Our meeting!

We have made some decisions about what we are going to do.

We will start making on Monday afternoon and continue on Thursday and the following Monday
It will be one rather large piece either on card or found wood(if it's still there!)
We will do it on the floor


It will be 2 layers.
The first will consist of layered photographs,A3 and A4 size and black painted text. We will bulk it up with newspaper in places before we start layering photos and the photos will be of the protests including the police and the public. This will represent the underbelly and unrest within the political system and the current climate.
The second layer will be a large campaign image of clegg and cemeron as they would like to be seen by the public eg campaign images which we have drawn from projection. (this may take a while!!). We will staple it ontop of the first layer and into the texture of the underneath. Then rip into it and have it asif the underneath is trying to break put onto the surface. L

Should be good! Fingers crossed
To discuss with David- how to display- Bow suggested in a shopping trolly?? I just thought also that we could have some photos coming out from the first layer through the cracks :)
Jo

Billboard Art project

I might have spelt that wrong, but check them out on facebook.

Nie

Placards

I had this idea to rather than display our work just on the wall (stuck and taped on) we could maybe make a few they can be smaller and be displayed like placards

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-12921158

I read this and got the idea from this

Alice

Exhibition we should visit!

Possible Damage!
Liga suggested it after our presentation.
Its at INIVA which is the gallery my group visited last semester with intro study and its in shoreditch so not far away!
I think its displaying items which have been thrown during riots!
Its on until 3rd May i think....
but basically i think we should go, I think I will go a week on wednesday, or maybe tomorrow morning, anyone want to join?

Jo

Hannah Hoch

This is "Cut with a Kitchen Knife" the piece that I have talked so much about, I feel it incorporates all our ideas and what we're trying to pursue.

Chapman Brothers

I just want to reiterate on the Chapman Brothers, as we quickly passed over them and I was just thinking for our presentation they are fairly important; especially as a just found out a new piece of information about them.

They made work that was deemed appalling, vulgar and offensive. They also produced work for the White Cube gallery in 2008 that exhibited 13 apparently authenticated watercolours by Adolf Hitler, they added hippie motifs. Jake Chapman described most of the dictator's works as "awful landscapes" which they had "prettified".

George Grosz

He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dadaists. He was friends with the artist John Heartfield, together they wrote a book entitled "Jedermann sein eigner Fussball" (meaning "everyman his own football"). It included two photomontages by the artists themselves.

I put this in because he recalled that his dada art was intended as a protest "against this world of mutual destruction".

"[Dadaists] expressed their rejection of [capitalist society] in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality."

Hans Arp

Jean Arp / Hans Arp

16 September 1886

Jean/Hans Arp was a German-French, or Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist in other media such as torn and pasted paper.

(When Arp spoke in German he referred to himself as "Hans", and when he spoke in French he referred to himself as "Jean". Many people believe that he was born Hans and later changed his name to Jean, but this is not the case.)

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/explore/work.do?id=595&action=3

In drawing systems we have been doing collage and I really loved this guy's work. Andrew brought up the subject of Dada collage and general collage and their meanings. The way collage either had no meaning or was left to the viewer to interpret. Well this is what I understood anyway. I want to look into this a little more, and really think it's important for us to think about if we want our collage to be interpreted in one way or many.

Nie

Russian Constructivism

Russian Constructivism

A movement that was active from 1913 to the 1940s created by the Russian avant-garde, but quickly spread to the rest of the continent. Constructivist art is committed to complete abstraction with a devotion to modernity, where themes are often geometric, experimental and rarely emotional. Objective forms carrying universal meaning were far more suitable to the movement than subjective or individualistic forms. Constructivist themes are also quite minimal, where the artwork is broken down to its most basic elements. New media was often used in the creation of works, which helped to create a style of art that was orderly. An art of order was desirable at the time because it was just after World War 1 that the movement arose, which suggested a need for understanding, unity and peace. Famous artists of the Constructivist movement include Vladimir Tatlin, Kasimir Malevich, Alexandra Exter, Robert Adams, and El Lissitzky.

Nie

Photomontage

Photomontage

The photomontage became the technique most associated with Berlin Dada, used extensively by Hausmann, Höch, Heartfield, Baader and Grosz, and would prove a crucial influence on Kurt Schwitters, El Lissitsky and Russian Constructivism. It should also be pointed out that Grosz, Heartfield & Baader all laid claim to having invented the technique in later memoirs, although no works have surfaced to justify these claims.

At the same time, Hausmann started to experiment with sound poems he called "phonemes", and poster poems originally created by the chance lining up of letters by a printer without Hausmann's direct intervention. Later poems used words were reversed, chopped up and strung out, then either typed out using a full range of typographical strategies, or performed with boisterous exuberance. Schwitters 'Ursonate' was directly influenced by a performance of one of hausmann's poems, fmsbwtazdu at an event in Prague in 1921.

Carlo Carrà

February 11 1881

Calro Carrà was an Italian painter and leading figure of the futurist movement that flourished in italy during the beginning of the 20th Century. In addition to his many paintings, he wrote a number of books about art and taught for many years in Milan.

His futurist phase ended around world war one when he became more interested in stillness and form. he began creating still-lifes in a style he described as 'metaphysical painting'.

Metaphysical art

The name of an Italian art movement, created by Giorgio de Chirico. His dream-like paintings of squares typical of idealized Italian cities, as well as apparently casual juxtapositions of objects, represented a visionary world which engaged most immediately with the unconscious mind, beyond physical reality, hence the name. The metaphysical movement provided significant impetus for the development of Dada and Surrealism.

Images

http://www.guggenheim-venice.it/inglese/collections/artisti/biografia.php?id_art=170

Nie

George Grosz

July 26 1893

George Grosz was a german artist known especially for his savage caricature drawings of Berlin life in the 1920's. Hw was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada movement and the New objective group durning the weimar Republic before he emigrated to the States.

He was born George Ehrenfried Grob but Changed his name in 1916 out of a romantic adoration for America, which originated from reading books by James Fenimore Cooper, Bret Harte and Karly May.

In 1920, with Heartfield and Otto Dix, he took part in the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe. Grosz and Heartfield criticized the contemporary art world and the elevation of the artist to quasi-divine status. In a letter of opposition to the ‘Novembergruppe’, Grosz called on artists to ‘collaborate in the building of a new human community, the community of working people’.

Grosz made his contribution towards realizing this goal by engaging with contemporary events through his works. For him Dada was the expression of a specific political stance. He remained politically committed even when he left Dada and turned to a realistic style of painting in the 1920s, in keeping with the spirit of the decade.

His earliest oils that can be identified today date from 1916. By 1914, Grosz worked in a style influenced by Expressionism and Futurism, as well as by popular illustration, graffiti, and children's drawings.Sharply outlined forms are often treated as if transparent.

In his drawings, usually in pen and ink which he sometimes developed further with watercolor, Grosz did much to create the image of Berlin and the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. Businessmen, wounded soldiers, prostitutes, sex crimes and orgies were his great subjects. His draftsmanship was very good although the works for which he is best known adopt a deliberately crude form of caricature.

After his emigration to the USA in 1933, Grosz "sharply rejected his previous work, and caricature in general.In place of his earlier corrosive vision of the city, he now painted conventional nudes and many landscape water-colours.

Images

http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=2374

Nie

John Heartfield

19 june 1891

John Heartfield is the anglicised name of the German photomontage artist Helmut Herzfeld. He chose Heartfield in 1916 to criticise the nationalism and anti-British sentiment prevalent in Germany during World War 1.

He Joined the Berlin Dada club and the communist party of Germany in 1918. He was a highly active member of the Dada movement organising the first International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920.

After meeting Bertolt Brecht, a man who influenced Hearfield's art, he developed Photomontage into a form of political and artistic expression.

He relocated to England in 1938 after having already moved from Germany to Czechoslovakia in 1933 after the National Socialists came to power.

Images

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/davepalmer/cutandpaste/heartfield.html

Nie

Raoul Hausmann

July 12 1886

Raoul Hausmann as an Austrian artist and writer who was a key figure in the Berlin Dada.

His experimental photographic collage, sound poetry and institutional critiques had a profound influence on the european Avant-garde in the aftermath of World War 2.

His earliest experience of making art was from his farther who was a professional conservator and painter. His experimental prints were influenced by Herwath Walden who he saw in the Der Sturm gallery in 1912.

In keeping with the expressionist views of the time he initially welcomed the war, believing it to be a necessary cleansing of a calcified society.

Hausmann met Hanna Höch in 1915, having an extramarital affair that produced an 'artistically productive' but turbulent bond that lasted until 1922. Two other influential people in his life were Otto Grass and anarchy writer Franz Jung.

The notion of destruction as an act of creation was the point of departure for Hausmann's Dadasoph, his theoretical contribution to the Berlin Dada.

Berlin Dada.

When Richard Huelsenbeck (a close friend of Hugo Ball and one of the founders of Zurich Dada), returned to Berlin in 1917, Hausmann was one of a group of young disaffected artists that began to form the nucleus of Berlin Dada around him. Huelsenbeck delivered his First Dada Speech in Germany, January 22, 1918. Over the course of the next few weeks, Hausmann, Huelsenbeck, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Jung, Höch, Walter Mehring and Baader started the Club Dada. The first event staged was an evening of poetry performances and lectures against the backdrop of a retrospective of paintings by the establishment artistLovis Corinth at the Berlin Sezession 1918.

Images:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/davepalmer/cutandpaste/hausmann.html

Nie

TRYOUT!! JO

This is JO's tryout using, paint...i cant remember the term EPPPP!!!!! anyway here it is...i quite like it however if this technique was to be handed in...i think that it needs a little something extra.....Alise talked about a parcile college....which would be very interesting.....

:)
from bow

xx

one last thought!

i was justa bout to clear up all the newspaper mess that i have just made and.... might be quite nice to have it around the bottom of the piece when we display it??
also... looking back through the blog at Nie's mock ups! anychance i can see the transfer ones in reality? they looked really interesting!
as i have found out with this piece- the photos often look very different to the actual thing!

Jo :)

the next stages...

basically i stencilled over the newspaper and gradually removed as much of the collageing as i could
more came off than i thought would but i think the final effect is quite good-

all the daily stuff people are interested in is stripped back to reveal this truth...

I was also thinking about filming... might be nice to have some close ups of the hands tearing away at strips...
i would have had a go at filming it if i had known my phone actually does video filming aswell as photos... clever me!

I will also have a go at making the stencils the opposite way round sizewise and using different colours like Alice and Bow suggested today!

Jo :)

Funding art groups

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12892473

This is an article looking at art groups that have had there funding taken away

The second stage

still the wrong way up, im pretty sure the top is the right....

one day from the evening standard randomly collaged together using mainly photographs with people in and any text or adverts which are attached.

Once its dry, probably thursday or early next week because of the sheer amount of glue on there i will tear off as much as possible. or maybe stencil ontop again first and at different stages

might cut out words too in relation to that scratching thing i found about graffiti earlier

Jo

Wolf Vostell

I was just looking back through posts from the last few weeks that i havent seen yet (particularly Nie's- lots of good artist!)
In Nie's post about this one (Wolf Vostell) I thought the word

Décollage

was a very interesting term!

 Very sorry if someone has written more about it previously but i haven't read all the posts yet...

The idea of taking apart an image, or a group of images which have been layered together to create something new. Obviously this is something we have been thinking about doing with our own collage- tearing into an deconstructing parts. 

Since this term is looking at using a found image where the artist is not the one who originally layered the images together, perhaps we should think about creating the layering of images in a mechanical way, not thinking about aethstetics (as the original DADA artists did) but then working back into the layered piece we have created by tearing into it and using that part to work a message into it.... not sure how mush sense that makes yet but ye :p

A more specific idea would be to layer the images over one another, using entire pages or images, perhaps in an order of people , police, government (just realised that i spelt this wrong in my stencil piece grrrr...) or backward or maybe all mixed in together, and then sorting them into the heirachy thing we have going on in the text pieces though decollage and maybe resticking some of the things we tear off, though this may defeat the point and we shouldnt need to if we use enough layers.... COMMENTS????

I've been interested in this for a long time but didnt know this word so thank you Nie! :)

Jo

On Kawara

On the theme of text as a political tool and it's use in fine art...
The piece speaks for itself really... very direct, you know exactly what it's talking about!

The History of graffiti (according to wiki :)

Basic Definition- lettering or images scratched, scrawled, painted or marked on property/ public marking...
i assume this means property not belonging or with permission of the owner... otherwise surely lots of things we consider art or design would be considered graffiti...
Some people consider man kind's early cave paintings as the earliest form of graffiti because they seem to have been making marks on a surface/wall which doesnt belong to them, without permission of the owner :S not sure about this one....
perhaps this consideration is more to do with the origins of the word!
Graffiti comes from the Italian word graffiato which means scratched
'sgrafitto' is a term used for scratching away one layer of pigment to REVEAL ANOTHER BENEATH- i think this has quite a strong relationship to the idea of COLLAGE and distressed collages, like we are intending to produce!


Modern graffiti-
as old as Ancient Greece!- a red handprint and footprint with numbers, believed to show a brothel is near by
Ancient Rome- phrases of love declarations, poetical rhetoric ect...
Today it is considered to be used for portaying SOCIAL and POLITICAL IDEAS (some evidence of this in Pompeii)
(historical graffiti has also offered and insight into the lives of the people who wrote it- their lives, views and degree of education)


Graffiti is seen to be intertwined with hiphop, lots of styles come from New York Subways... (you know the style, not stenciling so much, but the fat bouncy letters that are impossible to read)


Also associated with anti-establishment punk rock movements in the 70's


Stencils where introduced by BLEK LE RAT in Paris, 1985. I'm not sure his work is particularly relevant but its good and well worth a look! I will post if i find any that are relevant!
stenciling also has basic references to pop art, but i believe they only really stand up depending on the colours used


2001- GRAFFITI BECOMES COMMERCIAL
has been used in advertising by IBM and SONY (psp)
------maybe the use of spray cans is too over done...?------
 but is everything in art has already been done, then who's judging??


My Conclusion- It has been show, especially over the weekend by the protests that graffiti is used politically but any imagery we use will appear comercial
if we use a spray can at all it should be black and simply for writing with!
i think the reference to graffiti within collage is quite interesting and the idea of scratching words into other things


Jo :)

government police people

Couldn't get it the right way up... oh well, you get the idea
I used a stencil and a sponge... probably will do it with a spray if i remember to bring one from home next week. The spray paint would obviously reference graffiti and vandalism (and the incident of the graffiti in trafalga square this weekend!) but i think the style of lettering also has a reference to official labeling used on construction sites ect... probably more of an American thing that I've seen on films than culturally British though...? i think the spray paint might make it look even more like that...
i thought i would post it now, I'm going to collage over and around it to see if working text into it this way might work. Wish me luck!

Jo :)

Wars most unforgivable photograph

One of the most famous photograph's a provisioner getting shot in the streets his face half alive half dead....i don't know why I'm putting this here but its just one of thoughts things that really speak to you about revolutions/wars....and at the moment it seems as if the people are at war with there government

Around noon of February 1, 1968, in the opening days of the communist Tet Offensive, South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan summarily executed a Viet Cong prisoner on the streets of Saigon — and photographer Eddie Adams captured perhaps the war’s most unforgettable image.
http://www.executedtoday.com/tag/battle-of-saigon/

By bodean Pye

Mug shots

ryots can end you in jail so here are our mug shots....we are the

DADA DESTRUCTIONISTS!!!

Alice Simmonds

Bodean Pye

Jo Ellison

we need Nie's still tho

Protests...continued

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12873437

This is a link to the clear-up after the Protests but it has some good imagery of the Protests, including the take over of Fortnum and Mason. As well as the explanation to why the protesters vandalised cash machines and banks.

Alice

London Protests

This is a picture taken from BBC news

Wolf Vostell

October 14th 1932

Wolf Vostell was a german painter, sculptor, noise music maker, and 'happening' artist of the second half of the 20th century. He was a pioneer of video art, environmental sculptors, happenings and the fluxs movement. Techniques such as blurring and the décollage are characteristics of his work, as well as his strange taste for embedding objects in concrete.

He began his artistic career as an apprentice lithographer in 1953 and by 1954 he had created his first décollage. His philosophy was built around the idea that destruction is all around us, using the term décollage as a description of the act of tearing down posters and for the use of mobile fragments of reality.

Images

http://janosgatgallery.com/JANOS_GAT_GALLERY/Wolf_Vostell_slideshow.html

Nie

Gwyther Irwin

Born May 7th 1931, Hamshire, England.

Gwyther Irwin was a british abstract artist who lived much of his life in Cornwall.

His most famous works consisted of pictures assembled from newsprint and fragments of advertisements on paper, which he collected from the street. He then worked these up into a collage of fine delicacy and quite subtle shades. In some of his later work he also used string, wood shavings, chalk and paint.

Images

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=1343&page=1

Nie

Riots...

I quite like these images, I think I protest better but I just wanted to convey my idea of showing us protesting or our reaction on the piece of work (in our run-up to "destroying" it). So I quickly put it together, the two middle ones were from my first idea; the person is the subject so the background is irrelevant. Whereas the first and last are just when I was messing around in photoshop.

Alice

Bruce Conner

November 18th 1933.

American Artist renowned for his work in assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture,painting,collage and photography, among many other disciplines.

Assemblage: an artistic process in which a three dimensional artistic composition is made from putting together found objects.

Connor first attracted attention with his nylon-shrouded- assemblage: complex amalgams of found objects such as women's stockings, bicycle wheels, broken dolls etc, often combined with collage or paint. His work had a surrealist edge to it.

Generally, his works do not have precise meanings, but some of them suggest the discarded beauty of modern America, the deforming impact of society on the individual, violence against women, and consumerism. Social commentary and dissension remained a common theme among his later works.

image:

http://horsesthink.com/?p=652

Nie