Into the Unknown: the void in contemporary art. Upon entering the room, you look for the artwork.
After a quick look around the room, you notice that where you expected an object, you see nothing but a black circle. You are careful to approach it. After close examination you have to conclude it is not just a black circle, but an actual opening in the floor. Christo & Jeanne-Claude: Essays: Bond. Stanford Presidential Lectures and Symposia in the Humanities and Arts Lecturers || Christo and Jeanne-Claude Home || Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Essays The Real and the Revealed By Anthony Bond Editor's note: At the request of the artists and with the kind permission of the author, all references to the artist "Christo" have been changed to "Christo and Jeanne-Claude" or words to that effect wherever appropriate.
Wrapped Coast©1969 ChristoPhoto: Harry Shunk The discussion of the Christos' art in Australia has centred around their monumental project Wrapped Coast - One Million Square Feet, Little Bay, Sydney, Australia, 1969.1 This significant work coincided with the emergence of Conceptual Art in Sydney and the two events have been directly linked (by Daniel Thomas in An Australian Accent, 1984). Wrapped Cans and Bottles©1958-59 ChristoPhoto: Eeva Inkeri This exhibition includes sculpture dating from 1958. The veil or drape can be discussed in several different contexts. Body Issues in Performance Art: Between Theory and Praxis. Performance Art is a culture bound.
It is always related to the specificity of a particular context, situations and circumstances. It is a discipline that moves along the interface that exists between an action that just refers to itself, and a live art work intended not just as a mere ‘corpus of actions’, but mainly as possible instrument of expression and communication, aimed to create or decipher a particular experience. This could be possible only by producing meanings. Only meanings give actions a sense: lacking in meaning, any performance actions would lose its impact, and be scattered, poorly becoming a mere end, an empty joke. Flesh as Communication. Abstract.
Steve Yates: The Value of Space. "Landscape,Writing, and Photography" by Sarah (Sally) Hill. Deep South v.2 n.1 (Autumn, 1996) Copyright (c) 1996 by Sarah Hill, all rights reserved.
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Interview: Joan Fontcuberta, Landscapes without memory. Joan Fontcuberta, Orogenesis Pollock, 2002.
I first came across Joan Fontcuberta‘s Orogenesis series when I picked up a copy of the Landscapes without memory book in Arles last year. The series is deceptive; these aren’t photographs but computer-generated images created by software renderers that are designed to produce 3D images based on cartographical data. Fontcuberta decided to explore the possibilities of the technology by feeding it misinformation: instead of giving it a map to read, he fed it the visual data contained in famous paintings or pictures of different parts of his anatomy. The results are these “landscapes without memory.”
The thing I like the most about Fontcuberta is his ability to explore philosophical questions on the nature and contemporary practice of photography while remaining engaging and frequently hilarious. Marc Feustel: How did you first encounter photography and what was it that attracted you to the medium in particular? JF: Yes, certainly. NEW AGE PHYSICAL MEDIUMSHIP AND ITS PHENOMENA IN MODERN SPIRITUALISM. R E S P I R O - A R T. Zoe Beloff works with a variety of cinematic imagery: film, stereoscopic projection performance, interactive media and installation.
Her projects are philosophical toys, objects to think with. More and more she finds herself fascinated by phantoms, by images that, "are not there". Zoe’s work has been exhibited internationally. Spectral Bodies (1991)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role perception plays in understanding the world as well as engaging with the world.
The Body is Present Even if in Disguise: Tracing the Trace in the Artwork of Nancy Spero and Ana Mendieta. In the early 1990s Nancy Spero composed a series of homages to her deceased friend, the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta.
This commemoration involved her staging a recreation of a performance she had seen Mendieta act out in 1982. Paying homage to one’s female cultural forebears is a common trend in feminist practice, only in this case Spero was commemorating the work of a much younger artist. Mendieta – the second generation ‘daughter’ – is commemorated by the elder, first generation ‘foremother’, in a reversal of the usual matrilineal model. These two artists were linked by geographical location, friendship and, most importantly of all, a shared commitment to feminist politics and feminist art in the late 1970s. They admired one another’s work as well as being ‘comrades’ or collaborators on various projects and protests in New York.