Assignment 5a.
By Zoe Clarke, MA Entrepreneurship in Creative Practice.
Research Question: Is painting dead?
I am involved in the practice of painting. It inspires me, it drives me and more and more I am left to feel I am living in a forgotten era where an artist actively engages with the physical world around them and all the materiality this involves.
“The apprehension of environmental insecurity, and the searching analysis of its causes are very closely related to the existential motive in the writings of Karl Jaspers...His Man in the Modern Age is mainly a powerful indictment of the progress of contemporary technological civilisation, which he regards as a social disease; ever growing reliance upon objective criteria of thought having been paid for by ever-deepening ignorance of the real nature of human existence.”
Jean Paul Satre on Karl Jaspers, Existentialism and Humanism, p11.
Just as when photography was first introduced to the art world it was shunned and created flutters amongst the traditionalists within the art establishment, so too now it seems dated to want to revert to the actual real materiality of painting, instead of creating shoddily produced dull videos of nothing with any real meaning in them, or perhaps some performance nonsense which can be easily justified, but is actually designed to alienate the audience.
So in today’s world of technological advances is painting dead now? Is there still a platform for art using traditional mediums within the contemporary art world? I was very impressed by the Saatchi exhibition earlier this year (April 2011) where refreshingly the whole show was dedicated to exhibiting actual material art objects. There were no mundane videos or pathetic performances, where the artists and curators were placing themselves above the audience, sneering down at the public from the exalted heights of their invented art imperialism of a modern age of technology and internet nonsense. So I found the answer to be YES- thankfully there IS still a platform for material art to be exhibited and included as part of the contemporary art world.
There used to be a saying: just because it’s published and in writing it doesn’t make it fact or the truth. But less and less do I hear that saying. How much of what we see on the web can we trust? What will the future generations be inheriting as factual knowledge? It deeply disturbs me people are becoming more and more disengaged with their direct environments around them as they look down at a flat screen texting, face-booking or tweeting their ‘friends’. What happened to having an actual conversation with someone sat right next to you? As technology grows at such a fast rate time seems to be diminishing in the real world, the world of not having to spend 3 hours every evening on facebook or the internet to have any engagement with the world around you. The future is more and more becoming flatter and flatter- going from staring inanely from one flat screen pressing images and pushing products at us (i.e. the television) to another flat screen where we are encouraged to spend more and more time ‘interacting’ with the world on the web.
“ Karl Jaspers ...forsees a decline of the West. The surrender of man’s thinking to rationalism and of his artifice to technics have consequences which console man with the feeling that he is progressing, but make him neglect or deny fundamental forces of his inner life which are then turned into forces of destruction. “The sclerosis of objectivity is the annihilation of existence.”” Jean Paul Satre, Existentialism and Humanism, p11.
“Ludwig Tieck, the German Romantic, spoke of the ‘loss of reality’ in the preface to his edition of Heinrich Von Kleist’s works.....The industrialised, commercialised capitalist world has become an outside world of impenetrable material connexions and relationships. The man living in the midst of that world is alienated from it and from himself. Modern art and literature are often reproached with destroying reality. Such tendencies exist; but really it is not the writers or the painters who have abolished reality.” The Loss and Discovery of Reality, Ernst Fischer,The necessity of Art- a Marxist approach.
This is where my practical theme of man verses environment really stems from. In my artwork I am concerned with the artist’s relationship to the real world and the affect of industrialised processes on nature. By analysing textures created by manmade products left to deteriorate in the environment and juxtaposing natural textures of trees, rocks, fauna and flora of the real world around me.
I am investigating ways of transferring and involving photographic images into mixed media artworks. In order to do this I will have to learn new processes of artistic production: silk screening, etching and lithography, photographic transfers onto different materials, cyanotypes, glass enamelling and metalwork. Each of these processes will be involved in one or more artworks which I aim to produce as mixed media artworks involving painting onto a variety of materials- permanent and semi- permanent. Onto metals, plastics, paper, fabrics, plaster, found objects and glass.
I refer to the work of Robert Rauchenburg’s combine paintings (Pop Art, Tilman Osterwold) and his organisation “The experiments in Art and Technology” where he was concerned with trying to unite creative artists with technical and industrial engineers. I am also interested in how Pop Art involved photographic images from the press and current events to produce artworks.
I also shall be researching how the Dada artists such as Max Ernst incorporated actual photographs into final artworks and “how he gave pictorial logic to the irrationality of disparate juxtapositions. “ Oxford Companion to Art.
I shall also be researching current artists who work with mixed media and who are concerned with a discourse on the artist’s relationship with technology. This will involve interviews and reading around the subject area. I will talk to Elliott Seagul about the photographic processes he uses to transfer photography onto metal plates and I have interviewed Debbie Mason and will do a master class about mezzotint etching to produce a copper plate and prints using traditional print processes.
Bibliography:
Existentialism and Humanism, Jean- Paul Satre, Methuen, 1960, p11.
The Necessity of Art- A Marxist Approach, Ernst Fischer, Pelican 1963 p.197
The Oxford Companion to Art, Oxford,
Pop Art, Tilman Osterwold, Taschen, p150, p 151, 152, 153, 154 and 155.
No comments:
Post a Comment