Simon Starling

Starling, calls his work a "physical manifestation of a thought process"

Fascinated by the processes involved in transforming one object or substance into another, he makes objects, installations, and pilgrimage-like journeys which draw out an array of ideas about nature, technology and economics.

The concept of recycle-ability and re-appropriation, are at play here.




For Tabernas Desert Run 2004, Starling crossed the Tabernas desert in Spain on an improvised electric bicycle. The only waste product the vehicle produced was water, which he subsequently used to paint an illustration of a cactus. The contrast between the supremely efficient cactus and the contrived efforts of man is both comic and insightful, highlighting the commercial exploitation of natural resources in the region.

    

Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No 2) 2005 has a similar theme. Starling dismantled a shed and turned it into a boat. The boat was then loaded with the remains of the shed, and paddled down the Rhine to a museum in Basel. On arrival it was re-made into the shed.

Both pieces make a statement against the pressures of modernity, mass production and global capitalism.




Starling’s work One Ton, II 2005 brings in to focus energy consumption, and the huge amounts of energy used to produce tiny quantities of platinum. One ton of ore, mined from a South African open cast mine, was needed to produce the five handmade platinum prints above.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Starling
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/turner-prize-2005/turner-prize-2005-artists-simon-starling

Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell 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 (The Hotel Eden) (c. 1945)

Cornell's most characteristic art works were boxed assemblages created from found objects. These are simple shadow boxes, usually fronted with a glass pane, in which he arranged fragments of photographs or bric a brac, in a way that combines Constructivism with Surrealism.

These boxes, these hotels, are locales for memory. The trivial objects that Cornell picked up in dime stores and junk shops assume a significance beyond their triviality; through the vehicle of surrealism, their very placement as elements of a set activates their correspondence. Cornell's approach abstracts his objects, but arranging them into a set grounds them.


For me his box creations are fascinating, like mini-museums. Their meticulously construction shows a real passion for detail. Although Cornell was a shy, retiring person, and therefore we know little of his motivations. It was clear from certain works that he expressed the unattainable in his life through the boxes. His motivation was often to make them as gifts for individuals sometimes living, sometimes dead. Often people the artist had never met, but whom he admired from afar.

The concept here perhaps mirrors Cornell's own life of compartmentalisation, and collecting memorabilia, and the desire to communicate to the world visually in what he may have viewed as a "safe" method considering his reclusiveness.




Many of his boxes, such as the famous Medici Slot Machine boxes, are interactive and are meant to be handled.







References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Cornell
http://arthistory.about.com/od/from_exhibitions/ig/jcsfmoma_1107/jcni_08.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T65K0ipTQHo
http://www.boxofjars.com/vol1archive/MarcJaffee1.html

Hannah Höch

Hannah Höch's involvement with the Berlin Dadaists began in earnest in 1919. and although on the fringe due to her gender she was a major player in the Dada movement. Her work was also influenced by early work and training in embroidery, dress patterns and textiles. Höch was one of the first pioneers of the art form that would come to be known as photomontage.

“Hannah Höch the Dadaist” is the way that this German artist is usually pigeon-holed in art history. And indeed she was a leading member of the movement in Berlin in the 1920s, full of the calls for artistic revolution, the rejection of all that had gone before, the hectic partying and the collage works which made this movement so energetic and so productive.

Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic, 1919, collage of pasted papers, 90 x 144 cm, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

The above photomontage “Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany” reflected her views of the political and social issues that arose during this transitional time in German society. She chooses to give specifications, such as kitchen knife and beer-belly, to make it clear that this piece is social commentary regarding gender issues in post-war Germany. The Dada movement wished to critically examine German culture by not glossing over the negative aspects, but rather accentuating them. Hoch cut out pieces of images and text found in magazines, advertisements, newspapers and journals. She carefully pieced all these clippings back together in a way that made sense to her and as she felt appropriately served her purpose of critical examination.

I love the self expression in this piece, and you can see and feel what she may have been thinking as she put the piece together. Typical of Dada artists she uses photomontage to express messages of critique that censorship would not allow to be put into words.

As stated by George Grosz. “Cut with the Kitchen Knife…” has a feeling of rapid progress portrayed through a mocking and satirical tone. Pieces of machine are exploding throughout the montage to symbolize booming industry and culture within an urban area. This booming progress is not displayed in a proud, exciting and dignified manner however, but rather in a circus-like environment. The mood is whimsical to the point of ridiculous, with theatrical expressions and dramatic body language mixed in with images of political figures serving as a critique of the political free-for-all between the old Weimer leaders and the new left-wing communist agenda.

Untitled [From an Ethnographic Museum] (1930)

(Untitled) [From an Ethnographic Museum], she uses the photographic images of primitive statues in museums and from magazines and pastes on contemporary heads and body parts. The result is an astonishingly subtle and challenging portrayal of what makes up the human and gender in the modern world. It's quite brilliant but also intriguing in its layered meaning.

The series known as From an Ethnographic Museum fuses European bodies and African masks, black men and white women, blue-eyed boys and dark-skinned girls (montage as miscegenation). These are signs of the times. One infers a savage ridiculing of Nazi ideals of racial purity, and perhaps of western notions of beauty in general. But what is so contradictory about these montages is that they are always so elegantly made. Höch's deftness, her flawless sense of colour, tone and touch, her instinct for shape-making and balanced composition, leads to an anti-dada aesthetic – an art that is beautiful in itself.

Synthetic Flowers (Propeller Thistles)’ 1952

The fascination of Höch's art is the tension between the formal and the emotional and her collages after the Second World War give full rein to both. The colours grow brighter but the imagery, when it is recognisable, is more urgent. Journey into the Unknown from 1956 has a knife blade searing upwards through waving weeds, Synthetic Flowers (Propeller Thistles) from 1952 is literally that, thistles with propeller blades pushing towards you.

Für ein Fest gemacht (Made for a Party), 1936

References:

http://utopiadystopiawwi.wordpress.com/dada/hannah-hoch/cut-with-the-kitchen-knife/

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jan/09/hannah-hoch-art-punk-whitechapel

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jan/13/hannah-hoch-whitechapel-review

John Baldessari

Baldessari is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring photography and appropriated images.

I was drawn to his work after watching a very well made video, which is a work of art in itself...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU7V4GyEuXA

As mentioned in the video he burnt all of the paintings he had created between 1953 and 1966 as part of a new piece, titled The Cremation Project. Although contrary to the video it is reported that the ashes from these paintings were baked into cookies and placed into an urn, and the resulting art installation consists of a bronze commemorative plaque with the destroyed paintings' birth and death dates, as well as the recipe for making the cookies. Through the ritual of cremation Baldessari draws a connection between artistic practice and the human life cycle.




In some works Baldessari places dots of different colours on people’s faces in existing/appropriated photographs. By doing this, he erases the individuality of the people and forces the viewer to look elsewhere on the photo. Apparently his coloured dots also refer to specific codes: red/dangerous, green/safe, blue/platonic, and yellow/crazy.



Related to his early text paintings were his Wrong series (1966-1968), which paired photographic images with lines of text from an amateur photography book, aiming at the violation of a set of compositional rules
In one of the works, Baldessari had himself photographed in front of a palm precisely so that it would appear that the tree were growing out of his head.




Baldessari's pieces "Throwing four balls in the air to get a square (best of 36 tries)" and "Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)" are early examples of post-conceptual art. They combine the impossible task of balancing order and chaos. I like the concept for this, the process needed to complete the task, and the element of chance in the result,


Tying in with our current psychogeography project, another great concept of Baldessari's was the photographic California Map Project (1969). This time he created physical forms that resembled the letters in "California" geographically near to the very spots on the map that they were printed.



In "Double Bill" (above), a 2012 series of large inkjet prints, Baldessari paired the work of two selected artists (such as Giovanni di Paolo with David Hockney, or Fernand Léger with Max Ernst) on a single canvas, further altering the appropriated picture plane by overlaying his own hand-painted color additions. Baldessari names only one of his two artistic “collaborators” on each canvas’s lower edge, such as …AND MANET or …AND DUCHAMP.

References:
http://www.baldessari.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Baldessari
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU7V4GyEuXA
http://www.photoeye.com/Auctions/Auction.cfm?id=5210
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artists/bios/4454

Jim Lambie

Lambie's signature piece Zobop came from the concept of wanting to fill a room but empty a room at the same time. He wanted the edges of these pieces to merge into one to make a whole. Seeing such an installation in person is necessary to feel it's true impact on the senses. It produces some sense of disorientation. Is the floor level? How big or small is the space? Does it appear to contract or expand?



With Zobop particularly, like some other installation artists, he states he doesn't need to be there to complete the installation himself, but he sets the rules and design parameters for others to follow. Having just reviewed Sol Lewitt, Jim Lambie looks to have taken inspiration from Sol, his designs and working practices.

Other Lambie works draw on his love of bands and music. Although he admits the concept doesn't usually develop from this, he does incorporate band / album titles and album covers in many of his pieces.



The idea for his depiction of peeling aluminium and mirrors came from seeing old peeling posters around the streets of Glasgow.

In the recent exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, the downstairs area was turned into a hall of mirrors. Brightly coloured ladders with mirrors installed between the rungs gave the viewed a sense of disorientation. A kind of carnival atmosphere is created by Lambie at these exhibitions.



References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Lambie
http://fruitmarket.co.uk/exhibitions/current/

Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy, produces site-specific sculpture and land art situated in natural and urban settings. He lives and works in Scotland.

As land artist, he is very much in touch with his natural surroundings. His creations are envisaged and constructed to work alongside nature, and to be changed by nature. Where possible he uses only the local resources, and no tools to produce his pieces. In an interview he compared the repetitive quality of farm tasks to the routine of making sculpture: "A lot of my work is like picking potatoes; you have to get into the rhythm of it."

He uses photography to record his art due to its often ephemeral and transient state. He quotes: "Each work grows, stays, decays – integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its heights, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expressed in the image. Process and decay are implicit."

He also works on larger and more permanent pieces for galleries, museums and as public art. However the context and meaning behind his work remains the same. His work is tailored to reflect the locale in his material choice and the shapes he uses in the artwork.

Many of Goldsworthy's ephemeral works are untitled as they are so transient, and the images below reflect some of these. The first link is a short film on one such piece.

My introduction to the artist was when I found this short film with Waldemar Januszczak assisting Andy Goldsworthy create some impromptu land art in the Scottish borders. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPDH8yCnlk0

Rowan Leaves & Hole

  
The art material used often include brightly coloured flowers, icicles, leaves, mud, pine cones, snow, stone, twigs, and thorns. He has been quoted as saying, "I think it's incredibly brave to be working with flowers and leaves and petals. But I have to: I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole." 

The artist is generally considered the founder of modern rock balancing. For his ephemeral works, Goldsworthy often uses only his bare hands, teeth, and found tools to prepare and arrange the materials. However, for his permanent sculptures, and museum pieces, he does employ machine tools, and works with specialists such as dry-stone wallers and architects.

What impresses me about Andy Goldsworthy is that he sticks to his chosen concept of art, and isn't easily swayed to the commercial needs and wants of galleries and museums. He confirms this stubbornness himself in a talk given for the Saint Louis Art Museum by calling himself "bloody-minded" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7YEZMJatrY)

Roof

To create "Roof", Goldsworthy worked with his assistant and five British dry-stone wallers, who were used to make sure the structure could withstand time and nature. http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/goldsworthyinfo.shtm

Stone River

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2002/january23/goldsworthy-123.html



 "Three Cairns",


 "Moonlit Path" (Petworth, West Sussex, 2002) and 


"Chalk Stones" in the South Downs, near West Dean, West Sussex 
http://www.andrewgrahamdixon.com/archive/readArticle/98

The above structure can be seen in the River & Tides preview video. Unfortunately it collapses, showing the fragility of some of Goldsworthy's work

Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson coined the phrase "earthworks" which included Land art and Earth art. This was a revolution in it's time, when art was taken out of the galleries and into more natural surroundings.

In this the landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked using natural materials such as soil, rock (bed rock, boulders, stones), organic media (logs, branches, leaves), and water with introduced materials such as concrete, metal, asphalt, or mineral pigments. Works are not placed in the landscape, rather, the landscape is the means of their creation. On completion they are frequently left to change and erode under natural conditions, with time only existing as video recordings or photographic documents.

Spiral Jetty, Smithson's most famous work, was typical of this type of work. Constructed in 1970 it is a fifteen-hundred-foot-long, fifteen-foot-wide spiral of stone that extends out into the Great Salt Lake, in Utah. Smithson videoed and photographed the construction and the resulting work, and today, after 44 years the work is now only visible when the lake levels are very low.

Smithson building Spiral Jetty

Spiral Jetty 1970

Spiral Jetty as seen on Google Maps in 2014

Smithson employed the phrase "entropy" in his concepts. He quotes:

" ... it's a condition that's irreversible, it's a condition that's moving towards a gradual equilibrium and it's suggested in many ways. Perhaps a nice succinct definition of entropy would be Humpty Dumpty. Like Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again. There is a tendency to treat closed systems in such a way"

Another work, more permanent in nature is "Broken Circle Spiral Hill".

  

 However entropy also comes into play here too as nature has now taken over. Smithson at the time wrote a series of recommendations to ensure that his work would survive the test of time well. However, it no longer has the form of old, the lake water covers roughly the pier and Spiral Hill is in turn covered with evergreen plants.

Back in the gallery, Smithson brought land art inside to try and encourage viewers to seek out the origins of the work. He called these works "non-sites", and offered the following explanation in his writings: 

"The Non-Site (an indoor earthwork) is a three dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site. It is by this dimensional metaphor that one site can represent another site which does not resemble it - this The Non-Site. To understand this language of sites is to appreciate the metaphor between the syntactical construct and the complex of ideas, letting the former function as a three dimensional picture which doesn't look like a picture."

Rocks and mirror square II 

Smithson died in a plane crash is 1973, however many artists have paid homage to his works since. 

In 2005, the Whitney Museum collaborated with Minetta Brook, Robert Smithson's estate, and James Cohan Gallery to sponsor the construction of Robert Smithson's "Floating Island", a floating island of parkland tugged around New York Harbor, inspired by a 1970 drawing by Robert Smithson, entitled "Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island". The island, complete with living trees, was pulled by a tugboat. 

References: 

http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/entropy.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_art

http://www.robertsmithson.com/earthworks/spiral_jetty.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/arts/design/16floa.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2005/09/16/arts/20050916_SMITHSON_FEATURE.html

https://landmarks.utexas.edu/video/robert_smithson