Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming \ response by Chandler Damrill

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming \

Chandler Damrill

“They help us think about alternative possibilities–they challenge the ideals, values, and beliefs of our society embodied in material culture.” 

These works of fiction and of alternate realities bring attention to problems people wouldn't be able to fix otherwise. It does not matter whether these art objects can actually solve the problem it was created to resolve, the important function is that it brings attention to a problem mankind needs to fix. The role of the prop maker, whether it be through movies, photography, sculpture or design, is to bring the expanse of “what could be” to the viewer. “The speculative prop designer needs to be skilled at triggering an imaginative response…” There is no set placeholder for these designs and speculative props, that’s what makes these objects stand out. Within this new world that the artist creates, the viewer sets aside all possible things and opens up to the impossible. This is a place for the viewer where I believe the art can truly teach. Shifting the role of the viewer from spectator to having an active role in the piece itself. 

“…Fooling the viewer into believing something is real is cheating. We prefer viewers to willingly suspend their disbelief and to enjoy shifting their imagination into a new, unfamiliar and playful space.” 

To me, when it comes to art objects in this category, a viewer should have the same mentality walking into a gallery space as they do walking into the movie theater. Once the viewer understands that they are entering into a space beyond reality, the artist can communicate at a different level. This space allows the viewer to actively imagine greater possibilities than their own, thus pushing them to wonder away from their own personal belief systems that could potentially hold them back in these situations of viewing art. “They must be plausible but not necessarily believable.” When the artist creates a consistent environment within their pieces, the viewer can enter into the world much like cinema. 

I personally connect and am inspired by Dunne & Raby. The designs engage with the viewer in a truly interactive and imaginative way. The visual language asks the viewer to ponder what the devices could be used for. The artists then use their work in photography with people in the act of using the devices they have created. After seeing these photographs and then being able to see the physical object in front of you truly pulls a the viewer into a dimension of the possibility that these artifacts and tools exist on their plane. Much like the movie goer can see the lightsaber in which Luke Skywalker uses to defeat his enemy. This brings out a sense of excitement because of the investing that certain viewer has done towards Star Wars. In the same way, the works of Dunne & Raby speak in multiple languages, in turn, I believe, creates a deep connection with the viewer.       

 Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming 

 By Anthony Duane and Fiona Raby

 

2013

 

 

The authors discuss that the process of creating scene to reflect on the engagement contemporary viewers in exhibition space is experimentation of ideas that will the lead the viewer’s imagination into speculated spaces which could be real or unreal(pg 137). In the context of the speculative design prop, film was used an example because it has the capability to place the viewer within an imaginary space. Before I watch film, I already understand that the experience I would get in the film is not real, yet the film captures my consciousness which make me live within it and believe in the fiction with all its highest level of suspense and other aestheticized features. 

Film could be a virtual experience or a future space or a non-place. When I watch film, I tend to believe in the spaces in the scenes to exist, where I become the viewer who imagines the reality of the space. I have not physically experience but understand that it forms part of the world. This speculative design is inspirational because when I make art especially by transforming the found objects, it evolves my curiosity to understand that the sculpture is the original function of the transformed material. 

René Laloux’s “Fantastic Planet” 1973 

 

In this case of achieving experience, there is some sense of strangeness that is incorporated into the work which triggers the viewer consciousness to live closer and deeper into the work. The authors analyzed that photography is a good medium that unveil hidden realities in odd environments. 

 

Jasmima Cibic 

Ideologies of Display (Tyto alba), 2008, Lambda Print 120 cm x 120 cm

 

There are also constructed space where the authors talks about, as the ideologies of display. I find that very interesting in terms of the artist Jasmima Cibic's decision of engaging the viewer. In the picture Tyto alba, 2008, there is an owl in front you but and not only do you see the owl but also a constructed space with elegant abstract design which gives you a simultaneous experience within a single photograph.

Reading Response George Lucas, THX 1138/Jørgen Leth, The Perfect, Human, 1968

 

George Lucas, THX 1138, (1971)

Jørgen Leth, The Perfect, Human, 1968

There's a suspicion with theoretical work that it is situated toward the future, but it can essentially be someplace else, a parallel world to our own rather than a conceivable future. Once you drop a long-term viewpoint of speculative work you immediately broaden the scope for aesthetic experimentation and innovative depiction of elective substances. One of the most well-known cinematic nonplaces is the tremendous, white space of George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971). It is the model of future space or nonplace. But white does not continuously need to flag the long run. It can moreover propose we are watching a few kinds of try; possibly indeed a thought explore. In Jørgen Leth’s test film The Culminate Human (1967), a man, lady, and sometimes both associated with essential props to illustrate crucial human exercises such as eating, resting, kissing. In this film, the empty white space is a nonplace instead of a representation of the future. In each case, the chief makes no endeavor to build a detailed world, but instep gives a clear canvas, a “white box” onto and into which viewers can extend their claim thoughts.

They both have a definition of non-place. The definition of modern places in the super modernity is like what Marc Augé says in his book. And I am using the same definition of super modernity in the center of my recent work (Table). The emptiness in the center of my work is in the contrast with the accumulation of images around the center. I am trying to boost the notion of documentary photography. The chronology by images in news and media has been affected by the avatar and simulation. Using images as an object for controlling society leads to a new model of fraud. This kind of method for historiography emerges a new version of documentation according to the taste and not reality.

Reading Response, Gillian Wearing, Katharina Fritch and Erwin Wurm

 

The Many Selves of Gillian Wearing

She talks about social media in terms of how that is involved in our everyday activities and we are also always expecting to see new things happening. We perform the duties of liking and disliking the information we encounter and we desire to also have followers as part of life achievement. Wearing said she does include her life into her practice. She goes through her old pictures taken by photo booth camera and the recreate the same posture to compare the difference in time. It is interesting that that she uses photography as reference to her past as she tries to feel the progress of her life.

Thinking in Pictures Katharina Fritsch In Conversation with Susanne Bieber

I find it interesting when Katharina said that cloth is a very subject but not really regarded. She added that cloth could be a great a medium through which one’s status or identity could be shown. In her work uses mostly the male model as a way to explore her way of women rights because she believe that the female body always been a male’s sexual gaze but Katharina tends to twist the narrative in the opposite way. When she sketches her before she does her work she mentioned that she rather takes photos of Frank by record him in the right position. I found that interesting in relation to photography and sculpture where she uses photography as a process of sketching a model.

Photography Knocks At The Door Erwin Wurm in Conversation with Max Hollein

 Erwin Wurm’s practice is both a combination of sculpture and photography in the sense that she uses sculpture to explore photography. In her photographs, the figures pose as if they were sculptural pieces. What is also interesting about her work is that she stages the model take the photographs. In the interview, I realized that realized that Erwin uses her work to raise question sculpture but with the help of photography. She is more invested in her practice and she responds critically to art history movement and yet separates herself to explore new theories that inspire her work.

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.