D&AD Film Brief

 

 New Graphics Brief- D&AD Create 3 film posters in the style of a director. My chosen director is Texas born Wes Anderson.  

 

Wes Anderson’s style is unique and absurd. His films often don’t have a plot or a fully understandable story but they are always a 100% joy to watch.  Every second of Anderson’s films are like a perfect photograph, the camera work and direction makes every scene a beautiful one and that is something that I feel is pretty unique to Anderson’s style.

The Grand Budapest Hotel – 2014

Something that is very unique for The Grand Budapest Hotel is that fact that it changes aspect ratio according to the time period the film is in at the time. Not many people will notice this format change but I think one thing Anderson is is a perfectionist, it doesn’t matter than people will or won’t notice slight changes.

Moonrise Kingdom – 2012

All the characters in Anderson’s films use language that seems to be individual and unique to each other this is something i think i could use when create the film posters. The brief is focused around typography so I think using each character’s way of speaking could form a poster.

The image created with different coloured words and letters.

 

The colour Pallets of Wes Anderson Films

The Abject Body

Abject – without pride or dignity, self-abasing, low, unhopeful, scummy, miserable.

Beautiful– attractive, pretty, pleasing, good looking.

Today we see both the body beautiful and the abject body all around us.  Blood, vomit, urine, faeces, saliva. We come across the abject body much more now than ever before. On social media sites such as tumblr and facebook we see cuts, bruises and blood. On a Saturday night we see vomit on street corners and even in the Ferens art  gallery during the 3AM exhibition we see people pissing on the street as a form of art.

Writer of the book ‘Powers of Horror’ the abject refers to the human reaction to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other.

The abject body is where the boundaries of the body are crossed, internal becomes external.

Bodily fluids are essential to human function but when they cross the bounders of the skin they become a problem to us. The basic functions of the body are hidden away we are almost in denial that blood, urine, tears, saliva, faeces, semen and vomit are a part of being human.

The perfect example of the abject that my tutor used. We swallow our own saliva all the time without giving any thought at all. But what if we were to spit into a cup rather than swallowing, then once the cup is full drink our saliva. I disgusting thought  I agree but why?  It is still the same saliva that we swallow all the time, is it just that it has been removed from our body?

Religion

Pedro Da Mena – Christ as the man of sorrows – 1673

Pedro Da Mena – Christ as the man of sorrows – 1673 close up

Grunewald- The crucifixion from the Lseheim altarpiece – 1515

 

The abject body is shown in religion all the time. Christ nailed to a cross by his hands and feet, blood pouring from his body, but I don’t feel repulsed by these images as I do by the idea of drinking a cup of my own spit. Maybe because it’s an image that is accepted and seen frequently in galleries, tattoos and around peoples necks in the form of jewelry.

War

Chapman Brothers – Disasters of war, 1993

Two soldiers in pit – Don Mccullin

 

 

 

The Chapman Brothers created a series  of small scale sculptures titled Disasters of War.

These sculptures showed hanging, torture  and generally horrible scenes of violence. The small sculptures were done in almost a playful way they looked like they could be a child’s toys.    On the other side we have the very serious and hard hitting photographs of war by Don Mccullin.  Mcculin shoots all of the horrors of war, dead and injured solders and families. To me the Chapman Brothers is the most shocking even though there are no real lives lost. The childish way that they have shown the abject body seems almost disrespectful and horrid.

Body as Caracas

Sally Mann – Body Farm Series – 2000-01

 

Dying Aids Patient- Benetton – 1992

Sally Mann and Benetton have shown the the body as a caracas. It is quite shocking to see a  lifeless body it is something that isn’t often shown and hardly even spoke about.

What are the ethical problems of making work about the abject body? 

Making art about the abject body can clash with many ethical problems. Is it okay to photograph or paint the body as a caracas? One example of this moral and ethical problem comes from photographer Kevin Carter.

Carter captured this famous photograph of a starving child in South Sudan being watched by a lurking vulture in March 1993.

He said that the high pitched whimpering sound of a toddler near the Ayod village attracted him. The girl was taking a rest while struggling to get to a feeding center. He confessed that he waited 20 minutes for the vulture to fly away and when it didn’t, Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased away the vulture. (The girl’s parents had left her to pick food from a UN plane nearby.)

This image won Carter the Pulitzer Prize but he regretted not helping the child. He was haunted by questions about what happened to the girl. He told an interviewer that after this he smoked cigarettes under a tree and cried.

3 months after receiving the prize Carter committed suicide.

A note was found in which he had written:

“I am depressed … without phone … money for rent … money for child support … money for debts … money!!! … I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners…I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky.”

David Emin – The Modern Art Mouse.

Play at 2:18 min

Tracey Emin on being told that her bed isn’t art –

” just screamed louder and said yes it is, its my art”

I liked this idea that by being an artist you can clam anything is artwork, so I took it to the extreme and had fun with the idea that if I were an artist I clam everything as ‘Modern Art’.

And to make sure that everyone knew these things were modern art I began to put sticky notes everywhereeeee!  Buses, walls, people, signs, pretty much anything I came across had been given the title of Modern art.

Shortly after my sticky note escapades I came across David Shrigley‘s work and loved his tongue in cheek attitude.

Well within a few days it was my cousin’s 16th birthday and she give me the task of getting her something different, that nobody else would ever get her. Of course I accepted this challenge and immediately searched eBay for a taxidermy creature.

 One of my favourite works by Shrigley was the animals with signs, and what could be a more perfect gift for a girls 16th birthday?! And yes I know that this idea isn’t original and is stolen from Shrigley but as a gift I think it is fun and had to be done.

And of course I named him David Emin to honor the artists that I stole from to create him.

The Everyday part 1

“What happens When Nothing Happens?” – Paul Virilo

 “The everyday might be the common ground experience that allows museum visitors to understand the effects of history on the private lives of those who were usually overlooked.”

“The desire to confront things in the world at large rather that the world of art.”

Linked to this is the assumption that the everyday is both authentic and democratic; where ordinary people creatively use and transform the world they encounter from day today.”

“A turn to the everyday will bring art and life closer together.”

“Most of the art presented here or discussed here may aspire to directness and immersion but it does not approach the everyday in any straightforward documentary way, most of it uses ruses and subterfuge to find ways of representing and engaging with the quotidian.”

Authentic = genuine, real, bona fide

Democratic = equal, classless, open

Transformative = change something dramatically, undergo total change

Subterfuge = something designed to deceive

Quotidian = commonplace, done daily, recurring daily

For me seeing and using the everyday in art allows the objects or subject to be instantly recognizable and relatable but also every surreal and strange depending on the context in which I put them. I enjoy taking something safe and familiar and changing it to make it less usual. It draws people in and I think in some ways it helps people see the everyday in a different light. Things you see everyday aren’t boring or bland at all like many people might think, they become more extraordinary in my opinion.

Annette Messager

Messager is a French painter, photographer and sculpture.

‘I like to tell stories… children’s stories are monstrous,’

“I like to use material that you have in the house, for me the material of the house could be very strange and very dangerous too. it depends how you look at it.

TateShots: Annette Messager

Gabriel Orozco

Mexican Artist Gabriel Orozco had uses a range of everyday object ranging from cat food tins to  bits of rubber tires. For these two works he has used cars, and even though I see cars everyday i can’t stop looking at these works. On the left the car has been dismantled and suspended on wires to show how much of it would go together. Right the car has had the middle section removed and the two sides welded together.  By taking something so familiar and changing it it becomes more interesting and as Messager said it can be unsettling and strange.

The Sense of Self

In the book Philosophy bites again Galen Strawson and Nigel Warburnton talk about ‘The Sense of Self’

 

“’Know thyself’ was a popular aphorism with the ancients, but it isn’t that clear what this means. What is the self? Is it fixed? And should we spend our lives trying to uncover its nature? Is that being true to oneself? Or is the self, as the existentialists believe , something we create and revise as we go along? And what is the link between the self and character?” – David Edmonds asking the question of what is self?

 

Strawson on character says –“ Imagine that you are wearing pink spectacles through which you view the world, and you just assume the world is pink – it doesn’t occur to you that you’re wearing pink spectacles. I think your own character is a bit like that. It’s something you see the world through, and so it doesn’t really feature as an object of experience for you. It just conditions everything and it’s invisible to you.”

 

Warburnton- “and yet people around you are likely to make all kinds of attributions about your characters and believe that you’re an angry person, or that you’re a kind person.”

 

Is our own sense of self in other people’s opinions of us? I think if this was the case it would be a very superficial self. Our character changes depending on who we’re interacting with, where we are and what is happening. So how can anyone really get a full sense of who we truly are on character alone? I don’t think so.