Charlotte Sometimes

Tag: art

  • September [08:46]

    September [08:46]

    (Copied from a post I made from Facebook.)

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    Sometimes I sit on the floor of my photography studio to work rather than anywhere more conventional like a desk with a chair, or the sofa. I don’t know why I like the floor in here so much. Maybe it’s because I’ve drunk wine, a rarity for me at home, and therefore it feels safer down here.

    I’m contemplating the case studies I might use in my Masters thesis, to support my argument that videogames are works of art, when I find a book on the floor under the table in here. It’s not supposed to be here – only photography books go in this room. It’s meant to be downstairs in the study with my art books.

    It’s called ‘September’ and is an essay on Gerhard Richter’s painting of the same name – attached below to this post. It’s a small work, about 50x70cm. Indeed about the size of a television… or a computer monitor.

    Can you see it? If you let your eyes relax like a magic eye picture. Can you make out the image of the World Trade Centre?

    I’ve never seen the original of this painting with it’s thick layers of paint applied and then scraped back – I’ve only ever seen one of the edition of 40 prints. They are printed on vinyl, enlarged slightly, and shown between two pieces of glass, only increasing the temptation to compare it to a computer monitor. Or a TV screen.

    The book argues that paintings can be a way to engage with complicated events in our world today. That they can shape and mould our understanding of the world. That they can help us come to terms with world-shattering events.

    There is a game called [08:46]. I say a game, it’s a ‘serious game’, technically, if you want to use the lingo of the industry. It uses Oculus Rift technology to allow you to explore what happened at 0846 that dreadful day in September 2001.

    I was at school. Everyone can remember what they were doing that day. I was at school, and I found out about it in the parquet floored entrance hall, next to the big glass wall of windows that looked out over the playground. At home, after school, I watched the news with my grandmother. I even remember my sullen response – I had grown up near London with the ever-present threat of my father being blown up at work by the IRA. Terrorism was ingrained in the fabric of my life even at the age of 16.

    I should ‘play’ [08:46] to see if it brings the same kind of visceral experience and understanding that being stood in front of the Richter painting does. The Richter gave me that strong feeling as if I’d been punched in the gut. The layers and layers of paint, the streaks, the colour, the vinyl and the glass, it was like being there in front of the TV again. Watching the news. While people burned.

  • Wikipedia hack-a-thon : Non-male Photographers

    So… after reading some articles in class yesterday and hearing about a tutor’s experience with a women in architecture hack-a-thon, I’m curious to know if I could organise one for women photographers.

    This post is serving as little more than a bookmark to make me do something about it.

  • Tentmakers of Cairo

    Tentmakers of Cairo

    Islamic art has fascinated me for a long time. If I’m right (and I don’t have a reference book here with me now) Islamic art focusses on geometry, colour, pattern, and text due to ideas of non-pictoral representations in local religion. That’s why it’s so different to our art here in the UK – it’s grown up with a different religious tradition and with different restrictions.

    At The Festival of Quilts there was a large exhibition of a group of men who use traditional tentmaking techniques to produce beautiful quilts. Several factors have encouraged more contemporary work from these men, including exhibiting abroad and a generational shift where younger artisans have replaced those who have retired. Traveling around the world and showing their quilts has exposed their work to Western influences which can also be seen in the work that was on display. While the works are firmly routed in Islamic and tentmaking traditions, the motifs were clearly fashionable and influenced by Western style (and customer demand, I’d imagine).

    The quality of work was incredible. I’ve included a close up of the stitching further down to show the accuracy. And the men were so fast too. Some of them were stitching while sitting and being asked questions by visitors – I’ve never seen someone sew quite so fast. Certainly puts my own hand-stitching to shame. The technique used is needle-turned applique, and I’ve been planning on embarking a project using this technique for a while now.

    It was huge inspiration for costuming to see these works. I’d love to make a huge cloak based on this kind of work for the next part of the Mythlore costume. Just need to convince Simon he wants to play another game as a Persian influenced character.

    I believe the artists attending were Hosam Al Farouk and Tarek Al Safty. The exhibition was called ‘Tentmakers of Cairo’ and the pieces were made by various artists from Khan El Khayamiya. They’ve had a documentary made about them – you can find out about it here.

    And even better – you can buy their beautiful quilts here.


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  • Is Feminist Methodology still relevant in History of Art today?

    Since I’ve now had my results back from my second year at university, I can post the final essay for my Culture, Gender and Sexuality module. I got 80% overall in this module – 70% is required for achieving a 1st.

    Enjoy!

     

     

    Is Feminist Methodology still relevant in History of Art today?

     

    There is little doubt that the New Art Histories revolutionised the way that many art historians saw the world and participated in art historical academia in the 1970s (Rees and Borzello, 1986a, p. 3). The term ‘The New Art Histories’ came into use because of the book of the same name which tried to summarise emerging methodologies in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Rees and Borzello, 1986b). Other authors interpreted the term as an umbrella phrase for critical theory (Jõekalda, 2013, p. 2) and most would agree that the term the New Art Histories cover political, feminist, psychoanalytical and theoretical approaches (Fernie, 1995, p. 19). This poststructuralist approach marked an important shift away from art as objects and focussed instead on social context rather than concepts such as connoisseurship and biography. In this essay I will focus on how feminist art history methodologies do not address queer artists and artworks adequately, however it should also be considered that non-Caucasian, non-Western, and disabled people are also not addressed by mainstream feminist theory either – amongst other personhood statuses. The word queer itself is complex but for the purpose of this essay I will be using it to represent non-default gender, sex and sexuality.

     

    Women were often left out of the traditional art historical canon and the New Art Histories enabled feminist art historians to rethink the past. Initially there was a push to rediscover women artists and attempt to place them within the traditional canon. This was primarily achieved by questioning assumptions about the difference between art and craft – many feminist art historians at this time believed that these definitions of art and craft were one of the primary reasons for women’s art being seen as inferior (Fernie, 1995, p. 20). However this approach relied on traditional canonical and biographical methodologies and the late 1970s saw a move by feminist theorists to challenging the discipline of History of Art itself. Academics began to suggest that merely inserting women into history was not the same as writing women’s history (Fox-Genovese, 1982, p. 6) and Griselda Pollock put forward the idea that women’s studies were not about women but rather the social systems that allow and maintain the dominance of men over women (Pollock, 1988, p. 1). One of the formative essays for feminist art history was Linda Nochlin’s ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ (Nochlin, 1978) which warned against the idea of simply trying to name women artists who might be considered ‘good’ and insert them into the traditional male-dominated canon.

     

    Feminist methodologies, especially when combined with Marxist theories, gave academics a powerful and alternative way of looking at both history and the present, yet feminist methodologies as applied to the history of art have remained reasonably static in their approach. While feminism as a political movement has moved on with successive waves of ideologies, feminist methodology for history art often still works from the same seminal texts (such as Nochlin’s) that broke the original ground.

     

    In many respects feminist methodologies fit neatly into hegemonic, patriarchal culture – as much as their practitioners would like to suggest that they now champion intersectionality (McCall, 2005, p. 1771). They support the notion of a bigender society and specifically exclude those who exist outside of the gender paradigm that society currently uses to view the world and write history. Feminist art historical methodologies may well be the fight against the male dominated view of the history of art, but when viewing the history of art as a queer participant these methodologies only serve to reinforce the patriarchal structure and act as another hegemonic barrier that needs to be removed before a queer history can be composed. Traditional and New art histories combined act as a complete patriarchal version of the histories of art, a history that could potentially be rewritten by a new queer methodology.

     

    Introducing queer methodologies to the history of art is unlikely to be as simple as just viewing the world from a queer point of view. Queer methodology must be counterhegemonic in its nature, allowing new paradigms to be enacted. It is not simply a case of rewriting the history of art from a gay or lesbian perspective, or even a transgender perspective. In order to create a truly queered history of art the bigender paradigm should not be used and another must be found; otherwise queer methodologies will become just another pillar that supports the dominant patriarchal norm by acting in support of male masculinities and female femininities (Halberstam, 1998, pp. 3–4). Stephen Bann’s suggestion that a new cultural critique can gain strength from the fact that old positions have already run their course is as relevant now as it was when he discussed the idea almost thirty years ago (Bann, 1986, p. 19) and so queer theory must learn from the limitations faced today by feminist theory. As McCall discuses in a paper on intersectionality, feminist researches are already very aware of the limitations of using gender as an analytical category (McCall, 2005, p. 1772).

     

    ‘Feminine success is always measured by male standards’ claims Halberstam (2011, p. 4), and so by acting outside of the expected standards we can relieve ourselves of the pressure to conform. Some ‘renegade’ feminists, Jack Halberstam argues, have addressed that failing might be better than success while in pursuit of the counterhegemonies and this is a lesson that could potentially be learned by any new approach to the history of art. For instance lesbians do not conform to the expected heterosexual framework so they therefore fall outside of patriarchal societies and could redefine what gender means to them (Halberstam, 2011, p. 4). This way of thinking allows us to begin to construct a different gender narrative for the viewing of the history of art, by enabling those outside of the patriarchal hegemony to apply their own definitions of gender and sexuality. However most feminist history of art is largely unconcerned with sexuality or gender-fluidity and therefore this is not a tool that would be used by most feminist art historians. In most feminist art history the assumption is that the artist is heterosexual, white and often middle-class; there is no discourse available for the kind of alternative femininities and masculinities that Halberstam addresses in their text on female masculinity (Halberstam, 1998).

     

    Some feminist academics have begun to offer a kind of queer methodology – although still under the banner of feminism. The idea of introducing sex, gender and sexuality to feminist approaches is proposed by Mimi Marinucci (Marinucci, 2010, p. 105) and can be seen as part of the wider movement of mainstream feminism towards an intersectional approach. In some ways this approach works very well – there is real solidarity between the experiences of many women and those who are LGBT* (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex) due to the basic understanding of what it is like to be born into a state of patriarchal oppression. However there is also tension between the feminist and queer movements and as Marinucci points out there has been a history of feminist studies showing bias against lesbian women, gay men, minority sexualities and transgender people (Marinucci, 2010, p. 106).

     

    It could be suggested that art history is now in a state of post-feminism; where equality has begun to be achieved in academic writing and galleries. Certainly the large art institutions in the United Kingdom, such as the Tate, have no problems with showing large retrospectives dedicated to twentieth-century women artists. Marlene Dumas (Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden, no date) and Sonia Delaunay (The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay, no date) are currently showing major retrospectives at the Tate Modern in London, Cathy Wilkes is showing at the Tate Liverpool (Cathy Wilkes, no date) and the Tate Britain has hosted retrospectives of well known women artists such as Susan Hiller (Susan Hiller, no date) and has a Barbara Hepworth exhibition opening in June 2015 (Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World, no date). I am aware that naming the exhibitions being held of women artists pushes me precariously close to being guilty of what Nochlin warned against, however it does certainly appear that women artists now have a roughly equal number of major exhibitions as artists who are men when considering twentieth and twenty-first century art. Most feminist art historians can be categorised as using one of the other approaches to art history (such as connoisseurship, biography or iconography to name just a few) so it could be suggested that feminist art historians should just continue to work under those banners rather than identifying as feminists since the feminist art historian label seems to be no longer required.

     

    Marunucci presents the idea that queer feminism provides a new direction for feminism as a critical perspective. Introducing questions of sexuality into feminist art history would greatly increase the scope of the methodology. According to the label on the front of the book Art & Queer Culture it is ‘the first book to focus on the criticism and theory regarding queer visual art’ (Lord and Meyer, 2013). If this statement is indeed true it means that no feminist (or any other) art historian has been addressing the criticism and theory of queer art. This raises the question – if feminism was truly interested in any sexuality, sex or gender other than heterosexual women who were identified as women at birth, wouldn’t this book have been written years or perhaps even decades ago?

     

    Even if feminist art historians use approaches borrowed from gay and lesbian studies, this does not go far enough. A relatively recent biography of photographer Claude Cahun (Doy, 2007) is a good example of why feminist approaches are often inadequate even when combined with gay and lesbian studies. Cahun was a photographer who lived from 1894 to 1954. Originally identified as female at birth, Cahun had romantic relationships with women and in 1915-1916 began using the gender-ambiguous name Claude Cahun instead of the assigned birth name of Lucy Schwob (Claude Cahun – Chronology, no date). Most of Cahun’s body of photographic work is self-portraiture and Cahun presents as outwardly male in a large portion of the images. Where Cahun presents as a woman in images it is often an exaggerated and drag version of femininity. The biography by Gen Doy deals extensively with Cahun’s theoretical interests in sex and sexuality and also recounts her preference of living with a woman multiple times, however the assumption is always made that Cahun is a lesbian woman. Not once is the idea entertained that Cahun could possibly be transgender (and therefore potentially heterosexual) or genderqueer and Cahun is referred to as ‘she’ and ‘lesbian’ throughout the text without any explanation. Both feminist and gay and lesbian studies have failed as approaches when it comes to artists such as Claude Cahun since they refuse to engage with major political and personal aspects of the artist’s life and work. A queer approach may well have shed more light on this popular photographer from the early twentieth-century.

     

    According to government surveys only 93.9% of the adult population in the UK identified as heterosexual in April 2011 to March 2012 (Woodsford, 2012). Estimating the amount of transpeople in the UK is problematic due to the difficulty defining transgender status within current gender paradigms (do we consider self-identification as with sexuality or is medical intervention the standard for defining a transperson?), but a 2008 European study suggests that there could be as many as 1 in 20 transgender individuals within the male population alone using the most wide definitions – and this number is increasing exponentially (‘Transgender EuroStudy’, no date). Going forward feminist approaches do not offer enough scope to record and analyse these important aspects of an artists work and personal life.

     

    Feminist approaches to art history are still an excellent methodology for looking at artworks in the past and for discussing women’s status in society. However the fact that feminist methodologies rely heavily on a bigender paradigm, as demonstrated by the earlier discussed assumption that women’s studies are about the dominance of men over women (Pollock, 1988, p. 1), means that they are not so well-placed to look at artists today and in the future. In a society that is slowly but steadily rejecting the idea of a clear-cut ‘male’ and ‘female’ status (Hird, 2000, p. 348) we need methodologies that can produce a discourse on this new approach to working practices. Feminism is still relevant to the discipline of history of art while examining the past, but it becomes less relevant as we move into the future when those writing about art will need to talk authoritatively on a wider range of gender, sex and sexuality than feminist methodologies currently routinely discuss.

     

     

    Bibliography

    Bann, S. (1986) ‘How Revolutionary is the New Art History?’, in Rees, A. L. and Borzello, F. (eds) The New Art History. London, England: Camden Press.

    Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World (no date). Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/barbara-hepworth-sculpture-modern-world (Accessed: 6 May 2015).

    Cathy Wilkes (no date). Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/cathy-wilkes (Accessed: 6 May 2015).

    Claude Cahun – Chronology (no date) Claude Cahun Home Page. Available at: http://www.connectotel.com/cahun/cahunchr.html.

    Doy, G. (2007) Claude Cahun: A Sensual Politics of Photography. London: I.B. Tauris. Available at: http://site.ebrary.com/id/10333422 (Accessed: 6 May 2015).

    Fernie, E. (1995) Art History and Its Methods: A Critical Anthology. United Kingdom: Phaidon Press, Incorporated.

    Fox-Genovese, E. (1982) ‘Placing Women’s History in History’, New Left Review, (133), pp. 5–29.

    Halberstam, J. (1998) Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Halberstam, J. (2011) The Queer Art of Failure. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

    Hird, M. J. (2000) ‘Gender’s nature: Intersexuality, transsexualism and the “sex”/’gender’ binary’, Feminist Theory, 1(3), pp. 347–364. doi: 10.1177/146470010000100305.

    Jõekalda, K. (2013) ‘What has become of the New Art History?’, Journal of Art Historiography, (9).

    Lord, C. and Meyer, R. (2013) Art and Queer Culture. London: Phaidon Press.

    Marinucci, M. (2010) Feminism Is Queer: The intimate connection between queer and feminist theory. London: Zed.

    Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden (no date). Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/marlene-dumas-image-burden (Accessed: 6 May 2015).

    McCall, L. (2005) ‘The Complexity of Intersectionality’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30(3), pp. 1771–1800. doi: 10.1086/426800.

    Nochlin, L. (1978) Art and sexual politics; women’s liberation, women artists, and art history. 4. print. Edited by T. B. Hess. New York: Collier Books (Collier books).

    Pollock, G. (1988) Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art (Routledge Classics). United Kingdom: London ; Routledge.

    Rees, A. L. and Borzello, F. (eds) (1986a) ‘Introduction’, in The New Art History. London, England: Camden Press.

    Rees, A. L. and Borzello, F. (eds) (1986b) The New Art History. London, England: Camden Press.

    Susan Hiller (no date). Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/susan-hiller (Accessed: 6 May 2015).

    The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay (no date). Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/ey-exhibition-sonia-delaunay (Accessed: 6 May 2015).

    ‘Transgender EuroStudy’ (no date) TGEU. Available at: http://tgeu.org/eurostudy/ (Accessed: 7 May 2015).

    Woodsford, S. (2012) Integrated Household Survey April 2011 to March 2012: Experimental Statistics. Available at: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/integrated-household-survey/integrated-household-survey/april-2011-to-march-2012/stb-integrated-household-survey-april-2011-to-march-2012.html#tab-Sexual-identity (Accessed: 7 May 2015).

  • Vortographs

    I was reminded this morning of Alvin Langdon Coburn‘s Vortographs, creating in 1917. He was the first photographer to ever show abstract photographs in the history of art. He was a satellite member of the Vorticists movement and photographed both Pound and Epstein as part of the set of images.


    The tool he used was something that he called a ‘Vortiscope’, three mirrors attached together in the form of a triangle in 1916. Later he photographed pieces of wood and crystal on a glass table and in the autumn of that year he experimented further with mirrors and the Vortiscope to shoot portraits in silhouette.

    He initially labeled his work as cubist however later he picked up the Vorticist label. The exhibition at the London Camera club in 1917 included prefaces by both Pound and Coburn, however their collaboration was to be short-lived as Pound had little appreciate for the photographic medium and what Coburn had managed to achieve with it. This divide led to Coburn withdrawing from the Vorticist movement and really from photography altogether.

    By the year after, 1918, Coburn had formed links with an artists colony in Wales where he pursued his interests in Freemasonry, astrology and the occult.

    And here are his photographs.

    vortograph pound vortograph_2 Alvin Langdon Coburn - Vortograph, 1917 vortograph_1917 ezra-pound m196700980021

     

  • Revisionist/Feminist Art History

    I love finding new labels for myself. My latest muse has been revisionism and revisionist theory. I like to try labels on, wear them for a bit and see if they fit. I also like long new words and revisionism has a satisfying ring to it that makes my tongue get tied up when I try and say it too quickly. Anyway.

    There is a problem with calling yourself a feminist art historian. The problem is that you say it to most people and their eyes begin to roll back and glaze over. They’re seeing the militant revolutionists telling them to burn their bras and grow their armpit hair.

    Feminist art history has never been a term that quite works for me. I am a feminist and I’m an art historian. I have a particular interest in female artists throughout history. However feminist art history implies something about striving for equality in the history of art that is blatantly not there. Yes it’s an appropriate term for going forwards, but it doesn’t necersarily work for looking backwards. We can’t suddenly make men and women equal in the Italian renaissance, history doesn’t work that way and I don’t have a TARDIS.

    I like Revisionist Art History. This is a more accurate description for the things I’m interested in a historical context. But as the video said the real problem comes when you try to work out how to fit women into the canon of dead white guys. I have books on women and their place in society, I have books on women war artists, I even have books writing about women’s approaches to art history. But it doesn’t feel right, it feels like we’re singling them out as special and they weren’t special. Well they were, but no more special than their male counterparts.

    Grouping women artists into a group called ‘women artists’ seems so crude. It’s like displaying a Hirst next to a Rembrant just because they were born with a penis. These women don’t belong in the same books as each other, their art is so different.

    I don’t know what to do about this big old mess of wrongness. But I’m going to revisionism my way into feminism and possibly some more isms and see what I can do about it.

  • Marginalisation and African Art

    Marginalisation of individuals is something that is close to my heart for lots of reasons. I particularly love studying marginalisation in art and mostly it’s nice to think that we’ve started to conquer lots of problems that have been around in the past.

    However we’re still not there on so many levels. I mean, there’s a massive gulf in the numbers of women and male artists in top galleries, both exhibiting and working in academic positions. But today, I don’t want to talk about womens rights, or be a shouty feminist.

    Today I want to talk about the Tate Modern and the celebration of Africa that they’re having there at the moment. African art has always been marginalised. It came to the forefront when the Cubists and some other Modern Artists found it and thought it was cute, they used it as inspiration in a slightly patronising way.

    The Western world also has a long history of treating African Art as craft and not deeming it worthy of the social status of Art. However huge inroads are being made in this area, not least of which by the British Museum in the beautiful and contempory way that they’re exhibiting the Benin Bronzes in the Africa galleries. This is massively due to the new feminist approaches to art history that were established in the 1970’s and it’s the route that I’m choosing to pursue with my studies.

    But just watch this video. This guy is such an inspiration. He identified a problem – there were no spaces available to show contemporary African Art in the west. People just weren’t interested if it wasn’t cute craft. So he went out there and he found a space – at the Tate Modern of all places. And back at home he realised there was no Art education and you could not get hold of study materials, so he has established his own Art library. Just wow.

    More people like this in the world please, who have a dream and make it happen.

    http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/tateshots-museum-contemporary-african-art

  • I’ll be your mirror

    “I used to think I couldn’t lose anyone if I photographed them enough… In fact, they show me how much I’ve lost.” – Nan Goldin

    I think it’s utterly fascinating how Nan Goldin’s cutting edge style that was so revolutionary in the 1970’s has kept it’s edge and still feels so new and crisp now, 40 years later. To be honest, the only way of recognising that many of these are not modern images is the slightly dated consume and style of the characters within the scenes.

    Goldin was arguably one of the biggest champions of the snapshot aesthetic within photography and had been one of the largest driving forces behind it’s rise to popularity. Neither a photographer or some might say even an artist, Goldin documented her friends and those that she spent time around. Almost the equivalent of a modern day social media addict, except film was her medium and her galleries were projections in clubs rather than Facebook.

    Her images have a voyeuristic pleasure gained from examining strangers private lives. Susan Sontag said that in it’s voyeurism, photography levels all events to the same status. We usually see the images outside of their contextual framework which can lead to a disassociation from the subject matter, but Goldin originally showed her work with thematic structure revolving around subjects such as couples, gender roles and orientation. An early campaigner for sexual equality, if you will. Undoubtedly feminist although I’m not sure if she applied the label to herself.

    But on a personal level what I enjoy about her work is the bravery that the images demonstrate and a desperate need to cling to memories. Almost a compulsive desire to document in case she forgot a detail. Sontag also said that photography is practiced by most not as an art, but as a way to reaffirm how we feel about those we have relationships with. The resulting images prove that the events happened and the people existed. This is demonstrated so clearly in Goldin’s work.

  • British Museum – Pompeii and Herculaneum

    I am so excited that the major exhibition next year at the British Museum will be Pompeii and Herculaneum. I visited Pompeii over a decade ago while studying Latin at school and have been captivated ever since. In fact I can’t think of any place I’ve visited that has had a more profound impact on my hobbies and work.

    I fell in love with art in Herculaneum. The preserved mosaics and paintings are like nothing else on the planet. Two thousand years under dust and still they have a vibrancy that you don’t see in modern paintings.

    Since seeing the works that survive at Herculaneum (Pompeii has little surviving art due it being overwhelmed by lava instead of scalding ash) I’ve had more than a passing interest in Greek and Roman mythology and the images that accompany it – as you might have guessed from my last post with the paintings! It’s one of the things that inspired me to finally go on and study Art History.

    I’ve been trying to get out there this year, but situations have conspired against me. But I’m almost certainly going to try and get out there for my birthday next year. Who wants to come?

  • What would you save?

    The next module of my degree starts in just two weeks, I’m studying A226 with the Open University and if the last two modules are anything to go by it should be excellent. The first course book arrived last week and it really is a beautiful book. This is a brand new course so I can only hope that this is the way that the OU will be producing their course books in the future. It’s lavishly printed and feels like something worth keeping on your bookcase to refer to.

    Anyway, onto the good stuff. An icebreaker activity was posted in the course forum, the question is “Imagine you are in a place you know where art is on show – it might be a national or local museum or gallery, a heritage site, an arts centre, etc.  The fire alarms start ringing, you can smell smoke, and you think: I must save something as I escape.  What work would you save – and why?”

    I think this is an interesting question and poses two distinct trails of thought. Are you going to save a work which is culturally important or are you going to save something that you like? Or course there’s no reason why the two can’t be one and the same, but it may sway your judgement on your selection depending on which way you approach the question.

    So I couldn’t pick just one work, I had to be difficult and pick two.

    Rhine II – Andreas Gursky


    I love Gurskys work. I love the colours, the use of composition, the repeating motifs, everything. This shot isn’t my favourite of his, but I do believe it’s important for other reasons. I believe it’s possibly one of the most important art photographs ever produced and sold.

    $4.3 million this work sold for last year at auction. That’s an awful lot of money. I mean it’s no $250 million Cézanne but it does put it firmly into the high flyers list of prices paid for art.

    The thing is, a piece of photographic work being sold for so much money means that the art world is finally beginning to recognise photography alongside the more traditional disciplines. For too long it’s been thought that photography does not involve as much skill as crafts like painting or sculpture and that it is somehow inferior. The fact that anyone can take a half decent photograph with todays technology only serves to reinforce that assumption in many circles.

    For anyone that produces or admires lens based work this is a huge step forward in the way that the art world and the public think about this subject. Each time a photograph is sold for more than the previous one it helps raise the status of all art photographers out there.

    So for that reason, I’d save it.

    Love Poem for CF – Tracey Emin

    Your put your hand across my mouth / But still the noise continues / Every part of my body / is Screaming / Smashed into a thousand, / million pieces / Each Part For Ever / Belonging to You


    Tracey Emin is true Marmite isn’t she? You either love her or you absolutely hate her. I happen to love her, as you might have guessed.

    I’d save an Emin because I believe she says both important things about our perception of art and also raises interesting questions about being a woman in todays society. Susan Hiller said “Being a woman artist is advantageous. If you are a minority, you already know two languages” (1991) which I also think happens to apply beautifully to Emins work as well.

    Her work always seems so expressive and directly from her heart. Almost like there are emotions and thoughts pouring out and she just has to capture them and immortalise them somehow. Especially the neon poems that she has produced over the years. However at the same time in every piece, she seems to poke a little fun at the consumerist nature of art, reminding us to not take anything too seriously.

    I love this particular piece though for other reasons. Some time ago someone smashed my heart into a thousand, million pieces and still it sometimes feels like every piece belongs to Him. What can I say, it resonates.