Showing posts with label research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label research. Show all posts

Wednesday, 7 October 2009

Rauschenberg by Hughes

This is the part 3 of The Mona Lisa Curse, a critical film about the contemporary art market by Robert Hughes. The 12 parts of the movie are available on youtube.
Rauschenberg, with it's collages, builds open-ended narratives, he throws the elements of the mass media society at us, every element has it's own meaning, and a new narrative is created by every beholder as it connects the individual meanings of the elements in it's mind.
Furthermore, Rauschenberg pushed the concept to a new level as he pioneered a new form of art, the "assemblage", combining objects, and readymades (like duchamp), in a new way. About the assemblages, there is this interesting quote:

“There are two key ideas attached to the word "assemblage". The first, is that however the union of certain images and objects can result in art, those images and objects will never completely lose their identification with the ordinary world, the every day world from where they were taken. The second idea is that this connection with every day life, as long as we are not embarrassed by it, opens the way to the use of a vast range of materials and techniques that were, so far, not associated with the artistic production"

Archer, Michael. Contemporary Art. (Translated from portuguese)
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Monday, 5 October 2009

Werner Herzog

I have been to Werner Herzog's interview at the Royal Festival Hall, last Saturday, the 3rd of October. Been a great admirer of his work, I found the interview overall amusing. There were twoquotes by Herzog that I would like to reproduce here (trying to get as close as possible to his versions, but I might be paraphrasing something.

1 - "We cannot avert our eyes."

This remark is concearns our reaction to the lowest displays of pop culture on TV, like the late Anna Nicole Smith TV show, depicting a new bizarre cult for plastic, artificial beauty. He also mentioned the number of plastic surgeries and paralised botox faces he sees in LA.
According to Herzog this are clear signs of what the society is throwing back at us, and we can't simply chose not to look at it.

2 - "The 20th century was a tragic one. Because of the invention of such things as psychoanalisys, but, more seriously, because of the development and implementation of industrialized mass murder. But, above all, the greatest tragedy of the 20th century that we are still going to face is the exponential growth in the number of human beings on this planet, it's an almost vertical growth and we will face the consequences."

The video below contains a scene of his new film "The Bad Lieutenant. Port of Call New Orleans" and some remarks made by Herzog Himself.

His interview in Vice magazine, published on this months issue is also quite interesting, however, I couldn't find any online version.
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John Heartfield


After the Tutorial today, I followed Sigune's tip and did some research about work. I really liked his political photomontages. One can see the connection between his work and contemporary artist whose political work I admire, such as Banksy and the Chapman Brothers. All the advertising photomontages that have been bombing society in the last decades descend from this early form of communicative, political art developed by Hearfield and George Grosz

This quote I foundf in WWII Art is very interesting:

"When John Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my South End studio at 5'oclock on a May morning in 1916, neither of us had any inkling of its great possibilities, nor of the thorny yet successful road it was to take. As so often happens in life, we had stumbled across a vein of gold without knowing it."

George Grosz

More work from Heartfield and similar artist can be found in the avangarda online magazine. Very good quality images!

Hannah Hoch, Cut with the cake knife, 1919
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