Today a few of us met up with our tutor David to discuss with him what we had come up with so far as a group. We met the member of our group who was from the Art History course for the first time and she told us that she had been working on a poster to advertise our exhibition.

We discussed our ideas for the publication and set a deadline for everyone to upload their submissions as not many had been loaded as of yet.

Viewpoint

Later on that day I decided to visit the first of many 2nd year exhibitions opening this week around Manchester. This one was called Viewpoint.

 

All of the art was linked to geometry and shape. Mainly paintings, I liked the actual setting of the exhibition. I felt that they had used a small space well, and work was not just hung on a wall, but placed on the floor. It gave me an insight of how we could use our space given for Unit X.

Today I helped with a 3rd year called Natalie Wardle to create a video for her end of year show. She required as many girls as possible to wear nude underwear, particularly control style pieces. 11 girls turned up and we stood in front of the camera and pulled at what we were wearing for approximately a minute. The theme Natalie had in mind was about how women's underwear is restricting and doesn't show the female anatomy in its true form.

We stood in a line to begin with, then walked about pinging our own underwear, to then pinging each others

 

 

I found that working on this piece has developed my confidence to work collaboratively. Unit X is helping me by showing me an insight on what it is like to work with others, and I feel that so far I have taken a headstrong position within my group and that it is benefiting me in the long run.

I also felt very inspired by Natalie's use of underwear and pulling it away, so I have come up with a new, quick idea I can experiment with before our exhibition goes ahead. I want to get some fishnet tights and film myself ripping them off. Fishnets are often worn by 'hookers' and seen as a 'slutty' item to be seen it, so this links greatly to my ideas to do with the 'fallen woman'.

 

As promised to my group, I uploaded my submission for the collaborative piece we are making. I posted it on our Facebook page to remind and encourage everyone else to start doing so too.

I chose to use one of the images I took in the first week of me tearing down my space, and also a more recent picture of the space I work in, as I feel that it reflects all of the ideas I've had so far. My statement read:

"Past Ideology of the 'Fallen Woman' is something I am focusing upon in my current series of works. I am using pre-existing imagery to reflect upon, and trying to apply it to the modern day. I am creating a performance that has a ubiquitous theme of appropriation running throughout"

 

 

I had the pleasure to attend a performance workshop with the artist Angela Bartram today after receiving an email from one of my tutors about 15 spaces available for it. I eagerly took this opportunity, partly as my work for Unit X is taking a form in the medium of performance, but also as in my first term on Fine Art we received an artist lecture from Bartram that stood out to me, and everyone that attended. In that lecture Bartram showed us a piece in which she licked a dog for the entire duration of the video. This shocked the audience and I thought it was powerful as it stuck in my mind. I found Bartram's work ballsy and witty, she opened my eyes up to elements of performance art I had not yet thought about.

For this workshop we were told to bring 4 items. A piece of food that we find delicious and a piece of food we find distasteful. Also an item that has sentimental value to us, and another that has no meaning at all. I chose to bring chilli crisps, malt loaf, a teddy I have had since I was 5 and a half burnt candle.

As the morning began we sat and discussed performance, and got Bartram's perspective of it. In her own words 'everything you do is a performative action'. Everything that a person does from the minute they wake up is an action, from sitting up, to brushing your teeth, to travelling.
There is a difference between 'performance' and 'live art' as I found out. Performance is something that the audience can expect to get, yet live art is random and often done without the audience being aware that it was going to happen.

There are many types of performance art, one being One to One. This is where you perform to one person, and your piece is often memorable as it challenges awkwardness and how far a person is willing to react.
For our first task we were told to eat a bit of each of the foods we had brought and write down in great detail of how we were reacting to these things. Then we had to find a partner and reinact and describe how the food tasted. The girl I was partnered with found that when I ate and described the malt loaf, the food that I despise, she found herself cringing at it, even though she likes the food herself, so I feel like I did a good job.
We then had to work on a short piece with our partner that we could perform to the rest of the group. We used two sofas for our and put the foods we liked on one side and the food we dislike on the other. We'd take turns in swapping sofas, but if you went to the sofa you liked you lay on your back to eat the food as that's a pleasurable, comfortable way to consume food. If you went to the side you dislike you had to lie on your front as it was an uncomfortable way to lie as you are pressing on your stomach.
After performing this piece we were told to create individual speed performances with the item we had sentimental value. I chose to tell the story of how I got my bear at a young age, but in a creepy way as if the bear was like a boyfriend to me. I wanted to also reflect the fact that if you do the things you did as a child now it seems creepy and sinister as an adult. I performed the piece one to one with each member of the group and aimed to make them uncomfortable, but ended up apologising and reassuring them that I wasn't really like that. I think I fell down in that performance because as soon as I made eye contact with the person watching I started to panic.

I think this workshop inspired me a lot to carry on with performance art. I saw some strengths come out within myself, but also saw when things weren't working which I think was vital. I am now a lot more positive about my performance piece I am working on for Unit X, and hope that this workshop has boosted my confidence.

After a good turn out, my group met up today as proposed in our last meeting and had a look around each individuals studio. We did this to get an idea of each others thoughts on appropriation and the work they had been making for our exhibition. It also gave us a sense of scale of each piece so that we can figure out how to curate our exhibition to fit the size we may be given. It was interesting to see how each member of the group had interpreted 'appropriation'.
Before this we had a brief look at some of the images and statements people had written about appropriation, as only a few had managed to do this. We came to the agreement that writing what we all thought appropriation to be clashes and we were pretty much giving the same definition. We have now agreed to re-write about how appropriation links to the work we are making now, and we will post this with the images we have selected, on the Facebook group.

As we looked around the studios at each others work there was a vast range of collage ideas, to paintings, to sculpture.

Emily Straw

Emily had used images from fashion magazines that had caught her eye for not looking like clothes, but for their likeness to something else. She would then cut that particular segment of paper out and arrange it in another perspective

Ellie Algieri

We had been told Ellie was rather lost in her project so searched for simple words to spark her off. She collaged words to begin with, but then like Emily, resorted to fashion magazines. Here she cut out segments of models faces and arranged them back to where they were positioned in the first place, but noticeably with pieces missing, and layering features from different models up to create one face

Kiran Sandhu

Kiran's work links to appropriation in the fact that she is manipulating old images that she took in the first term of her course. She has chosen to stitch and embroider into these portraiture photographs to highlight certain areas, and also distract from the black and white images with brightly coloured threads

Ed Florance

Money is Ed's chosen theme, as he discussed with us in the previous meeting. He chose this theme as 'we all could trade another way, but we choose to use money'. In his last project he produced a working sculpture of a printer that imitated printing an endless roll of money. This brings the idea of appropriation in as he is essentially duplicating something that has already been made. The work Ed showed us during the group crit was a large, accurate painting of a £10 note. Ed explained to us that the paint he used changes under UV light. I personally think his work reflects appropriation strongly, especially with the idea that if you mass produce something it looses its value, so this questions the role of money

Michael Koropisz

Michael has been working on pieces that reflect old classical paintings. He initially started copying well known paintings such as 'The Girl With the Pearl Earring' to get a hang of what techniques these past painters had used to create their pieces. He has then painted members of his own family in this style, making them look grand and eerily like monarchs

Nathan Lee

Collage is Nathan's chosen medium, he has been quite experimental by re-arranging images from fashion magazines, with images from National Geographic. This clash provides us with an image that you take a double look at, as the two images are very different, but work together well. I personally felt that the images show the differences from Western and Eastern culture.

At the end of the crit, we all agreed to keep the facebook group more active with ongoing progress within work and ideas to help each other out. We also agreed to all have posted our submission for our collaborative piece before our next meeting.

Today I met up with my Unit X group as we have had a 3 week break for Easter that has given us time to develop our ideas. I notified the group via a brief Facebook post a few days before this meeting to remind them.

After a good turn out, we sat and talked about what ideas we had come up with and how we could link it to appropriation. We went round the circle and got an idea of where each member of the group was coming from. A vital thing discussed is how we would hang or display our work, so that we could think of a way to utilise the space we will be given at Federation house. There are a lot of painters within our group, so we discussed ways of displaying these pieces without using a wall. As we do not have an assigned curator, it is crucial that we practice the layout of our exhibition before the main event.
After looking at each others brief notes and sketches, there was a few ideas floating about that stood out to me, these being:

• Iconic imagery
• Taking images/ideas out of perspective
• Manipulating images
• Consumerism
• Re-working old ideas to create a new outlook
• Influences

Other things we discussed were how we could make a collaborative, simple piece together as a group within the short few weeks we had. I suggested a panflet/zine that has collective images and passages from each of us. The images being of our work or work that has inspired us. This idea went down well with the group and we talked about making it a rather amateur looking piece that we could duplicate and distribute with ease. We thought another good idea would be to make the publication into a piece that reflects the amount of adverts contained in modern magazines, by putting a lot of images of modern art in-between our own passages. This would reflect the 'distraction' element of advertisement's used in these magazines.
After closing the meeting, we agreed to meet Friday the 24th and bring our images and passages for the panflet/zine then.

I've had another idea that experiment's with appropriation and taking an image that's not yours and displaying it as your own. I printed off an A4 image of the statue of David's genitalia and held it against my own to see how this would look and the effect was quite strong.

 

Although the image needed shifting around a bit to match exactly where my body began, I began to think about the themes I could portray by experimenting with this piece. The image I was holding was quite clearly of a males body, but as I am female the juxtaposition of me and the image worked well. You can tell that I am female by many tell-tale signs such as the shadow of my breast, the curves of my hips, but slap bang over the top of this is a common photo we all recognise of a males presence. I also liked the suggestive qualities this picture provided as I chose to use my duvet as a backdrop and it is quite a personal way to portray my body. This is when I started to experiment with the medium of displaying this piece. I took a video of me scrunching up the image close to my body.

 

 

I liked the way it gave a rather feminist stance to the piece as I felt it linked to the performance art piece I saw a few weeks ago by Riike Enna at the Manchester Art Gallery, where she broke out of a shell of modroc which made her look like a statue from the past and ripped all the clay off defiantly. The setting she did this in was one of the powerful elements of the piece as she was surrounded by paintings and sculptures by men of the past that forced women into a certain form. I feel like I have shadowed this as I am basically 'crushing' the ideal male form, particularly as I have chosen to use an image from a statue that stands so heroically and is an image that refers to masculinity a lot.

 

 

I'd like to develop this idea further and perhaps use images from other statues or classical art paintings. I could also maybe create a performance piece from this idea aswell.

 

After three weeks away from university, I took the time to explore Manchester in research for Unit X. I made use of the two main galleries, The Manchester Art Gallery and the newly refurbished Whitworth Gallery. I also visited the Trial/Error exhibition at our Holden Gallery in university.

The Whitworth Art Gallery

The Whitworth proved fruitful in its many links to appropriation, it's main exhibition being the work of Cornelia Parker. From looking at her work I see that she has taken elements from old famous paintings, such as canvas linings and margins, and displayed them as her own work.

As I walked into a lighter gallery, I was confronted with crushed musical instruments and cutlery suspended from the ceiling, floating just inches from the floor.

 

Parker had taken pre-existing items, manipulated them and displayed them as her own. I went into a smaller gallery and was confronted with Parker's widely renowned shed. Here she had taken an object we all identify with, containing items we are all likely to own, taken it to a company that specialises in explosives, and blown it up. She then collected the pieces and reassembled the piece in an almost time frame of the moment the shed shot apart.

This piece must've taken a long time to produce, but the effect is very impressive.The use of found objects in appropriation art is very prominent as I moved onto the Sarah Lucas pieces in the gallery.

Here she has used these inanimate, everyday objects we use, to create weird and almost human like sculptures and self portraits.

I liked the spontaneity of these pieces, this is something I'd like to do within my work.

 

Trial/Error Art - The Holden Gallery

As I moved onto my own university's art gallery, I discovered after passing through many times that the current Trial/Error exhibition has many works contained that apply to Appropriation.

 

 

The exhibition focuses on art that is made with the prospect of failure. I found that the particular artist that stood out in relation to appropriation was John Stezaker. Several of his collage pieces where displayed, that used clippings from magazines, juxtaposed to create a particular scene

 

 

I liked the way that these images were not Stezaker's own, but he manipulated them in order to make you look twice at the image. The hand of the middle lady in the above piece isn't actually part of her picture, but the way you see it at first glance makes you believe that the pasted above photo is part of the foundation photograph. A simple way of portraying appropriation, but I feel that Stezaker makes a strong impact.

 

Manchester Art Gallery - Emily Allchurch In the Footsteps of a Master

I once again made a trip to the Manchester Art Gallery as I had heard that there was a small new exhibition set up of the work of Emily Allchurch. She had taken the work of French Impressionist Adolphe Valette and his 1910 painting of Albert Square, Manchseter and taken it into a more modern narrative painting of her own.

 

 

The pieces Allcurch created were displayed as lightboxes and were amazingly accurate to their original paintings, yet with eerie updated differences. As I walked into Allchurche's celebrated 'Tokyo Story', the curation of this exhibition stood out to me.

 

 

The exhibition was dimmed, with Allchurche's lightboxes illuminated. In front lay the original pieces by 19th century Japanese printmaker Utagawa Hiroshige, that Allchurch had based the pieces upon. I found out that these pieces were a complex digital collage using hundreds of photographs stitched together.

 

Attending these galleries has given me some inspiration, and I hope to meet up with my collaborative group in a few days to discuss these ideas.