Marine Hugonnier

http://www.thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-marine-huggonier/

.... there is a discrepancy between what exactly you see on the photograph, and the cultural frame that transforms what you are actually looking at. So on the one hand, you have an image that stands for itself – a seascape. On the other hand, you have the cultural frame, which mediates your relationship to it.

When you make a photograph, its subject always belongs to the past. Photography is this magical thing, where you can bring the past back into the present. 

http://www.we-find-wildness.com/2012/01/marine-hugonnier/ 


ARIANA, THE LAST TOUR, TRAVELLING AMAZONIA THE WHITE REVIEW
MH: I see these films as tools for critical thinking. They are an attempt to define another kind of experience – an experience of images through the world rather than the world through images.

Gerhard Richter https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/
When I see Gerhard Richter’s paintings, a very figurative one next to a very abstract one, I’ve always feel that it’s not the piece on the right or the piece on the left that’s interesting, but exactly what stands in the middle – the confrontation between the two.

So the artist as a witness? Having been in Afghanistan and Palestine, I realized that war is a place where past, present and future collapse. When you are physically in a state of survival, you do not have the luxury of that scope of linear time; you are absolutely inscribed in the present moment. Wars makes social categories completely explode. So what’s the difference between being a reporter, or an artist-reporter, or journalist? When you take part in a moment in history, where do you actually draw the line between these positions?

Time and Space is in the mind

Q: But past and future exist?

M: In the mind only. Time is in the mind, space is in the mind. The law of cause and effect is also a way of thinking. In reality all is here and now and all is one. Multiplicity and diversity are in the mind only.

- Sri Nisargadatta, Maharaj, I am that, page 110

PLACE seen from a running car to Berlin on highway

Last week I was on business way and I took some photographs from car when sunset was happening.

PLACE - THE FIRST OF ALL THINGS notions (Tacita Dean Jeremy Millar)

..... everything that happens here depends on us, not on the Zone. (Stalker, Tarkovsky 1979)

Saint Augistine's remark
"What, then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know" In considering place, one might respond similarly.

.....place is something more often sensed than understood.... (p. 14)

Place is thus space in which the process of remembrance continues to activate the past as something which, to quote the philosopher Henri Bergson, is "lived and acted, rather than represented".

..... place remember events ......

.... important historical events are now known simply by the name of place: Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Chernobyl ....

.... there is nothing outside of place ..... ?

Place is all that there is, the limit of all things and in this it might be considered as a divine being.

Descartes proclaimed: "When we say that a thing is in given place, all we mean is that it occupies such a position relative to other things."

We retain a strong sense of place, even if we find it hard to define with any satisfaction, and this in itself demonstrates a refusal to accept the mathematical model of place-as-location proposed by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers.

Jacob van Ruisdael (first landscape paintings in oil in the West)



William Blake forcefully rejected the mechanistic universe of Newton, whom he portrayed as a cold monster measuring out the world, and vilified in verse: "May God us keep / From single vision and Newton's sleep.

Caspar David Friedrich
.... horseless French cavalry officer....., find themselves clearly out of place.


John Constable "Why, then, may not landscape painting he considered a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments?"


"The real voyage of discovery consists in not seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes" , Proust wrote, and perhaps these are what are required if we are to see the complexities of the places that surround us.

Artist are not bound in the same way that property developers are, and so have no need to build upon what is already in place.

Huebler has created a rich and delicate work that asks us to consider the difference between what we believe to be our relationship to a landscape, and what we would like to believe that relationship to be.

Robert Smithson
A tour of the Monuments of Passaic

Marine Hugonnier Ariana - Profound limitation of the visual


How would one make visible the extraordinary history and mythic status of the Bialowieza Forest?  ..... they look just like many others places if we can not see "the invisible ones of the days gone by" in Hardy's phrase.

Joachim Koester Bialowieza forest


Guy Moreton Ludwig Wittgenstein's house
http://www.guymoreton.org/works/2005/Ludwig+Wittgenstein/67/

"Everything is somewhere and in place." Aristotle said.

Sam Taylor-Wood

Sam Taylor-Wood, Still Life, 2001

http://artforum.com/video/mode=large&id=25377

My initial response was it is just a speeded up record of decaying fruits. Why there is a pen? Everything is going to be disintegrated. Here we see fruits but the walls and pen are "unchanged". We just see a record of a part of a time? It is a record - something similar to our memories - speeded up so we can see what happened to fruits in time. Is it a moving still painting? Yes, and the pen says approximately when it was recorded and we clearly see what is decaying fast (life) and what is decaying slowly (lifeless things). We see a state of being as it flows in a time. Anyway the current state of anything happens only now in present. We see just a record and will be seen only in our memories. Need more time to think about that :-).

Taylor Wood "A Little Death" [2002]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01tx6u3lasM

Nice, we can see what is decaying faster :-)

Interpretation of Longplayer

There was an idea connected to millennium especially how to make time experience tangible. Finer's intention is to convey passing time to us from point of view of philosophy, physics and cosmology. His desire to make a 1000 year long music piece build a music system with a shape which reminds the solar system with its rotating planets or an atom structure. The longplayer has a system of six concentric circles where singing bowls are arranged. The music is composed and played as the time passes on every circle according to calculated positions. Combinations of these positions will never be repeated after 1000 years.

The choice of singing bowls was perfect to create a meditation atmosphere and really listen to the longplayer makes me fulfilled by peace, stillness and reflect other questions in my mind. Is there really a time? What represents the record in my phone now the longplayer has been playing for 15 years 333 days 4 hours 25 minutes 46 second. Now it is 29 minutes 25 second. Listening to longplayer makes my mind calm. The rushing thoughts are away and there is a mind with its stillness. I think a combination of a light, a connection with seeing sense would be great experience (as I had it when I was listening to longplayer and researching Roder Crater).

Finer made great hearing experience and anybody who listen to it must realize themselves through that medium.

Tehching Hsieh: One Year Performance 1980-1981

It is time based piece. He has photographed himself every hour one year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvebnkjwTeU

Ana Mendieta: Traces

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72Nk0sPfRrU

Roden Crater

Listening to Longplayer and watching the Alpha tunnel (especially when it moves at the main page) was such a great experience of peace, unknown, mysterious, try it as well. I like the atmosphere of the place. It strongly reminds me Kubrick's Odyssey.

James Turrell on Moving Towards a New Landscape - Station to Station EP12 - WIRED

James Turrell's Alpha (east) tunnel

Site-specific art

Site-specific art is artwork created to exist in a certain place. Typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning and creating the artwork.

Site is a current location, which comprises a unique combination of physical elements: depth, length, weight, height, shape, walls, temperature.

Source: wikipedia

Outdoor site-specific artworks:
Henry Moore


Alexander Calder


George Segal


Robert Smithson


Dan Flavin


Richard Serra

2 dimensions: line

I made a photograph of a light (point) inside a tunnel at 80 km/h (I did not drive).

Longplayer

I have just installed the longplayer into my phone. My initial reaction to the idea of that piece was: It must be something special. Listening to that piece reminds me a song TIME by PinkFloyd. The music / sounds are piece-full, movement is everywhere, I can feel whole universe and its emptiness :-), just listen and relax. I have some applications for music composition and those sounds are very suitable to play with them, to combine them, just let play with them and listen. I can play with those sounds nearly whole day and it is "composed" somehow itself. It looks I have no influence on it :-). The music hold my consciousness in a great, unspeakable state.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhEI3FEvxU0

Tacita Dean

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lefvPUYGvi0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DexVQrDxZ1o&list=PLC27etu8jEkjNa5PvcsNbNmQihlWbJH9g

Project 2 Time and time based media - Exercise 1 The fourth dimension

Time-base media is a term used to cover sound, video, film, performance and any other media which is duration-based.

We have
1 dimension - the dot
2 dimensions - the line, drawing or painting
3 dimensions - the cube, sculpture
4 dimensions - the time: sound, film, video, performance

My notions:
I have never thought about time in relation to artwork. I have been interested in reading and listening about the present time for last 3 years and time in relation with our perception, with our mind. The mind is a machine which records events as memories (past) and plans (future). So what is time? A file of memories? Assume, there is no mind, no memories, will be there a time? There will be an awareness of a being state. The same it is with state we wake up after we fell asleep. Sometimes it is longer, sometimes the time is short. Anyway, the time in dreaming state, can we say exactly how fast the time is? No. It is our mind which tells us what time is it.

I like that talking about time by Rupert Spira:
https://youtu.be/nGqnPtrjNPg?t=152

Anish Kapoor

http://anishkapoor.com/ - wikipedia information

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umVSGErfg8E

http://www.jewish-museum.ru/en/exhibitions/anish-kapoor-my-red-homeland/


"I am nothing to say as an artist I'm not interested in what I know. The job of an artist the work of an artist is not to do what we know. The artist is like a fool like an idiot. going on a journey to discover something and I think it is quality of that discovery which is the mysterious, mythology of the artist and that is what I hope I am doing."

"There is in a way a constant continuous process that gives up the same questions again and again and again so those questions are for me you know The void object of a none object, many questions about colour, questions about space and time because I really do believe that for there to be new objects there has to be new space and then of the Sigmund Freund what is the object after psychoanalysis, what is the status of the object ......"

".......... one other things I'm interested in is the idea that object is unlimited. The physical object always has unknown physical counterpart and that the two are in some strange dialogue but when it is right the physical object is not limited by its physical self. If you think about ourselves our bodies as an object we occupy ourselves but I know that I am NOT just this (he shows on his hand). I think the same is true all those things that we reflect upon as art, it is a very special condition but in art there is this possibility of the object being something else on I'm interested in that."

  - Anish Kapoor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7sx0zsUjP4

10 Contemporary Artworks That Confront Mortality

http://flavorwire.com/406465/10-contemporary-artworks-that-confront-mortality/10

Marilyn Arsem
https://vimeo.com/65170422

It was a little bit uneasy to see it till end. As we are used to doing something every time it was hard to keep my mind quiet and just seeing what is happening on screen. Some woman is pushing very slowly two glasses on wooden table at its end and the glasses fell down at the end. It was 7-hour performance. Why somebody undertook it? To slow down time, to show how our mind are still keeping thinking and it is really hard to see something like this? I was really nervous what I will see next. I was waiting for an action, in my mind revealed  thoughts like why there are two glasses fulfilled by water. Ok, water = life, two = world of polarities, right? Death Life, at the end the glasses are both broken. Never-ending story life - death - life - death etc.

"A work of art is completed by the viewer."

Notions from https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/global-culture/beginners-guide-contemporary-art1/v/hirst-s-shark-interpreting-contemporary-art

"A work of art is completed by the viewer." - Marcel Duchamp

"By choosing the thing itself, he created the impossibility of its preservation. .... You have that whole conceptual dimension, but then you have this absolutely physical dimension and you have this clash between that physical and that poetic. It's in that contradiction, It's in that confrontation that I think the art really is."

"Yeah, I don't think it's just in the title. The Title is lovely and really speaks to me, I admit it. But the title with the sculpture is a really complicated experience."

EVEREST

I have seen a film EVEREST and must say it hit my heart. I have not seen such a film for a long time. People do a very dangerous journey close to death just to stand up that mountain to fulfil their desire.

When I was back home from Cinema I was reading some information about the film and expedition. Even the film is based on true story and the frozen bodies those who did not survive are still laying there. There is a point which is call Green boots which is used as a landmark for climbers. It is an unidentified corps of a body. Green Boots Wikipedie

The image of the Green boots point really not shocked me but surprised me somehow (contradiction between the desire / reality - the death is closer than you think). What climbers are feeling when passing that point and seeing the frozen body laying there what their thoughts are about? It is the dead zone where human body has problem with insufficient delivery of oxygen to regenerate itself, it is fatal risk to help others there. 

  

Contemporary art - Exercise 5 Finding out more

Author: Melendez, Luis Egidio (1716-80)
Title: Still of fisches, oranges and garlic (oil on panel)



Author: Clara Pieters (Flamish painter 1607-1621)
Title: Still life of fish and Lemons




My sketches:

Contemporary art - Exercise 4 Looking at context

Not knowing there will be an exercise I have already seen a video about Hirst's Shark.

• First reaction to Hirst's shark: when I saw it for the first time in past (I do not remember exactly when) I was really surprised that somebody can call it art. The problem was I have got only the visual part of that piece, there was not any context mainly due to language obstacle, time (my country in '90s was awaken from communist regime), my knowledge about art.
• The emotional response: it is good question because I can see it only as reproduction from different angles. I can imagine what emotions must a man have when see the shark in gallery. Anyway, to see it on paper/monitor I have those emotions: mortality, some kind of devotion to this creature (knowing that shark is here over thousand millions years, he has great "tools" to kill), to be present next to a "killer" must arise several question around death, meaning of life, will I swim in sea at all :-)?
• I think the piece reminds us that we are not here forever and everything what we can see and realize about it happens only in our mind, the projection of our experiences, knowledge, emotions, conditional mind etc. Just a thought  crossed my mind: our "creator" and his presence in all form around us :-) Man - dominator on dry side and Shark on the wet side :-)
• The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living: The title is like a magic formula. It gives complete other point of view how to THINK about the object.

• First reaction Collier's still life: impermanence of life is one side of being, but the pleasures of life like music, alcohol are still with us. It is a window into 17th century. The death is same but the forms such the watch, the glass are a little bit different. Better said. The "nature" forms (death, grapes) are same the objects made by man have changed.
• The emotional response: stillness, humbleness
• What it is about? Simply said: life in its form. we live, we enjoy live, we die.
• The title is just a description. It could be without it and we know what it is about.

Kazimir Malevich

kazimir malevich

Art History: The basics Grant Pooke & Diana Newal

There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists. (Gombrich 1984:4. Art History, page 4)

Art is something which artists do.

The classical concept of art: 
in a western context, art understood as a practical, craft-based activity has the longest history. The Greek word 'techne' denoted a skill or craft and 'technites' a craftsman who made objects for particular purposes and occasions (Sörbom 2002:24). Simirlarly, within the classical world, examples of of craft, such as statues and mosaics, had practical, public and ceremonial roles.

The categories of art and craft have become familiar within specific contexts, cultures and in relation to particular audiences (academies, museums).Of central importance to this were the social institutions such as academies and museums which were established from the late sixteenth century onwards.Collectively, these interests, and those associated with them, establish normative definitions of art, that is, ideas about how art should look and what it should do, variations of which have continued today.

Fine art as an exclusive category:
From the later nineteenth century onwards many avant-garde artists began to make work which questioned either the conventional subject matter and primacy of these distinct categories (history paintings and portraiture), or the tradition of representation which they signified.
The work of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963) underlined the importance of still-life as a gengre to the birth of modernism. Development of collage by Braque and Picasso, explored the actuality of the flat structure. Academy-based ideas typically marginalised non-Western art practises which reflected different ideas about aesthetics, culture and meaning. Overseas trade, colonisation and imperialism stimulated interest in tribal masks, carvings, fabrick and fetish objects from regions such as Africa, Asia, India and Iberia. Within the avant-garde artist like Beaque, André Matisse, Picasso and Maurice de Vlaminck popularised the cult of primitivism.

African art.

Art is imitation:

Adam and Eve 1526  by Lucas Cranach I vs Mrs Fiske Warren and her Daughter Rachel, 1903 by John Singer Sargent's


There are differences between these two paintings in terms of subject, date, genre, origin, materials and meaning. Whereas Cranach attempts to convey the symbolism of a Biblical story and Sargent seeks to capture the likeness of his sitter.

ReadyMade

There are three important points here: first, that the choice of object is itself a creative act. Second, that by cancelling the 'useful' function of an object it becomes art. Third, that the presentation and addition of a title to the object have given it 'a new thought', a new meaning. Duchamp's readymades also asserted the principle that what is art is defined by the artist.

- The Tate Guide to Modern Art Terms

Contemporary art - Exercise 3 Reading about art

I had a problem to buy The Tate Guide to Modern Art Terms on Amazon because there is a restriction for non Britain countries. What a luck there is a digital version.

As I was playing with that application I have found dada term and those names next to Duchamp:

Hans Arp,


Francis Picabia: I like his cubist paintings. This one has a great feel of plasticity and it makes me to be happy :-)


Kurt Schwitters

Another day Closer to Paradise - David Hensel

It is really unbelievable incident. Instead art piece was displayed its support piece. Hey, is not art an illusion - projection in mind which can be manipulated.



http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5081744.stm

Favorite aspect of that art is its title.

Hirst's Shark - Khan academy clip

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock - Khan clip

I love his action paintings, how he was concentrated, his movements when he was walking along the canvas (Jackson Pollock 51), the reactions in my mind when looking at those pieces. I have seen the film and it also influenced me to think about the context around his art.

I like the critic: "What was to go on canvas was not a picture but an event." - Harold Rosenberg

Contemporary art - Exercise 2 - What is art?

What is art?

Really, what is art? For me, a piece which makes me happy. It could be film, it could be a series, a painting. And I do not know if it is really art because there are pieces which were marked as art but I do not like them.

We can know it is art because we have proofs for it from society. We see it at galleries, critics are saying it is art, it was sold for a huge money, it is displayed in museum. Is that enough?

I think there are two main areas. The first: ourself recognition what is art (what we learned about it and what had influence on our judgement - culture, other opinions) and the second: the others who established critical issues around what is art.

"To put art back in the service of the mind." Marcel Duchamp: to go behind the piece of art? To let mind imagine something when it sees an object? Like a film montage?

Contemporary art - Exercise 1 - Duchamp's Fountain

First response: ugly, strange, it can't be art, who could say that?

I was thinking about that piece and I must say Marcel Duchamp might wanted to show the world from another point of view. The things we use everyday and not too much consciously lets say and now we see them in other angle and named differently, in other context, it could make an effect to stop for a moment and think "hey he is kidding? what is that about? Fountain?" Illusion is the word which appeared in my mind.

I was also thinking if I can display that piece in my house. I do not why but a model in smaller scale I would have it.



26.9.15: I agree with that comment from TheNicoleTrain youtube Duchamp's Shovel

"It's not about admiring the aesthetic qualities or it or diminishing it of it's function to be looked at purely for it's beauty or lack of. He was challanging the perception of art, it was a test for the masses. Showing the world that art is in the interactivity of the mind, and what each and every person thinks of the object not the object itself. The art is in the debate, the art is in the thinking."

Grayson Perry's Reith Lectures

Here are some of my notions:

Why he done the talks: to give people a tools how to understand contemporary arts
What is good and who can judge it?
For example: critical issues are conflicting.
Where BEAUTY comes from? Soft problems and subjecting issues.

Validation process. Who validates? Critics, art dealers, public, collectors, art curators. Visitors numbers equal good museum, museum quality.

I have found a great link. It perfectly explains the first talk.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/c37b1b6a-3017-11e3-9eec-00144feab7de.html

Exercise 5 - planning studies

Study schedule: I would like to finish the course within one year. There are five assignments, so the schedule should be as below:

04.12.15 assignment 1
21.02.16 assignment 2
08.05.16 assignment 3
24.07.16 assignment 4
16.10.16 assignment 5

It is not one year but I think I could work.

I will be studying at home over weekends and I can spend some time by reading books when I am back home from work.

Primary and secondary source

I clearly remember in my mind what happened at Nationally gallery when I was there in '90s. I was really in hurry to see Rembrandt's paintings but suddenly a shining yellow thing hit my perspective from a distance. It was a magical charge which made me to change direction and when was closer I realized it is Vincent's sunflowers. There were so beautiful, warm feelings to stand before it, that I suddenly realized why somebody could pay a fortune to get it. I have never had such a strong experience at all. All printed versions are worthless, you need to see it, go the galleries :-)

Exercise 4

hmmm, originally I thought it is a piece of art from Mark Rothko but it is not.

The author is Godlewska de Aranda, Izabella and a title of that piece is Space, Time, Motion, Green.

Five words: Mystery, Hidden, Simplicity, Hope, Lost. I love it.