Group Seminar Student-led

29th April 2013

Histories of Art. James Elkins.
Eleanor, Amelia, Jennifer

Eleanor. The Sensory Cortex

The parallels with Bacon image
Book - the Reality of Fact (?)
Relevant, almost scientific.
Stroke awareness, the feeling.
Looking, seeing with blindness.
Maps, the compensation.
A fictional view of landscape -
Hockney photos stitched together - it's not such a leap.
A created landscape.
Photographs are not a true view - a modern distortion,
Like Anselm Adams and everything in focus - the f64 club-
distorts the way we think we see things
False perspective, whereas not everything is in focus, the eye is always moving.
Also distorts size.
Different ways of seeing in the future - perhaps superseding current false photographic view -
Perhaps the Medieval perspective was more true, or will become so.

Rorik Smith - artist who distorts architecture, manipulates perspective.
http://www.roriksmith.co.uk/
There is a cultural way of looking at things.
Looking at landscapes from different perspectives - what are the important features.

Rackstraw Downes - Brit landscape artist, intentionally distorting, optically.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rackstraw_Downes
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/arts/design/25downes.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0


Amelia. Alternative Realities

Universal analogy - artists rotating, orbiting, crashing into each other, changing course
Time colliding.
James - Like cooking. All different cultures and techniques together. contemporary fusion.
Jo - Come Dine With Me - a caveman, various artists throughout history conversing.
Eleanor - Water analogies, river flowing, streams in and out. Even an isolated pool can be part of an estuary in time -Bag of marbles, randomness.


Jennifer. Atomism vs Monism

Contemporary art discourse is based on philosophies.
reflection in our own time and own art practice.
Monism - simplification - all art is art.
All painting - cave,master.
Atomisn - very sequential.
not necessarily linear time, but arranged by hierarchy.
Information becomes atomist, linked and sequential from the monist glob of art -
the extremes become similar.


Artists and Authenticity
James, Simon, Sarah

Ready mades / fakes
Skill/ unskilled.
Genuine fakes.
Adding something different by small variations.
Reframing conceptually.
Aesthetic - beauty or appreciation, pleasure.
Empiricism - all knowledge is sense experience - observation and experiment.
Contrast to rationalism - the mind can apprehend directly without observation - self evident.
Objects - the artists intention is reframing, recontextualising.
We rethink and resee.
Duchamp's Urinal - really not retinal, but in the mind.
The sensual experience of thinking.


New Aesthetics
Alexa, Clare, Jo

Art and artists roles and responsibilities.
Feminine principles - collaboration responsive - Mierle Ukeles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mierle_Laderman_Ukeles

Divisive - Richard Serra - Tilted Arc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Serra

The power of gestures - making contact with the audience.
Does an artwork alienate or not.
there is still a valid place for alienating artwork in public - it can expose divisions.


Reflection

Once more an informative and interesting evening, and although three hours is a long time, everyone more or less kept to time and kept the visuals, text and the talking balanced. Very important points when there is so much thinking going on. In fact, looking wider than the MA, that was a really useful experience for all of us in presenting, and at MA level. At first the task seemed complex, because of logistics, and splitting aspects of a text between three presenters, but the diversity made it interesting, and it exemplifies how many valid aspects can be explored from just one text - it doesn't all have to be within the actual text, but from  ideas sparked from within it.

If I hadn't gone first I may have been reminded by other presenters to incorporate some directed open questions to start off the debate, rather than just hoping people would speak - which of course they did. I hadn't incorporated that within my slides, and so I sort of forgot to pose the questions I had planned. In future, I think a question or a small task is a great way to bring immediate response. Equally, drawing from others' experiences, these questions posed should not be too long or specific, or directed towards a particular response or indeed person, as that limits the spontaneous response to the text of the presentation, and puts on the spot rather than drawing out.

There was an extensive discussion about the Serra Tilted Arc piece at the UCA research conference I recently attended
http://eleanormacfarlane.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/research-student-conference-uca-farnham.html
One of the presenters had commented on the piece, which sparked some questions and debate, and actually some more angry views. Someone from New York was there who was adamant about its imposition, saying that it has detrimentally affect the funding of public art there which still has reverberations today. Interestingly, the piece was remade and shown in a larger gardens in Paris, where it proved popular and was well received. Different audience, different setting, different context.

1st May 2013