Conceptual Portrait: My Face For One Week

When contemplating self-expression, I believe that the manner in which we present ourselves to the world can take on various forms. Our bodies serve as vessels for our thoughts and emotions. For many individuals, makeup is a tool that enables us to express ourselves externally. Personally, I view makeup as a means of highlighting my internal confidence and enhancing my features to feel more self-assured. There is a symbolic element to this practice as I remove my makeup at the end of each day with a wipe. Each wipe represents a day in my life, and the amount of makeup removed reflects the level of confidence or desire to feel special I had for that day. While these wipes are individual pieces, together they represent how our internal qualities manifest in our external appearance. I hope that even those who do not wear makeup can relate to this idea of self-awareness in how we present ourselves to others in the world.

Stella Ella Ola

This is a recorded audio of my roommates and I playing “Stella, Ella, Ola”, a clapping game played by many throughout my childhood. There were 5 females playing. Within the audio, you can hear the girls singing the song with an underlying consistent clapping rhythm throughout. Players were asked to sit in a circle and overlay their hands. When the players count down from 5 at the end of the song, the player’s hand that gets clapped is the one that is eliminated. The game ends when there is only one player left. I asked that we play this game on the floor, and for the participants to sing what they could remember. You can hear the shuffling on the carpet and subtle laughter throughout the game, all things that brought me back to the nostolgic feeling of what playing this game was like as a child. This piece is intended to make the listener feel a sense of nostalgia while listening to the recording, potentially even making them feel like they are in the room playing with us.

A Kilometre in my Student House

1 kilometre. 1000 metres. 100,000 centimetres. We walk them, run them, transport them on wheels, in the air, or perhaps on a track. Over the past 3 years of my life, I have thought about where a lot of my unnoticed kilometres lie; in my own student house. This is a place where I have had experienced some of the happiest days of my life, and the saddest days of my life. This is a place where I have danced for hours, and also stressfully paced around before writing my exam. I walk around the kitchen putting together some of the best meals I have ever made. I walk around my bedroom getting ready for the bar, stressfully yet eagerly between my closet and makeup desk. I walk across the living room to reenact a funny situation that happened on the weekend. The walking in this house is not just a dirty pair of socks after 1000 meters on my feet, but it is a literal walk down memory lane. Perhaps maybe a wake-up call to wash and vacuum the floors, but I will not remember my dirty floors, I will remember the situations and memories that got them to this point.

Making Buttons

My One Kilometre Journey Inspired by Marina Abramović

I was inspired to do this piece after examining Marina Abramović’s work. I was intrigued how she used her body in her art and tested the limits of her physical endurance. I thought about using my own body to measure one kilometre, wondering what it would be like to feel every metre of that journey. 

I started my journey at a local park, laying down my outstretched body to mark the two metres. I placed a red stick over my head so I could mark the next two metres. I performed the process a total of five hundred times to achieve a one-kilometre journey. My husband, Tom Bishop, documented the event using Stop Motion on an iPad. Later, I inputted the document into iMovie and then formatted it on YouTube.

I was surprised how very long one kilometre is. I appreciated how tactile the experience was – feeling stones, bushes, gravel, and mud under my body. There were some sweet moments too – like looking up at birds, tree branches, and planes overhead. I wished I could have an extra camera to film from that perspective too. Another project maybe… 

One Feat Three Ways

Creating this series reminded me of the video that we saw in class of the woman eating cherries. The first few mouthfuls seem like pure delight… but the task appears increasingly difficult the longer she eats. It was like that when we filmed this video. At the beginning, I felt the delighted surprise and deep satisfaction of blowing that perfect bubble. It brought back happy memories from childhood, eating bubble gum with a friend. However, the longer we chewed, the harder the task became; we ran out of the ‘good’ bubble gum; our jaws started getting tired; and we got tired. Like Diane says, sometimes art is hard. But even though it’s hard, it is still worth doing and admittedly can still be a lot of fun.

The Loop: The Perfect Bubble ….

The One-Shot: Hubba Bubba

Each bubble blown is unpredictable and temporal – and a beautiful little sculpture on its own…

The Sequence: PoP

This was my favourite film. It felt very intimate to do this film; we were physically close and at times our bubbles touched. It felt especially poignant given our hyper awareness of physical proximity during COVID. There was a lot of unpredictability doing this piece. Could we blow a perfect bubble? What would happen when they touched? And when the bubbles did touch, there was something subversive about sharing chewed bubble gum; it felt like a special connection to share the gum with a friend, throwing away conventional ideas about hygiene and the proper way to behave.

Audio Project: You’re so smart. You’re so clever.

Praise is something that many people have heard and given. It is something that is culturally engrained, a social nicety intended to be positive and affirming. I often find myself sometimes mindlessly uttering praises throughout my day. Sometimes it is unconsciously said and other times it pops out when I want to be positive but feel lost as to what to say. Yet, when receiving praise, I am sometimes reminded how meaningless the words are. Or, I feel confused as to what the speaker’s real intention.

This audio piece is intended to comment about the giving and receiving praise. I emptied the power of my words by reading them in alphabetical order using a monotone voice.

Trip to the Power Plant: Brenda Draney

I have been thinking a lot about Brenda Draney’s exhibit, Drink from the river. She examines the complex nature of intimacy, referencing her own memories and experiences. I find it fascinating how Draney explores how meanings of these memories can shift and even the memory itself can not always be completely recalled. The viewer is invited to use their own interpretations when viewing her deliberately unfinished canvases. Sometimes, there are noticeable corrections to the paintings, creating a halo-like effect above the portrait. On one of her works, the canvas has not been stretched tight, causing a ripply sensation like the wobbly effects of a memory. Her work makes me consider just how much memory can wobble and morph over time.

Zavitz Gallery: Better late than never

Sarah Fabrizi stresses the importance of experimentation and risk-taking in her body of work. She is pushing herself to try something different, trying new techniques in every painting. I admire the confidence not only in her words, but in her bold markings and colour palette. In her artist statement, she relates how her pursuit of art has come at the end of her undergraduate degree. Fabrizi’s work resonated deeply within me. I realize that my own artistic studies at Guelph have also been two years of experimentation and risk-taking. I have tried new forms of expression such as video, audio, sculpture, and printmaking. Even in the areas of painting and drawing where I have some experience, I have been wildly changing and experimenting with style and colour and form. Like Fabrizi, I have come to study art later but as she states “better late than never”.

University of Guelph Art Gallery

Last week our class took a trip to the University of Guelph’s art gallery. The exhibits were very thought-provoking. I found Insoon Ha’s installation, Dirige, especially moving. Dirige was inspired by the isolation and grief experienced by Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns and deaths of people who were close to her including her father and a friend. At the same time, information was being released in the media about the discovery of bodies at the residential schools. It reminded me of my own feelings of isolation and grief at this time. This installation acknowledges these enormity of feelings, offering a space for grief and mourning. Each sculptured head is created as unique and different. Sometimes when we hear of loss in the media, these deaths are thought of collectively. Ha insists in this installation that each life lost is worthy of honouring and remembering.

Conceptual Project: Pythagorean Theorem in Five Minutes

Feat: Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem Explained and Understood in Five Minutes

Mathematics is my son’s love language. There is nothing more that he loves than to explain to others a difficult mathematical concept. The challenge that I face is that mathematics is not a language that I understand or speak very well. I often struggle to understand. However, the trying is the important part because I want to connect with him.

For the purposes of this conceptual project, I set the task for Jack to explain a challenging mathematical concept in just five minutes (usually his explanations are closer to 40 minutes). Jack chose to surprise me with the proof behind the pythagorean theorem, something he thought would be manageable to accomplish in five minutes. This is a video about building connection through language and relationship, despite the challenge of the set time limit.

University of Guelph Studio Tours

This afternoon, the MFA and Specialized Studio Students opened their studio doors to the public. Wow! It was such a great experience to see and talk to the students about their work. I was especially excited to Samuelle Grande’s work. Samuelle has a very exciting colour palette and brushwork style. I was fascinated to hear how she worked on larger canvases. Although they look like they were painted in a short time period, each one took her around three months. She often puts away work, and then pulls it out later to see the canvas with a fresh set of eyes.

It was also very interesting to hear about the specialized studio courses. Every student that I talked to spoke passionately about being in the program, and was excited to talk about their works.

Tatoo Party!

Big thank you to the Experimental 2/3 studio class. It was so much fun to see your tatoos and put them on!

Artist Multiple: Buttons

I decided to do something intimate and personal for my button project, printmaking art work using my own body. Each button holds work that is personal and one of a kind. The sensual pleasure of touching the paper used is enhanced by using watercolour paper with no plastic covering. These buttons could be worn as special occasion, to be handled with care and treasured. Alternatively, they could go out and be exposed to the elements, celebrating their temporal nature like kisses and bodies.

Read My Lips

This button series was inspired by by Joyce Wieland’s O Canada (1970). I touched my lips to each button as I made the sounds of the phrases – I love you, Hey sexy, Kiss me, No. Each button in the phrase could be worn as a multiple or on its own, passing on the kisses to the viewer.

Boob Buttons

I was inspired to create my second body printmaking button work from Yves Kline’s Anthropometries series. I decided to reclaim Kline’s work, printing my own breasts. The nipples look like eyes staring back at you, reminiscent of some of the paintings like Manet’s Olympia where the naked female directly confronts the gaze of the viewer. I choose to do some boobs in blue, as Kline did. Some are also in red, referring to how breasts can be different temperatures for a variety of reasons! This piece became a personal celebration about my own breasts.

Art is Har….

I couldn’t resist ending my blog with this button. It is a little bit funny; I was totally unaware when creating it that the words would be backwards or that the type would not all fit in. Art is like that – it’s hard, full of trial and error and sometimes things don’t quite turn out the way that you might expect. But there is beauty and realness to the trying, which can also sometimes be reflected in the product. A big thank you to our instructor, Diane, and to all of you for opening my mind further to what art can be.

Monday:

Introductions

Syllabus

Tour of lab and equipment

Class blog – invites, demo post

Lecture: Intro to Conceptual Art

Intro to Conceptual Art and art forms we explore in Experimental Studio:

Assignment: Make a KILOMETRE

Make a KILOMETRE*

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Bring in a KILOMETRE next week.

Document a kilometre. Walk it. Sculpt it. Talk it. Write it. Draw it. Video record it. Perform it. Get your mom to perform it. Conjure a kilometre in any media.

It could be a walk down the street, a path down an intestine, a line going up into the air, a kilometre’s worth of rocks. It can be a kilometre made of chewing gum. Made of telephone conversations. Made of complaints. Made of a walk with a cat. Made with light. It can be a distance between two points. It can be imagined, traced, documented, listed, performed, evidenced on the bottom of your shoe, rolled up into a ball.

Make sure to measure your kilometre in some way, and be prepared to discuss your process, and justify how it is precisely a kilometre.

You have up to 5 minutes next week to present your kilometre to the class.

Bring it, or show us documentation of it.

IT MUST BE PRECISELY A KILOMETRE – EXPLAIN HOW YOU KNOW IT IS!

Due for discussion on MONDAY next week.

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Wednesday:

Marina Abramovic Watch the film: The Artist is Present, Marina Abramovic Popcorn and discussion on Performance Art at the museum.

CONCEPTUAL ART

“Conceptual art is art for which the idea (or concept) behind the work is more important than the finished art object. It emerged as an art movement in the 1960s and the term usually refers to art made from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.” (From the Tate)

Some works are reflections on language and semiotics:

Artworks that ask us to think again about what we are really looking at, to be aware of form, signification, illusion, and ideas…

Which one is the chair? Are any of them chairs? What else in the museum is what it appears to be?

“A chair sits alongside a photograph of a chair and a dictionary definition of the word chair. Perhaps all three are chairs, or codes for one: a visual code, a verbal code, and a code in the language of objects, that is, a chair of wood. But isn’t this last chair simply . . . a chair? Or, as Marcel Duchamp asked in his Bicycle Wheel of 1913, does the inclusion of an object in an artwork somehow change it? If both photograph and words describe a chair, how is their functioning different from that of the real chair, and what is Kosuth’s artwork doing by adding these functions together? Prodded to ask such questions, the viewer embarks on the basic processes demanded by Conceptual art.

“The art I call conceptual is such because it is based on an inquiry into the nature of art,” Kosuth has written. “Thus, it is . . . a working out, a thinking out, of all the implications of all aspects of the concept ‘art,’ . . . Fundamental to this idea of art is the understanding of the linguistic nature of all art propositions, be they past or present, and regardless of the elements used in their construction.” Chasing a chair through three different registers, Kosuth asks us to try to decipher the subliminal sentences in which we phrase our experience of art.
“The art I call conceptual is such because it is based on an inquiry into the nature of art,” Kosuth has written. “Thus, it is . . . a working out, a thinking out, of all the implications of all aspects of the concept ‘art,’ ” From MOMA

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Some works use text as an image, and to convey ideas in interchangeable forms:

As a gesture of peace activism during the Vietnam war, Yoko Ono and John Lennon created this graphic image/declaration – blaring like a headline – to provoke thought. It has been re-made in various forms, in different locations, including non-gallery locations. Text is both an image, and an idea. And the artists explored the effects of bringing artwork outside of galleries, and made it circulate in the mainstream as billboards, newspapers, cheap, accessible posters/buttons etc.

Is there an original artwork here? What is the most important aspect of the work? Who is the work for? What does it mean if it’s copied and multiplied?

Jenny Holzer: A contemporary artist who uses text in public that circulates in different media/locations

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Some works are produced with a system, or even a set of instructions – and the final realization of the work is less important than the idea:

For Sol Lewitt, the IDEA is “the machine that makes the art”

“In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work.  When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman.” SL from Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.

“Incomplete Open Cubes demonstrates an artistic technique integral to the art of the 1960s: seriality. Generally speaking, serial art is generated through the application of premeditated rules or plans. In this case, LeWitt systematically explored the 122 ways of “not making a cube, all the ways of the cube not being complete,” per the artist. LeWitt might have taken all the necessary steps to realize each of the 122 solutions to his query, as seen here, but the work can hardly be understood as finished in the conventional sense. It would be more precise to say, according to LeWitt, that  Incomplete Open Cubes “[runs] its course,” ending abruptly. Moreover, to the extent that the cubes frame and, by extension, incorporate elements from the surrounding space, they muddy the boundary between art and world.” From the Met Museum

Erwin Wurm: A contemporary artist who uses instructions for an audience/performers to interpret

Erwin Wurm – see: Public Delivery article

What kinds of everday materials does Wurm use? Do you normally associate these objects/environments with the museum?

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Art that is made with a system

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO49s8WlUis

I will not make any more boring art – John Baldessari

Micah Lexier

39 Wood Balls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0YslbcvdXo

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What is the formula, task or recipe that these works begin with? Does it matter if they are impossible to realize perfectly? How might you compare this way of working to scientific methods?

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Institutional Critique, and art that is self-aware, self-reflexive

The Baldessari print is based on an installation created at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, but not by John Baldessari’s hand. “As there wasn’t enough money for me to travel to Nova Scotia, I proposed that the students voluntarily write ‘I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art’ on the walls of the gallery, like punishment. To my surprise they covered the walls.” Those same students made this print, but Baldessari wasn’t at the workshop when the print was made. In both cases, Baldessari gave scant instructions to the students from thousands of miles away, and he was not present to supervise, raising questions of authorship and the role of the artist.

Baldessari points out that language has made-up rules that we all agree to follow. Conventional notions of art may be as ingrained, passed down, and unquestioned as rules of language, but artists like Baldessari aimed to show that they are equally arbitrary, and open to interpretation. Baldesssari described his conceptual works as “what I thought art should be, not what somebody else would think art would be. You know, received wisdom, what you would get in school. And so a lot of my work was about questioning this received wisdom.” (From MOMA)

Piero Manzoni may not have lived to be 30, but he produced one of art history’s funniest gestures: Merda d’artista (Artist’s Shit), a 1961 project for which the Italian artist supposedly canned his own excrement. Reports from more recent years claim that some of the cans may have been filled with plaster, not poop, but Manzoni’s anti-art moves extended beyond that one conceit to others including abstract paintings made without paint. (From Art News)

From the article: https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/checklist/maurizio-cattelans-golden-toilet-in-the-time-of-trump

Enter Cattelan’s “America” (2016), the 18-karat gold, fully functioning toilet that was installed at the Guggenheim for nearly a year in a long-term, sculptural performance of interactive art. Like all of Cattelan’s most complex works, this sculpture is laden with possible meanings. There is the art-historical trajectory, from Duchamp and Manzoni to more contemporary artists like John Miller and Wim Delvoye, that traffics in scatological iconography. The equation between excrement and art has long been mined by neo-Marxist thinkers who question the relationship between labor and value. Expanding upon this economic perspective, there is also the ever-increasing divide in our country between the wealthy and the poor that threatens the very stability of our culture. Cattelan explicitly comments on this fact by creating what he called “one-percent art for the ninety-nine percent.” The gold toilet—a cipher for the excesses of affluence—was available for all to use in the privacy of one of the Guggenheim’s single-stall, gender-neutral bathrooms. More than one hundred thousand people waited patiently in line for the opportunity to commune with art and with nature.

Yet it was the Trump reference that resonated so loudly during the sculpture’s time at the Guggenheim. When the artist proposed the sculpture in mid-2015, Donald Trump had just announced his bid for the presidency. It was inconceivable at the time that this business mogul, he of the eponymous gilded tower, could actually win the White House. When the sculpture came off view on September 15, Trump had been in office for 238 days, a term marked by scandal and defined by the deliberate rollback of countless civil liberties, in addition to climate-change denial that puts our planet in peril.

That Trump is synonymous with golden toilets was proven not at the Guggenheim but in a recent satirical pop-up “exhibition” in midtown Manhattan staged by Trevor Noah of the Daily Show that he called the “Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library.” In addition to framed tweet storms, visitors were treated to a “tour” of the Oval Office, where they could don a Trump wig and pose with an, albeit fake, golden toilet.

Cattelan’s “America,” like all his greatest work, is at once humorous and searing in its critique of our current realities. Though crafted from millions of dollars’ worth of gold, the sculpture is actually a great leveler. As Cattelan has said, “Whatever you eat, a two-hundred-dollar lunch or a two-dollar hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise.” Art-wise, the work reached a certain pinnacle of acceptability—or notoriety—when it was featured on the cover of the New York Post (September 15, 2016) with the headline, “We’re #1 (and #2!),” and an article titled, “The Guggenheim Wants You to Crap All Over ‘America.’ ” However, Cattelan’s anticipation of Trump’s America will, perhaps, be the lasting imprint of the sculpture’s time at the Guggenheim. (from The Guggenheim Foundation)

Maurizio Cattelan – and the controversies of the art fair banana: