Monthly Archives: March 2020

Exercise 2.5: Text in Art

Posted on by
Reply

For this exercise I made notes while taking a walk one lunchtime.  I then used these notes to make a piece of work using text as its basis.

A Walking Meditation

I often take a meditative walk where I take regular breaths in time with my steps and be consciously aware of what is around me, so I used one of these walks as. The starting point for this work.

I photographed the sky to use as background, giving a sense of the conditions I was walking in.  However, despite the overcast sky there was definitely a sense of the forthcoming Spring in the air.  It seemed to me that the notes I made had a colour to them and thus I used these colours as part of the finished piece.

The style is similar to Richard Long’s textworks, with a selection of my notes made during the walk presented in list format which suits the chronological timeline of the act of observing whilst placing one foot in front of the other.

References

http://www.richardlong.org/textworks.html [Accessed 28 February 2020]

Exercise 2.4: Is Appropriation Appropriate?

Posted on by
Reply

The term appropriation in art refers to the “practice of artists using pre-existing objects or images in their art with little transformation of the original”.  A well-known early example is Marcel Duchamp’s ready mades which have had a significant influence on artists throughout modern art, including Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and is still widely used today.

Appropriation sits readily within the realms of photography because of the wealth of available material for artists to draw upon.  Old photograph albums, books, magazines, postcards and the like connect us to history, our ancestry, politics and the  entire world.  In the modern era the proliferation of images available via the internet provides a vast amount of raw material for the artist.

For his series A Series of Unfortunate Events Michael Wolf took images from Google Street View of accidents, violence and other ‘unfortunate’ incidents, all captured randomly by the Google car.  Wolf in effect acts as curator, sifting through many thousands of images to create a discrete collection with a common theme.  As with all appropriation, by pulling the images together in this way he creates a new discourse; in this case they are no longer by-products of a mapping app but have become objects for discussion in their own right.

It is this creation of a new context which the artist is adding to the original object and because of this I think appropriation is a valid and appropriate method of creating art.

References

http://www.lensculture.com/articles/michael-wolf-a-series-of-unfortunate-events [Accessed 20th February 2020]

photomichaelwolf.com [Accessed 20 February 2020]