Assignment 2 Feedback

I was a little nervous about receiving feedback from my tutor after submitting the assignment.  So much so actually, that I somehow managed to forget to tell him the assignment was ready for feedback on my blog.  Anyway, we got there in the end and he kindly came back relatively fast especially considering his own limited time, for which I was grateful.

I have tried to upload the whole document here as a PDF but that is tricky in Blogger and I can't work out how to do it.  Will keep trying (and perhaps do the same for Assignment 1) but in the meantime here are some extracts: although having completed this, I like how I can put in my thoughts so maybe this is for the best anyway:

Feedback - assignment 

"Overall, this is bold, thoughtful, ambitious, striking, expressive and fascinating work; more so when viewed in the context of it being only your second assignment of your first module with the OCA. At this point, while students are often still making the adjustment from shooting purely for themselves/ pleasure, it’s unsurprising that many people take a fairly cautious approach to their assignments, producing work that’s less about being bold and taking chances than playing it safe. That you’ve clearly thought about how you can take the assignment criteria and do something that’s ambitious, creative and rather lyrical with it is extremely encouraging. This is an enormously intriguing assignment, from the text that outlines your thoughts and ideas processes, to your final execution of the photography. It doesn’t always come together, but at this point that’s less important than taking chances and having the imagination to even attempt to produce work like this in the first place."

I was very pleased to read the above and felt that the risk I had taken was recognised.  I agreed that in some instances I didn't quite reach what I was hoping for, mainly due to my lack of perseverance and worry about time - which in retrospect was silly.  In future I will endeavour to be sure of all the images I include and not allow a couple to slip under that don't quite do it for me.  I am glad to find out that I can replace the two images I wasn't happy with before being assessed and plan to do so.

Learning Logs/Critical Essays

"The way you’re thinking and writing about your experiences is really engaging and enormously promising. The overview you give of the assignment was extremely readable, and a great accompaniment to the images- there’s a seriousness and determination that is apparent throughout, and everything is always thoughtful, eloquent and extremely readable. More please…

On a techy note, I very much appreciated how you presented the photographs in a full-screen slideshow; it really presented them in a lovely light. In the long run, an awareness of how people view your photographs is something that is incredibly important."

I love writing and have lots to say so I am very encouraged by this.  I have also been noticing how people present their work and am interested in learning new ways to do so myself.

Suggested reading/viewing

"‘I have not read enough’- very honest! It’s hugely encouraging, gratifying and exciting to see someone who’s so committed and willing to take chances and not feel the need to tread well worn paths. Harnessing this adventurous spirit by getting a more pointed sense of what’s out there is certainly something that will give an added sense of purpose to your work- but having said this, your accompanying notes very clearly give a sense of someone who is taking note of what’s out there, and absorbing all manner of things. You’re clearly keen to explore and try new things, and I get the impression that you know anyway that ‘consuming’ more photography and writing about photography will feed your own ideas processes. So keep going…

More specifically, your work in this assignment immediately called to mine a series by Jessa Fairbrother, whose series The Rehearsal (dedicated to Augustine) attracted a fair bit of attention. There’s a similar stylistic approach in terms of the way the work is set up, but also quite a few differences that go beyond one project being in colour and the other in b/w. Yours appears to be rather more concerned with, dare I say, existential matters than Jessa’s… but also keep in mind that work like this that doesn’t loudly flag up what it’s intended to be ‘about’ lends itself to a much more diverse and ‘open’ set of readings by the viewer. This is a moot point in all forms of creativity, not just photography, and scholars in the field of Cultural Studies have been interested in the way audiences have a ‘creative role’ in the production of meaning and interpreting art and culture for quite a long time. Stuart Hall and Roland Barthes are a couple of key figures if you fancy some not-so-light reading around this! Jessa’s other work is also well worth a look."

I do of course aim to read more and I am certainly looking at photographic work a lot as well as other mediums.  My problem with reading the prescribed books is that I am too easily drawn to psychology and social anthropology books which does inform the work I do, but I am aware I need to make sure I don't miss out on important photography commentary too.  I have nearly finished one of the books which was recommended so I don't feel too bad now but this is something I must keep an eye on.  Saying that the writers that have been recommended of course appeal to me (and my slight sense of grandiosity?) because they are looking at all creative arts and theatre has been an interest of mine since I was very young.  I am extremely interested in work that isn't prescriptive.

I have looked at Jessa Fairbrother and was thrilled by her work.  I am inspired and I look forward to seeing more.  I was also grateful to a fellow student who recommend Alexey Brodovitch after seeing my assignment work.  The peer review Facebook group that has been set up has been great for getting to know some of the other people studying, even if only online. 

Pointers for the next assignment 

We’ve already touched on this in email correspondence, so all I want to add is that you should just keep going: the work you’ve submitted so far, as well as what you’ve uploaded to your blog, gives an extremely clear sense of someone who is pushing, searching, and hopefully finding what it is they are looking for. There’s quite a wide array of styles, which rather than suggesting uncertainty and inconsistency, points to someone determined to find an appropriate vehicle to work with… even if this doesn’t necessarily settle into a permanent and easily identifiable visual ‘style’. The notes that you include, highlighting ‘keening, death, love, sex, innocence, isolation and aging’ were very welcome, and indicative of someone who’s very ambitious and wants to use photography to communicate some things that are not easily communicated. What’s also encouraging is that I had quite a big sense of these themes being part of the work before I read your notes, so things are definitely moving in the right direction, and I’m pretty confident that if you can maintain your enthusiasm and obvious work ethic- and put right your sense that you’ve ‘not read enough’!- you’ll continue to get closer to wherever it is you want your work and your studies to take you. Please feel free to drop me an email if you want to discuss your plans for A3.

I have been thinking about A3 quite a lot now and was a bit unsure about how to proceed.  Having looked at Jessa Fairbrother's work though I am beginning to relax a little about it.  I've been uncertain about continuing to use myself in the the work I do here.  However, I was once an actor and the idea of using photography to create my own little productions is quite appealing.  I never felt I was able to express what I wanted to when acting - in large part I'm sure because I was quite messed up and unsure about who I was at the time rather than because of any failing in the people I was working with, or the scripts I was working on, or acting not being the right medium.  But now I have an increasingly clear idea of what it is that is I am eager to express and I think having the tools to do it, i.e a camera might be liberating in the end.  So, for now I am not going to worry too much about being my own little producer-megalomaniac - although not much of a one since I'm potentially only bossing myself around.

As far as an easily identifiable style goes, I do feel slightly ambivalent about closing down and honing in just yet. (One of the things I took away with me from the Richard Hamilton show was how versatile and wide ranging his work was and I liked that a lot).  However, I do also appreciate that finding one's own language is an extremely worthwhile aim.

 

 

 

Gallery Visit: Richard Hamilton, Tate Modern, 21st May 2014

I am interested in co-incidences and synchronicity: in how and why we project our inner world onto our outer world and the how we make sense of, or try to fathom, those two positions, as well as the interplay and tensions between our conscious and unconscious minds. 

Is it a co-incidence that I keep going to see work by people who work with the idea of montage, with collage or simply cutting out and pasting shapes, physically and by placing different styles and media together? 

I did not notice the date when I set out on the 21^st of May.  However, it was in fact my late father’s birthday and he would very much have enjoyed visiting the exhibition with me despite his painful feet and inability to stand for very long. 

I mention my father because his death seems to have been the trigger for the beginning of my photographic odyssey.  Shortly before he died he mentioned how much he admired a photograph I took, and which was framed for me by my ex-husband.  The night he died, unbeknownst to me at the time, I dreamed that that photograph was no longer on the wall and in the dream the sense of its absence was overwhelmingly troubling to me.  Utter nothingness where once there was something. The next day I rang the police when I could not get hold of my father and they discovered that he had died in quite strange circumstances less than 24 hours previously – the night I had had my very powerful dream.

Photography, my father’s death and the new direction I have taken in life are all in my mind connected. 

What is more, Richard Hamilton’s work spans from the late 40s to 2011.  My father was born in 1939 and died in 2011. Because Hamilton’s work can, I think, be read as a ‘social documentary’ of those years, as a commentary on British preoccupations, mood and changing attitudes, it seems intrinsically connected to the world in which my father lived.

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Although Hamilton is not primarily a photographer, he was interested in and utilized photography in his work, not only in preparatory work but also as a medium in itself.  There are lots of photographic works in the exhibition, which contains over 200 altogether, and also includes installation, painting, print, film and sculpture.  I tend to focus on installation in this written work.

Hamilton was born in 1922 and died in 2011.  He was English but more than any other British artist, ‘associated with international colleagues’[1], ‘a champion of Marcel Duchamp in the post-war era, he befriended and collaborated with American and European artists from Roy Lichtenstein to Dieter Roth.’[2]  Hamilton studied at Slade following a succession of jobs in advertising, design and production after leaving school at 14.

I know virtually nothing about Pop Art (to be honest I’m beginning to comprehend that I know virtually nothing at all and have a growing awareness of a hideous sense of ignorance which with everything I learn becomes grows greater and can’t possibly be overcome sufficiently in the remaining 30, maybe 40 years if I’m lucky, that I have left – it’s annoying; my fractured un-education is annoying.) Hamilton is, I have read, understood to be the founding father of this movement – I think I might have assumed it was Warhol but perhaps he is merely the most populist of the pop artists.

There is an enormous body of work in the exhibition – it really is quite prolific - so I will discuss a small selection of those that I found most interesting here:

Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different and appealing? 1956, which was a collage to be used in the catalogue representing an installation called, The ‘fun house’, one of twelve in the This is tomorrow exhibition held at the Whitechapel gallery as part of a collective, referred to as ‘the now infamous icon of Pop Art’[3](although I have struggled to discover why infamous), instantly reminded me of Hoch’s work (again!) which I’d seen at the Whitechapel a few months ago.

The collage for me contains a great deal of humour with its pastiche of Adam and Eve, and contains a number of contemporary aspirational objects such as a vacuum cleaner, tape player, television, and a tinned ham (I remember eating that!).  I’m not sure if the ham is meant to indicate what I see as the ‘ theatrical hamming’ physicality of the couple but if so, I can’t help reading a kind of ridicule of all the very materialistic desires of modern ‘keeping-up-with the-Jones’ habits and sentimentalities.

“Like Hamilton’s exhibition strategy, the image was complied from a tabulated list of image requirements…”[4] which served to outline and determine a basic foundation for Pop Art itself: Popular, Transient, Expendable, Low Cost, Mass Produced, Young, Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big Business.

Hamilton worked alongside artist, John McHale and architect John Voelcker.  “Their installation consisted of an a-symmetrical, dramatically angled structure, the ‘Fun house’, covered with an over-sized image of Marilyn Monroe which, along with a large scale replica bottle of Guinness, mimicked the monumental scale of city hoarding and cinema advertising, although an aesthetic tension was set up between these mass –culture images and the mass-consumption poster of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers hung on the wall as a work of Art”[5].  I have to say when I first returned to England, aged 16 (having been born in the UK but emigrated to South Africa aged 6 weeks) I was struck by the visual bombardment of advertising in London.  It had a definite impact on me and contributed to the sense of cultural shock I experienced for some years.  Although I returned in the 80s and not in the 50s, that cultural trend probably began with such alacrity three decades earlier and Hamilton and his collaborators’ commentary on it resonates profoundly with me.

I am also struck by the irony of the title, which in retrospect becomes a joke – This is in fact yesteryear but also a comment on the future impact of materialism.

There was a jukebox playing music from the era which was incredibly evocative.  I do think that sound-scapes and music in a gallery is an immensely powerful means of communicating and creating a mood.  It harks back to my experience in theatre and I’m tentatively and perhaps a little bashfully drawn to the idea of creating art that is almost a 'production' of sorts.  I know this is not right for all art and think often such a collage of aural, visual, and spatial sensations is likely to be overwhelming and undermining of the individual aspects in many cases – but for me I think it might be something to think about as my appreciation of what is possible grows.

The Critics Laugh, 1968 is not covered in the catalogue book a great deal which means I must try to make sense of it alone.  The work encompasses several photographs, actual items, design drawings and and an advertisement and it really struck a chord with me.  Hamilton’s work is intrinsically tied up in modern design and engineering.  He seemed obsessively interested in the detail of design and this preoccupation runs throughout the exhibition.  I suppose what stood out for me with this work in particular is the humour and Surrealist nature of it.  The utterly ridiculous fake set of false teeth (a memento his son bought back from a seaside holiday) is attached to the handle of a Braun toothbrush.  Hamilton always admired Braun and did a lot of related work around the design of Braun items.  To me Braun has always been around in the background of existence I suppose but I’ve only ever seen it as a logo on functional and quotidian objects in the home.  Hamilton sees the beauty of design but by attaching it to the teeth creates an hilarious and bizarre object that has some sort of feedback loop on itself – a toothbrush that shakes and rattles a set of false teeth.  There is something about the ridiculousness of human sexuality here which made me laugh out loud when I watched the very funny advert, a spoof of overtly sexualized advertising which has been so prominent in our media.  I thought this was one of the highlights of the whole exhibition but perhaps that is because I have an infantile sense of humour.  I do, however, like the Surrealism – sex, death, inner worlds colliding in fantasy and dreams with outer worlds.  And humour is immensely powerful.

Treatment Rooms 1984 is another installation but one that is very different in tone and temperament to the one discussed earlier. Although there is an innate criticism about commercialism and materialism in This is tomorrow, there is also a sense of optimism and hope.  This is utterly gone by the time Hamilton created Treatment Room for the Arts Council Group exhibition titled Four Rooms in 1984.  There is an Orwellian sense of despair and oppression in the austere, unhappy rooms.  Hamilton “found the spirit of the 80s to be one of contrasting ‘depression’, and determined his room would be ‘inspired by the bleak, disinterested, seedily clinical style of the establishment institution”[6].

In one of the rooms there is a hospital bed/table and a less than comfortable looking blanket strewn upon it, just underneath a TV monitor, which plays silent footage of one of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Political party Broadcasts.  ‘The installation dealt with the workings of power through surveillance (the monitor reminding the viewer of CCTV cameras in Public spaces) and indoctrination (the patient cured by the image of the leader”[7].  What I am struck by is the foretelling and warning about the growth of mass surveillance, and the critique of what that might do to individuals in society, possibly robbing them of something precious and fundamental to life.  Whilst the accompanying literature sardonically talks of indoctrination ‘healing’ the patient I of course read the image as one where the patient is in fact killed off – empty hospitable beds with crumpled bedding seem symbolic of someone having been removed.  Nothingness where once there was something.

I wonder what my father would have made of this installation – an avid Thatcher supporter and defender. 

Finally, I was struck by Lobby, 1988, another installation (seems I like such things) which is a work inspired by a postcard Hamilton owned of the German hotel lobby.  It is a room: at the back of the room covering the entire wall is a painting of the postcard, containing a pillar, which is covered floor to ceiling in mirror.  Then the lobby is recreated in actuality in the room, a pillar covered from floor to ceiling in mirror.  A set of stairs in the postcard is also there, although in the real room you’re standing in, the stairs of course lead nowhere.  Dotted about the room are smaller paintings of the lobby plus drawings.  The carpet in the painting is on the floor of the actual recreated lobby.

Even though the sense created by Lobby is one of loneliness, isolation, disorientation and detachment I found it a magical work.  You are able to step into and walk around the artwork and it reminded me of Broadway Danny Rose, a Woody Allen film where one of the characters steps out of the film – reality and fantasy merge.  Here the same thing happens only the other way round, and the fantasy is a pretty miserable one at that.  The mirror maintains a sense of never-ending blurring between the two dimensions and this blurring is something that interests me a great deal.  I was really quite over-awed by this particular work.

I must end otherwise this may be the longest Gallery Visit write up ever, but wanted to say there were so many works which I have not had time to mention here which I found interesting and compelling.  I am not sure what my father would have made of Hamilton’s view of the world – perhaps too left wing and bleak for him, a bleak, despite his profession as a comic, but right wing individual.  He would have certainly appreciated the intellect, Hamilton’s immense knowledge and broad use of media.  While some of the work did not immediately draw me in, there was much that did, and I have found his use of so many different styles and media inspirational and fantastic to see.

I think there was so much unconscious ‘stuff’ about my decision to visit the Tate on the 21^st, and I think it will take me a while to think about and make sense of it.  But I am very pleased I went because I sense I am beginning to appreciate just how much of an impact art can have, and in a way that I haven’t done before.

Hamilton’s relationship with Surrealism and then pop art suggest to me that he was dealing with the tension between our inner and outer worlds, connections, projections and the various levels of reality we humans must contend with as we navigate through life both as individuals and in terms of the state.  I think I will be considering some of what I picked up on during this visit for a good while to come.

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[1] Richard Hamilton, 2014 Tate Modern exhibition accompanying handout – Introduction.

[2] Richard Hamilton, 2014 Tate Modern exhibition accompanying handout – Introduction.

[3] Page 73, Richard Hamilton catalogue, Published by Tate Modern Publishing, 2014 originated by Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and TF Editores, Madrid.

[4] Page 73, Richard Hamilton catalogue, Published by Tate Modern Publishing, 2014 originated by Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and TF Editores, Madrid.

[5] Page 73, Richard Hamilton catalogue, Published by Tate Modern Publishing, 2014 originated by Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and TF Editores, Madrid.

[6] Richard Hamilton, 2014 Tate Modern exhibition accompanying handout – Room 12.

[7] Richard Hamilton, 2014 Tate Modern exhibition accompanying handout – Room 12.

Gallery visit: Matisse The Cut-Outs 14th May 2014, Tate Modern

I went along to see the Cut-Outs exhibition last week as I’d found myself watching a documentary about the exhibition a few months ago and was completely drawn into it which surprised me.  Matisse was one of those names that existed in my mind as someone who was terribly important in the world of art, but about whom I knew next to nothing.    I have to admit that if anyone had asked me about him I might have put him in with the impressionists rather than a Modernist.  I really have known very little!

I am learning a great deal about art the moment and I don’t think there is enough time in the day to take it all in (given that I nearly fell asleep this evening doing bedtime for my youngest child, it must be true that there really aren’t enough hours!)  Matisse in particular is a huge subject just by himself and I am currently reading a book about him, but since I should try to keep up with these entries and am behind a little, I will give a very brief account of his life before discussing my response to the exhibition.

Matisse was born in 1869 and died in 1954.  His life covers an incredibly active and extraordinary time from our history.  He was born at what seems to be the beginning of modern life, before all the inventions that propelled human existence into something quite unlike anything that has gone before; cars, planes, trains, industrialization and modernism[1].  The changes when looked back at from the present seemed to have happened so speedily and I have often wondered what it must have been like for people to live through all these changes, not to mention the extreme violence and political upheaval, two world wars, revolutions, nation and empire building as well as the dismantling that occurred.

Matisse’s work “Open Window was exhibited at the landmark Salon d'automne of 1905, where Matisse and other fauve painters were greeted with critical skepticism and public disdain. The "fauve" (savage beast) label itself originated in the art critic Louis Vauxcelles' newspaper review of the exhibition.”[2]  Matisse’s work seemed to blatantly defy tradition and culturally excepted norms in art, and was instead shockingly primitive in form with huge brush strokes and broad colours.  However be became on the of the grand names of Modernism and produced an enormous body of work continuing to paint, draw and sculpt throughout all the social upheaval that happened during the first half of last century. 

Thirteen years before the end of Matisse’s life he nearly died but survived although in great pain, often consigned to a wheel chair and as he described ‘mutilated’[3].  During this time and despite his ongoing health problems Matisse invented a new way of working.  He no longer painted but instead began to cut out coloured shapes with a huge pair of tailor’s scissors.  With the help of assistants he pinned these shapes to the walls around him and created art that was vibrant, significantly more primitive than his earlier work and also difficult for contemporaries to accept.  In fact there were those that thought he’d gone quite mad, cutting bits of paper out.  He understood that the world would not appreciate and understand this work until much later: ‘the creators of a new language are always 50 years ahead of their time’[4].  The new language he created went on to be used in models for stained glass windows, theatre and book designs and an entire church including liturgical vestments.

I am not surprised that people found the work difficult to understand.  It is not easy work in my mind and the departure from any notions of ‘classical’ painting must have made it hard to comprehend as ‘art’ when you consider the context in which it was first produced.  Nowadays we are used to seeing beds with sheets crumpled up and stuffed sharks and dots and blurry photographs described as art, so we are probably less hindered by the classical conditioning people may have been in the 40s and 50s.  However, even so, I did not respond to the exhibition as I did others I have recently been to.  

I can appreciate the primitive colours and patterns, the playfulness and intensity, the bravery of how broad, bold and ambitious the cut-outs are, to a sense of creativity that is utterly without classical conditioning, that says, ‘here, I am’ so stridently.  I see that the patterns he created are extraordinarily rhythmical and alive, containing a sense of explosiveness, which is wonderful to be surrounded by.  But the art is so very primal that I actually find it quite difficult to access.  Maybe I am 50 years behind my time!

I am, however, immensely grateful to the universe for a bizarre co-incidence, where I have attended several consecutive visits to exhibitions that concentrate on cutting and pasting, or pinning in Matisse’s case, as it has demonstrated to me that these artists, Hoch, Matisse, William S Burroughs and most recently Richard Hamilton were, in much of their work, having fun.  I do not mean the work was not serious for I truly believe it was, and that with the work came pain and distress and difficulty.  Nevertheless the artists I have looked at this year have repeatedly shown me that artistic activity can be made with whatever medium you choose, provided you commit, are dedicated to it, to fulfilling the expressiveness of what you’re exploring.  Does any of that make sense?  I’m just beginning to see the possibilities and perhaps am still forming the words to explain what I am becoming aware of.

I should also say that my companion at the Matisse exhibit, my 2-year-old son, evidently had a much more visceral, uncomplicated response to the cut-outs than me.  He told me towards the end that he was scared, the paintings were scary and that he wanted to go home.  This surprised me but they are really big and bright and intense and so I can begin to see what he was saying.  It’s helpful having an unadulterated, unconditioned, uncomplicated small person with you sometimes.

Some links:

http://www.henri-matisse.net/

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/henri-matisse-cut-outs

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[1] http://www.henri-matisse.net/artofmatisse.html

[2] http://www.henri-matisse.net/artofmatisse.html

[3] Page 5, Henri Matisse, A Second Life, Alastair Sooke, Penguin, 2014

[4] Page 8 Henri Matisse, A Second Life, Alastair Sooke, Penguin, 2014