Categories
Recommended

Gee Vaucher on 96gillespie.com

Gee Vaucher on 96gillespie.com

http://www.96gillespie.com/artists_profiles/vaucher.htm (the link doesn’t work anymore unfortunately)

Here is an alternative link, but at another venue: http://www.alice-wonderland.net/bracketpress/EXHIBITIONS/liverpool.html

See works of Gee Vaucher on 96gillespie. I always admired her work (since I became a huge fan of the famous Crass in 1983 I guess). Gee’s ART is so critical, political and aesthetically highly expressive.

I believe her ‘Animal Rites’ works, convey something about the gap that exists in the whole human-towards-animals relation: People pull an anthropocentric “dress” over animals as much as over “nature”.

Gee Vaucher’s work as “the CRASS artist” put that what the CRASS lyrics and music expressed into a visual scheme. And one can’t really tell if it wasn’t even her arts that would give the very crucial impulses to the band. Her sleeve designs certainly left a stimulating impression on the onlooker. Vaucher’s CRASS related works created an atmosphere consisting of the same interesting fragmental pieces, that the sound collages added to the recordings. I am not sure who made these collages, maybe Vaucher too, maybe Libertine?

The sound collages together with the image-and-word-collages by Vaucher seemed to express an essence of a spirit which it still hard to grasp, and which I personally would put into a chain of associations … : London, the post WW2 Generations, an intellectualist mood that hadn’t anything to do anymore with either socialist leftism or right wing conservativism, a social system that could be told apart from that which this “system” would try to smother, society as a veil that can hide away an outer and an inner reality.

Crass, I believe, sought to set things into sharp contrast with each other. An own rebellion can become dependent only on yourself, when life becomes meaningful by stepping out of something that looks like a “home” but that in reality turns out to be an evasive scientific and philosophical miscalculation. The rebellion discovers a specific value of freedom, one has to be engaged for, fought or struggled for.

Other than that … if I let myself be carried away by thoughts

I could imagine a picture, in which the love for the inevitable combination of ‘a tame nature’ and the human desire for luxury (as a possesable paradise, dead, packed up in slices)  is critically explored. The earth as a possesable item? In equal or unequal shares, what difference would it make.

Categories
Animalistic Issue

Biologistic arts links

A questionable validity of self-dignity in arts and the arts discourse.

It’s pretty logical that I can always perceive that which reflects my desires and needs as more valuable, than ‘whatever’ I don’t perveice simply because it’s out of my cognitive reach. These following links represent a small range of examples of artists, and the discourse about their works, in which one can see how much the idea of “aesthetics” here are pretty blatanly self-circling.

All that comes up is the collective pro or contra attitude towards the degree of how people can have AN impact on WHAT either is or is not of their immediate concern.

It obviously does not come to these artists minds … that whatever is out of the reach of their positive concern can vice versa also have an impact on them, philosophically, insofar as it puts them on a scale of relativity as soon as they interact with “THE OTHER” (phenomenon)!

(THE ANGRY VEGAN’S COMMENT IS: “Now anybody can say: whoopidoo, f***ing stupid animal rights a++++holes.
Nevertheless, Here are my two cents about the f***ing stupid destructive art-creating-scene and its bootlickers.”)

How remarkable “the other” is, whether dead, tortured, killed, or alive. Really, how can you unmake that what consitutes the concept of “dignity” in life? By deconstructing it? Can I deconstruct the phenomenon “love” etc. simply by not loving etc.?

FIRSTLY:

On the bottom of this linked page are two arts related entries by me regarding Jill Greenberg (USA/CANADA), and Damien Hirst (UK)

http://tierrechts.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html

SECONDLY:

‘A Self-Proclaimed Artist and an Inexplicable Act of Cruelty’ NYTimes

http://movies.nytimes.com/2005/04/27/movies/27cat.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The Filmmaker on his site (CANADA): “http://www.roughage.org/”:http://www.roughage.org/ “Jesse Power, ex-vegetarian, was an art student when he conceived a new project. In May 2001, he enlisted two friends, Anthony Wennekers and Matthew Kaczorowski, to help him kill a cat. The intention was to make a video that protested the unthinking consumption of factory-slaughtered animals by killing, cooking and eating a cherished domestic pet – a feline posthumously named Kensington by animal-rights activists.”

THIRDLY:

Francis Upritchard (NEW ZEALAND … and, also a self-described “ex-vegetarian” – whatever this hip/top statement is supposed to imply)

“Let’s talk about some of the stuff you’ve made. I’m interested by that photo you showed me of a stuffed cat, what’s the story behind that?
‘My brother Robert got given $20 to dispose of the family cat…'”

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/francis_upritchard_articles.htm

FORTHLY:

Natalia Edenmont (SWEDEN)

I suggest anybody to take a sample about what people think not by reading the blog authors waffle, but by reading the comments he got

http://sbutler.typepad.com/main/2005/01/nathalia_edenmo.html

here is a text in German I wrote regarding Natalia Edenmont:

http://www.simorgh.de/pdf/blick.pdf

Categories
Animalistic Issue

Your life being reduced to being ai Specimen

Here is No. 1 an artist who uses slaughtered lambs to indicate something. That what she is indicating might be of a political meaning to her and to the people who agree with her on a certain viewpoint. Now why does she use a dead lamb and not something else? Because the live of the specific lamb does not have any special “meaning” to her, and I assume she would not even understand why a particular life of a particular animal should have any big meaning at all. She seems to connect the oppression of the indigenous people with the conflicts that ride modern day Cuba. And it seems she believes that using the lamb as an indicated sacrifice, will rectify that what is wrong in the world today. Only: necrophilia only encourages the necrophiles.

Tania Bruguera: El Peso de la Culpa (The Burden of Guilt)

“Tania was standing before a Cuban flag which she had herself woven from human hair, a butchered lamb hung around her neck. She spent approximately 45 minutes mixing Cuban soil with water and eating it…”

http://www.universes-in-universe.de/car/havanna/szene/e_tania.htm

Here is No. 2. Temple Grandin is famous, because she models slaughterhouses and says it’s all being done with love – well she says that in some other words. Here she had been making sofa chairs that tells us about the privileges (the feeling good factor) of sitting in a chair with the slaughterhouse in the back of the mind, because her chairs she says, are modelled after some device she uses in slaughterhouse construction. Only, who needs to feel superior with his ass sat on an armchair? Bet you, she will always have the lobby of the humane slaughtering advocates behing her back.

Wendy Jacob with Temple Grandin – The Squeeze Chair Project

“A collaboration between renowned animal scientist Temple Grandin and Chicago-based artist Wendy Jacob. The effects of Grandin’s autism led her, at age 18, to develop an apparatus, based upon cattle handling chutes, which applied soothing,..”

http://www.artfacts.net/index.php/pageType/exhibitionInfo/exhibition/18631

And No. 3. There are today a lot of so called Animal Rights artists and Eco artists who undermine their self-proclaimed causes, by turning what’s top down to the bottom. Diversity comes from freedom and plurality, and these guys here for example take away the freedom bit, and stick your ass right into a test tube, to find out how much your life sucks, or they want to save you by showing everyone what a sucking looser you are in this life on this earth. Why is life used in an exemplaric way here? I guess they’s add that what they are doing is for some greater purpose.

Your life being reduced to being ai “Specimen”.

“Since then he has had numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally in which he presents photographs and biological samples of the creatures he collects…”

http://greenmuseum.org/artist_index.php?artist_id=19 (Although I think the greenmuseum is a good idea, and I do respect their work, I think they should be more clrea about their position on the value of animal life.)

Species Reclamation Via a Non-linear Genetic Timeline; An Attempted Hymenochirus Curtipes Model Induced By Controlled Breeding, 2000
live specimens, varied housing, preserved specimens, digital photographs, Apple Powerbook; dimensions variable (detail).

http://www.genomicart.org/ballengee.htm

Categories
Recommended

a key arts approach

Art recommended:

Monique Fagan Smith

Monique Fagan Smith, homeless New York based visual artist. I heard about her on the Bryant Park Project and recommend you the blog entry there: Post Office Steps: One Artist’s Studio  about her: http://www.npr.org/blogs/bryantpark/2008/06/post_office_steps_one_artists.html#more

Two other links for Fagan Smith are also:

Monique Fagan Smith at Art Pathways: http://artpathways.info/#/moniquefagansmith/4522236905

and

on ConnecTV –  On Her Own Terms: Painting a portrait of a homeless artist in New York: http://connectv.org/streaming_media/on_own_terms.html

Categories
General

Re-inaugaration of the Visual Opinions Workshop!!

I am starting to run a blog here, on which I want to talk about what I perceive in arts today. This is a humble start, and I can’t put ALL my efforts into it, but I hope I will add this or that useful contribution, because in arts today there is a huge vacuum as to what regards “meaningful content”.

What I mean by “meaningful content” is that I believe arts should not be an aesthetical post-cartesianism which nevertheless STILL endorses a “cogito ergo sum” and divulges itself in a complex subjectivity.

To my view it is important that art relates to the “other phenomena” in this way:

=> A has a real (and in that way an expressedly objective) relation to B, where B is not simply “that what is seen” in the eyes of A.

=> B is real.

Arts currently seems to keep insisting on a message that equals:
‘What I see mainly relates to my or ai surrogate collective “subjective self”. And, my subjective self has an authority that is completely independent of the authority of “what else” exists in the universe.