Julieduffy’s Weblog

Something that I found really inspiring about her work was how clear it is how open she is to experimenting with various materials from latex, marble and found objects. there is so much variation in each room that I would find it hard to believe if someone could not find somethinh they liked. The exhibition is arranged chronoligically and includes sculpture, drawing, paintings and prints.

A lot of her work is motivated by her exploring personal memories and expressing psycholigical states of trauma and anxiety. She was born in Paris in 1911 and moved to New York in 1938 where she still lives and works today. Her career spans almost seven decades.

Persistent Antagonism 1946-8 as referring to ‘ sex, men show off their penises. It is irritating. The maco bit is irritating. I have nothing against the penis. It is the wearer of the penis. ‘

The sculptures that were in room 3 Personages, were abstract columns stacked of wood and plaster. The structures are almost always skewed and off-balance, giving them a fragile, vulnerable quality. There was a few groups of sculptures like this, they had originally been intended so the public could walk throught them but at this exhibition they had been croossed off so that this was not possible which was a bit dissapointing.

Some of her most recognisable pieces have an obvious phallic or sexual dimension. there are pieces that seem to combine both male and female sexual organs and others are a bit more ambiguous evoking both body and landscape. the materials she uses are very important helping to show the comparisson between the object e.g a limp penis being made from something hard e.g marble.

She began to make work of a much larger scale in a series of ‘cells’. The cells are a tangible space that suggest both rooms with confinement, prison cells, as well as rooms with private reflective thinking space, monks cell or a bedroom. She has also linked the cells to the cells in our blood.

The cells are autobiographical works. They contain a collection of objects such as hanging chairs, tapestry panel which refers to her memories of tapestry and antique restoration business.

In her work something that occurs quite frequently is the spider. the spider is to represnt the mother, being both the predator and the protector. I thought her piece Maman was very impressive. Her work with the spider demonstrated her fascination with how humans and animals create and shape their domestic environments. she connects the spider to her mother in the way that she ran a tapestry restoration business involving the processes of sewing, spinning and weaving.

Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth is currently on in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern. This is the first time I have came across Salcedo’s work and after seeing this piece it has left me wanting to no more about her. I had a vague idea before I had seen the piece that it was about immigration based on a review I had watched about the work.

Shibboleth ‘ a word used as a test for detecting people from another district or country by their pronunciation; a word or sound very difficult for foreigners to pronounce correctly ‘.

For Salcedo, the crack reveals a ; colonial and imperial history that has been disregarded, marginalised or simply obliterated… the history of racism, running parallel to the history of modernity and its untold dark side’ The Tate modern use to be a power station, which was commissoned in 1947 to assist in the powering and reconstruction of post war London. It was from here when London was becomming more multicultural as a result of labour migration of the British Empire and the exclusions of postcolonialism were already beginning to be played out. The power station was established alongside the welfare state, which was designed to assist in creating multiracial harmony. It was decommissioned in 1981 by the Conservative government and sat derelict until reopening in 200 as an art gallery. Salcedo reconnects the building to these colonial and postcolonial histories by digging under the surface.

Something that I found intersting about this piece was the way the public interacted with it by walking in line with it, crossing the crack, dipping their feet in to the crack or lieing on the floor and pretending to hang of it.

While I was in London I came across Thomas Schuttes work at Trafalgar square. The work is part of the on going Fourth Plinth Project, his work is replacing Marc Quinns sculpture of Alison Lapper. The work was unveiled on Wednesday 7th November 2007. The piece Model for a Hotel is a glass sculpture of a 21 storey building, constructed in specially engineered red, yellow and blue glass and weighs over 8 tonnes. When the piece was first proposed in 2003 it was called Hotel for the Birds, perhaps Ken Livingstons war with the pigeons may of had something to do with the change of name. Schutte explained that he liked to think that the piece would really be a hotel for the birds. He did not want to get involved with the scheme to get rid of the pigeons, he says for the birds is just an expression. I like the site specificity of this work but I’m so keen on the actual sculpture. I think it could have something to do with the colour as I think it is a bit garish and looks a bit out of place with everything around it.

Go Figure our first serious brief, well that were getting assessed on which is kinda scary. I quite like it so far, in that it’s the first brief where I’ve had an idea fairly quickly, usually takes me a while to get the ideas rolling. At the moment I’m thinking that this project may be a kind of progression from the protection project I did last year.

The focus of the brief is to be on the figure and it has to be site specific/relevant. I’m going to focus on my figure and the way it relates to its surroundings. My aim at the moment is to concentrate on the way my body moves and the shapes that are therefore created. The way that I am going to tie in the site specificity is through the site I choose, the way my body moves will be directly specific to the area it is involved with. The site that I am thinking of working with is the Gully in Oxgangs. I’ve worked with this site before and it’s an area that I seem drawn to. Quite intrigued to see how my body would react to climbing up and down the Gully, just need to figure out why I want to do this.

The more I think about it my work being site specific seems to be the next logical step for this project. In the previous project I hadn’t really thought about where I was doing the movements and why, so in this project I hope to make this more relevant.

As I have been thinking about this project it occurred to me that the way I am going to start off investigating this work is quite similar to the Alex Hartley exhibition I saw at the Fruitmarket Gallery this summer. Some of his finished images were looking into how he approached various buildings and areas. He also mapped out the route in which he would travel across an area. I really liked his finished images just hope my images don’t look like I’ve just copied his. This has happened before where I get an idea then start to research it and come across someone that has done something similar to it already. However even though the approaches are similar I think my finished piece will be different from his and the idea and thought behind mines is different so hopefully it should all work out ok.

Was speaking to Alan about what I had done so far. Think the main thing he was trying to get across was to not worry too much about it being site specific, the main thing is to make the work visually interesting. Need to start making more visuals to help my ideas progress. Things that I am to ask myself are

-What is this work about?

-Why am I doing the climb?

-What is the experience?

If the work does not have to be directly placed in the Gully then where would it be best suited? Bruce McLean’s work ‘pose work for plinths’ is site specific in that the positioning of his body, the use of the plinths and where the performance took place. With this in mind could I make an art work where all the inspiration and thought has came from the Gully but then place it somewhere else and it still be site specific.

Been trying to work out what my work is about and why I’m doing the climb. At the beginning of working with a site I always want to make sure I understand the site so by doing the climb I feel I have been getting a better understanding of the gully and literally getting a feel for it. When I think about doing a climb I think the aim is to get from place to another but in the Gully I’m not really going from one place to another.

Maybe its not really about doing a climb but more about exploring the site.

When I was exploring the site the main thing that I was thinking about was the placement of my body. I had to very much think about where I positioned my body to get around the site so I may not have been thinking about the aesthetics of my body but I had to consider the practicality of where I positioned my body.

Finally feel I’ve got some where with what I’m going to do. Got myself away from thinking about sculpture. From the visuals that I had been creating Neil thought there was something in them to work with further. the images I had been creating were based on the negative space from my climb. They are elongated in the manner of the climb-going up & down-they even look like symbols of some sort. so with these images thinking of making bigger ones with every step from each climb as there is around 100 steps from each climb. then placing them where the climb took place as a way to show what i had done. Bruce McLean done something like this using paper and placing it amongst hills, what I liked about this work of his was he made a point of saying this was the work not the photographs of what he had done as these were documentation.

From the images I had created using the negative space I did the same thing but on a larger scale. I then placed the images where the climb took place but not sure if this is necessarily the right place to put them. After going to see the Richard Long exhibition it made me think about how the images were a kind of documentation of what I went through during the climb. They are my experience of the Gully.

Do the images have to be placed directly into the Gully?

If not then where and would it still be considered as site specific?

If the images are documentation of what I experienced in my site by separating them from my site does this help to engage the viewer as they would not be entirely sure as to what the experience was. In letting the images stand as they are by themselves, in say a gallery situation I would hope that the viewer would read them as is they were flowing into one another, just as each step was vital for the climb to happen.

Since starting the project I have been looking into some of Bruce McLeans work, quite an interesting character. He’s probably best known as a performance artist but his work has been expressed in many different ways such as photography, painting and sculpture. He was born in Glasgow and studied at Glasgow School of Art for 2 years before he travelled down to London. Turning up in the office of Frank Martin, Head of sculpture at St.Martins where McLean was asked when he would like to start.

McLean was involved with a performance group ‘Nice style: the World’s First Pose Band’ their aim was to remove the personality of 1 individual artist and look into patterns of human behaviour. They did their first public appearance abroad in Norway in 1972 when they were not taken seriously, and mistaken for a rock and roll group. ‘ High Up On A Baroque Palazzo’ is their best known work. It was performed at the Garage in November 1974, 3 times a week for the month. They were shown training to get the perfect pose, demonstrating the way in which people project an image of climbing up the social scale and obtaining status worthy possessions. This performance was virtually the end of ‘Nice Style’

The piece that really interested me was his pose work for plinths, it was made as a ‘ version ‘ of the performance of that name that McLean made at the Situation Gallery in 1971. He re-enacted a number of poses which resembled Henry Moore’s reclining nude figures. In the performance he balanced on 3 plinths while recreating the poses. These poses were photographed and later presented as an image. The piece was a parody on much of the traditional sculpture and also implied that the artists appearance was his greatest achievement. I thought this was quite an interesting concept as I was looking at my body and how it responded to the area around it, I liked how McLean had removed the sculpture completly placing his body amongst the plinths making the image purely about his body.

Just found out that Alan has actually met McLean which I think is pretty cool. Confirmed my thought that he is a total character.