Stick it y'all!!!

Stick It! an exhibition of collage works by Australian artists currently showing at the NGV Ian Potter Centre (Fed Square)! And it's free!
While you're around the city you may also like to check out Mangamorphosis, but hurry because it closes Saturday.

Collage through the times

Pablo Picasso 'Glass and Bottle of Suze' 1912

Collage

Pronunciation: \kə-ˈläzh, kȯ-, kō-\

Function: noun

Etymology: French, literally, gluing, from coller to glue, from colle glue, from Vulgar Latin *colla,kolla from Greek

Date: 1919

1 a : an artistic composition made of various materials (as paper, cloth, or wood) glued on a surface b : a creative work that resembles such a composition in incorporating various materials or elements
2 : the art of making collages
(http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/collage)

Raoul Hausman 'The Art Critic' 1919-1920

A thoroughly modern medium, collage expressed the characteristics of the 20th Century - immediacy, the mass media and capitalism - through creative process and concept. Collage, coming from the French term coller, meaning glue, paste or stick, is the construction of pictures through the pasting of torn images.

John Heartfield 'Adolf the Superman: Swallows Gold and Sprouts Junk' 1932

According to the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction, collage as an artform is much more than just simply making pictures. "It's a mode of perception, a multi-dimensional language with aesthetic implications that spans the histories of art, architecture, literature and music."

Kurt Schwitters 'The Proposal' 1942

Collage first emerged as a fine art medium in the form of papier colles, or pasted papers, from Cubists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Since, it has been an important medium throughout Modern art, showing up in Italian Futurism, Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Pop Art and Fluxus. Artists who worked in the collage medium included Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell; who asserted that art could be made from anything. Abtract Expressionsist artists, such as Robert Motherwell, were attracted to the medium to expand their practice in abstract painting (IMCSC 2005).

David Hockney 'Pearblossom Hwy, 11th-18th April, 1986, #2' 1986

Contemporary artists use collage, and the closely related assemblage and mixed media, to construct a visual representation of their world and experiences, by using found objects and objects closely bound to the everyday; which viewers make an immediate identification to.

Peter Lewis 'The Birth of the Information Age' no date

Peter Lewis 'Tiki Touring' no date

As a medium, collage blurs the boundaries or bridges the dichotomy between high and low art or pop art; text and image; figuration and abstraction; past and present; and two and three dimensions (ibid). According to media theorist Marshall McLuhan. collage effectively breaks down perspectivalism, while at the same time emphasises the disparity of images or objects it juxtaposes.

Martin Smith 'Teevee #13' 1999

A collage is not just a bunch of random things pasted together. It is important to consider conventional design elements and principles such as composition, line, shape, colour, form, texture, etc; and what the images and objects in the collage represent and the meaning they add to the work. So before cutting and pasting, have a clear understanding of the message you want to send to your audience and the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of the work.

Traditional collage and practice and digital collage practice share the same characteristics, both immediate and seemingly simple, yet potentially tedious and complex.

Natsuki Kimura 'Gone' 2000

Further Reading:

Greenberg, Clement. "Collage (The Pasted Paper Revolution)." Art News 57.5 (September 1958): 46-49, ff.

Rosenberg, Harold. "Collage: Philosophy of Put-Togethers." Art on the Edge. New York: Macmillan, 1975.

Barthes, Roland. "The Rhetoric of the Image." Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

Waldman, Diane. Collage, Assemblage and the Found Object. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992.

Wescher, Herta. Collage. Trans Robert E. Wolf. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1968.

Online resources for digital collage artists:
Ear Studio
Jonathon Baker
Natsuki Kimura

Photography Terms

Check out this online glossary of photographic terms and get familiar with them for next week's class... coz I'll be using them and I hope you're gonna know what I'm talking about!

ART PROPOSAL DUE SOON

Assessment 1 - proposal is due in soon! (Monday's class 29th March, Wednesday 31st March)
To help you in writing your proposal you may like to check out the Artists Foundation Resources for Artists, in particular How to write a proposal.

Genres and Contemporary Artists of Art Photography

List compiled from Bright, S. 2005, Art Photography Now, Thames and Hudson, UK.

Portraiture - Gillian Wearing, Hellen van Meene, Cindy Sherman, Tina Barney, Sam Taylor-Wood, Katy Grannan, Rineke Dijkstra.

Landscape - Elina Brotherus, Joel Sternfeld, Richard Misrach, Doug Aitken, Andreas Gursky, Dan Holdsworth.

Narrative - Gregory Crewdson, AES&F, Sarah Jones, Tracey Moffatt, Hannah Starkey, Bill Henson, Wang Quingsong, Jeff Wall.

Object - Laura Letinksky, Gabriel Orozco, Wolfgang Tillmans, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Thomas Demand, Vik Muniz, Zoe Leonard, Jean-Luc Moulene.

Fashion - Jonathan de Villiers, Craig McDean, Mert and Marcus, Camille Vivier, Corinne Day.

Document - Larry Sultan, Erwin Wurm, Martin Parr, Tacita Dean, Nan Goldin, Sophie Calle.

City - Melanie Manchot, Naoya Hatakeyama, Olivio Barbieri, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Thomas Struth.

WEEK 4 - Vision and Manipulation

Photography is constantly changing and hard to define. Its discursive and somewhat promiscuous nature has tended to confuse many people as to its status and value as an art form. The trouble is that it lends itself to many varied uses. We see photography in newspapers, surveillance, advertising campaigns and art galleries, and as fashion shots or family snaps. Meaning can slip and slide depending on context, and the fact that photography lacks any kind of unity and seems to have no intrinsic character makes the insistent cry of 'but is it art?' a constant refrain throughout its relatively short but complex history. Susan Bright 2005 'Art Photography Now', p. 7.

It is popular belief that the photograph was something to be believed, it was a moment frozen in time, an unquestionable product of authenticity. Photographs have never been evidence of absolute visual truth; double exposure and splicing, amongst other techniques, have been photographic processes since used to manipulate perception as early as the 19th Century.

Bright follows on by saying that the early reservations about photography has been exacerbated by the invention of digital technology, and now the question is not 'is it art?', but 'is it photography?' "One reason why digitization makes many observers uncomfortable is that it takes us away from reality and into the realm of fantasy, an area which at first seems at odds with a seemingly objective and descriptive medium. However, the photograph's role as a conveyer of 'truth' or as a trace of reality has long been contested; and photographs have always been manipulated" (ibid, p. 9).

Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) discusses the affect of modernity on the art making process, in particular the invention of photography, and how that has changed perception. He talks about the loss of the aura in art work that is reproducible, where authenticity and originality of a work of art cannot be reproduced with the image.

The Work of Art had an immense influence on artists working in the 1960s and 70s, such as Andy Warhol, Dan Graham and Robert Rauschenberg, who questioned photography's supposed evidence of reality; and as a result challenged aesthetic conventions.

Postmodernism "exposed how photography was used and understood as a medium, as a material and as a message; ... a work was no longer seen as the creation of a single 'author' who retained the monopoly on its meaning but as the product of a certain context with a multiplicity of meanings" (ibid p. 13).

Further Reading:

Bright, S. 2005, Art Photography Now, Thames and Hudson, UK.

la Grange, A. 2005 Basic Critical Theory for Photographers, Elsevier, Burlington. (electronic resource available from VU library)

Masters of Photography

Australian Photography and Photographers: Contemporary Australian Photography By Anne Marsh

Photography Reborn: Image Making in the Digital Era by Jonathan

Online Photoshop Tutorials

Photoshop CS4 Tutorials
Lynda

Very handy!!

Captain Amerika!

Check out the wonderful work of Mark Amerika. He has heaps and heaps of examples of what you could do with your mobile phone, from video art, to whole installations and an entire feature film filmed on a mobile phone.

WEEK 3 - txt, pix & mre: Mobile Phone Art

There are so many different approaches to mobile phone art; the mobile phone can be used to create, present or distribute digital art. Here are some great links to the various types of mobile phone art that has been created over the past decade.
Mobilising Phone Art
CELL PHONE: Art and the Mobile Phone
Portable Worlds
Future Screen Mobile
Dialtones (A Telesymphony)
Sleepy Urbanite

Some ideas for mobile phone art you may want to explore:
Poetry
Haiku (Japanese poetry)
SMS
MMS
Flash SMS/MMS
Video art
Short film
ASCII art
Collaborative piece
Game
GPS
Music
Ringtone
Sound
Light
Photography
The spoken word

And themes or issues you might want to address may include:
Privacy
Language
Space
Surveillance
Communication
Technology
Globalisation
Community

You may want to create the artwork on your phone or on the computer (i.e. in Illustrator) and then bluetooth it to your phone. You may want to create send the artwork to all of your peers, display it on your phone, use your phone as a part of a sculpture... there are so, so many possibilities! GO WILD!!!

LTR HDS @ 1000 pound bend

Just to flow on from our tutes on using text in your art, you might want to check out the current exhibition running at 1000 Pound Bend, 361 Little Lonsdale Street, Melbs. (Gorgeous little cafe to boot.) Artists include Graeme Base (from Animalia fame) and Ghostpatrol. Check it y'all!

MORE TEXT ART LINKS

Check these links out for some more text art ideas and inspiration:

Beautiful text art

ASCII

Text as Art Blog

More to come I'm sure...

WEEK 2 - THE TEXT EFFECT

Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics program, which means that, because it relies on vectors to mathematically describe lines and shapes, you can change or modify graphics without compromising quality or clarity. It is great for graphic style artworks, logos and in particular text; which we will explore in this lesson.

Please refer to the online help manual for Adobe Illustrator CS4, this will be a particularly useful resource not only for today's class, but as you continue to create and finish off your works for the semester (particularly if you are considering printing off large graphics, etc).

Before heading straight on into creating text art, have a look at the drawing basics. Learning the specificities of drawing in Illustrator will aid in you being able to produce more creative text art. For example, your text can follow a line or be in the form of a shape, but you need to know how to create a line or shape before you can float the text. Along with the basic lines, you can use the pen or pencil tool, and even edit, move or manipulate the lines you have already drawn (known as paths) using various methods.

You have several options of adding text to your artwork. Select the Type tool [T]. You can add point type, by clicking anywhere on your page, and begin typing. The text field expands as you type, and will only return to a new line if you direct it to by hitting the enter/return key.

Area type allows you to create boundary (usually square or rectangular) in which the text will wrap into. If you hold down the Type button you will have the option of selecting the area type tool. If you now click to being to type inside a shape or object, the text will wrap to the object.

Type on a path allows you to follow an existing line or path that you have already drawn within the artwork.

Continue to be creative with text by changing the colour, rotating, duplicating, mirroring, and all sorts of effects. Just select the text with the direct selection tool [A] and experiment with different tools from the tool box or effects from the menu bar.

CONCEPT

After experimenting with the different effects and looks of the text, now you must create an artwork based on text. But what will you do?

Do you want to write a poem, Ern Malley style?

Do you want to concentrate of the aesthetic values of individual letters or words?

Do you want to make bold or political statements, a la Jenny Holzer or Barbara Kruger?

And be sure that the way you use text and illustrate it reflects what you want to say, the message you want to convey and what you want your artwork to mean.

The Written Word - approaches to creative use of text

The Angry Penguins, an Australian Modernist artistic and literature movement , controversially shook the conservative Australian art scene in the 1940s. Artists Sydney Nolan, Joy Hester, Arthur Boyd and Albert Tucker were influenced by the European modernists trends of more emotionally expressive creativity, such as surrealism, expressionism and French Symbolism.

A literary journal of the same name, published from 1940 through to 1946, espoused modernism and internationalism, poetry by Dylan Thomas, Mallarme, Proust, Kafka and Faulkner, and was championed by the Angry Penguin poets, such as Charles Jury, Max Harris, Paul G. Pfeiffer and D.B. 'Sam' Kerr.

In 1944 Angry Penguins published Ern Malley's poetry, sparking greatest literary hoax of the Twentieth Century. Read the full story here.

Ernest Malley was a fictional poet born out of two Sydeny poet's, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, loathing and disdain of modernist and surreal poetry, such as that published in the Max Harris edited Angry Penguin journal. McAuley and Stewart's approach of haphazardly lifting random lines or words from books and papers, deliberate bad verse and confusion, resulted 16 nonsense poems, 'written' by Malley. Three of his works can be found here.

The premise of this 'experiment' was to expose whether the Angry Penguins had any literary credentials, and could distinguish between real poetry and absolute drivel. Evidently, in McAuley and Stewart's eyes, they failed when they published The Darkening Ecliptic, the life work of poet Ern Malley.

This was later exposed as a hoax, and resulted in the widespread humiliation of Harris, the Angry Penguins and was a major setback for modernism in the Australian arts.

However, it is now acknowledged that Malley's poetry has artistic merit, and perhaps the interventionist act of Malley's creators was in fact one of the greatest pieces of modernist art of all time; which in turn just proved themselves 'wrong'.

Facebook groups you may like to join

Here are some groups you may like to join or pages that you might like to become fans of on Facebook, which are great contemporary art resources! Enjoy!

Australian Contemporary Artist Network
unMagazine
Art World
Centre for Contemporary Photography
National Gallery of Victoria
Seventh Gallery
Footscray Community Art Centre
Bus Projects
Melbourne Fringe
Art News
emaj
Artshub
Artabase

Welcome to Intro to Digital Art at Victoria University

Hello one and all,

This blog has been set up as an important resource tool for you guys to refer to through out this semester. I will be posting websites of interest, articles, images and notes and reminders for class. So it is important that you refer to this website regularly!

I will also provide links to everyone's digital art journal (both Monday and Wednesday classes), so you can interact with your fellow students, provide feedback, share links etc.

Occasionally, I may start a discussion topic, and would appreciate your contribution.

Happy blogging!

:) Jenna