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martes, 12 de abril de 2016

Artist films 2011 // VIMEO.

I think it is important to listen to the artist talking about her/his own artwork. This channel is a good opportunity for it. I highly recommend you to watch some of the videos, maybe you find an interesting artist!

Examples:
https://vimeo.com/36826942
Catherine Bertola: Bertola makes temporary interventions that respond to existing sites, objects and drawings in order to uncover and re-animate their forgotten histories.

https://vimeo.com/33661877
Laura Lancaster: Lancaster’s paintings use as their source found photographs, slides and cine films of strangers, which she collects from flea markets and thrift stores.

https://vimeo.com/32790531
Thomas Whittle: Whittle’s work often defies categorisation by blurring the boundaries between the different media

https://vimeo.com/33023103
Iris Priest: In her own words, Iris Priest’s practice explores art as a channel for discovery, as a new means of communication via a cross-pollination of ideas.

"The yellow wallpaper" Charlotte Perkins.

This is a really important book of the end of 19th century about feminism and an inspiration for me about leading our own life.

For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia-and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still good physique responded so promptly that he concluded that there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to 'live as domestic a life as possible,' to 'have but two hours' intelligent life a day,' and 'never to touch pen, brush or pencil again as long as I lived.' This was in 1887…
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Why I Wrote the Yellow Wall-paper," 1913


It is sad how history has separated women to artistic paths and I think this book reveal women struggle for a change on it.

This is the first lesson of an article about the book:
http://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-plan/charlotte-perkins-gilmans-yellow-wall-papermdashthe-new-woman

 Wash day.

"The concept of "The New Woman," for example, began to circulate in the 1890s–1910s as women pushed for broader roles outside their home-roles that could draw on women's intelligence and non-domestic skills and talents.
Gilman advocated revised roles for women, whom, Gilman believed, should be on much more equal economic, social, and political footing with men. In her famous work of nonfiction Women and Economics(1898), Gilman argued that women should strive-and be able-to work outside the home. Gilman also believed that women should be financially independent from men, and she promoted the then-radical idea that men and women even should share domestic work.
First appearing in the New England Magazine in January 1892, "The Yellow Wall-paper," according to many literary critics, is a narrative study of Gilman's own depression and "nervousness." Gilman, like the narrator of her story, sought medical help from the famous neurologist S. Weir Mitchell. Mitchell prescribed his famous "rest cure," which restricted women from anything that labored and taxed their minds (e.g., thinking, reading, writing) and bodies. More than just a psychological study of postpartum depression, Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper" offers a compelling study of Gilman's own feminism and of roles for women in the 1890s and 1910s."

Second lesson:

lunes, 11 de abril de 2016

Lygia Clark.

In 1960, Brazilian artist Lygia Clark wrote, "For me art is only valid in the ethico-religious sense, internally connected to the inner elaboration of the artist in its deepest sense, which is the existential. My whole vision is not purely optical, but is profoundly connected to my experience of feeling, not only in the immediate sense, but even more, in the deeper sense in which one doesn't know what is its origin. That which a form may express only has a meaning for me in a strict relationship with its inner space, the empty-full of its existence, just as there exists our space which goes on being completed and taking on meaning as maturity arrives. At times I think that before we are born we are like a closed fist which opens its first finger when we are born and is opened internally like the petals of a flower as we discover the meaning of our existence, for us at a certain moment to become aware of this plenitude of an empty-full (interior time)."
https://www.artsy.net/article/artbookdap-lygia-clark


The official and complete biography, useful and insightful
http://www.lygiaclark.org.br/biografiaING.asp


From the late 1960s through the 1970s she created a series of unconventional artworks in parallel to a lengthy psychoanalytic therapy, leading her to develop a series of therapeutic propositions grounded in art. Clark has become a major reference for contemporary artists dealing with the limits of conventional forms of art.
http://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1422?locale=es



I accept nothing from those who want to put a label on me. I only 

accept criticism from those who are willing to live with me through 

the sensibility and experience that led me to a painting or an 

attitude.

Lygia Clark



The structuring of the self.

 
    Elastic net.

   
Dialogue goggles.                           Dialogue of hands.


A revealing article:

The Therapeutic Art of Lygia Clark // CHRISTINA GRAMMATIKOPOULOU

"What is particularly striking about smell is that it is not simply about discerning and recognizing an odour; a spectrum of experiences and emotions that are associated a particular smell comes to memory along with each smell. For this matter, it is a very subjective experience that is difficult to describe with words. Therefore, the sense of smell breaks the traditional separations we place within the world because the air carries a blend of odours that one cannot avoid: pleasant smells with unpleasant ones, known with unknown ones, intimate smells with the ones that are devised to cover them up.
Smells act as unifying elements between imagination, desire, the past and the future. They transgress the boundaries of space and time, lingering like a powerful projection of the past onto the present.
In this light, the marginalisation of smell could be largely due to its ability to transgress personal boundaries and to stir up memories and emotions."

"Guy Brett observes that Clark “produced many devices to dissolve the visual sense into an awareness of the body”. Her works involve specially designed hoods and suits that are intended to enhance the senses of their participants, favouring smell and touch over sight. She treated the body and mind as a unity and disregarded the divisions between artist and audience. For her, the artistic object is co-created by the artist and the participant, acquiring meaning and structure only through interaction.
Lygia Clark explained that the emphasis on her work shifts from the artistic object to experience and from matter to the surrounding space, the “empty-full” surrounding an object and filling a body."

"There is a strong political tone emerging from these artworks, especially if one considers the fact that the artist’s home country, Brazil, was under a military dictatorship when they were created. However, there is also a positive charge within those works, despite the feeling of confinement. The stimulation of the other senses –rather than vision- creates a similar experience to when one stays within the darkness for too long, and one’s eyes begin to discern things that were initially invisible. In these series, the artwork is not the object, but the new sensations that it produces to the viewer."

"In the work of Lygia Clark, the connection of the senses to memory and emotion became an even stronger focus during her later work. From the 1970s and on, the artist employed her Relational Objects –as she named these hoods and suits- in healing processes, to treat patients with psychological problems. Thus, she restored the link between art and medicine, which was present in ancient cultures, like the Greek world –where the music was seen as a magical means of purification and healing- and the Chinese culture, where the concept of Chi runs through the fields of philosophy, medicine and art. As the artist revealed, the therapeutic aspect of her work is aimed to recover a notion of the body’s “plenitude”."

(Re)Educating the Senses: Multimodal Listening, Bodily Learning, and the Composition of Sonic Experiences // Steph Ceraso // Part 2.

"Another problematic feature of sound-as-text multimodal composing assignments is that they rarely require students to reflect on their embodied listening experiences. The teaching of listening as a practice has not yet been discussed substantively in multimodal composition scholarship on sound.10 Taking listening for granted as something that students just “do” when composing with sound is a problematic notion because it perpetuates the idea that listening is a natural (as opposed to learned) act, which implies that everybody (every body) can hear the sounds being composed. These kinds of assignments are ear-centric in that they do not account for an embodied listening audience—they do not ask students to consider their own or others’ bodily limitations and capacities."

"Ear-centric listening practices often focus narrowly on the meaning and interpretation of audible words, but multimodal listening practices take into account the dynamics of the sonic composition as a whole. This holistic approach to sonic composition requires composers to consider how sound works with and against other elements in a multimodal composition (images, video, text), as well how those elements and the composing environment in general will affect the audience’s experience."

"I want to be clear that my emphasis on the body, or situated embodied experience, as a mode of inquiry in multimodal listening practices does not make this kind of training any less intellectual than listening practices that focus solely on the meaning of sound or alphabetic language. Instead, I understand multimodal listening to be what Debra Hawhee refers to as “a mind-body complex.”"

"Multimodal listening pedagogy offers a way to teach students to be more capable and sensitive listeners during the production of multimodal compositions, and in their experiences with various sonic texts, products, and environments. This project is pedagogical, then, not only because it presents teaching applications for the classroom; it is also pedagogical in the sense that it proposes listening practices that can help anyone learn to be more thoughtful about sensory experiences and interactions in everyday life. In a culture where being plugged in to digital devices is a common occurrence, when so much of what we pay attention to is streaming through earbuds or flashing on screens, I am calling for a reeducation of our senses—a bodily retraining that can help us learn to become more open to the connections between sensory modes, materials, and environments. In addition to listening in to digital content, it is time that we learn to listen up, out, through, and around."

http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/CE/0772-nov2014/CE0772Educating.pdf

miércoles, 6 de abril de 2016

Olivier de Sagazan // Transfiguration.

A really disturbing but original, artistic and important performance in my opinion. Pivotal in art.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gYBXRwsDjY

Evoking an incredible sense of violence and destruction without actually causing any damage or harm, Sagazan creates an unsettling but incredibly moving body of work  that involves building up layers of clay and paint on his face and body before hacking, cutting, wiping and drenching it in order to achieve disfigurement and transformation.  He uses jerking and contorted movement to exaggerate this sense of animalistic escapism.  This destruction and reinvention of self reveals a primal desire to break away from the physical world with a childlike inventiveness.  This sensitive and detailed yet brutal manifestation describes an exploration of the body and of the senses, free of social constraints or identifiable features of status, culture or convention.  Sagazan has said of his work “I am interested in seeing to what degree people think it’s normal, or even trite to be alive”. 

https://guliverlooks.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/the-work-of-olivier-de-sagazan/
(Please, watch all the pictures of this link because they are really interesting)

  


"For more than 20 years, Olivier de Sagazan has developed a hybrid practice that integrates painting, photography, sculpture, and performance. Disquieting and deeply moving, his body of work collapses the boundaries between the physical, intellectual, spiritual and animalistic senses."

http://www.veniceperformanceart.org/index.php?page=196&lang=en


Marina Abramovic: an art made of trust, vulnerability and connection.

An amazing talk of Marina Abramovic about some of her most important performances in her life. It is a moving video and I really encourage you to find time for watching. She claims that performance is one of the most ephemeral arts but in my opinion she left her track on me. I hope you enjoy it and think about her advice of an inner change.

TED: MARINA ABRAMOVIC

Another video more specific about Rhythm 0
https://vimeo.com/71952791