23rd March - The Gaze

This week we studied The Gaze which put basically is looking at looking. The Gaze largely explores feminism and we focused mainly on the male gaze. The example of the male gaze we saw first was a great introduction to helping me understand it, it was a photograph by Robert Doisneau called The Oblique Glance.
The image portrays a woman talking to her husband about a painting, but he isn't paying attention to her rather he is staring at a painting of a nude woman. This represents the male gaze because we see what he sees, not what she sees, it is in his point of view. In this way the joke seems to be on her as she is oblivious to what he is doing, but it also catches him in the act. Tessa mentioned a quote: "all dirty jokes are at the woman's expense" which is very directly about feminism and also makes this seemingly small moment very stereotypical and kind of a big deal as we can only imagine how she would feel if she knew.

The next image we saw was by Barbara Kruger, Your Gaze Hits the Side of my Face, which linked really well with the Hitchcock film we watched.

This image shows a literal representation of women being objectified in art (a bust of a woman). Because her face is side on she doesn't get to return the gaze, so she has no choice, therefore it is the male gaze. It seems that in art women are always the recipient of a males gaze, his desire, interest etc.

This image with the words Your Gaze Hits the Side of my Face links to the sequence we watched in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The film is about a San Francisco detective who investigates the strange activities of an old friend's wife, all the while becoming dangerously obsessed with her, in the sequence we watched he is trailing her, watching her and we see everything in his point of view. We as an audience see his gaze, we are looking at him looking at her and we only see her profile. We don't see what she is looking at unless he looks at it afterwards, even the music is in tune with his emotions as he follows her and discovers things about her. Something I noticed also was that although she is the subject under his gaze, she is the one doing the leading.

16th March - Unpacking My Library

This week we went to Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts to see the 'Unpacking My Library' exhibition, it basically explores the idea of collecting things, the process of collecting and the content of a collection. It is based on Walter Benjamin's text and therefore addresses his argument that in a collection you can see traits of the collector revealed, what the order and disorder can reveal about the gatherer. He writes "what I am really concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection" (http://www.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/benj-bookcoll.htm) Different approaches to collecting were on display by different artists, the most interesting one to me was 'Found Time: Big Ben', an ongoing project by Elizabeth McAlpine that attempts to represent every minute of a twelve hour period through existing postcards of Big Ben (the nickname for the great bell of the clock at the north end of the Palace of Westminster in London). By 'existing' I mean that she uses one of two approaches to collecting, there is the artist that explores collecting and the artist that reflects on existing objects. At first glance you can't tell that the work is assembled from postcards, they just look like photographs under glass. When you get closer and see that it is postcards it becomes much more fascinating, you take into consideration the time and effort it took to collect them all and find out the exact minute of the day the photograph was taken. Also the photos, though of the same thing, all look different, one that I noticed and decided was my favourite was one taken at night and the clock was glowing with yellow light and the clouds behind it looked very dark and sinister, the Gothic architecture made the photo look very cool. It was a very interesting and very attractive way of collecting. Admittedly I didn't fully understand this collecting concept, there are obviously a lot more layers to it to explore which is why it is its own exhibition.
What i do understand of collecting is that it can be very much a form of art in the sense that it reflects the artist, a painting can reflect its artist by the technique and even the subject as can a collection of objects, texts, etc. There are different approaches to collecting, meaning different mediums. The process of collecting is always going to be different and it could take ten years or ten days.

9th March - How to Look at a Painting

I loved Justin Paton's 'Ten Good Reasons' because the way he reads a painting is quite inspiring, it makes me want to have his words as my own. He is so in depth and so passionate, his passion for art really comes through. You can tell when reading it that he knows what he is talking about, he writes about his top ten favourite artworks and ofcoarse why he likes them. He notes great things about them like actual painting techniques and how a certain painting can look almost 3-d from how well it is painted. He also talks about how the painting can generate ideas and concepts from the meaning behind them, the meaning of a painting can be just as alluring as the painting itself. I particularly like how in number 11 he talks about how "passion for a particular painting doesn't always have to be underwritten by a reason" and that there's nothing wrong with saying you like a painting just because.

So my top artworks are as follows:

1) Vjekoslav Nemesh, Blue Orchid

This is one of Nemesh's latest paintings and is absolutely gorgeous, the colours and technique are amazing, to be honest if I could paint like this my life would be complete. I absolutely love his work it is so passionate and dreamy an surreal, it isn't quite abstract but this technique really intrigues people. It is so unique, he paints how he feels, he doesn't have to think about any reason why he should paint what he paints but does because he feels it. Which I believe is a great state of mind for an artist armed with paint to be in. I have tried his technique of painting which is scraping paint onto a canvas and using dry brushing to blend the colours softly together, but as evident in this painting he sometimes leaves the dry brushing which makes the painting very sharp and contrasts the colours. I mostly love the theme of fantasy it presents, like a getaway you can escape into it.

2) Audrey Kawasaki, Hyakki Yakou

Hyakki Yakou, Night Parade, is a great example of Kawasaki's work. I love her style of mixing elements of beauty and serene, pouty expressions with disturbing images of animals, objects or like in this one, monsters. In others I like she has incorporated skeletons of animals or a gruesome human heart in the transparent chest of a beautiful young woman. I like the dark theme but also her medium, she uses oil and graphite on wood. Personally I love this kind of art with its disturbing quality, it really interests me and how it contrasts with the beautiful aspect. In this respect I must mention her motif of bird wings, she incorporates birds and bird wings alot which adds to the beauty. I have a thing for wings which is why I used dreaming of flight for my theme for year 13 art last year, so Kawasaki was a perfect artist model for that and I still look up all her new art now.

3) Victoria Frances, Angel de la muerte

Victoria Frances, again, paints beautiful women. This time though, she portrays not a disturbing quality but a dark, classically gothic quality. It is a fantasy escape again which attracts me, I love the dark theme, it's beautiful and inspiring. This kind of art is also very contemporary and probably more likeable to teenagers and young adults. It also kind of goes along with this dark, vampire, werewolf, van helsing fad going around. (Not Twilight, I don't like Twilight) And also this painting depicts angel wings which definately makes me love it, the kitten is a cute too though I do fail to see its relevance. This artist is definately one of thoses artists that doesn't paint to be deep and meaningful, rather she paints women in gothic, corset dress clothing with long, beautiful hair in gothic castles, as vampires, as witch's, as voodoo priestesses etc... and turns them into picture books as stories, she even takes photos of herself and paints herself.Basically i like her work because it is beautiful, her painting is flawless and I love the gothic theme.

4) Zindy S. D. Nielsen, Her Protector

Zindy is a very romance based artist, alot of her drawings are very romantic like this one. I love the way they are holding each other close, by looking at this you know he really is her protector, like the angel he is. What I love most about her drawings is how real they look, she does do some drawings where she brings in the dark element and she has alot of drawings that show emotion in facial expressions and poses. I really admire her drawing skills mostly and how they so closely resemble their photographic counterparts.

5) Lara Jade, Smoke and Ashes

Lara Jade is a portrait photographer I discovered on deviantart.com, she does commercial photography as well as conceptual, fashion and beauty. I love her fashion photography because of the beautiful use of light, costume, makeup and scenery, it is something I am very interested in doing. This photograph i love especially, I love black and white portraits and i love the smoky texture of the image. i get the impression she is exhaling smoke against glass so because of her netted hat I can picture her in a smoky bar in the past smoking and drinking brandy. It can be a cozy image or a sad one as she is alone.

This kind of photograph is something I would like to experiment with, perhaps create a series of black and white portraits trying to convey this smokey bar kind of atmosphere.

2nd March - Fast Food Nation

For the first week of contextual studies we started to explore the idea of life being 'fractured.' An example Grant used was that in the past there would be one person to do a whole job, like making a chair from scratch, adding cushions and sending it to the customer but in today's society there would be different people trained to do different stages of the job so that one person wouldn't know how to do any other part of the job except their own. This concept of a 'fractured' world could be described as a machine, which is shown quite obviously in the film 'Fast Food Nation' directed by Richard Linklater. The film is a mix between drama and documentary, on the film's official website (www.foxsearchlight.com/fastfoodnation) a subtitle reads "Do you want lies with that?" which is great comical representation of the film's story:
'Fast Food Nation' exposes the fast food industry as a lying, ignorant, evil company that hides its faults and mistakes from the public and actually risks their health. When it becomes apparent that the meat used for Mickey's (a spin off of McDonalds and a link to real life) number one burger 'the big one' is tainted, Don Henderson who works as a marketing executive for Mickey's is sent to investigate. When he discovers it is true he ultimately chooses to keep these secrets as they are instead of exposing them because he thinks of how he and his family will fare if he talks. So this choice, among others made by other characters in the film, shows how choices we make impact life in different ways, it may affect a few people or a hundred. In the film, also, we see those physical and more literal examples of fracture, we see all the different departments of the slaughter house like "the kill floor" or "the gutting table" which are the different jobs required for one final goal. This is also evident in Mickey's, we see the chain of restaurants and their managers which are small-time compared to the marketing executives and the head honcho.

I actually found this film very interesting and not boring like apparently the rest of the class did. I liked the way it was made as a drama, I liked the character Don and his journey to find the truth and the confrontations he has with all the other characters. I also liked how it was part documentary, it didn't hold anything back and it showed you the real truth, the real tragedy of slaughter houses and what happens in between a live cow and a fast food burger. At the end when it shows the exact steps of the slaughter house, at the time I did think "ew yuck, that is terrible, horrible, I did not need to see that" but now I think "what would it be like if more people did see that?" so in this respect I believe that 'Fast Food Nation' would be an excellent film to be used to raise awareness about this industry and even encourage people to eat less fast food.
Just thinking about the treatment of the animals makes me sick, the way these modern slaughter houses run. All they care about is profit, that's actually it, their one goal is to make money. A giant working "machine" has no compassion. The actual book 'Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal' was written by an investigative journalist named Eric Schlosser, he describes what speaks to me most about this film, what makes me know that this is real and is happening right now: "The animals keep strolling up, oblivious to what comes next, and he stands over them and shoots. For eight-and-a-half hours, he just shoots. As I stand there, he misses a few times and shoots the same animal twice. As soon as the steer falls, a worker grabs one of its hind legs, shackles it to a chain, and the chain lifts the huge animal into the air. I watch the knocker knock cattle for a couple of minutes. The animals are powerful and imposing one moment and then gone in an instant, suspended from a rail, ready for carving. A steer slips from its chain, falls to the ground, and gets its head caught in one end of a conveyor belt. The production line stops as workers struggle to free the steer, stunned but alive, from the machinery. I've seen enough."