May 11th - Materiality, Surface, Affect, Site

This week we watched a slide where we saw some artists who worked with materiality like:

Eve Armstrong, Run Off, 2007

The materials used in this were metal shelving, metal display hooks, clotheshorse, metal storage racks, plastic filling trays, plastic storage stacks, pegboard, chrome towel rail, chrome stool base, chrome rubbish bin, plastic rubbish bin, plastic bucket, Perspex tube, carpet, plastic plant pots, carpet protector, Tupperware lids, plastic bowls, towels, ice pack, and a pot plant (Rhipsalis Capilliformis).

She has a passion for what other people might think of as rubbish, she sees beauty in it and she also likes to work with layers and different colour palettes. I like how in Run Off the colours are greys and blues with a hint of green. I also like how it can appear as a still life, for example because of the objects used it could be the life of an office worker?

I mostly am intrigued by the materials and how they are the work without anything else, they aren't glamorized or sitting on something though it would be interesting to know if she did place these objects in those positions on purpose and if so, why? Perhaps it is a relation to her other work Spill, 2005 as this has a similar shape in the way it is sitting, with objects moving outward in a pathway at the bottom.

A good example of surface was:

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, 1967

From www.webexhibits.org/colorart/marilyns:

"In August 62 I started doing silkscreens. I wanted something stronger that gave more of an assembly line effect. With silkscreening you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple, quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it. When Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face the first Marilyns."

By screening these famous images you see all these different effects, themes, but also what was contemporary. This is pop art. When we focus on the flat surface of the prints we see him moving away from the traditional realistic three-dimensional oil paintings and is instead showing difference in two-dimensional. This is the only observation I have explored of surface as I don't think work being literally 3-d would have made these works memorable, they would have just been classed as sculpture.

Affect in art is what I came to understand as a sensory experience, so I chose this artwork to look at:

Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field, 1977

400 custom-made, stainless steel lightning rods planted in the ground, stretched for miles, and only six people are allowed to see it at a time.

First of all, you know this is a sensory experience because the viewer is in the work of art. In New Mexico, you have to stay in a log cabin so you are actually living in it. Seeing it also inspires ideas, like how it looks like something from a science-fiction movie or how the landscape looks like a conventional western. The picture it makes when lightning actually strikes is, as can be seen on the left, extraordinary and if you were there I imagine seeing this and being so close to it would encourage strong feelings of excitement, fear, it would be very thrilling to see it by stormlight. I think it would most certainly give me goosebumps. Also it would probably be quite loud when the lightning strikes.

For site I think that the site of the artwork is important because it relates to the artwork itself, it is part of the context. The most interesting artwork that had an important site to me was:

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1971

Smithson reportedly chose this site, the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah, because of the blood-red colour of the water and industrial remnants from nearby Golden Spike National Historic Site. The spiral appears and reappears as the water level rises and falls and ever since it was made it has been an icon.

Smithson wrote that the jetty jutting from the shore was ''the edge of the sun, a boiling curve, an explosion rising into a fiery prominence.''