Source 3 : Bill Viola and Joseph Cornell

Bill Viola (born January 25, 1951) is a contemporary video artist. He is considered a leading figure in the generation of artists whose artistic expression depends upon electronic, sound, and image technology in New Media. His works focus on the ideas behind fundamental human experiences such as birth, death and aspects of consciousness

BILL VIOLA - Ocean Without a Shore, 2007 3-channel High Definition Video/Sound Installation Production stills Photo: Kira Perov

In 2007, Viola was invited back to the 52nd Venice Biennale to present an installation called "Ocean without a Shore," which was seen by over 60,000 viewers throughout its duration. In this piece, exposed in the little but perfectly fitted Church of San Gallo, Viola is exploring life and death. The experiment consists of people standing in the foreground with nothing but black behind them. Each of them seem to produce gallons of water from themselves as if they were waterfalls. The water comes gushing out of their bodies as if they are being reborn. The very last individual is an elderly man who actually glows a supernatural green while dozens of gallons of water erupts from his body. There are 2 individuals in the middle of the piece who only seem to trickle water, while all the others produce a waterfall of water (Sal 2008). Viola says that this piece is about how the dead are undead. That once they get through the water they are conscious again.

I was focusing on Bill Viola’s way of using water and how he metaphor the meaning of water. For my body of work, Leaving with wound (2011), water was using as meaning of healing.

There is one more artist who influenced my work, Leaving with wound.  Joseph Cornell (December 24, 1903 – December 29, 1972) was an American artist and sculptor, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of Assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental filmmaker.

Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall) (1945-46) Construction, 20 1/2 x 16 x 3 1/2 in

By collecting and carefully juxtaposing found objects in small, glass-front boxes, Cornell created visual poems in which surface, form, texture, and light play together. Using things we can see, Cornell made boxes about things we cannot see: ideas, memories, fantasies, and dreams.

Untitled (Medici Princess) (c. 1948), Construction, 17 5/8 x 11 1/8 x 4 3/8 in

From Bill Viola to Joseph Cornell My body of work, Leaving with wound has been influenced from their style of work. Bill Viola’s meaning of water, as healing and Joseph Cornell’s collecting of personal memories, especially the fact that some of Joseph Cornell’s work was for his lovers intrigued me and let me think about my personal memories as well, as a result I construct an experimental video installation work, Leaving with wound.

  

Source 3: Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville is a current painter who's work I look at constantly as a source for my own. I am interested in how she uses the human figure as a vehicle to confront tensions surrounding the body as a living mass of meat. Saville's paintings are sumptuous representations of full bodies, often as a commentary as to how the female form is seen and criticized. Her impasto paint and lush qualities of her images draw me in as a viewer like looking at a frosted cake; I can anticipate how delicious it is. Yet a skin crawling feeling comes over me when viewing Saville's paintings.

These portraits are not of individuals, but of meat and mass, cut up, rearranged, and amplified. I am drawn to these images because they are such (gore)geously rendered images of body discomfort. Her work is beautiful to look at a first glance, disturbing in honesty, and yet undeniably hold my attention. Saville uses gore, scaring, fat, wounds in tandem with lushly painted flesh, which has been developed skillfully though layering of paint. The figures and images she chooses to render are often confrontational and put me on edge.

Figure 1: Propped, Jenny Saville, 1992

Saville paints her bodies that are reminiscent of Ruben's overtly lush female figures or of Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox. Her figures are often on display, splayed open across the canvas. The figure is unapologetic in her realness, but there is a great sorrow to be found in the details of the painting. Tension is derived from opposing small and large elements within the compositions. Issues of self-awareness are played with as single, smaller areas impose themselves upon the larger surrounding masses of each image. One example of this is clear in Saville's Hybrid (Figure2,) where the nakedness of a large woman ripples over the canvas, her hands gripping her own flesh. The point at which her left hand forcefully hangs onto and amplifies the fat of her stomach. This gesture is something that people do all the time in the mirror, but it becomes lude seen in the public realm.

Figure 2: Hybrid, Jenny Saville, 1997

Saville’s paintings are much larger than life size, adding to the generous quality of the flesh being depicted. The paint quality is strongly pigmented and gives a highly sensual impression of the surface of the skin as well as the mass of the body. She sometimes adds marks onto the body, such as white "target" rings. Plan (Figure 3) employs contour lines that are reminiscent of topography maps, giving an allusion to land masses. These rings also highlight Saville’s interest in cosmetic or reconstructive surgery. Something hidden or private is always being revealed in this work. While Saville’s bodies seem to be aware of what they are and they challenge the viewer’s gaze by sharing these private moments of reflection.

Figure 3: Plan, Jenny Saville, 1993

I am currently working on a piece that wants to capture similar moments of unease as Saville, but in a more subtly reflective way. Saville uses all kinds of bodies to investigate her interest in discomfort. I am choosing to use my own body because I want to express something specifically personal about myself. I am also using fleshiness as a way of communicating something visceral and something about anxiety. All of my works up until now have been self-portraits in one way or another, but I was always beating around the bush, trying to make my figures universal everymen. With the piece, Pressure (Figures 4-6,) the body is undeniably my own. This piece is still in the early stages of making, but I finally understand my own intent. I want to create tension and empathy by pinpointing a physical reaction to stress as a way of conveying an interior anxiety.

Figure 4: Pressure, photo inspiration, Avery Lucas, 2011

Figure 5: Pressure, drawing, Avery Lucas, 2011

Figure 6: Pressure, in process piece, Avery Lucas, 2011

Erik Wilhelmsen source 3 - Rothko

[1]Erik Wilhelmsen

Third Source- Mark Rothko

October 11, 2011

[2]

There are two main aspects to Rothko’s paintings that I’m looking at as a source to my work: monumentality of size and the multi-form blocs in his classic paintings that contrast, relate, and disguise what is underneath. Rothko’s contemporaries known as the New York school all created large works. “Rothko stated explicitly that he painted large paintings because ‘I want to be very intimate and human…however you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command”(1). A primary concern Rothko abstractly employed was human emotion. Art critic, Irving Sandler wrote, “ Rothko’s mature work enlists the viewer as a substitute for the absent performer, that his pictures effectually cast the viewer as ‘an actor who plays his solitary self”(2). The size of his paintings as well as display in which his paintings often surround the viewer in a solitary room encompass the viewers space. (Fig. 1)

Fig. 1 Rothko Chapel, Houston

[3]

Typically Rothko’s classic paintings termed multiform paintings consist of one or a few blocs with a division between the colored blocs and surrounded by a frame or border. (Fig.2) To describe Rothko’s work some critics used the word façade. “The term façade is a face or front, often of a building – something solid, if not impermeable. The term façade also implies that something more lies behind what is visible, that the face itself is an artifice or an enticing disguise for something unexpected and possibly unwelcome behind it”(3). I believe this is an appropriate metaphor of the experience while viewing Rothko’s paintings. Through the division of space and large voids within the rectangular blocs the empty space seems to reflect back toward the viewer.

Fig. 2. No. 18, 1951 (207” x 170.5”)

Similar to Rothko I choose to work large to encompass the viewer’s space. In contrast I’m working three-dimensionaly. Physically there is the potential of interacting within the space I create, although I’m not inviting the viewer to neccesarly physically do so the potential is still there. My piece Untitled (23.4) (Fig. 3), is a large bowl form with a deep curve of the wall, the more severe the curve, the more the form displaces space. Displacement is important in this piece to evoke fullness. The interior of this vessel is literally filled with a repeating square fingerprint stamp densely banning the interior. In this piece I’m drawing the relation to the hovering allusion of Rothko’s multiform paintings created by the interface of blocs and borders and tone. In my piece the pattern is offset from the centrifugal form of the vessel. The banding pattern competes with the form creating a tension between the two.

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[1] Anna C. Chave, Mark Rothko (Yale, 1989), 7

[2] Anna C. Chave, mark Rothko (Yale, 1989), 16

[3] Anna C. Chave, Mark Rothko (Yale, 1989), 107

Camille Chedda: Source (3) - David Hammons

Fig 1. David Hammons, In the Hood, Sweatshirt hood, dimensions variable, 1993

David Hammons uses non-traditional materials to create a dialogue around social issues concerning race, identity and class. He does this by re-contextualizing discarded materials such as clothing, hair, dirt and plastic. He is essentially using objects which have an association with poverty, derived from his own surroundings in Harlem New York, and gives these unwanted items a new voice.

One such piece is In The Hood (fig 1.) in which Hammons displays the severed hood of a green sweatshirt. The title of the work is a play on words, which calls attention not only to what the object is, but also to where it is typically seen. Colloquially, 'hood' refers to poverty stricken, violent African American neighborhoods, and the sweatshirt is stereotypically what such a person within that community might be seen wearing. This torn hood calls attention to a people who may feel just as discarded and socially decapitated as this exhibited object.

Fig 2 & 3. David Hammons, Untitled from Installation View, Mixed Media, 2010

In Installation View (Fig 2 & 3), Hammons displayed several abstract paintings on canvas which were concealed by large sheets of garbage bags, thick fabric and furniture. In some pieces the plastic and cloth are glued directly unto the paintings, while in others, they hang from the top of the canvas creating a veil. He has hidden these paintings behind worn and torn coverings, thereby desecrating the commodity of art. Or perhaps the coverings are meant to protect the sacred paintings beneath.

A piece from the series: Built-In Obsolescence, Acrylic paints on plastic bags, 15.8x13.9cm, 2011

Like Hammons, I have used a non-traditional material in my artwork. In combination with the painting tradition of self-portraiture, the plastic bags communicate conflicting ideas about personal and social identity. The portrait gazes directly out at the viewer from inside the transparent bags. The bags remain utilitarian, cheap, disposable items, while the portrait infuses them with new personal and social meaning.

Lilita Krys 10/11/2011

Influence #3

Viennese expressionist Egon Schiele has been a commanding influence in my work. In his paintings and drawings Schiele draws attention to human psyche, through expressive poses, angularity, anxious lines, and a limited color palette. Nude self-portraits and portraits are indicative to the artist"s own sexual perversity – exhibitionism and voyeurism.

My main interests in Schiele’s work are his superior draftsmanship, expressive quality of the poses, and that of the color, and creation of space without using any actual surrounding. In his

Seated Nude Male, (See Figure 1: Seated Nude Male, by Egon Schiele) a man is seated by means of his curvature into a suggested space. Through bent knees, perspective of femurs, and the leaning of his upper body, Schiele constructs a third dimension. In my paintings I eliminate most of the surroundings in favor of expression of the body (See Figure 2: Reclining). Unlike Schiele’s work, my painting has shadow which is used to suggest the space, and chair. An agitation and angularity in the Seated Man, is reversed into lifelessness in the Reclining, yet both of them are traumatized by the space, loosing their body parts.

In another painting (See Figure 3: Reclining Woman with Legs Apart, by Egon Schiele), a half-naked woman is displaying the intimate parts of her body. The painting’s composition and sexual tonality is echoed in my Floating III (See Figure 4: Floating III). Open legs and a shallow angular perspective are seducing a viewer to step into a very intimate personal space. In Shiele’s it is a voyeuristic experience for a male (presumably). My work is a view at other people’s expressive body qualities (in this instance, a couple), layered over my intuitive psychological responses to them, and a creation of my personal symbolic language in painting.

A portrait of a couple (See Figure 5: Embrace (Egon and Edith Schiele, by Egon Sciele), is a visually dynamic portrait of a relationship. In a Couple I (See Figure 6: Couple I) the poses are more static, where intensity of Shiele’s Embrace strives to show through an awkward head stand of the woman supported from falling by the male’s penis and his head.

In all Shiele’s works, a limited color palette is an important instrument for expressiveness. All combination are used to reflect a certain quality of the subject’s state of mind, rather then a realistic representation of skin or clothes. This aspect of his work is burgeoning in my mind, and as it will form into my own symbolic language, a new body of work will be communicated.

List of Figures:

Figure 1

Egon Schiele, Seated Nude Male, 1910, oil and gouache, 152.5 x 150 cm

Figure 2

Liliya Krys, Reclining, 2011, oil on board, 30” x 30”

Figure 3

Egon Schiele, Reclining Woman with Legs Apart, 1914, gouache and pencil, 30.4 x 47.2 cm

Figure 4

Liliya Krys, Floating III, 2011, oil on board, 40” x 48

Figure 5

Egon Sciele, Embrace (Egon and Edith Schiele), 1915, gouache and pencil, 52.5 x 41.2 cm

Figure 6

Liliya Krys, Couple I, 2011, oil on board, 48” x 40”

Kevin Calisto

Source 3: Giorgio Morandi

Neutral gray tones, bare objects and supple lighting are characteristic elements of the works of the Italian painter, Giorgio Morandi.  Known for his still-life arrangements of bottles, boxes and cups, Morandi paints with cool and warms tones of white and gray.  His use of space is minimal, however the complexity of the objects provides a balance to composition and form.

Throughout the 1940’s and 50’s Giorgio Morandi created his still-lives with most of the same objects but with slight rearrangements.  In my opinion, his practice calls upon great discipline and attention to how simple forms can exceed their everyday function in our lives.  I acknowledge Morandi’s ability to capture a resilience and life to these objects through reorganizing their interaction.  In May 2001, Donna De Salvo and Matthew Gale of the Tate Modern in London, curated an exhibition of Giorgio Morandi’s work from several Italian and private collections.  They stated “his paintings appear to transcend time and place, an effect he achieved by removing labels from his bottles, faces from his clocks, and people from his landscapes. In fact, many of Morandi's works can be read as arrangements of pure form.”[1]  For example in Figure 10, Natura Morta, 1956, Morandi confronts the viewer with five clustered vases and cups.  Their slight variations in grays and white build form and stand with solid cast shadows.  The addition of a horizontal at the top of the page enhances the visual affects of the space in which these objects occupy.  Washed gray areas with vigorous brush strokes carefully line the edge of the horizontal creating a visual balance of unidentified space. 

Confronted with arranging still-lives and lighting, I have found a connection between the work of Giorgio Morandi’s and my own.  From the limited palette of warm and cool grays to the unknown landscape, my work continues to be influenced by his evocative still-lives.  According to the Tate Modern, “Morandi engaged in a lifelong attempt to seize reality through the familiar.”[2]   In Figure 12, I choose to draw rolls of receipt paper because it is something that everyone has touched, used or been associated with.  Most individuals discard their receipts.  They are used to record and catalogue purchases.  Receipts are reflections of our consumer society.  Consequently, I take blank rolls of receipt paper and arrange them with intricate and delicate folds to draw more attention to its formal qualities.  The paper gently folds and bends and strong horizontals are achieved.   The image begins to translate and transform into a landscape.

Morandi’s still-life series incorporates the depiction of truth but conveys strong relationships to time and place.  Working in a series, allows for subtle nuances of light and dark to act upon each object in a different way.  I enjoy exploring those shifts to achieve a strong connection with the drawn item.

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[1] Donna De Salvo and Matthew Gale, Giorgio Morand Exhibition, 2001, October 2011

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/morandi.htm

[2] Donna De Salvo and Matthew Gale, Giorgio Morand Exhibition, 2001, October 2011

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/morandi.htm