Invisible art?

An article of Lana Newstorm

“Art is about imagination and that is what my work demands of the people interacting with it. You have to imagine a painting or sculpture is in front of you”.

The invisible art of Lana Newstrom is in fact a hoax, perpetrated by professional radio parodists Pat Kelly and Peter Oldring. But I can see why so many people fell for it – especially having just covered the Turner prize.

While all of the work in this year’s Turner is just about visible, this prize has often featured the not-quite-there. Martin Creed and Susan Philipszboth won it for empty rooms – Creed’s with the lights going on and off, Philipsz’s with a folk song sound installation. And that’s just the tip of an invisible iceberg.

For Lana Newstrom is not the radical artist she has been taken for. Her work is old hat. I am yawning, it is so retrograde and familiar – just another rehash of ideas that go back to the 1950s. Ever hear of John Cage? The Hayward Gallery even dedicated a historical exhibition in 2012 to this phenomenon. Invisible: Art about the Unseen, 1957-2012 “is not a joke”, insisted curator Ralph Rugoff. And it wasn’t.

This year, Marina Abramović caused a stir when she said her exhibition at London’s Serpentine would be about “nothing”. Yet the controversy was not about the potential invisibility of the idea – it was about plagiarism, for another artist CLAIMED prior rights in nothing.

So, given that if anything Lana Newstrom’s art is a bit staid and behind the times, it is not so strange that people were fooled by the hoax. On the other hand, what they took from it is revealing. It shows how much we hate the rich.

A website called Wealthy Debates relished the exposure, not so much of art, as of art collectors. Believing Lana Newstrom to be real, it sneered at her stupid rich collectors. “The most amusing aspect of the story,” it enthused, “is the image of snobby art collectors walking through an empty studio studiously staring at blank walls ... Some of the art afficianados [sic] actually stop and soak in the lack of art that is not hanging on the blank wall...”

Barstool Sports agreed: “If you’re some artsy fartsy idiot paying money for invisible art, you GOTTA kill yourself. Imagine paying someone a million dollars for some Emperor’s New Clothes shit?...”

The reason CBC’s joke story had legs is not so much that we want to laugh at contemporary art, as that we are so shocked and repelled by the art MARKET. The image of rich people forking out for invisible art and proudly showing it to their friends as the very latest thing is such a glorious image of plutocratic idiocy that it just had to be true.

If only it were. I want to see those rich art snobs suffer, too. But not only is this story a hoax – it also appears to be untrue that collectors will pay a fortune for the non-existent. For when Christie’s tried to auction Creed’s Work No 127: The Lights Going On and Off for £70,000 earlier this year it did not sell.

So here’s the punchline. Invisible art really does exist. And it’s going cheap.

Antony Gormley

I recently went to London and came across an Antony Gormley (first picture). The second one is of an exhibition in Manchester where his work was hanging from the ceiling over the stairs.
Gormley describes his work as "an attempt to materialise the place at the other side of appearance where we all live." Many of his works are based on moulds taken from his own body, or "the closest experience of matter that I will ever have and the only part of the material world that I live inside."
His work attempts to treat the body not as an object but a place. The work is not symbolic but a trace of a real event of a real body in time.
Gormley won the Turner Prize in 1994 with Field for the British Isles. He was quoted as saying that he was "embarrassed and guilty to have won – it's like being a Holocaust survivor. In the moment of winning there is a sense the others have been diminished. I know artists who've been seriously knocked off their perches through disappointment."

Banksy

I had recently found a Banksy piece that I was really intrigued by... my first impressions were 'wow what a shocking image' I understood it straight away! It is a college stencil piece incorporating the Napalm war- the horrible attack of the American troops on Vietnam
Within the picture it interprets so much power but at the same time I just feel so helpless. When I first saw this piece of art I was shocked. The way in which the child is black and white and the characters have contrasting colours (such as black and yellow) indicates that the child is being pulled along by the major superpower of the USA! It also tries to point out, in an cleverly ironic way, how the Americans are treating the Vietnamese people. It shows how they are being manipulated by the USA- hence the fact the two characters are holding up the child's arm. It is a display of dominance. As a geography student I can see the widening gap between economic development which is clearly shown  through this picture- the globalisation of goods and services, cheap labour etc...
The characters captured my attention the most I think... I think they actually look at bit sinister with their patronising smiles! Maybe that's the effect?
The question I ask myself is... Where are they going?

Jackson Pollock

I had recently visited The Liverpool Tate and came across a Jackson Pollock piece.
A friend of mine who came with me said; "I could do that... that's not art" (in reference to seeing a Jackson Pollock)... ONE OF MY PET HATES!!!!!
Though I have never been fully keen or widely knowledgeable on him but as I looked into him more I began to understand the real context behind his work...

He started using synthetic resin-based paints called alkyd enamels, which, at that time, was a novel medium. Pollock described this use of household paints, instead of artist’s paints, as "a natural growth out of a need". He used hardened brushes, sticks, and even basting syringes as paint applicators. Pollock's technique of pouring and dripping paint is thought to be one of the origins of the term action painting. With this technique, Pollock was able to achieve a more immediate means of creating art, the paint now literally flowing from his chosen tool onto the canvas. By defying the convention of painting on an upright surface, he added a new dimension by being able to view and apply paint to his canvases from all directions.

Later, a series of influences came together to guide Pollock to his mature style: years spent painting realist murals in the 1930s showed him the power of painting on a large scale; Surrealism suggested ways to describe the unconscious; and Cubism guided his understanding of picture space.
Also, he used this 'drip' technique to express his feelings as he was an alcoholic and it shows his expressions as the stand for the terror of all modern humanity living in the shadow of nuclear war.

From the words of Tony Cragg himself...

"When you’re born, you’re born with a fantastic organ in your head.  There’s not much in it. And you open your eyes and you start to hear and you feel temperature and smell things and hear things and want to touch things — through your senses. Your senses, you have to see as being your inside body communicating with the outside. So it is collecting all this data about the world. Where you’ve got data you’ve got a syntax. So this, if you like, is some kind of language. Your finding out what surfaces are, what softness is, what hardness is, what noises – everything. So through your senses, you filled up these fantastic senses of perceptions of the world, and you use them very shortly after that to survive. You know what tastes good; you know what noises you don’t like; you know what forms are interesting for you, and whatever. And this is a language. You can’t write it down, but that material is already talking to us. Material gives us a message, and we go out and we read into the material something."

Richard Wilson Works

Richard Wilson

Richard Wilson was born 24 May 1953 and is an English sculptor, installation artist and musician.

His art- Wilson's work is characterised by architectural concerns with volume, illusionary spaces and auditory perception.

His most famous and more well known piece would be the room that is part-filled with highly reflective used sump oil creating an illusion of the room turned upside down. This room gave awareness of specific proportions. It was first exhibited at Matt's Gallery, London in 1987, and then became one of the signature pieces of the Saatchi Gallery. It is considered to be a defining work in the genre of site-specific installation art^.

Claire Morgan

Statement . June 2011
"My work is about our relationship with the rest of nature, explored through notions of change, the passing of time, and the transience of everything around us. For me, creating seemingly solid structures or forms from thousands of individually suspended elements has a direct relation with my experience of these forces. There is a sense of fragility and a lack of solidity that carries through all the sculptures. I feel as if they are somewhere between movement and stillness, and thus in possession of a certain energy.

Animals, birds and insects have been present in my recent sculptures, and I use suspense to create something akin to freeze frames. In some works, animals might appear to rest, fly or fall through other seemingly solid suspended forms. In other works, insects appear to fly in static formations. The evidence of gravity - or lack of it - inherent in these scenarios is what brings them to life, or death.

 

I feel a close connection with the natural world which I hope is evident in my work, but our clumsy, often destructive relationship with nature, and the 'artificial' world we have contrived for ourselves are of equal significance. Ultimately I find myself focussing on areas where the boundaries cannot be clearly defined.

 

The titles of the works are very important, and often make reference to historical or contemporary popular culture, words being appropriated from the titles of films or books, or phrases being manipulated through combination with the artwork. These connections often add a comedic element to the works, a sense of irony or bluntness that keeps them firmly rooted in my experience of the world that we humans inhabit. Though the phrases have a specific history, the jarring between the title and the form can bring a desirable ambiguity through intentionally creating confusion.

 

The processes involved in the work are laborious and there are thousands of individual elements involved, but clarity of form is of high importance. I do not wish the animals to provide a narrative, but rather to introduce an element of movement, or energy, or some sort of reality; animating or interacting with the larger architectural forms.

 

Drawing is important, and allows me to explore a different side of each idea. The processes involved in my blood drawings bring a growing degree of understanding of material and form. "

Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin

 

Emin's art takes many different forms of expression including needlework and sculpture, drawing, video and installation, photography and painting.

 

I find one of Emins early works, My Major Retrospective, absolutely inspiring and is something I feel must have taken a lot of thought to whether it should be displayed. It was just so personal! It is almost autobiographical- consisting of personal photographs, and photos of her (destroyed) early paintings, as well as items which most artists would not consider showing in public, such as a packet of cigarettes her uncle was holding when he was decapitated in a car crash. This willingness to show details of what would generally be thought of as her private life has become one of Emin's trademarks.

 

 

In 1999, Emin was shortlisted for the Turner Prize herself and exhibited My Bed at the Tate Gallery. There was considerable media furore regarding the apparently trivial and possibly unhygienic elements of the installation, such as yellow stains on the bedsheets, condoms, empty cigarette packets and a pair of knickers with menstrual stains. The bed was presented as it had been when she had stayed in it for several days feeling suicidal because of relationship difficulties.

 

 

In my opinion I feel like this installation is a bit too over rated... yes I realise its conceptuality is about Emins way of expressing her difficulties but why such unhygienic objects?... I don't know just my opinion?