Fritsch, Wearing, Wurm Reading Responses

Reading Response (India)

 

Erwin Wurm in conversation with Max Hollein

Max Hollein Interviews Erwin Wurm about his series of one-minute sculptures, which are documented performances. Wurm is influenced by Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman.  Wurm’s sculptures are spontaneous portraitures that are contorted, comical forms.

 

Wurm remarked that his greatest fear was of “sickness of the body and the spirit.” “Maybe,” he continued, “my whole work is about this fear,” an observation that points to the pathos that often resides within the comedic.  Wurm talks about the phenomenon known as "planking," where people stage themselves as stiff boards in public series spaces and let themselves be photographed.  He says that this could be interpreted as a continuation of his own sculptures.

 

Wurm uses photography as a medium to make sculpture though images.  He captures a form in a moment in time.

 

Thinking in Pictures: Katharina Fritsch in Conversation with Susanne Bieber

 

Fritsch photographs models and object to create sculptures within images.  She states how her sculptures can “never be totally grasped, like a picture that has something unresolved about it.  They stay in your head like an enigma.”

 

In Monk Doctor Dealer, Fritsch’s dark, severe figures are intended to reveal male power structures in our society.  She says, “Bad characters and such bad men are unfortunately still in the majority.”

 

Fritsch considers the entire gallery when having an exhibition.  She thinks of it as “one large-scale composition.”  She says, “Everything has to look completely natural, as though it had been absolutely no trouble, as though it had suddenly just appeared out of the blue.”

 

The Many Selves of Gillian Wearing

 

“Wearing's practice is distinctly multidisciplinary, switching from photography, to film, to sculpture, and at times utilizing all three.”  In one of her works, she used mask she had made of her family member, wore them and photographed portraits in an attempt to show concepts of selfhood.  

 

Wearing talks about Instagram having the potential for a huge audience.  However, Wearing states that “Instagram is perpetuating a constant daydream state.  Everyone has become a little bit more self-obsessed because of the internet, with things like ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ options, having followers, etc.  I think what drives narcissism is a fragile identity of self.”  She talks about how selfies are usually an inaccurate representation because of all the technology at the fingertips to alter the images.  When she photographs portraits, she gives people mask so the model doesn’t have to deal with revealing their own identity, because of all of the social media judgment.  

 

Conclusion

 

Wurm, Fritsch, and Wearing all use human subjects and photography to inform and create sculpture.  All three of them create images that are haunting, but in different ways.  Also, in all three text, getting to know the artist through interview enables the reader to feel a personal connection to the artist and the work.

PHOTOGRAPHY THAT EVOKES SCULPTURE

By Helen A. Harrison

EAST ISLIP SCULPTURE is by nature a three-dimensional art form. Photography, in contrast, is implicitly two-dimensional, and its primary relation to sculpture is as a recording device. True, there are sculptors who incorporate photographic elements in their carvings or constructions. But for most, the camera is a tool chiefly employed for documentationand publicity purposes.

However, in ''Photo/Sculpture,'' a provocative and highly recommended show at the Islip Art Museum, we see that photographic processes can have a more direct relationship to sculpture, can dictate its form and prescribe its meaning - can, in fact, be its raison d'etre. The nine artists represented here all use photography to elucidate sculptural imagery rather than simply to record and preserve it.

With the rise of environmental and conceptual art in the 1970's, photography came to play a major role in disseminating the work of artists whose main interest was less in the creation of objects than in communicating attitudes and shaping consciousness. Art as information, and the reverse, became more and more a preoccupation of the avant-garde.

The photographs in this show are all essentially informational, and yet not strictly documentary in the ordinary meaning of that term. A few of them have a sculptural, or three-dimensional, aspect, but for the most part, they capture a moment, a setting or a piece of action that exists in another realm of tangibility. Still, none are photographs of discrete art objects, such as statues or structures. In each case, we feel that the scene was made especially to be captured in this way, and that the photographing is as much a part of the finished work as were the selection of subject matter and composition of the tableaux.

Vicki Ragan's theatrical, sometimes bizarre arrangements include toylike fragments grouped on patterned cloth to give the impression of a private domain of fetishes. Many of the props she favors seem to have an intimate personal significance, hinting at subconscious obsession or the reminiscence of dreams. Painted animals, fake fruit, dolls and other symbolic devices interact with each other on miniature stages, where the familiar and the unexpected coexist. Gloved hands and even whole people sometimes intrude, asserting the artist's presence and heightening the sense of autobiography that pervades these sculptural events.

Bernard Faucon creates a similar, if more sinister, atmosphere with mannequins of children as the actors in surreal dramas. His color is lush and seductive, but the vitality of the natural settings, such as a field of blossoming lavender or a beach at dawn, is jarringly offset by the stilted poses and vacant expressions of the lifeless figures. Every element is carefully orchestrated for maximum psychological impact. Occasionally, as in ''Lacs Sieste,'' a live child is included among the dummies, so that reality and fantasy are further confused.

Laurie Simmons also creates miniature worlds peopled with toy figures, but they lack the visionary intensity of Miss Ragan's tableaux and the surreality of Mr. Faucon's scenes. In her most effective image, a tiny cowgirl and her horse are made to assume the false scale of full-sized figures by the way they are photographed against the landscape.

In contrast to the subjective, hermetic imagery of these artists, Luis Camnitzer takes a more intellectual, more deliberately witty approach. His pieces deal with perception as an act of will, particularly in ''The Book of Holes,'' where the incomplete outline of an open volume is held before various surfaces. Thus we can read in the same book a variety of content, depending on our point of view as manipulated by the artist. Mentally, consciously, we must supply the missing pieces that complete his statement.

The show is liberally laced with humor, notably in Mr. Camnitzer's ''Landscape as an Attitude,'' where the artist's face becomes the hills and valleys of a pastora le, complete with grazing sheep. The double meanin g of the word ''attitude'' - a state of mind and a selfconscious posture - ironically implies that inner reality and outward appea rance are often at variance.

Photographic postcards are the basis of Howardena Pindell's relief assemblages, several of which seem to be free associations based on the artist's travels. These are the show's most colorful and decorative works, but they also contain a strong narrative line that emerges on closer scrutiny. Miss Pindell is noted for her abstractions of great textural richness, but here, on a small scale, she allows the outside world to engage in a dialogue with creative technique.

The remaining four photo-sculptors take more formalistic approaches to both subject matter and treatment. David Haxton uses the standard props of the phraw material, cutting and tearing backdrop paper and arranging the lighting to articulate and define its patterns. Glass, scrap paper and assorted fragments enliven the neutral surface of the floor. The play of light, shadow and color is beguiling and often deliberately misleading, as the ephemeral paper is made to appear unnaturally substantial.

Boyd Webb combines highly refined and elegant formats with strangely ambiguous arrangements, such as bunched linoleum that might be read as fabric, or a shower room where up and down have lost their meaning. Like so many of the other works on view, these images came into being only to be captured on film, and the photographs exist to tantalize our imagination. In different ways, Gerry Marx and Pierre Bo ogaerts use photographs as sculptural objects in their own right. Mr. Marx's cutout enlargements of rocks and boulders are crease d and mounted to suggestthe volumes of the original objects, but they are only slightly raised off the plane of the wall, so that the y carve out their own territory somewhere between rock and photograph.

Mr. Boogaerts's wide-angle view of an intersection extends in segmented panels that both draw the viewer in toward the center and stand up well at a distance, where they are experienced as a completely different phenomenon. What was felt close up as negative states seen from below becomes a jagged cross of blue with black edges when viewed from across the room. In the works of these two artists, sculpture and photography have become a single medium.

''Photo/Sculpture'' will be on view through March 7. The gallery is in Brookwood Hall at 50 Irish Lane, and is open Wednesdays through Saturdays from 10 A.M. to 4 P.M., Sundays from 2 to 5 P.M. and Wednesday evenings from 8 to 10. Admission is free.

Eleanor Antin, Representational Painting, B&W Silent, 1971

Eleanor Antin, Representational Painting, B&W Silent, 1971, 38 min, b&w, silent, video here

The artist explores make-up as a traditional mode of self-expression. As a woman, she uses make-up to find a representation of herself with which to face the world.-- EAI

This title is available for exhibitions, screenings, and institutional use through Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), NY. Please visit the EAI Online Catalogue for further information about this artist and work. 

 

                                          Still: Hito Steyerl's How Not to Be Seen (2013)

The New Manifestos: 6 Artist Texts That Are Defining Today's Avant-Garde

By Ian Wallace

MAY 17, 2014

Once upon a time, you couldn't flip through a European newspaper without coming across the polemical manifesto of a budding avant garde artists' movement. The major movements of the 20th century—Dada, Fluxus, Futurism, Surrealism, Suprematism, and so on—all started with formal statements of intent written by artists, not critics, and often in inflammatory prose. In contrast, today's categories like "conceptual art," "relational aesthetics," "bio art," and "new media" refer to general trends in contemporary art as a whole rather than describing specific groups of artists who are professionally or socially associated with one another. What's more, these terms are more often cooked up by critics than by artists themselves. 

View article here

Visiting Artist Lecture: Paul Mpagi Sepuya, 6:15PM, Tuesday, September 15, 2020

Meet the Artists | Paul Mpagi Sepuya video here

To access the Tuesday' Sept. 15th talk, 6:15PM join Zoom Meeting

https://ucsd.zoom.us/j/93924511495

Meeting ID: 939 2451 1495

Paul Mpagi Sepuya is represented by ​by Team (New York, Los Angeles), Document (Chicago) and ​Vielmetter Los Angeles. Document will present a solo booth by Paul Mpagi Sepuya in the Positions sector during Art Basel Miami Beach 2019. Camera and edit: Gillian Garcia Production: Coline Milliard and Jeanne-Salomé Rochat for Art Basel.

A slew of exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial and recent shows at the Guggenheim Museum and the Getty, have put Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s name on everyone’s lips. The Angelenoartist re-examines portrait photography’s formal and conceptual foundations, as well as its traditional tools: mirrors, black velvet, and darkrooms. Questions around the representation of the black and the queer body – be it his own or his friends’ and collaborators’ – also inform Sepuya’s sensitive and intimate body of work. He welcomed Art Basel in his Boyle Heights studio.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, San Bernardino, CA) is an artist working in photography whose projects weave together histories and possibilities of portraiture, queer and homoerotic networks of production and collaboration, and the material and conceptual potential of blackness at the heart of the medium. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and Guggenheim Museums, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Getty Museum and MOCA Los Angeles, among others. His work has been reviewed in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Art in America, and he was featured on the cover of ARTFORUM’s March 2019 issue. Sepuya has been in recent exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, New York, Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Barbican Centre, London, and the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. A survey of work from 2008 - 2018 was presented at CAM St. Louis and University of Houston Blaffer Art Museum, accompanied by a monograph published by CAM St. Louis and Aperture Foundation. He is Acting Associate Professor in Media Arts at the University of California San Diego.

https://www.paulsepuya.com

https://arts.ufl.edu/in-the-loop/events/visiting-artist-lecture-with-paul-mpagi-sepuya/

LESLIE HEWITT "READING ROOM" AT PERROTIN NEW YORK

 

LESLIE HEWITT "READING ROOM" AT PERROTIN NEW YORK video here

Leslie Hewitt

On the occasion of her solo exhibition at Perrotin New York (September 11 – October 26, 2019), Leslie Hewitt talks about Lewis Michaux, a Harlem bookseller and civil rights activist who inspired the show. She also explains her attraction to minimalism, and the connection between her photographic work and the Dutch still life paintings of the 16th and 17th century.

Artie Vierkant "Rooms Greet People by Name", Perrotin New York

 

Artie Vierkant "Rooms Greet People by Name", Perrotin New York video here

Artie Vierkant website here

Artie Vierkant uses augmented reality to put his art in your hands

By Drew Zeiba • March 13, 2018 

Brooklyn-based artist Artie Vierkant melds photography, commercial printing, and sculpture. For Vierkant, there is no real hierarchical distinction between art experienced in real life or in a photograph. In Vierkant’s post-digital world, 2-D and 3-D, image and object, original and copy, exist on a level playing field. He often takes photos of his installation, modifies them, and repurposes them as new works in and of themselves. 

Most recently, this has taken the form of an augmented reality (AR) app, Image Object (a term Vierkant termed in 2010 to describe work which “exist[s] somewhere between physical sculptures and altered documentation images”), released in conjunction with his exhibition Rooms greet people by name at Galerie Perrotin on the Lower East Side. Vierkant sat down with the Architect’s Newspaper to discuss the app, the boundaries between 2-D and 3-D, and what augmented reality means for the future of public space.

Read more here