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The Unconscious Mind and Advertising PowerPoint
UncategorizedThe Abject Body
Home, UncategorizedAbject – 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
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
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 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.”
City Centre Ruins – 2018
Own work, UncategorizedMy entry to the Ferens Open Exhibition 2015. The title of the image is 2018, i.e. year after the city of culture. This photo reflects the views of the cynics and the haters. Hull as a post apocliptic waste land after all the glitz, glamour and money has gone…. Not that I think this will be the case at all.
The image is created with own images and 4 copy right free source images. By creating the landscape with real everyday images I think it creates a certain believable realise that drawings and paintings might not have.
Taking around 30 hours the images where placed and manpulated using photoshop and a LOT of groups and layers.
Within my photography I like to create surreal, odd, magical scenes with locations that people still recognise. My main drive for doing this comes from often I hearing that Hull is boring or uninspiring and dull and I guess within my work I’d like to prove the bored, uninspired haters wrong.
(And also I absolutely love creating my own manipulated realties).
I think the themes of this work could both fit in with the everyday and also gothic.
Everyday = Using everyday images to create a work.
Gothic = Decay, dread, ruins melodrama & mistrust.
Contemporary Gothic Art
UncategorizedLouise Bourgeous
Dark, bloody red objects, body parts. Memories of a unhappy childhood. The space is frightening and unnerving it gives the viewer a sense of fear and dread. It also reminds me of the 1980 Stanley Kubrick film The Shining.
Charles Ray
Family Romance consists of four sculptures of the Father, Mother, son and toddler daughter. The father figure who could be seen as the head of the family, top of the hierarchy list has been shrunk down to be the size of the children as well as the mother. A crisis of authority and power.
David Altmejd
Altmejd’s sculpture of a half rotting half eaten magical creature plays with the gothic themes of decay and schlock. And also it could be considered Anti God’s law in the enlightenment time due to the face that Altmejd has created this mythical beast and changed ‘gods’ natural order.
Lnez Van Lamsweede
Again another fantasy creation linking to the theme of Frankenstein and monsters.
Gregory Crewdson
Dramatic, theatrical, fantastical and staged. Like the Gothic themes of mistrust and melodrama Crewdson’s images are set up and false but also give a feeling of unease and nothing is quite what it seems.
Rachel Whiteread
House was a concrete cast of the inside of an entire Victorian house. This work fits perfectly with the Gothic themes of Decay and also the Gothic obsession with ruins new and old.
18th Century Gothic
Own work, UncategorizedThe age of enlightenment started in Western Europe in the 18th century. It was an intellectual movement focused on reason and science in philosophy and the study of human culture and the natural world. People at this time believed that knowledge leads to fulfillment and happiness and that religion was only superstition. Science requires proof therefore it can be believed unlike superstitious religion.
Not everyone agreed with the age of enlightenment (or also known as the age of reason). Reason was about law, order and hierarchy. Philosophers Vico and Herder could see the problems, the rationalists needed the irrational to survive. After all you can’t have rational without irrational and so Gothic was born.
Gothic loved rebelling established authority, it was the opposite to the age of reason. Gothic focused on subjects such as power, decay, dread, anti God’s law, schlock, melodrama, mistrust and sado-masochism.
Decay
In architecture a fascination for old ruins and new ruins made to look old. Then moral decay, bodily ruin and emotional ruin. Ethical decay, today we have graffiti, terrorist bombings and ruins of shops and businesses failing.
Dread
Dread was believed to encourage fear and therefore respect. The Gothic embraced autocracy. It thrived on monsters, vampires and the evil within. The opposite to what the age of reason wanted.
Anti God’s Law and Sado-masochism
Fetishist decoration and mutilation of the natural order. Domination and submission, master and slave, superiority and inferiority.
Schlock
The gothic style perused schlock for its own distinct atmosphere, vocabulary and furniture.
Melodrama & Mistrust
Dramatic, theatrical, fantastical and staged. Gothic yet again is everything that the Enlightenment age was trying to avoid. Everything is false, nothing is real or what it seems to be.
What is a Portrait
Uncategorized
SURFACE
“Everything is Surface” – Andy Warhol
Stylish but Blank!
Andy Warhol’s screen print of Marilyn is purely surface. The images were often sourced from newspapers or press shots. They were impersonal and said nothing about the subject. But knowing the history and background of Marilyn we can read between the lines and give our own interpretation to the image.
With this screen print the images are fading out gradually to nothing. This could be interpreted as Marilyn’s fame slowly fading out of peoples memories since her death. This could also be the case for Elvis.
This image of Jackie Kennedy before and after her husband’s death could be considered to have a deeper meaning, showing the emotional strain of losing a loved one through the media’s unsympathetic camera lens.
Not Portraiture in any traditional sense.
Like Warhol Gerhard Richter uses photos from the mass media. Richter projected the images onto walls and hand painted the projected image. Both Richter and Warhol spoke of the importance of surfaces, the lack of depth and the equality of various subject matter.
“I blur things to make everything equally important and everything equally unimportant”.
Cindy Sherman creates a mask for herself, she dresses up in wigs and clothing to transform herself into characters.
These images aren’t self-portraits in the classic sense.
EXPOSED
Photographer Nan Goldin captures her life, she captures the good the bad and the ugly. She shows everything to the viewer in her work. Many of the people in her images died of drug overdoses or aids. Goldin showed over 700 photographs at the Mudd Club and various art galleries.
Tracey Emin’s work also puts herself on display, both hers and Goldins work blurs the lines between what should be public and private.
SCIENCE
Gary Schneider creates ‘Genetic Self Portraits’ with handprints, photographs of his irises, parts of his DNA sequences, x-rays and microscopic images of his own hair.
All of these artists challenge the idea of what a portrait is.
And I think it is impossible to fully define what a true portrait is.
Attitudes to Landscapes
UncategorizedMany if not most of the preconceived ideas we have of landscapes come from either the Greek and Roman classical view or the 18th centuries Romantic attitudes and movement.
When we view landscape we automatically build up our own view of what that landscape is like either playing to the classical or romantic ideas or our own experiences.
Wilderness
Classical: Beyond civilization, a place to be feared, untamed man, mountains, forests, deserts, seas, witches, thieves, savages, the devil.
Romantic: A pure place untouched by human hands, an earthy paradise, spiritual, hermits, outdoor adventures, artists, noble savages.
Countryside
Classical: Owned and tamed wilderness, work, farming, boundaries, hedges, walls, uneducated, simpletons, gossiping villagers, incest, migrant workers, muddy, smells.
Romantic: A place of honest work, working in harmony with nature, pastoral idyll, milk maids , squires, farmers, a place to retreat to.
City
Classical: A centre of civilization, a place of progress, education, employment, law and order, culture, government, affluent people, educated, cultured, civilized, Utopian.
Romantic:, A place of disease, dirt, over populated, crime, fear, noise, smells, disorder, crime, ghettos, corrupt, powerless, ill, unemployed, homeless, gangs, dystopian.
Suburbia
Classical: Success, money, normality, ideal life, wife 3 kids and a dog, matching, clean, middle class.
Romantic: Cookie cutter houses, sterile environment , two faced, clicks, weird, strange, confined, dull.