned out to be a red herring, a false plot that has diverted impetus away from that ungraspable something which constitutes this director’s most “strategically ambiguous” leitmotiv. Ambiguous because the “MacGuffin” exists, despite everything, as a scandalous inexplicability, as an indefinable obscenity, something that blocks, in and of itself, every dialectical plausibility."

Kasie Campbell [21]

"Campbell utilizes materials traditionally associated to women and craft combined with industrial materials, drawing on the functions of Kennedale facility and the collaborative nature of the residency. The work is presented in a space that is aesthetically and historically connected to the work. As a woman sculptor working in a material that is particularly dominated by men, Campbell's work resonates with the buildings history. For some time, The Great Western Garment Company created employment and empowerment for women in this community, however, wages were low and women working in the clothing's trade, were present as unskilled or less skilled then men. 

The beautiful and the grotesque that is apparent in Campbell's work adds layers and meaning in its connection to Boyle Street Community. The building is culturally rich and attractive and yet is often perceived as decrepit or useless. "

04/12/18

Graham Caldwell [22]

"Brooklyn artist Graham Caldwell explores the concept of visual perception and the way we perceive and distort the world around us by creating multi-faceted surfaces that crumple and distort vision using steel, mirrors, blown glass, epoxy, and a myriad of other materials. His works evoke the idea that human sight is intrinsically elastic – our own psychological differences play a part in the construction of what we perceive and understand our surroundings. His exploration also delves into the past, to encompass and include the connection between vision and glass – how the eye peers through windows, lenses, and mirrors, and how we translate that into experience."

"Much of my work focuses on glass as a conduit or modulating agent for light and its parallel in the functionality of the human eye: using a lens to flip an image of the world, upside down and backwards, into the brain where it is reassembled, through illusion and forensics."

06/12/18

Robert Janson’s floating plastic bag sculptures [23]

"As plastic bags slowly become a thing of the past and reusable totes take over, one artist is putting the leftovers to good use. Robert Janson’s beautiful plastic bag installations range from delicate to heavy and resemble giant pink jellyfish. Using light, heat and air, Janson and his friends recycle the plastic bags into moving sculptures.

With his installations, Janson explores the ideas of color concepts, geometry, light and presentation to effectively transform his pieces from simple groupings of plastic bags into powerful floating sculptures. Recalling Andy Warhol’s floating Mylar balloons, the resulting pieces hover in space, moving with the viewer (and the air currents of the room).

The installation process begins with Janson and his helpers inflating countless plastic bags until they are taut. Then, employing geometry, Janson ties the bags into starburst groupings of six and eight bags, and then joins those groupings together. Gelled lights are then added, creating a spectacular luminosity as the light passes through the transparent bags. The resulting sculpture is a moving amorphous mass, looking more like a freakish (and grandiose!) member of the jellyfish family in appearance and movement, rather than a bunch of plastic bags.

Janson’s other plastic bag sculptures are equally transformative. By fully inflating larger bags and then freezing them, Janson is able to create the illusion of weight – the pieces look as though they were cast from bronze, instead of like they are full of air. He also “sculpts” the bags using an iron. With heat applied, Janson is able to melt a bag’s shape, creating more shape options without the pointed edges of the pre-formed bag. Using simple materials, Janson has achieved the difficult task of transforming something that we might throw away into something delicate and beautiful."

Robert Janson's work reminded me of Jimmy Kuehnle's sculptural/performance infatatble art suits.!!!

Andreas Zingerle [24]

Squeeze means something connected with the manipulation of shapes and materials. Andreas Zingerle freezes the sexual imaginary linked to the body of the individual and to its collective bestowal in his concrete molds of erotic toys. He investigates the linguistic conventions produced by the commercial exploitation of the body, and encourages a re-thinking of the artificial nature of desire, always with a hint of irony.
The shapes of the inflatable dolls are frozen once and for all in a concrete grip and they go from the perishability of plastic and the instability of compressed air to the specie aeternitatis of a new, unknown material. In this way, Zingerle converts the apparently exciting lie of the undamaged doll into a concrete clamp of de-structured forms, at times so tangled to become unrecognisable at first glance, recalling, in their dry dramatic force, the plaster casts of the victims of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

This exhibition focuses on a big installation of works on canvas and a series of sculptures made of absolutely fine concrete, where the artist explores the matter of the body through a vivid and personal tool such as casts of inflatable dolls. Human forms are therefore perceived as sexual wrecks, whose perfectly polished skin emerges from the deep circumvolutions and curves given by the artist’s work of deformation.

Bibliography

[1] http://blog.sfmoma.org/2008/11/interview-rudolf-frieling-on-the-art- of-participation/

[2] https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2008/11/interview-rudolf-frieling-on-the-art-of-participation/

[3] https://www.boredpanda.com/everyday-objects-turned-into-illustrations-javier-perez/?utm_source=workflow.arts.ac&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=organic

[4] https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/fischli-weiss/fischli-weiss-room-guide-room-1/fischli-weiss-1

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction

[6] https://www.gessato.com/monobloc-by-bert-loschner/

[7] http://stelarc.org/?catID=20316

[8] http://www.clarkgoolsby.com

[9] http://luckycompiler.com/spontaneous-and-unexpected/

[10] https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-272518968/the-made-v-the-readymade-mark-prince-on-the-resistance

[11] https://www.ignant.com/2013/05/07/gerardo-feldstein/

[12] http://cargocollective.com/danielramoso

[13] https://art-sheep.com/art-sheep-features-outrospection-the-body-and-mind-by-daniel-ramos-obregon/

[14] http://www.faithistorment.com/2016/02/surreal-sculptures-by-yuichi-ikehata.html

[15]. https://www.ignant.com/2017/04/10/disturbing-works-of-yuichi-ikehata/

[16] https://scene360.com/art/107329/yuichi-ikehata/

[17] http://thebreedersystem.com/artists/allyson-vieira-artist-page/

[18] https://www.artsy.net/artwork/allyson-vieira-block-9-block-12

[19] https://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2015/april/29/phaidon-s-frieze-ny-interviews-allyson-vieira/

[20] http://moussemagazine.it/matthew-smith-alessandro-sarri-2009/

[21] https://www.kasiecampbell.com

[22] https://abominableink.wordpress.com/tag/graham-caldwell/

[23] https://www.lostateminor.com/2011/04/01/robert-jansons-floating-plastic-bag-sculptures/

[24] http://1995-2015.undo.net/it/mostra/142537

[25] http://moussemagazine.it/larsen-zingerle-anselmi-berlin/ 

Wider Reading/ Visited Websites 

• Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge University Press, 1988
• Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, MIT Press, 1981
• https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jun/16/hayward-gallery-sculpture-exhibition-human-condition-
• beehivehttps://trendland.com/photography/fine-art-photography-2/
• https://daily.jstor.org/personification-is-your-friend-the-amazing-life-of-letters/
• https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2011/09/rook-floros-shadow/
• https://www.saatchiart.com/zingerleandreas
• http://poppyjanelee.blogspot.com\
• https://www.kasiecampbell.com
• Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, MIT   Press, 1981

Visited Galleries 

• Korakrit Arunanondchai Carlos / Ishikawa
• Francis Upritchard The Curve Gallery at The Barbican
• Gordon Matta-Clark David Zwirner
• Gabriele Beveridge Seventeen 

Glossary

Abstract- Abstract art is not representational. It could be based on a subject or may have no source at all in the external world.

Anthropomorphism- The attribution of human form or other characteristics to things other than humans

Appropriation- In art this is the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them. For example, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Readymades’

Approximation-a value or quantity that is nearly but not exact

-a thing that is similar to something else, but is not exactly the same

Cerebral- Relating to the brain or involving intelligence rather than emotions or instinct

Relational Objects- A term coined by artist Lygia Clark. They are objects that relate to people, to each other, or to a group of people. Here, the art is not not

manifested

Somatic- Relating to the body, especially as distinct from the mind

Transformation- A marked change in form, nature, or appearance