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.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Collage through the times
Pablo Picasso 'Glass and Bottle of Suze' 1912Collage
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
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
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.
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.
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.
Monday, March 15, 2010
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)
Photography Reborn: Image Making in the Digital Era by Jonathan
Sunday, March 14, 2010
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