Contemporary Drawing Practices ART 304
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Various and Gould, Artists
A cobalt blue streak sweeps through a narrow street in Istanbul as Various and Gould don fluorescent orange work vests and push brooms with a purpose. The lunchtime crowd gathers a few steps back and to the sides to witness a remarkable cloud of ultra-marine pigment forming a wake behind the two German Street Artists as they perform their new installation focusing on work and workers.
Simply by changing the color of the dirt, the effect of an everyday act by municipal workers is effectively transformed, if not understood. 34 kilos of non-toxic blue pushed up a street with confidence and industry by two people wearing an official-looking logo on their uniforms does cause confusion. "What happened? Did someone die?" asks a spectator. No, they are assured, it is an art performance - an explanation that calms most but not all, including restaurant owners here in this eastside tourist district of "Beyoğlu" while their dining guests look curiously with mouths agape.
More to read. Source is Huffington Post. Link here.
Ana Ventura, Artist
Marks were made to surfaces that already exist.
For instance, a sidewalk with splattered paint, a concrete wall with paint chipped away.
Source link here.
Richard Hamilton, Artist
Pin-up
Richard Hamilton (British,1922–2011)
1961. Oil, cellulose, and collage on panel, 53 3/4 x 37 3/4 x 3" (136.5 x 95.8 x 7.6 cm) including frame. Enid A. Haupt Fund and an anonymous fund. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London
One of the founders of Pop art in Britain, Hamilton took his theme for this work directly from popular culture, using pictures from Playboy and other men’s magazines as his sources. While the work references these ubiquitous photographs of sex symbols, it is also a modern treatment of a conventional subject of painting—the odalisque, or reclining nude. Hamilton approaches this tradition through a variety of pictorial modes: the hair is a stylized cartoon, the breasts appear both in drawing and in three-dimensional relief, and the bra is a photograph applied as a collage. "Mixing idioms," Hamilton has said, "is virtually a doctrine inPin-up."
Source is Museum of Modern Art
Joseph Beuys, Artist
Eurasia Siberian Symphony 1963
Joseph Beuys (German, 1921–1986)
1966. Panel with chalk drawing, felt, fat, taxidermied hare, and painted poles, 6' x 7' 6 3/4" x 20" (183 x 230 x 50 cm). Gift of Frederic Clay Bartlett (by exchange). © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Eurasia Siberian Symphony 1963 is composed from materials used during a 1966 performance, or “action,” by the artist at a Berlin gallery. Eurasia, the continental block that links Europe and Asia, evokes the fusion of Eastern and Western cultures, particularly resonant for Beuys in divided, Cold War Germany. The hare, with its quick jumps, suggests the ability to span long distances. The blackboard notes the degrees of the angles of fat and felt affixed to the poles during the performance and the temperature (42 degrees Celsius) of a high human fever. Fat and felt are essential components of Beuys’s “warmth theory” of art; he was deeply interested in the calorie’s role in the preservation of life and the insulating properties of felt.
Source is Museum of Modern Art
Friday, December 14, 2012
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Janine Antoni, Artist
"I mopped the floor with my hair…The reason I’m so interested in taking my body to those extreme places is that that’s a place where I learn, where I feel most in my body. I’m really interested in the repetition, the discipline, and what happens to me psychologically when I put my body to that extreme place.” - Antoni. Source link here.
Rosemary Meza, Artist
"Meza stands among a small group of artists who employ human hair; however, by using it in place of the drawn line, she differs from the pack. The artist admits to obsessively collecting, sorting and arranging her hair by length and color. She even tints it two shades of brownone a bit redder than the otherso she can bring subtle tonal differences to her palette. Meza sews hair to canvas, paper and other surfaces, using it as its own form of repetitive mark-making; thus, she is never far from the draftsman's toolkit, shading and shaping in two dimensions. By sewing hair in place of the drawn line, she is able to harness many meanings, both in connection with the act of sewing and the tactile presence of the material at hand. In works like Keep Your Fingers Crossed, she focusesfigurativelyon the hand, but her materials communicate remarkable tension. When no longer on the head, individual strands of hair suggest stress in a way that no amount of crosshatching can ever do, alluding to such clichés as tearing my hair out or a hair-pulling experience." - source Rosemary Meza: Uncomfortable Positions by Peggy Geinkel-Wolfe, Art Lies. Link here.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Vida Simon, Artist
"The Montreal-based artist creates gentle, introspective drawing installation/performances where we witness her artistic process live and in progress. She literally embodies her own art, working with practices of drawing, writing, object making, movement, and sound. " - source is ART 21. Link here for more.
Luisa Rabbia, Artist, Italy
"Though Luisa Rabbia works in various media, the core of her practice resides in drawing." - source is The Brooklyn Rail, article by Stephanie Buhmann. Link here to read.
Nic Hess, Artist
Swiss-born artist Nic Hess creates what he often refers to as drawing installations or tape drawings, which actively manipulate traditional art practices such as drawing, painting, sculpting, collage, and installation art.1 Hess collects images from fine art sources and commercial and popular culture, and he draws them in a way that removes the traditional hierarchy among the images, in a sense leveling art and commerce to an even playing field. -an excerpt from an essay by Robert Summers.
Images and text from Hammer Museum. Link here.
Christian Holstad, Artist
"Christian Holstad’s erased newsprint photographs, known collectively as the Erasurehead series, began as a way of killing time. Working as a waiter in a restaurant after graduation from art college, Holstad began to erase the images in newspapers while waiting for customers, finding that the action of rubbing out became a way of probing the complex depths of each image. Erasing is a kind of negative drawing: its marks are gestural, reminiscent of the physical action of the artist’s hand and arm, and yet their residue is a kind of blankness. Photographs in newspapers are used to widen the implications of the stories they accompany through the willful ambiguity of imagery: they say more than they mean."
Image and text source link here.
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