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.