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Vlasta Delimar

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Vlasta Delimar - visual and performance artist. Born in 1956 in Zagreb, Croatia. 1977 graduated from The School of Applied Arts in Zagreb.

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Eddy Ilunga Kamuanga

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Eddy Ilunga Kamuanga - Solitude - Contemporary Art

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Njideka Akunyili Crosby

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Eulàlia Grau. Terrassa, Barcelona, España, 1946

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Aiko Hachisuka

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Teresa Margolles examines the economy of death through sculptural interventions and performances, having trained in forensic medicine and worked in a morgue.

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Teresa Margolles' work focuses on the collective turmoil of the Northern Mexican social experience where drug-related organized crime has resulted in widespread violence and murder.

Anonymous traces of past lives, burial and memory are drawn together in her practice. Since graduating with a diploma in forensic medicine in the late 1990's, Margolles has examined the economy of death, whereby the morgue and dissecting room bear witness to social unrest.

For Margolles, sculptural installations and performance bring the physical reality, and materiality, of death to the fore. Typically activating the blind spots of our imagination, Margolles collapses the distinction between art and reality, as in her work for the Venice Biennale in 2009 where the floor of the exhibition space was mopped continuously with water from a morgue in Mexico. By means of artistic intervention, Margolles brings attention uncharacteristically close to our understanding and relationship with death.
Artes Mundi 5 Exhibition
Teresa Margolles examines the economy of death through sculptural interventions and performances, having trained in forensic medicine and worked in a morgue. Plancha and Sonido de la primera incision torácica durante la autopsia a una victim de asesinato (Sonidos de la morgue) are both 'multisensory' sculptures. In Plancha water, which has been used to cleanse dead bodies in a Mexican morgue, drips from the ceiling onto hotplates. each drop evaporates on impact with a noticeable hiss. The work narrates the transition in death from present to absent and the processes of decomposition. Ultimately it honours the anonymous lives that have been lost. Sonido de la primera incision torácica durante la autopsia a una victim de asesinato (Sonidos de la morgue) continues the exploration of death through the morgue context. Visitors were invited to an intimate experience of the sounds of an autopsy through a single set of headphones.

In stark contrast to the multisensory engagement of her other two works, 32 años. Levantamiento y traslado donde cayo el cuerpo asesinado del artista Luis Miguel Suro is mute. This piece has been pivotal in terms of the direction Margolles' work has taken, exploring the impact of violence, and how it permeates into everyday lives. Taken from the studio of a close friend, it is a section of ﬂoor on which he was found murdered. The empty surface, which has borne witness to a horrific crime, marks the absence of the person, showing loss as a result of the act rather than evidence of the act itself.

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Teresa Margolles' work focuses on the collective turmoil of the Northern Mexican social experience where drug-related organized crime has resulted in widespread violence and murder. Anonymous traces of past lives, burial and memory are drawn together in her practice.

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Lea Lublin (born 1929, Brest, Poland, died in 1999, Paris, France[1]) was an Argentine-French performance artist.

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VOIR CLAIR MON FILS TERRENAUTES FLUVIO SUBTUNAL DEDANS/DEHORS LE MUSEE INTERROGATIONS SUR L'ART ARTEMISIA DISSOLUTION DANS L'EAU LE ZIZI DES PEINTRES LA MEMOIRE DE L'HISTOIRE RENCONTRE LA MEMOIRE DE L'ORDINATEUR PRESENT SUSPENDU AIMER TES HEROS DOCUMENTS TEXTES BIOGRAPHIE CONTACT

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Mary Sibande was born in Barberton (1982) and lives and works in Johannesburg. She obtained her Diploma in Fine Arts at the Witwatersrand Technikon (2004) and a B-Tech degree from the University of Johannesburg (2007). Sibande broke the historical echoing of her generation, who has been domestic labourers, and rose from these awful circumstances through her education and artistic career.

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An influential performance artist, filmmaker, and installation artist.

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Eleanor Antin was born in New York City in 1935. An influential performance artist, filmmaker, and installation artist, Antin delves into history-whether of ancient Rome, the Crimean War, the salons of nineteenth-century Europe, or her own Jewish heritage and Yiddish culture-as a way to explore the present. Antin is a cultural chameleon, masquerading in theatrical or stage roles to expose her many selves. Her most famous persona is that of Eleanora Antinova, the tragically overlooked black ballerina of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Appearing as Antinova in scripted and non-scripted performances for over a decade, Antin has blurred the distinction between her identity and that of her character.

In the process, she has created a rich body of work, detailing the multiple facets of her beloved Antinova, including a fictitious memoir and numerous films, photographs, installations, performances, and drawings. In her 2001 series The Last Days of Pompeii, Antin lingers behind the camera to stage the final, catastrophic days of Pompeii in the affluent hills of La Jolla, California. In The Golden Death from this series, the imagined citizens of Pompeii drown in the excess of their own wealth-an ironic parable of American culture in the throes of over-consumption.

Eleanor Antin received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1997 and a Media Achievement Award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture in 1998. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including an award-winning retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1999. Antin is a highly respected artist and teacher, and has been a professor at the University of California, San Diego, since 1975. She lives with her husband and son in southern California.

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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'Read my Face' -facial scarification and tattoos in Benin. 

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'Read my Face' -facial scarification and tattoos in Benin. 

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http://ericlafforgue.com/wp-content/uploads/holi.pdfhttp://ericlafforgue.com/wp-content/uploads/holi.pdf

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Indigurrito Nao Bustamante video collection

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Nao Bustamante (www.naobustamante.com) is an internationally known performance artist born

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Taus Makhacheva, an artist with Russian citizenship, a western education and Dagestani (Northern Caucasian) ethnic roots. In her projects, Makhacheva traces and questions various traditional and contemporary modes for appropriating space and communicating with the natural, the man-made, the animal, the machine, the social and the historical.

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Taus Makhacheva is a member of Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

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Was 'pop art' a term used by yourself or colleagues or was there a different terminology that referred to a new figurative art movement in the 1960s and early 1970s?

In official art the term 'pop art' was not used, but a certain group of artists working outside the official circles were familiar with it; for me personally the expression 'pop art' was important and inspiring.

Jana Želibská
Kandarya - Mahadeva 1969

Collection Linea, Bratislava, Slovakia
© Archive of the artist

Did you ever consider yourself (now or in the past) a pop artist?

I do not consider myself to be a pop artist, but in the past I have used some expressive means of pop art in my work.

Did your work engage with current events in the 1960s and early 1970s?

Yes.

How did you choose the subject matter for your work included in The World Goes Pop?

The work Kandarya Mahadeva refers to Eastern philosophy - to the Indian temple. Other pieces tackle my personal themes and formally use elements of pop art.

Where did you get your imagery from (what, if any, sources did you use)?

From the contemporary art scene of the 1960s.

Were you aware of pop art in other parts of the world?

Yes, I was following the contemporary scene. I was also learning about pop art during my travels to foreign countries.

Was commercial art an influence on your work or the way in which it was made?

No.

Was there a feeling at the time that you doing something important and new, making a change...?

Of course, especially in Slovakia this represented a substantial change in the way art was perceived.

Was there an audience for the work at the time - and if so what was their reaction to it?

The audience existed: eager spectators accepted it with enthusiasm; the other, more conservative audience, was shocked by it.

Looking back at these works, what you do think about them now?

The works made at that time were excellent, full of energy and new visual elements. I fully stand behind them.

September 2015

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Was 'pop art' a term used by yourself or colleagues or was there a different terminology that referred to a new figurative art movement in the 1960s and early 1970s? In official art the term 'pop art' was not used, but a certain group of artists working outside the official circles were familiar with it; for me personally the expression 'pop art' was important and inspiring.

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Dada artist Höch's photomontage pieces can be linked to the work of Cindy Sherman and Martha Rosler. A lot of her photomontage work turns men into women and vice versa through cut and paste. Therefore commenting on gender norms and roles..

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Nengudi is an African-American artist who is interested in visual arts, dance, and body mechanics. Using natural, unconventional and unusual materials in her work, she aims to share common experiences through her work, often inviting the viewer to be a participant.

"Sharing each others cultures through the arts provides a true bridge to a healthy respect for one another and arts education in general provides a means to stimulate the mind and
exercise creative problem solving."

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In March 1992, performance artist and MacArthur Fellow, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and writer/artist Coco Fusco locked themselves in a cage. Presenting themselves as aboriginal inhabitants of an island off the gulf of Mexico that was overlooked by Columbus, their spectacle provided a thorn in the side of postcolonial angst.

Enacting rituals of "authentic" daily life such as writing on a laptop computer, watching TV, making voodoo dolls, and pacing the cage garbed in Converse high-tops, raffia skirts, plastic beads, and a wrestler's mask, the two "Amerindians" rendered a hybrid pseudo primitivism that struck a nerve. Interested members of the audience could pay for dances, stories, and Polaroids. Guilt, molestation, confusion, and letters to the humane society were among audience responses. Nearly half the visitors that saw the cage in Irvine, London, Madrid, Minneapolis, and the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. believed that the two were real captives, true natives somehow tainted by the detritus of technology and popular culture.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña We performed the piece at Irvine, which is known for it's incredible xenophobia towards Mexicans. We also performed the piece in Madrid in Columbus Plaza, the heart of the Quincentennial debate, and later on in London at Covent Gardens. People of color were exhibited at Covent Gardens and many other places in Europe, from the 17 th century to the early 20 th century.

In all of the cities we have performed, there have been a range of responses from absolute tenderness and solidarity-people giving us presents, offerings, quietly being with us, sending notes of sympathy-all the way to extremely violent responses. In London, a group of neo-nazi skinheads tried to shake the cage. In Madrid, mischievous teenagers tried to burn me with cigarettes while some handed me a beer bottle of urine. There were business men in Spain regressing to their childhood, treating us as if we were monkeys-making gorilla sounds or racist "Indian" hoots.

I think we have touched on a colonial wound in this piece.

Coco Fusco When we created this piece, our original intent was not to convince people that the fiction of our being Amerindians was a reality. We understood it to be a satirical commentary both on the Quincentenary celebrations and on the history of this practice of exhibiting human beings from Africa, Asia, and Latin America in Europe and the United States in zoos, theaters, and museums. When we got to Spain, more than half the people thought we really were Amerindians. Then there were others who came to watch those who were taking us seriously. There were people who were not sure whether to believe that we were real. Other people were absolutely convinced that they understood Guillermo's language, which is virtually impossible because it's a nonsense language. One man in London stood there and translated Guillermo's story for another visitor. We had a lot of sexualized reactions to us. Men in Spain put coins in the donation box to get me to dance because, as they said, they wanted to see my tits. There was a woman in Irvine who asked for a rubber glove in order to touch Guillermo and started to fondle him in a sexual manner. There were several instances where people crossed the boundaries of expected sexual behavior. I think that was provoked by us being presented as objects, by their sense of having power over us ...

GGP ... the boundary between ethnography and pornography. To add to what Coco has said, this endemic dual perception of the Other, as either noble savage or cannibal, has existed at the core of European and American relations since the very first encounters. We try to play very much with these dualities. When we appear in the cage I am the cannibal, I am the warrior, this threatening masculine Other who causes fear to the viewer. Coco performs the noble savage, you know the quiet, subdued innocent. The response people have towards her is either one of compassion or one of sexual aggression.

CFThe most hysterical reactions we had to the piece happened when we appeared at the Smithsonian. One alarmed person called the Humane Society. The Humane Society told that person that human beings were out of their jurisdiction.

The responses we had from Native Americans and Latins were more interesting. They tend to find fault with the hybridity of the contents of the cage, while Anglos take this as a sign of our lack of authenticity. In Washington, for example, there was a Native American elder from the Pueblo tribe of Arizona who was interviewed by a Smithsonian representative. He said that our performance was the most real thing about the Native Americans displayed in the whole museum. He said the installation and performance ought to be permanent to give people a very clear idea of the Native American experience. Then there was a man from El Salvador who pointed to the rubber heart hanging in the cage and told everybody, "That heart is my heart."

Anna Johnson In your performance, you presented artifacts from a fictional land, including: a lap-top computer, video, a bottle of Coca-Cola ... poking fun at the idea that you were authentic savages from a foreign place. Could you talk about your idea of authenticity and ethnic identity?

CF We were trying to blast this myth that the non-Western Other exists in a time and place that is completely untouched by western civilization or that in order to be authentic one would have to be devoid of characteristics associated with the West. It's reasonable to say that non-Western cultures have a better understanding of Western civilization than Western civilization has of other cultures. In any case, we introduced into the cage some elements that shocked and bothered many people and became the focus of a lot of questions put to the zoo guards. People said, "How could we be authentic if he smokes Dunhills? How could she really know how to use a computer if she is from this undiscovered island? Why is she wearing Converse high tops?" Everything they viewed as part of their world, they didn't want us to have. That would mean that we were inauthentic. However, if you see Conchero dancers in Mexico City, they do wear Converse high tops and Adidas and Nikes. They probably listen to hard rock when they are not dancing to traditional music. We wanted to make fun of this very Euro-centric notion that other people operate in a pristine world untouched by Western civilization.

GGP To me, authenticity is an obsession of Western anthropologists. When I am in Mexico, Mexicans are never concerned about this question of authenticity. However, when I am in the United States, North Americans are constantly making this artificial division between what is an "authentic" Chicano, an "authentic" Mexican, an "authentic" Native American in order to fulfill their own desires. Generally speaking, this authentic Other has to be pre-industrial, has to be more tuned with their past, has to be less tainted by post-modernity, has to be more innocent and must not live with contemporary technology. And most importantly, must have a way of making art that fulfills their stereotypes; in the case of Mexico-Magical Realism.

CF This fetish about authenticity is connected to an idea that the non-Western being doesn't have a sense of reflexivity about him or herself. I think, for example, of the videos being made now by Kayapo Indians in the Amazon. I was at a conference this year where American academics questioned the Kayapos' interest in filming themselves filming and editing. They want to talk about the process while they're making it and that blows American academics away.

GGP The bottom line is they don't want us to be part of the same present or the same time. They want us to operate outside of history.

CF The Kayapos aren't allowed to be self-conscious. If you can be ironic, if you can be reflexive, it's because you can think. Ethnography and anthropology have consistently negated that dimension of non-Western cultures. It would threaten the veracity of the Western observer's "information."

GGP A lot of the work that our contemporaries are doing, like James Luna and Jimmy Durham, attempts, through performance, to take identity out of this historicists ice cube and bring it back into the present, to tell North Americans, "Hey, we're members of the same society and the same historical moment."

AJ Guillermo, in a recent article you referred to the Western view of Latin American culture as a fantasy of descending into the underworld, and the Latin American perception of the West as an ascent. Could you expand on this?

GGP Europeans and Euro-Americans utilize a Dantean model when they deal with other cultures. For them to abandon the United States or Europe (conceptually or physically) implies a descent to hell. It is very much part of the Western psyche: you descend in search of enlightenment, sexual pleasure, magic, exorcism ... and come back.

AJ In your performance, Border Brujo, you use kitsch imagery, Mexican visual mythology, plus references to the 1940s Hollywood conception of Mexico as a libidinous and carnival atmosphere where servicemen could pleasure themselves. The young Jane Powell could go down to Mexico, warble a few musical numbers and perhaps, lose her virginity. What conception do Mexicans have of the way in which Americans present them? As you were growing up, how did you respond to those Hollywood images?

GGP Observing Mexican culture, you can find two very schematic responses. A more politicized response is that of anger, realizing that an extremely complex culture that is two or three thousand years old has been reduced to an inventory of very simplistic stereotypes. We are viewed as lazy, over-sexual, romantic, irrational. Then the other response is that of simulation, which is the saddest one for me because of the way the United States has broadcast these stereotypes through movies, television, and art. The publicity has been so powerful that we, in fact, have internalized many of these stereotypes and regurgitated them. You have situations of many cities in Mexico creating simulated environments after the meta-Mexican environments created by Californians. Tijuana is a perfect example; like many of the border towns, Tijuana has recreated, as reality, this fantasy about the Amigo country that Hollywood invented 40 years earlier. It's like a game of mirrors in which images and symbols reflect and ricochet off each other and, at some point, reality gets lost for good.

CF The situation is even more grave among Latinos in the U.S., many of whom lose direct contact with their culture of origin after one or two generations. Their primary experience of cultural identity becomes the reductive stereotype broadcast via mainstream United States culture. Which, in many cases, they assimilate as "real."

GGP Hope for Latin America really lies in the incredible capability that Latin Americans have to subvert these stereotypes and bring them back in a politicized manner. Unlike the traditional notion of the Left, that everything the United States sends to Latin America is damaging to Latin American identity, we strongly believe that Latin American popular culture has creative capability. It can take this information-plastic, and neon, and cheap industrial materials-and turn it into art. It's called Rascuachismo in Mexico, a form of voluntary kitsch and political practice: an altar from hubcaps, a temple from plastic, a decoration for the house from cereal boxes ...

CF This does not square very well with this very Anglo and European notion of authenticity. A very banal example of this is the reaction of many Americans who went to Nicaragua during the Sandanista revolution. They would get to Managua and be upset to find Sandanistas playing baseball and going to la ciudad plastica, "the plastic city" or mall, to eat at McDonalds. The gringos wanted to go to the mountains to find the peasant.

AJ How does this bear upon the mid-to-late '80s obsession with everything border and everything Latin, the revival of the kitsch invention you're talking about?

CF The United States has been enamored with Latin culture on and off since the transfer of Mexican territory in the 1840s. It's a cyclical thing, every once in a while there is a return to this fetishistic fascination. Usually, what is appealing is what Americans perceive as the spirituality, the carnality, the sentimentality of Latin culture. We are there to fill a void for Americans every time they recognize or they sense that they have no meaning in their lives.

GGP It is very symptomatic that the "Latino boom" and the multicultural craze and the border hoopla that hit the United States art world around 1987 coincided with a realization that the United States was headed towards an economic disaster, the crumbling of the American dream. It is precisely this moment of disenchantment that Americans look towards the Other to seek those answers they no longer can find inside themselves. The United States art world is fascinated with the form and the carnality but really not with the political content. They want enlightenment without irritation.

AJ That's why Frida Kahlo is such an appealing icon. She was a martyr and she suffered. Even though she was strong, she was literally pierced through the middle.

CF What is interesting, is that the Frida Kahlo venerated by American feminists is a very different Frida Kahlo to the one people learn about in Mexico, in the Chicano community. In her country, she is recognized as an important artist and a key figure in revolutionary politics of early 20 th century Mexico. Her communist affiliations are made very clear. Her relationship with Trotsky is underscored. All her political activities with Diego Rivera are constantly emphasized. The connection between her art and her politics is always made. When Chicana artists became interested in Frida Kahlo in the '70s and started organizing homages, they made the connection between her artistic project and theirs because they too were searching for an aesthetic compliment to a political view that was radical and emancipatory. But when the Euro-American feminists latch onto Frida Kahlo in the early '80s and when the American mainstream caught on to her, she was transformed into a figure of suffering. I am very critical of that form of appropriation.

AJ You have both been received on a very literal level. The reviews in the New York Times, the audiences around the cages. Why do you think that people always address the superficial aspects of your performance? Are they discomforted by the more subtle anxieties and antagonisms?

GGP One of the most popular traditions of North American literature is that of the testimonial-style narrative, the confessional mode that comes from a Protestant tradition. In Mexico, a transcendentalist Catholic culture, allegorical symbolic thinking is more popular. We don't have a tradition of psychological realism in literature or in theater. Social realism was really known in Mexico after the Cuban revolution and more as a fashion than an organic tradition that came from within. As a result you have two drastically different world views that create incredible misunderstandings between artists living a border experience like me. I have learned to create a meta-commentary that makes these misunderstandings evident. I have referred to the border as a place where symbols crack open. I try to make this evident on a stage right in front of an audience.

AJ How has your cage performance altered over time?

GGP It is becoming more focused and cleaner. The first time it was performed, it was excessive in all ways. We are much more conscious of the piece as a visual performance. Now that we have tried so many possibilities, we know exactly how to trigger reactions. We have added to our list of activities; mine is walking around with a kitchen knife, and as members of the audience ask to be photographed with us, I sometimes take out my knife and pose with it. The police have gotten very upset. Dark skin, a mustache, and a knife are a deadly combination.

CF Something else is happening. There is this feature film about Ishi the Yahi, the Native American who was made to live in a museum in California for five years. He was the last of a tribe that was wiped out by white settlers.

Meanwhile, there has been all of this press about Ota Benga, a Pygmy who was brought to the U.S. in 1904 and exhibited at State Fairs and in the primate cage of the Bronx Zoo. He wound up shooting himself. Tri-Star is now making a movie about the life of Ota Benga. In addition, many women have done work on the Hottentot Venus lately ... For some reason, this history of human exhibition is receiving a great deal of critical reevaluation.

GGP People believe these practices are extinct. And we say it still exists in more benign forms. While we were in Minneapolis a month ago, we were invited to the Minnesota State Fair. There was a freak show, and one of the people exhibited was called Tiny Tisha, Island Princess. We entered, completely shocked to find a Haitian midget on display in the same way freaks were displayed in the late 1800s. In fact, her donation box was strangely similar to our donation box.

CF You could take a picture of her for $2.

AJ In Queensland, Australia, they actually had plastic versions of Aborigines in glass cases. That was about 14 years ago. Today, the museum has changed in many respects but it was a very colonial museum.

CF Those museums are the existence of their collections to colonialism. The relationships are now somewhat more egalitarian because museums are realizing that they are not always entitled to objects they have laid claim to. We saw this happening in Minneapolis where there is a dispute over the exhibit of Native American sacred pipes. The curators of the museum felt they had every right to them. And Native Americans protested. It lead to a long series of discussions that the Native Americans wound up winning.

GGP This is one of the most important aspects of the battle right now in this country. Who is in control of the means to represent Otherness? Our national institutions are part of this struggle and there are two sides. Although it's taking place in the field of the emblematic and the allegorical, nonetheless, it is reflective of the larger political struggle in this country. If we can contribute to giving light to this conflict, we would be very satisfied ...

CF Why do people feel the way they do when they see us in a cage? The image and the chronology that we present is something people don't want to see, it implicates the audience. That understanding is very difficult and painful. Many would rather operate with the belief that racism no longer exists because legal segregation is part of the past.

AJ Your image of the woman in the cage is a very sexually loaded image.

CF Eliciting the same type of comments women hear on the street. I think men do that because they think they can get away with it-I'm in a cage; how can I understand? Or even if I can understand, I'm in character, so I can't react. A lot of guys get a kick out of that. Also, I had very little clothing. To repressed Westerners, my costume represented pure sexuality.

AJ Like dressing Naomi Campbell up as a Northern African tribeswoman, or Gaugin's Tahitian odalisque ...

CF In Minneapolis, people tended to be less verbally aggressive, choosing instead to take pictures, more than the Spanish or British had. I decided that their way of sublimating was voyeurism.

AJ People feel that with a camera, they have the right to make a theft. Do you feel stripped-down, exhausted, after you've been in the cage for a few weeks?

CF It's physically tiring but nonetheless fascinating.

GGP I think every human being who undergoes the experience of living in a cage for three days would have a different experience according to their degree of familiarity with being exposed to the public eye. Coco and I had very different experiences. Coco, as a woman, has had to face this sinister experience of always being objectified. Because of that, she has already developed mechanisms of protection against that gaze which make her seem very tough. She can turn off an inner channel and disconnect from that experience, just as she would riding the subway.

AJ And you, as a male, experiencing the perpetual gaze?

GGP I had a more emotionally involved experience, I don't know how to turn off. As a result I came out of the cage three days later completely, spiritually devastated. And Coco was complete and whole and ready to do the next piece.

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Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña by Anna Johnson - BOMB Magazine

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In March 1992, performance artist and MacArthur Fellow, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and writer/artist Coco Fusco locked themselves in a cage. Presenting themselves as aboriginal inhabitants of an island off the gulf of Mexico that was overlooked by Columbus, their spectacle provided a thorn in the side of postcolonial angst.

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https://frieze.com/article/olga-balema-1
Her Curves. Warm Bodies. Body of Work. What Enters … When listed together, the titles of four of Olga Balema’s most recent exhibitions indicate a clear current in her thinking: the body as a simultaneously self-contained and permeable entity.

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Fusco and Gomez-Pena's performance pieces Year of the White Bear & Two Undiscovered Americans visit the West 1992-4 explores ideas of colonisation and westernisation. http://bombmagazine.org/article/1599/

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This is a link to the press release of Mona Hatoum's exhibition held at the Tate Modern last summer.  Her work explores themes of displacement, identity and the body.

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Mona Hatoum
Hot Spot III 2009

© Mona Hatoum
Photo: Agostino Osio
Courtesy Fondazione Querini Onlus, Venice

Press Release
17 November 2015

Mona Hatoum
4 May - 21 August 2016
Tate Modern, Level 3 West
Supported by AGC Equity Partners
Open daily 10.00 - 18.00 and until 22.00 on Friday and Saturday
For public information call +44(0)20 7887 8888, visit tate.org.uk, follow @Tate #MonaHatoum

In May 2016 Tate Modern opens the first UK survey of the work of Mona Hatoum (b.1952), one of the most important artists of her generation. Drawing on her expansive career, this exhibition will reflect 35 years of consistently poetic and radical thinking expressed through a diverse range of media. The exhibition will present over 100 works from the 1980s to the present day, from early performances and video, sculpture, installation, photography and works on paper.

Mona Hatoum is well known for her large-scale installations and sculptures which challenge the formal languages of Minimalism and Surrealism to expose a world characterised by conflicts and contradictions. She began her career in the 1980s with performance and video works in which the body gave expression to a divided reality, besieged by political and social control. In the video Roadworks 1985, she documents a performance where she walked barefoot through the streets of Brixton with a pair of Dr. Marten boots tied to her ankles.

The body has always been central to Hatoum's work and she is known for referencing its vulnerability and resilience, as exemplified by Corps étranger 1994, an endoscopic journey through the interior and exterior landscape of the artist's own body. Her installations also situate the body as subject to power or incarceration, evident in Impenetrable 2009, a suspended square formed of hundreds of delicate rods of suspended barbed wire, and the iconic Light Sentence 1992. In this work, walls of industrial wire mesh lockers and a single moving lightbulb create dramatic shadows that transform the gallery into a disorientating and unstable place. Furniture and other familiar objects feature prominently in her work, often modified and scaled up, to explore the fine line between the familiar and the uncanny. Homebound 2000, for example, consists of an assemblage of kitchen utensils and household furniture connected by electric wire, through which runs an audible electric current.

Hatoum's work highlights the condition of displacement, shared by many in the modern era.
Present Tense 1996 is made from 2,200 cubes of traditional olive oil soap from Nablus, a city north of Jerusalem. Lines of tiny red glass beads pushed into the surface depict the map of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accord between Israel and the Palestinian Authorities. In the recent installation Twelve Windows 2012-13, comprising twelve pieces of embroidery made by Palestinian women living in refugee camps in Lebanon, embroidery becomes an act of resistance. Organised and produced by Inaash, a Lebanese NGO, these delicately embroidered 'windows' are suspended on crisscrossing steel cables, each one representing a key region of Palestine through their unique motifs, stitches, colours and patterns.

Born in Beirut in 1952 to a Palestinian family, Mona Hatoum settled in England in 1975 after war broke out in Lebanon. She is represented in major collections around the world and recent solo exhibitions include Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice (2009); Kunstmuseum, St Gallen (2013); Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2014); and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2015). She has shown at the Venice Biennale (1995 and 2005) and Documenta XI, Kassel (2002). Hatoum was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1995; received the Joan Miró Prize 2011; and will be awarded the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2017.

Mona Hatoum is curated by Clarrie Wallis, Curator of Modern and Contemporary British Art, Tate and Christine Van Assche, Honorary Curator, Centre Pompidou, Paris with Katy Wan, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. The exhibition is organised by the Centre Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, in collaboration with Tate Modern, London and the Finnish National Gallery / Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki. It will be accompanied by a catalogue from Tate Publishing and a programme of talks and events in the gallery.
For press information contact Kate.Moores@tate.org.uk or Daisy.Taylor@tate.org.uk or call +44(0)20 7887 4906/8730. For high-resolution images visit tate.org.uk/press

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Press Release 17 November 2015 Mona Hatoum 4 May - 21 August 2016Tate Modern, Level 3 West Supported by AGC Equity Partners Open daily 10.00 - 18.00 and until 22.00 on Friday and Saturday For public information call +44(0)20 7887 8888, visit tate.org.uk, follow @Tate #MonaHatoum In May 2016 Tate Modern opens the first UK survey of the work of Mona Hatoum (b.1952), one of the most important artists of her generation.

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http://wafaabilal.com
Iraq-born artist Wafaa Bilal is known for his on-line performative and interactive works provoking dialogue about international politics and internal dynamics.

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http://www.leahschrager.com/portfolio/2017/

"I work mainly with social media, I own all my images. It’s usually the artist or the painter who owns images of their subjects, so it’s a pretty intense inversion of the power relationship. I’m tentatively calling my recent work “SFSM” (Safe for Social Media)"

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Zoe Buckman is a multi-disciplinary artist working in sculpture, photography, embroidery and installation. Her artwork explores themes of feminism, mortality and equality.

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https://www.jonathanyeo.com/page_flesh/

“Flesh is a word that immediately provokes a reaction – it is no surprise that artists have always drawn on this tactile, organic and changeable material for inspiration. This exhibition brings together some of the biggest names in art as well as exciting emerging artists who all interpret flesh in different ways. From still life paintings and anatomical studies to abstract sculpture and contemporary film, Flesh presents a series of visual encounters which surprise and challenge, raising questions about the body and ageing, race and gender, touch and texture and surface and skin.”Laura Turner, Senior Curator of Art and Science at York Art Gallery

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Andrew Thomas Huang is an American artist who uses video to explore surreal symbolism in his portrayal of the body, and his interpretation of heritage and culture.
http://crackmagazine.net/article/art/andrew-thomas-huang/

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INTERSTICE

Probing the illusive boundary itself, Interstice presents the veil as a self-contained magic trick: a shapeshifting second skin loaded with potential energy to manipulate identities and temporal-spatial dimensions that would otherwise be rendered immeasurable in its absence.  Interstice is an attempt to pass through the veil that obscures our collective vision to reach a space in-between.  An interstitial space.

Directed by Andrew Thomas Huang

www.andrewthomashuang.com
https://www.facebook.com/AndrewThomasHuang
https://twitter.com/Andrew_T_Huang
https://www.instagram.com/andrewthomashuang/

Featuring Flex artists Bones the Machine, Slicc, & Brixx

Producer: Sophia Rothbart
Executive Producers: Adam Joseph & Tom Berendsen

Cinematographer: Alexander Khudokon
Production Designer: Lauren Nikrooz
Costume Designers: threeASFOUR
Choreographer: Jason Akira Somma
Original Music by CFCF
Editor: Armen Hartootun
Visual Effects by Wolf & Crow
Special Effects & Fragrance Design by Stephen Dirkes
Helmet Designs by Savannah Wyatt & James Marsella

Voice Talent:
“Tao Te Ching” read by James Lee
“Olive Tree” by Chyi Yu read by Mike Fu

Unit Production Manager: Francesca Consarino
Assistant Director: Dave Ebel
2nd Assistant Directors: Amanda Rodriguez & Blake Wilson
Assistant Camera:  Barry Silverman
Gaffer:  Smokey Nelson
Key Grips: Will Gottlieb & Garrett Cantrell
Grip & Electric:  Zach Frank & Will Gottlieb
DIT:  JJ del Rosario
Special Effects Assistant:  Adam Maiolo
Art Assistants:  Megan Kiantos, Jonathan Qualtere & Tim Ferro

Hair & Makeup Artist: Christyna Kay
Wardrobe Stylist:  Sasha Sheehan
Production Assistants:  Tyson White, Rebecca Tiernan, Dennis Nguyen, Lucca Galloway

Wolf & Crow:
Executive Producer: Kevin Shapiro
Compositors: Lindsey Fry, Cecilia Sweet-Coll & Martin Tzonev
Post Production Coordinator: Kitty Walsh

Sound Mix by Paul Seradarian
Sound Mix Studio provided by Shapeshifter Post Production

SPECIAL THANKS TO:
Tom Berendsen
Casey Burry
Song Chong
Leanne Elliot
Sara Greco
Adam Joseph
Mazdack Rassi
Sophia Rothbart
Kevin Shapiro

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Aiming to transform the banal everyday commodity, Gerhardt Richter re-imagines and re-presents the subjects within his paintings, making them oddly beautiful. Despite his initial desire to explore unfettered, free expression of one’s unique inner assertion, Richter managed to undermine his own intentions through creating works that all utilised gestural abstract marks. Therefore, his art was no longer a symptom of self-expression, but merely demonstrative of conformity. Upon recognising this, Richter initiated a new way of working for himself. Now, when painting, Richter claims he does so without agenda or intentional aesthetic outcome and, as a result, he acknowledges it as a ‘blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless’. Richter transforms his paintings by creating gestures over the top and finds certain behaviours desirable in the surfaces of his works. The subject of the work consequently becomes the work itself, personifying the fraught and anxious process as the squeegee takes control. Through intentionally exploiting accident in his work, avoiding a quality of ‘made’ness, Richter allows each painting to exist in between chaos and composition. Deliberately designed to have no overall control as the artist, the paintings take on the role as the new directors; doing things that Richter recognises he can’t. The incorporation of something accidental allows a call and response between him and the painting, leaving him as a spectator of the work, eager to see the final product. Ensuring the work is neither chaotically unfinished nor academically contrived, Richter empowers gestures to be forms of art in themselves, inviting composed disorder to enliven the work. NS Making an active decision to relinquish personal control within his artworks may be indicative of his lacking control during the war. As a result, this method could be interpreted as a displacement of his early childhood trauma and infact expose hysterical tendencies within his work, revealing a sense of unconnectedness with his own body and a suppression of his inner thoughts. Alternatively, it could be argued that due to the careful precision involved in making the photorealistic works, through severe and obsessive control over his body, that are later transformed with a squeegee, through choosing to vitiate and blur them, Richter is not infact suppressing his emotions, but is actually exposing them, through firstly the dissatisfaction with what is a visibly skilful piece of art work and secondly, more potently, the subsequent destruction of it. As such, the artwork is an extension of himself.

Oscillating between photo and painting, Richter’s works mirror the musings of William Faulkner about arrested motion being the ‘aim of every artist’, allowing art to hover between past and future. As such, his art becomes non-impositional, creating a space to be definitively unfinished, an act which is, in itself, hysterical. Richter represents something passed and something about to happen in his works. They signpost an elsewhere in and out of here and now that is indisputably visible and palpable. Not to be mistaken for anti- conceptual works, they simply open a margin between the utterable and visible, producing a space:time continuum of possibility. Subsequently, Richter’s art becomes more than momentary distractive art, and extends to being thought of in terms of percepts, one of which could be the confusing aesthetics. Refusing to conform to conventional aims of art at the time, Richter almost aims to make the viewer feel uncomfortable and gain a sense of confusion that cannot be articulated or relieved. These works hint at something that once was perfect, whilst being in a state of perfection presented in a gallery as ‘finished’, which could evoke disorientation or dizziness for the viewer. With these two experiences beings symptoms of hysteria as found in sufferers of war, we are invited to ask the question of whether Richter was knowingly disturbing the subconsciouses of his audience through his works, forcing them to experience similar things to him, or if infact, he was completely unaware of his hysteria, like most may be, and was unable to create work without his symptoms infecting it.

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http://stelarc.org/?catID=20316
Stelarc pushes his body in his suspension pieces. His stretched skin oddly captivating

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http://hilarypaynter.com/portfolio-item/socio-political/http://hilarypaynter.com/portfolio-item/socio-political/

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https://zillahbellgallery.co.uk/exhibition/society-wood-engravers-79th-annual-exhibition/https://zillahbellgallery.co.uk/exhibition/society-wood-engravers-79th-annual-exhibition/

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Alina Szapocznikow - Artist - Andrea Rosen Gallery

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One of the first to use materials such as polyurethane foam and polyester resin, Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973) is a renowned artist in her native country of Poland, and has been the subject of increased interest in the U.S, following her 2012 touring retrospective.

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Marwedel paints on the body to create a living work of art
https://www.gesine-marwedel.de/

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International Fine Art Bodypainting Artist

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INTEGRATION/Who Wants to Play? - sandrasterle.com

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When it comes to her attitude towards creating the ob- ject of art, Sandra Sterle, although sculptor by MA education, is close to the generation of the 1960s...

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Presenting a psychological drama is one of Mueck’s chief aims in creating his sculptures. This is nowhere better seen than in ‘Spooning Couple’. The figures are lying together on a low plinth so that we look down on them from a bird’s eye perspective. The man, naked from the waist down, and the woman, naked from the waist up, are lying together, almost in a foetal position, her body fitting into the hollow of his – like spoons. They may be ‘spooning’ in a literal way, but they are in anything but a warm, loving embrace. Their expressions show them to be deep in their own separate worlds. The man almost catches our gaze in complicit acknowledgement that the bond between them seems to have broken down.

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Spooning Couple is a sculpture by Australian artist Ron Mueck representing a man and woman lying down together. Both figures have a light skin tone and are semi-naked. The figures are represented with a high degree of realism apart from their scale, which is approximately half life-size. They are displayed on a low plinth so that the viewer sees them from above. The couple lie in a spooning position: both figures lie on their right-hand side facing in the same direction, with the woman lying in a slight foetal position while the man lies behind her, his body curled next to hers. The man wears an off-white T-shirt and is naked from the waist down. He lies with his right arm bent under his head and his left arm bent up to his chest. His pale brown straight hair hangs limp around his face and his gaze is cast slightly downward. The woman is naked from the waist up and wears grey knickers. Both of her arms are drawn up close to her body with her right hand pressed lightly against her mouth. Her straight brown hair falls under her head with one strand falling loose. The woman's eyes are also open and she looks slightly downwards.

Spooning Couple was made in 2005 according to the same method Mueck consistently employs to create his sculptures. The artist begins with drawings before creating small maquettes made from plaster or clay to refine his ideas. The maquettes are gradually scaled up to create a full-sized, detailed clay model of the work. From this clay model Mueck makes a series of mould sections in order to cast the sculpture in fibreglass. The fibreglass sculpture is then painted and the hair is applied, with each strand inserted individually into the polyester resin. The last detail added to the sculptures are the eyes. Spooning Couple, like all Mueck's sculptures, is rendered with hyper-realistic detail, noticeable from the texture of the skin to the careful placement of individual hairs. Before working as an artist Mueck was a puppet and prop maker for television and film, where he developed his precise techniques. Prior to Spooning Couple Mueck had only made one sculpture that included more than one figure, Mother and Child 2001 (Museum Brandhorst, Munich). In 2005, however, he made Spooning Couple and another sculpture which features two figures, Two Women 2005 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne).

The position adopted by this couple would usually convey affection. However, there appears to be tension between the two figures. Originally the artist had considered draping the man's left arm around the woman's waist. Instead, he retracted the arm, leaving the man holding it close to his own body. As the curator Keith Hartley has observed, 'by moving [the arm] away, he altered the whole relationship between the couple' (Hartley 2006, p.10). Moreover, the facial expressions of both figures also suggest that they are, as Hartley has said, 'deep in their own separate worlds' (Hartley 2006, p.10).

Mueck frequently experiments with the scale of his sculptures. Some works are larger than actual size, such as Wild Man 2005 (Tate ), while others, including Spooning Couple, are on a much smaller scale. The art historian Rachel Wells has noted that, in the case of this work, the small scale allows the underlying anxiety and tension between the man and woman to be more effectively portrayed: 'the exaggeration in terms of scale accompanies the outward expression of inner loss of "proper" proportions' (Wells 2013, p.46). By altering scale Mueck also gives the sculpture more of an emotional and physiological impact. As the artist has remarked: 'it makes you take notice in a way that you wouldn't do with something that's just normal' (quoted in Tanguy 2003, accessed 10 December 2014).

Further reading
Sarah Tanguy, 'The Progress Big Man: A Conversation with Ron Mueck', Sculpture: A Publication of the International Sculpture Centre, vol.22, no.6, July/August 2003, http://www.sculpture.org /documents/scmag03/jul_aug03/mueck/mueck.shtml, accessed 10 December 2014.
Ron Mueck, exhibition catalogue, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh 2006.
Rachel Wells, Scale in Contemporary Sculpture: Enlargement, Miniaturisation and the Life-Size, London 2013.

Susan Mc Ateer
University of Edinburgh
February 2015

The University of Edinburgh is a research partner of ARTIST ROOMS.

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tate / national galleries of scotland collection

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'Spooning Couple', Ron Mueck, 2005 | Tate

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Spooning Couple is a sculpture by Australian artist Ron Mueck representing a man and woman lying down together. Both figures have a light skin tone and are semi-naked. The figures are represented with a high degree of realism apart from their scale, which is approximately half life-size.

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Scarlett Johannson - Under the skin performance

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Scarlett Johannson - Under the skin performance

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoSWbyvdhHw

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http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/cecile-b-evans
Sprung a Leak 2016 explores the movement of data, artificial intelligence, and the relationship between humans and machines

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Thinking of the body as a object in sculpture, Charles Ray famously created the 'Plank Pieces'. The work suggests that help was needed from another person but they are not in the photo, this hints at another body which has a presence without being seen. Ray intended the body to look as if it was 'pinned to the wall by the plank'

Charles Ray
Plank Piece I-II 1973

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Goldin is a portrait photographer who takes  intensely personal, spontaneous, sexual, and transgressive photographs of her family, friends, and lovers.

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Nancy " Nan" Goldin (born September 12, 1953) is an American photographer. Her work often explores LGBT bodies, moments of intimacy, the HIV crisis, and the opioid epidemic. Her most notable work is The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), which documents the post-Stonewall gay subculture and Goldin's family and friends. She lives and works in New York City, Berlin, and Paris.

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Nancy " Nan" Goldin (born September 12, 1953) is an American photographer. Her work often explores LGBT bodies, moments of intimacy, the HIV crisis, and the opioid epidemic. Her most notable work is The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), which documents the post-Stonewall gay subculture and Goldin's family and friends.

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https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/allen-jones-ra
Few artists inflame debate like Allen Jones. Celebratory, satirical and boldly inventive, his work embraces popular culture and has in turn influenced everything from design to film and fashion.

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http://www.aurorareinhard.com/web/index.php?id=90 This links to Reinhard's website, but in particular her series of images entitled "Gender Untitled" "This work portrays adolescent boys and girls in an urban environment. In 1998
I saw in a bar a young female who looked just like a boy. That was a starting point
for a series of works about people who don’t fit to the most common gender
catergories. " Her series 'Perfect' and 'Girls, Girls, Girls' are also of relevance. They comment on female 'ideals, gender roles, and sexuality.

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http://www.miekebal.org/artworks/films/reasonable-doubt/ The link is to the artwork: Reasonable Doubt. This artwork encompasses Descartes and his theories on dualism. The PDF document below is an essay regarding gallery vs museum and culture vs nature.

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Shirin Neshat Shirin Neshat’s Ted Talks speech, “Art in Exile” is key to the subject of cultural identity under the topic of the colonised body. Iranian born, Neshat is stuck in the middle of clashing cultures. Her work largely takes the medium of video. In her “Rapture” we see the empowerment of women within a culture of male domination. “Art in Exile” explains Neshat is proud of and inspired by Iranian women. Meanwhile, she sees their rejection of her western culture.“Culture is beyond communication” – Shirin NeshatMona Hatum also addresses her confused cultural identity. In her work, “Measures of Distance” she reads a letter from her mother. She overlays Arabic script and in the background we hear mummers of Arabic speech. Hatum’s mother is very much involved and part of her work, which shows the bravery of Islamic women that Neshat talks of. Her mother addresses Hatum’s “identity Crisis”.

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Shirin Neshat Shirin Neshat’s Ted Talks speech, “Art in Exile” is key to the subject of cultural identity under the topic of the colonised body. Iranian born, Neshat is stuck in the middle of clashing cultures. Her work largely takes the medium of video. In her “Rapture” we see the empowerment of women within a culture of male domination. “Art in Exile” explains Neshat is proud of and inspired by Iranian women. Meanwhile, she sees their rejection of her western culture.“Culture is beyond communication” – Shirin NeshatMona Hatum also addresses her confused cultural identity. In her work, “Measures of Distance” she reads a letter from her mother. She overlays Arabic script and in the background we hear mummers of Arabic speech. Hatum’s mother is very much involved and part of her work, which shows the bravery of Islamic women that Neshat talks of. Her mother addresses Hatum’s “identity Crisis”.

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Measures of Distance is a video work comprising several layered elements. Letters written by Hatoum's mother in Beirut to her daughter in London appear as Arabic text moving over the screen and are read aloud in English by Hatoum. The background images are slides of Hatoum's mother in the shower, taken by the artist during a visit to Lebanon. Taped conversations in Arabic between mother and daughter, in which her mother speaks openly about her feelings, her sexuality and her husband's objections to Hatoum's intimate observation of her mother's naked body are intercut with Hatoum's voice in English reading the letters.

Hatoum was born in Beirut to Palestinian parents and became an exile in Britain, during a short visit to London, when war broke out in Lebanon in 1975. She attended art schools in London (Byam Shaw School of Art 1975-9, Slade School of Art 1979-81), where her experience of cultural displacement, both as a woman and an Arab national, informed much of her practice. She made Measures of Distance in Vancouver during a year as artist-in-residence at Western Front Art Centre. It is a Western Front production. Hatoum has said:

Although the main thing that comes across is a very close and emotional relationship between mother and daughter, it also speaks of exile, displacement, disorientation and a tremendous sense of loss as a result of the separation caused by war. In this work I was also trying to go against the fixed identity that is usually implied in the stereotype of Arab woman as passive, mother as non-sexual being ... the work is constructed visually in such a way that every frame speaks of literal closeness and implied distance.
(Quoted in Mona Hatoum 1997, p.140).

In the video the decorative Arabic script of Hatoum's mother's letters floats over the images of her body like a veil or barbed wire, preventing total visual access to the image. It both conceals and reveals the woman inhabiting that body, explicating her as an active thinking and feeling being, an image which is emphasised by the frank conversation about her sexuality with her daughter. The Arabic and English parts of the sound-track have been given equal emphasis, 'creating a difficult and alienating situation for a Western audience who have to strain to follow the ' (Hatoum in Mona Hatoum 1997, p.140). The work evokes a strong sense of intimacy between a mother and daughter and suggests a creative and transformative relationship through the breaking of taboos around the maternal body. It is through the daughter's art-making project that the mother is able to present herself freely, in a form which cements a bond of identity independent of colonial and patriarchal concerns.

Further reading:
Mona Hatoum, exhibition catalogue, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Castello di Rivoli, Milan 1999, pp.11-12
Michael Archer, Guy Brett, Catherine de Zegher, Mona Hatoum, Mona Hatoum, London 1997, pp.13-14, 53, 56, 96, 138, 140-1, reproduced (colour) p.54-5, 96
Mona Hatoum, exhibition catalogue, Arnolfini, Bristol 1993, p.22, reproduced (colour) p.29

Elizabeth Manchester
February 2000

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'Measures of Distance', Mona Hatoum, 1988 | Tate

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Artwork page for 'Measures of Distance', Mona Hatoum, 1988 Mona Hatoum left Beirut in 1975 for a short visit to London. When war broke out in the Lebanon she found it impossible to return. In this video, letters from her mother in Beirut, written in Arabic, move across the screen.

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https://corporealfem.wordpress.com/2012/11/04/the-art-of-hannah-wilke-feminist-narcissism-and-the-reclamation-of-the-erotic-body/

The self- imaging of women artists such as the provocative American artist Hannah Wilke was frequently attacked and dismissed by art critics as being indulgent exercises in narcissism that only served to reinforce the objectification of the female body.

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Export uses a pseudonym, and during 'Identity Transfer' she uses a feminist critique of the limits imposed on the individual based on their perceived gender.

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VALIE EXPORT created her black and white photographs Identity Transfer 1, 2 and 3 (, and ) soon after creating her artistic identity as 'VALIE EXPORT'. Born Waltraud Lehner, she rejected both her father's name and that of her former husband (Höllinger) and reinvented herself using the name of an Austrian cigarette brand, EXPORT, that marketed itself as unique - ' semper und unique, immer und überall' (quoted in Ob/De+Con(Struction, p.26). In a mock advertising shot she had herself photographed holding out a packet of VALIE EXPORT cigarettes, bearing her own face on its side, to the viewer ( VALIE EXPORT - SMART EXPORT, 1970). Her pose is confrontational and macho - a burning cigarette clamped between her lips, she looks down at the viewer from under virtually closed eyelids - while an area of breast visible above the low neckline of her leaf-patterned dress emphasises her femininity.

EXPORT has recounted that as a teenager she had wanted to act and, that when she was eighteen, she and a boyfriend switched gender by exchanging their appearances for a series of photographs, now lost (VALIE EXPORT, p.144). For the Identity Transfer works she wore tight black trousers, a curly short-haired wig with blonde highlights, heavy gold chains around her neck and wrists, full 1960s make-up (heavy black eyeliner and pale lipstick) and a short androgynous jacket which appears white in Identity Transfers 1 and 3 and coloured in Identity Transfer 2. In 1 and 3 the jacket is unzipped, showing a narrow section of chest and the long chain hanging under the jacket; in 2 it is zipped up and the chain lies over the fabric. EXPORT's poses in 1 and 3 are identical - her left hand rests on her hip at waist level pulling the jacket zip, hooked between her index and middle fingers, vertically downwards and her right hand secures the jacket edge to her waist, ensuring it remains in position. Only her head changes - in the first picture it tilts to the right and she has a sad expression, while in the third she holds her head straight up and stares ahead with a faint smile. In the second Identity Transfer picture EXPORT smiles out at the viewer while her hands rest on her hips as though she is about to slide them into her trouser pockets. Another self-portrait photograph made in the same year and using the same wig and jewellery, entitled Pop, also features the hands-on-hips pose.

EXPORT has commented: 'All my works are self-portraits in different characters ... in which I communicate my identity' (quoted in Ob/De+Con(Struction), p.24). In her most famous image, a photograph taken in 1969, she appears sitting on a bench against an outside wall, her legs spread wide, wearing crotchless trousers and holding a machine gun. This work, entitled Action Pants: Genital Panic (see Tate ), commemorates a performance in which EXPORT confronted film viewers with her naked genitals, forcing them to encounter her femininity as object, a historical cliché of cinematic representation, in the flesh. The image appropriates a male symbol of phallic aggression constituted by the gun to defend the artist's female body and in this way confronts gender stereotyping and power relations directly. By contrast, the Identity Transfer images are ambiguous in their representation of gender and reflect a particular historical moment - the end of the 1960s - when male and female clothing began to merge and become confused, as men donned tight trousers and jewellery and grew their hair long, at the same time as the feminist movement began to gain cultural visibility. EXPORT's Identity Transfer images anticipate a suite of works produced by artists in Europe and America in the early 1970s concerned with gender issues. Such performances and photographic series as Jürgen Klauke's Transformer,1973, Adrian Piper's Mythic Being project, 1972-5, Eleanor Antin's King of Solana Beach,1974 and Cindy Sherman's Untitled A-D,1975 (Tate -40) highlight identity as performative, based on costume and role play. More recently, in her Self Portraits 1990-1998 (Tate -54), British artist Sarah Lucas uses her androgynous appearance in a photographic series to subvert traditional representations of women.

Identity Transfer 1, 2 and 3 were photographed by Viennese photographer Werner H. Mraz, who documented several of the artist's actions in the late 1960s. They were not exhibited until the 1990s, when they were printed in an edition of three plus one artist's proof. Tate's copy is the third in the edition. In 1973 EXPORT created a second Identity Transfer series differentiated from the first through the use of roman numerals.

Further reading:
VALIE EXPORT, exhibition catalogue, Centre national de la photographie, Paris, Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Geneva and Camden Arts Centre, London 2003, reproduced p.11.
VALIE EXPORTt: Ob/De+Con(Struction), exhibition catalogue, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, Santa Monica Museum of Art and Otis School of Art and Design, Los Angeles 2000, p.26.
Donna De Salvo, Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970, exhibition catalogue, Tate Modern, London 2005, reproduced fig.31, p.113.

Elizabeth Manchester
March 2006

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'Identity Transfer 1', VALIE EXPORT, 1968, printed late 1990s | Tate

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Artwork page for 'Identity Transfer 1', VALIE EXPORT, 1968, printed late 1990s Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT adopted her pseudonym in 1967 to reject the names of both her father and of her former husband and assume a sort of commercial brand identity.

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“Painting on the body creates a special connection to a person that other visual art forms have trouble accomplishing; it’s a distinctly human experience.” Trina Merry

http://www.trinamerryartist.com/about/

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Unicorn is a white sculpture designed to be worn by a female performer. A series of vertical and horizontal white fabric straps serve as a kind of bodice that binds the performer's naked body, with further straps connecting the neck to a tall, conical, horn-like structure that extends vertically from the top of the performer's head. In an interview in 1993 Horn explained the development and original manifestation of this work, one of her earliest sculptures for the body:

[I had a vision] of this woman, another student. She was very tall and had a beautiful way of walking. I saw her in my mind's eye, walking with this tall, white stick on her head which accentuated her graceful walk. I was very shy, but I started talking to her and proposed that I measure her to build this body-construction that she would have to wear naked and that would terminate in a large unicorn horn on her head. To my surprise she agreed ... I invited some people and we went out to this forest at four AM. She walked all day through the fields ... she was like an apparition.
(Quoted in Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 1993, p.16.)

Developed from a 1968-9 preparatory sketch (Tate ), Unicorn is part of a series of body extensions - including Trunk 1967-9 (Tate ), Arm Extensions 1968 (Tate ), and Scratching Both Walls at Once 1974-5 (Tate ) - in which unwieldy prosthetics are used to emphasise the fragility and vulnerability of the human body. For Unicorn, however, the layers of meaning are more complex: the single woman clad in white, the original forest location and the symbolism of the unicorn reflect what curator Germano Celant has identified as Horn's 'intentional manifestation of white magic, in which woman tries to win out over reality and society' (quoted in Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 1993, p.44).

Emerging onto the art scene in the late 1960s, the German artist Rebecca Horn was part of a generation of artists whose work challenged the institutions, forces and structures that governed not only the art world but society at large. In art, this meant a renewed critical focus on the human body, contesting the commodification of art objects by foregrounding the individual. This focus on the human body took on a particular personal resonance for Horn, who was confined to hospitals and sanatoria for much of her early twenties after suffering from severe lung poisoning while working unprotected with polyester and fibreglass at Hamburg's Academy of the Arts.

Horn has made work in a variety of media throughout her career, from drawing to installation, writing to filmmaking. Yet it is with her sculptural constructions for the body that she has undertaken the most systematic investigation of individual subjectivity. Her bodily extensions, for example, draw attention to the human need for interaction and control while also pointing to the futility of ambitions to overcome natural limitations. Similarly, her constructions, despite their medical imagery, are deliberately clumsy and functionless, while other works attest to the unacknowledged affinities between humans, animals and machines.

Unicorn appears in Horn's 1970 film of the same name, and in her 1973 film Performances II.

Further reading
Ida Gianelli (ed.), Rebecca Horn: Diving through Buster's Bedroom, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 1990, pp.38-9.
Germano Celant, Nancy Spector, Giuliana Bruno and others, Rebecca Horn, exhibition catalogue, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 1993, no.4.
Armin Zweite, Katharina Schmidt, Doris von Drathen and others, Rebecca Horn: Drawings, Sculptures, Installations, Films 1964-2006, Ostfildern 2006, pl.25.

Lucy Watling
August 2012

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Artwork page for 'Unicorn', Rebecca Horn, 1970-2 Horn designed Unicorn for a fellow student, whom she associated with the mythical beast, symbol of purity, chastity and innocence. 'In my early performances, I was very shy. I would focus on one person and try to communicate through the object I had constructed...'

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is a collection of objects of varying sizes, made of various rough-hewn fabrics and stuffed. When installed, the boulder-like forms are accumulated into large group environments that the viewer can walk into and around. The objects inhabit an ambiguous, disturbing place between bodies, organic matter and rock. While they appear firm and weighty, the seams and slashes in the fabric betray their softness. Their shapes are evocative of cocoon-like forms, something also suggested by the series title, Embryology. Magdalena Abakanowicz made these works to reflect on regeneration and the development of human and animal nervous systems, topics she discussed with scientists in Poland during the early 1970s. The materials and scale of this work exemplify Abakanowicz's preoccupation with surface, texture and seriality.

Abakanowicz began her earliest cycle of these artworks, called the Abakans, during the 1960s. These objects were the product of the conditions in which the artist lived in Soviet-controlled Poland: in one room, with limited access to materials, the soft objects were woven using threads pulled from discarded ropes. Having previously made gouaches on canvas which she kept folded under her bed, Abakanowicz was able to store the large-scale sisal pieces in the same way. The artist's active use of a technique more commonly associated with a craft tradition is a central concern of these works, which stage the tension between hard and soft as well as monumentality and a poverty of means.

The artist has described the Abakans as 'Monumental, strong, soft and erotic' (Magdalena Abakanowicz, 'Reflections', in Institut Valencià d'Art Modern 2008, p.97). Historically they have been shown individually or installed in groups to create an environment. Resembling both organic and bodily forms, they vary in colour and shape. Made in 1969, Abakan Red (Tate ) is suspended from the ceiling, falling in folds that appear both vaginal and suggestive of a great protective cape. Abakan Orange 1971(Tate ) consists of a long orange rope-like form hanging from the ceiling, gradually diminishing in width to a thin thread connected to a large, roughly circular shape draped on the floor. Here the horizontal and vertical are held in tension in a dramatic interdependent connection.

The seriality of Embryology is also replicated in Backs 2009(Tate ), a group of humanoid figures shown hunched over, their spines towards the viewer. The figures appear pensive but also abject; it is unclear if they are bent in prayer or subjugation. The artist has described the work: 'people who saw the Backs would ask: "Is it Auschwitz?" "Is it a religious ceremony in Peru?" "Is it a dance of Ramayana?" The answer to these questions is affirmative, because it speaks about the human condition in general' (Abakanowicz, 'Reflections', in Institut Valencià d'Art Modern 2008, p.98).

Further reading
Magdalena Abakanowicz, 'Confession: Excerpts from My Autobiography', Sculpture, vol.24, no.8, October 2005, pp.30-7.
Konteksty, special issue on Magdalena Abakanowicz, vol.60, nos.3-4, 2006.
Magdalena Abakanowicz, exhibition catalogue, Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Valencia 2008.

Lucy Askew and Rachel Taylor
November 2008

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'Embryology', Magdalena Abakanowicz, 1978-80 | Tate

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is a collection of objects of varying sizes, made of various rough-hewn fabrics and stuffed. When installed, the boulder-like forms are accumulated into large group environments that the viewer can walk into and around. The objects inhabit an ambiguous, disturbing place between bodies, organic matter and rock.

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http://hewillnotdivide.usShia Le Beouf begun a live stream performance lasting four years from 20th January - the span of Donald Trump's presidency. The camera is situated outside the MOMA New York and is live streaming 24 hours a day.

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http://www.emmahackartist.com.au/emma_art/emma_wallpaper07.html#.WIEh_Mc8F-U

EMMA HACK is an Adelaide-based artist working in the unique medium of body paint installation and photography. Emma has received great acclaim for her refined body paint camouflage technique; through a combination of painting on canvas, body painting and studio-based photography, her work evokes a rich array of visual narrative and magical realism.

Best known for her Wallpaper series (2005-2010)- in which she painstakingly camouflaged the human form by hand painting her models into the remarkable designs of the late Florence Broadhurst. Emma Hack’s diverse artwork collections draw inspiration from the unique Australian flora and fauna, as well as Oriental influences.

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Klein uses the body and performance art to immateriality and infinite space through pure colour.

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Yves Klein - Exhibition at Tate Liverpool | Tate

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A major figure of post war art, Yves Klein is renowned for his dazzling monochrome paintings. This exhibition at Tate Liverpool will be the first in the UK in over twenty years

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Within the years of 1973 to 1980, artist Ana Mendieta created a collection of works entitled Silueta. They were created on a number of trips Mendieta made, traveling between Mexico and her hometown in Iowa. All of the pieces in this series are created in a very similar matter, using the silhouette of Mendieta's body. Often times the silhouette of the body was filled with organic elements of the earth including rocks, sand, flowers, and twigs. The piece I found the most interesting from her Sileta series is entitled Alma Silueta en Fuego.

Alma Silueta en Fuego translates to mean "Soul Silhouette on Fire," which is what the piece appears to be. Pictured above, the Alma Silueta en Fuego, originally recorded to film, displays a ghostly silhouette of a body. The silhouette is then set to fire and burns until completely encompassed in flames. The video below is from the original Super 8 camera footage filmed in October 1975, when the piece was created.

Ana Mendieta's pieces shared many common themes. From the video above, you can see that there is a prominent theme of what appears to be violence. Often called "eerie" and "haunting," Mendieta's Silueta series "reveal her interest in the earth as a site to address issues of displacement" ("Ana Mendieta"). This seemed to relate largely to the theme of immigration discussed this semester, which Mendieta experienced early in her life at the age of 13. Ana and her sister, Raquelin Mendieta, were born to a politically prominent family in Havana, Cuba during the reign of the Communist movement and leader Fidel Castro. When tensions arose between her family and Castro in 1961, her and her sister were shipped on a plane that was headed to the United States, specifically Miami. This is where Mendieta's theme of displacement in her work originates. This story of Ana Mendieta's displacement from her home and immigration to the United States reminded me a lot of the graphic novel, Persepolis. A young girl at the time of her move to the U.S., Mendieta probably questioned what was going on in her home country. With political and social movements on the rise and riots occurring in the streets of Cuba, Ana's childhood seems almost parallel to Marjane's, the main character in Persepolis, except the fact that Marjane was not sent away from her home to a completely foreign country. This displacement from her natural country of birth, away from her family and friends, had a big influence on her life, which is why it is such an intense, prominent theme in her work.

Along with this personal theme of displacement, Mendieta also seems to be inspired by the earth. As she states in the following quote:

"For the past five years I have been working out in nature, exploring the relationship between myself, the earth, and art." - Ana Mendieta

In this quote, recorded during the years of her Silueta series, Mendieta is explaining what her intentions were during the years this collection of works was produced. She states she was attempting to discover "the relationship between" herself, the earth and her art. By using earthly materials such as rocks, sand, and leaves, and interconnecting them with the earthly element of fire in Alma Silueta en Fuego, Mendieta is developing her unique relationship with the earth. The use of fire can appear to mean many things such as anger or violence, but the use of it in Alma Silueta en Fuego is more complex. Taking interest in the many rituals of Latin and Afro-Latin culture, fire seems to represent life in this piece, another major theme of Ana Mendieta's work. Fire, for many ancient cultures, tends to symbolize the renewal of life through the warmth and comfort of flames. So why many criticized Mendieta for the "violence" present in Alma Silueta en Fuego, this piece was not simply about burning the silhouette of a body. I understood it to represent a renewal of the soul within the body.

Ana Mendieta represented those artists that Joanna Frueh speaks of in the first lines of her article "The Body Through Women's Eyes," which states:

"Feminists who portrayed the human body or used their own bodies in their art created some of the
most radical and provocative works of the 1970s. Since then, the body has been an image, an idea,
and an issue of continuing significance in women's art" (Frueh 190).

By using her own body in her work, Mendieta was promoting these feminists ideals spoken about in Frueh's article. By "recording the presence of her body-or the imprint it left behind-within different natural environments," Ana Mendieta was reclaiming her body for herself with a purpose ("Ana Mendieta"). This is why I believe her creations constitute as feminists art. She wasn't depicting herself nude, which she did in many of her pieces, to make pornography or cause these provocative thoughts so many people came to when viewing her work. She was simply expressing herself and the natural connection she felt with the earth. Mendieta's Alma Silueta en Fuego showed that "women could become makers of meaning, as opposed to being bearer's of man's meaning" (Frueh 190).

Works Cited

"Ana Mendieta." MOCA | The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Web. 11 May 2012. <http://www.moca.org/pc/viewArtWork.php?id=87>.

Image: "Ana Mendieta." Galerie Lelong. Web. 11 May 2012. <http://www.galerielelong.com/artist/ana-mendieta>.

Frueh, Joanna. "The Body Through Women's Eyes" in The Power of Feminist Art, p.190-207.

Video: "Video." San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Web. 10 May 2012. <http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/194>.

Author: Ashley A.

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Within the years of 1973 to 1980, artist Ana Mendieta created a collection of works entitled Silueta. They were created on a number of trips Mendieta made, traveling between Mexico and her hometown in Iowa. All of the pieces in this series are created in a very similar matter, using the silhouette of Mendieta's body.

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http://acconci.com/

Vito Hannibal Acconci is an American designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist.

One installation/performance piece from this period is Seedbed(January 15–29, 1971). In Seedbed Acconci lay hidden underneath a gallery-wide ramp installed at the Sonnabend Gallery, masturbating while vocalizing into a loudspeaker his fantasies about the visitors walking above him on the ramp. One motivation behind Seedbed was to involve the public in the work's production by creating a situation of reciprocal interchange between artist and viewer.

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https://rosiejamestextileartist.wordpress.com/

Anonymous passers-by, individuals and crowds are the subject matter of Rosie James’ artwork. Within her figurative thread-drawings and screen prints, she draws attention to often overlooked details found in  everyday occurrences, seeking to capture the commonality within groups. We see people passing on the street, on the way to work, whilst shopping, and little acknowledgement is made of them. James, however, carefully represents each individual in stitch, looking for detail in the ordinary and commonality within the group. Through layering, James allows us to see both aspects of this, with the block of pattern representing a lack of individuality, and the intricate sewn portraits depicting the individual.

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160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People ... is a video documenting an action that took place at El Gallo Arte Contemporáneo in Salamanca, Spain in December 2000. The artist's text explains: 'Four prosititutes addicted to heroin were hired for the price of a shot of heroin to give their consent to be tattooed. Normally they charge 2,000 or 3,000 pesetas, between 15 and 17 dollars, for fellatio, while the price of a shot of heroin is around 12,000 pesetas, about 67 dollars.' (Quoted from the artist's text accompanying the video.) The single-channel black and white video constitutes an informal record of the event in which the four participating women allow their backs to be used for the tattoo. It shows the women - two fair haired and two dark haired - arrive in the space and take up positions, naked from the waist up and with their backs towards the camera, straddling black bentwood chairs. During the action they move constantly, chatting, laughing, smoking, turning to look behind them, curiously watching the female tattoo artist and commenting on her processes until, finally, she cleans their wounds and covers them with bandages. During the film, two men in dark clothes pass in and out of the frame, holding a tape measure over the bared backs for the initial measurement and taking photographs of the process as it develops.

Born in Madrid, Sierra studied at the Universidad Complutense, Madrid (1989), the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg (1989-91) and at the Escuela de San Carlos, Universidad Autónoma de México, Mexico City (1995-7). He has been based in Mexico City since 1995. Early works involved industrial-scale interventions on urban situations: large cubic and rectangular containers placed inside buildings, and sections of road, wall and floor cut out and positioned elsewhere. In the mid 1990s he began staging actions involving obstruction and disruption in urban environments utilising fire, vehicles, rotting food, wrapping tape and, since the late 1990s, people. Taking the form of site-specific actions and installations documented by video, photography and text, Sierra's work confronts the workings of the global capitalist economy and the persistence of the division between the first and third worlds. Each of his works highlights the exploitation of human labour taking place in systems of economic exchange. Many address issues of individual freedom and mobility and the restriction of these freedoms through national identity, border controls and immigration policies. Sierra focuses on those sections of the community who are most exploited and yet who remain least 'visible' in official terms: illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, prostitutes, drug addicts and the urban poor, unemployed and homeless. He employs such people to perform pointless or repetitive tasks that are often absurd or degrading. Since 1999 Sierra has paid people to sit in a cardboard box, lie inside the trunk of a car or in a wooden box being used as a bench at an art party, to clean people's shoes without their consent, to form a crowd, to block a museum's entrance, to masturbate on video and to support large weights as long as physically possible.

By turning the process of exploitation into a spectacle, viewed in a gallery or museum, Sierra causes the institution to collaborate in relations of power and economics, thus highlighting the ubiquity and inevitability of such relations and raising a number of related ethical questions. By enabling heroin addicts to have more heroin, as in 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People ... and a work made a few months previously 10 inch line shaved on the heads of two junkies who received a shot of heroin as payment 2000, Sierra himself enters an ethically ambiguous situation in which the artworld participates by purchasing his art product. Focusing on the extremely poor and disadvantaged, Sierra's works emphasise the tension between the choice of the participants to undertake the tasks for a wage, and their lack of choice owing to their economic situation and neglected medical conditions. The actions he instigates are metaphors - or poetic equivalents - for all the poorly paid jobs backing the structure of the global market economy.

160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People ... is the third of Sierrra's actions involving tattooing. In the first, Line of 30 cm Tattooed on a Remunerated Person 51 Regina Street. México City, Mexico. May 1998, the artist 'looked for a person who did not have any tattoos or intentions of having one, but due to a need for money, would agree to have a mark on his skin for life'. The participant received $50. The second tattooing work was 250 cm Line Tattooed on 6 Paid People, Espacio Aglutinador. Havana, Cuba. December 1999, in which six unemployed young men from Old Havana were hired for $30 in exchange for being tattooed.

The video 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People ... may be projected on the wall or exhibited on a monitor. It was produced in an edition of three plus one artist's proof and one exhibition copy; Tate's copy is the third in the edition.

Further reading
http://www.santiago-sierra.com
Santiago Sierra: Works 2002-1990, exhibition catalogue, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 2002, reproduced pp.52-3.
Fabio Cavallucci and Carlos Jiménez, Santiago Sierra, exhibition catalogue, Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea, Trento 2005, reproduced p.164.

Elizabeth Manchester
August 2006

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‘160 cm line tattooed on 4 people el gallo arte contemporáneo. salamanca

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línea de 160 cm tatuada sobre 4 personas el gallo arte contemporáneo. salamanca

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'160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People El Gallo Arte Contemporáneo. Salamanca, Spain. December 2000', Santiago Sierra, 2000 | Tate

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Artwork page for '160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People El Gallo Arte Contemporáneo. Salamanca, Spain. December 2000', Santiago Sierra, 2000 on display at Tate Modern. Sierra's works highlight the exploitation of human labour. He focuses on those who are most exploited and yet who remain least 'visible' in official terms: illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, sex workers, drug addicts and poor, unemployed and homeless people.

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Natalia Lach-Lachowicz, or Natalia LL, is a pioneer of feminist art in Poland. LL’s photographs, drawings, moving image works and installations have from the outset addressed the female subject in a patriarchal, increasingly consumerist society.

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Born 1937 in Żywiec, Poland. Lives and works in Wrocław.

Natalia LL at a LGBT demonstration in New York in 1977

Courtesy the artist and lokal_30 gallery Warsaw

Natalia Lach-Lachowicz, or Natalia LL, is a pioneer of feminist art in Poland. LL's photographs, drawings, moving image works and installations have from the outset addressed the female subject in a patriarchal, increasingly consumerist society, and as a result she was soon noticed by Western feminist critics, including Lucy Lippard, providing her with international exhibition opportunities from the mid-1970s onwards. LL studied at the PWSSP (today the Academy of Fine Arts) in Wrocław, graduating in 1963. In 1970, she co-founded PERMAFO (short for permanent formalisation) Gallery in Wrocław, with fellow artists Zbigniew Dłubak, Andrzej Lachowicz and Antoni Dzieduszycki, which was set up as a home for artists' experiments in photography.

Using photography to depict small, everyday actions such as eating, sleeping, copulation, resting and speaking, LL introduced the notion of 'permanent registration' seeing art as 'a process that generates successive phases of reality', rather than a sphere divorced from the everyday. As one of the most prominent conceptual artists in Poland, she was critical of conceptualism's cold, rational detachment from physical sensuality and the everyday, which led her to incorporate popular culture and the possibilities of mechanical registration and distribution into her work.

Following the Permanent Registration body of work (1970-2), Natalia LL embarked on a series of film and photographic works entitled Consumer Art 1972-5 - a critique of the commodification of women's bodies in pornography. The sixteen-minute silent film Consumer Art 1972 features young, attractive female models provocatively eating a variety of suggestively shaped foods, emulating the style of pornographic films. The women gaze at the camera seductively as they perform the erotically charged 'play' with bananas, sausages, ice cream and other food filled with sexual innuendo. Unlike pornography, in Consumer Art the models are given agency, their actions teetering between seduction and humour, as they gaze back, reversing the dynamics from objects of male gaze and consumption, to being active protagonists in control of the situation.

Lina Džuverović
September 2015

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Natalia Lach-Lachowicz (Natalia LL) | Tate

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Born 1937 in Żywiec, Poland. Lives and works in Wrocław. Natalia Lach-Lachowicz, or Natalia LL, is a pioneer of feminist art in Poland. LL's photographs, drawings, moving image works and installations have from the outset addressed the female subject in a patriarchal, increasingly consumerist society, and as a result she was soon noticed by Western feminist critics, including Lucy Lippard, providing her with international exhibition opportunities from the mid-1970s onwards.

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Jann Haworth (born 1942) is a US pop artist. A pioneer of soft sculpture, she is best known as the co-creator of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. Haworth is also an advocate for feminist rights especially for women representation in the art world.

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The photographer saw the beauty in America's tragic wastelands and offered us new ways of seeing the world - here we trace the seminal moments in her five-decade career

Few photographers can boast a body of work as deep and uncompromisingly honest as that of Nan Goldin. Internationally renowned for her documentation of love, fluid sexuality, glamour, beauty, death, intoxication and pain, Goldin's photographs feature her life and those in it. Her visual language and "social portraiture" approach not only rejects the conventional limits of the medium of photography, it creates something unique: a mirror of herself, as well as the world.

Having run away from home in her early teens, before being fostered by several families, Goldin did everything in her power to run away from the respectable world, her parents and the Jewish household she was brought up in. It was in school that she tried her hand at photography, before putting on her first show in Boston in 1973. While photography offered her a pathway - on which she progressed before graduating from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Tufts University with a degree in fine arts in 1977 - Goldin was using heroin by her late teens. Having moved to New York in the 1970s, it was in 1979 that Goldin's show of transgressive photos featuring her friends making love in messy apartments, her naked lovers and the Bowery's drag queens (a subject that she would later make her own) was widely noticed and considered as groundbreaking within the field of fine art photography. By seeing the beauty in America's tragic wastelands, she paved the way for photographers like Corinne Day, Wolfgang Tillmans and Juergen Teller. As her ever-evolving exhibition The Ballad of Sexual Dependency runs at New York's Museum of Modern Art until February, we give you a definitive 26-point guide to the photographer herself.

A IS FOR AESTHETIC

Goldin's snapshot style quickly became integral to her approach to photography. Shooting her friends and lovers during candid moments that range from intimacies in the bedroom to throwaway moments in a club or a bar, the photographer's circle of friends naturally became her subject matter. While other photographers, such as Diane Arbus have made a name for themselves photographing marginalised people, Goldin lived and experience the exact same life as her subjects - the lawlessness, the struggles, the heartbreak and the pain - much like Larry Clark did (see L for more).

B IS FOR BARBARA

From Sisters, Saints & Sybyls to The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, the influence of Goldin's sister Barbara, who committed suicide at 18-years-old, is a significant vein in the photographer's work. While Sisters, Saints & Sybyls was an image and video exploration of her sister's suicide, in the book introduction to The Ballad of Sexual Dependency- dedicated to Barbara - Goldin recalled, " I was eleven when my sister committed suicide. This was in 1965, when teenage suicide was a taboo subject. I was very close to my sister and aware of some of the forces that led her to choose suicide. I saw the role that her sexuality and its repression played in her destruction. Because of the times, the early 60s, women who were angry and sexual were frightening, outside the range of acceptable behaviour, beyond control. By the time she was 18, she saw that her only way to get out was to lie down on the tracks of the commuter train outside of Washington, D.C. It was an act of immense will."

Immediately following Barbara's death, Goldin was seduced by an older man. Despite this being a period of mourning, she became obsessed with him, stimulated by the sexual excitement that came with it. Later, after promising to marry Goldin, cruelly, the older man admitted that he had in fact only been in love with her sister.

C IS FOR COOKIE MUELLER

A recurrent protagonist in Goldin's work was writer and actress Cookie Mueller, who featured in a number of John Water's films. Having met in 1976, Goldin photographed Mueller extensively and a series of these intimate shots make up 1991's book Cookie Mueller. In it, the photographer writes, "She was a cross between Tobacco Road and a Hollywood B-Girl, the most fabulous woman I'd ever seen". Goldin's images of the Lower East Side starlet range from photographs of her with her son, to those of Mueller's battle with Aids of which she died in 1989, along with the occasional photo of the two of them together.

D IS FOR DRUG USE

High-risk substance abuse, domestic violence and Aids surrounded Goldin and her New York family, and while many of them did not escape the scene, Goldin did. Checking into a detox clinic for drugs and alcohol in 1988 two years after The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was published, as Goldin told The Telegraph in 2009: "When I crossed the line from use to self-abuse my world became very, very dark." It's unsurprising that Goldin has previously spoken about the redemptive properties of photography, despite having admitted that she once told her students not to study post-modernism, but to take LSD because "it teaches you the same thing". Upon checking in, the clinic took away Goldin's camera and her copy of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, fearing they may provoke sexual and drug-based urges in other patients. While so many of her companions died at a young age, Goldin's images acted as a continuous reminder of what she has lost. Post-rehab, daylight became present in Goldin's work (see X).

E IS FOR ENROLLING AT SCHOOL

Following expulsion from a number of boarding schools and disagreements with her parents, Goldin left home at 14 to live in foster homes and communes. It was during this period that she enrolled at Satya Community School, an institution that believed the school should fit the child, as opposed to the other way around. At Satya, Goldin met fellow photographer David Armstrong, who crowned then-Nancy, "Nan". Sharing a mutual obsession for 1930s film stars, the women of Andy Warhol 's factory and a fondness for going to the movies, the pair remained very close friends until Armstrong died of liver cancer in 2014. It was at Satya that Goldin discovered photography, when American existential psychologist Rollo May's daughter, who worked at the school, facilitated a shipment of Polaroid cameras to be delivered there.

F IS FOR FILM

It was in an interview with The Telegraph in 2009 that Goldin expressed that while she is widely renowned for her photography, these days her focus is on making film. Her work has varied between collages, slideshow projections, and film - all of which stem back to her early fascination with the movies shared with Armstrong. "My whole relationship to the world has been created by cinema", revealed Goldin in a 2007 interview with the Tate. She also previously described how her slide-based approach stemmed from an aversion to printing in the darkroom in art school. She made slides to show her lecturers, and this habit quickly turned into her trademark. It was later in the 80s when Goldin started presenting her work in bars and clubs that she started to devise sequences of images, to pair with sound - a reaction to the way her images played off the live bands playing in them.

G IS FOR GENDER POLITICS

Much of Goldin's work explores the conventions of gender politics, in particular, throughout The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Questioning what it is to be male or female, the book approached gender politics before there was a term to define such a thing. Having grown up during the height of conformism of the 1950s, Goldin realised how hard it was for females to own their individual identities. During her older years, she realised that there was no one-fits-all mould for a relationship, that sexual attraction and love could be different things, and that marriage could result in violence, pain and re-marriage. It's these subconscious realisations that make for the politically charged pages of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. As the photographer put it in the introduction to The Other Side: "The pictures in this book are not of people suffering gender dysphoria but rather expressing gender euphoria.... The people in these pictures are truly revolutionary; they are the real winners in the battle of the sexes because they have stepped out of the ring".

H IS FOR HEARTBEAT

Goldin's Heartbeatis a multimedia installation of 245 portraits of "couples and lovers" that formed part of a wider exhibition titled Seduction. Featuring four European couples indulging in intimate moments and engaging in sexual activity, the images or "treasured moments" play out as a series of short stories that chronicle the intimacy, passion, love and longing between each pair. The minimalist electronic music that accompanied the installation was written by English composer John Tavener and performed by Björk.

I IS FOR IRREPLACEABLE NEW YORK FAMILY

It was upon moving from Boston to New York that Goldin found her new, chosen, dysfunctional family of outsiders, artists, transvestites, junkies, actors and prostitutes that became the subjects of her work. As Goldin wrote in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, they were a family "bonded not by blood or place but by a similar morality, the need to live fully and for the moment". In turn, Goldin was one of the first photographers in the Western world to extensively photograph her band of outsiders from the inside out. While renowned photographers like Arbus and Sally Mann were aware and informed about their subjects, Goldin's advantage was that she actually lived with her subjects and while they were not bound to her by blood, they were the family that she actively chose.

J IS FOR JOEY

Another main protagonist in Goldin's work is Joey. From the famed "Joey at Nan's apartment" and to "Joey in my mirror", to the lesser-known "Joey at Spaghetteria" and "Joey at the love ball" - Goldin documented Joey in various scenarios in the early 90s, between New York and Berlin. Speaking to Sleek about her portraits of friends, Goldin says, "I know how to make someone look beautiful. And I'll never photograph anyone I don't know. You have to know the person to really be able to photograph them. But I never show pictures of my friends if they don't want me to. My drawers are full of great photographs that I won't show because the person asked me not to."

K IS FOR KIM HARLOW

Kim Harlow was a very famous transsexual performer in Paris during a time where being trans was taboo. Known as one of Paris' most beautiful women, Harlow featured heavily in Goldin's work before she suddenly died of Aids in 1993. Perhaps the most iconic of Goldin's Harlow photos is, "Kim Harlow in her dressing room at Le Carousel", taken in 1991, that sees Harlow nude but covering her breasts in a very demure way, staring straight at the camera. Speaking about Harlow on camera Goldin says, "I was very, very attracted to her and found her incredibly beautiful and became friends with her. She didn't want to meet any transsexual or transvestite friends of mine because she really felt that she was living as a woman and didn't want to be classified in that world."

L IS FOR LARRY CLARK

Goldin's self-taught approach to photography and lack of traditional technique meant that many people rejected her as a "good photographer". When a professor advised Goldin to look at the work of Larry Clark, she could instantly relate to the intimacy of his lawless pictures of teenagers having sex, playing with guns, or shooting up heroin in the 60s. In other words, they shared an insider's perspective on what Clark coined "the outlaw life". It's no surprise that Goldin often cites Clark's seminal book Tulsa - that documents the lives of a group of rebellious teens from his hometown through a series of black and white photographs - as a main influence on her work along with Clark himself who spent much time as her mentor. Much like Goldin's, Clark blurred the lines between voyeurism, honesty, and exploitation, in turn creating new boundaries of what documentary photography subject matter could or should entail for the creatives that followed his lead.

"My drawers are full of great photographs that I won't show because the person asked me not to" - Nan Goldin

M IS FOR MEMORIES

Memory is a key theme throughout Goldin's work. She wrote, reflecting on Barbara's death, "I don't really remember my sister, in the process of leaving my family, in re-creating myself, I lost the real memory of my sister. I remember my version of her, of the things she said, of the things she meant to me. But I don't remember the tangible sense of who she was . . . I don't ever want to lose the real memory of anyone again". With the snapshot nature of her photographs, it's clear that Goldin documents her life and that of those around her as a way to immortalise memories of people, places and times forever. However, on a personal level her work doesn't always have the desired effect. As she wrote in her book Couples and Loneliness, "I used to think that I could never loose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I've lost". Meanwhile, Goldin's closing testament in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency upon reflecting on departed friends reads, "The book is now a volume of loss, while still a ballad of love".

N IS FOR NAN'S LEGACY

While there is no doubt of the weight of Goldin's legacy, it's also more complicated than it might initially appear. While highly successful - her photographs that raise tens of thousands at auction - Goldin has also made no secret of her troubled finances, partly due to a contract with a publisher that stopped her publishing books for a long period of her career. However, while the photographers that influenced Goldin are apparent, her vast body of confessional work has, in turn, inspired many of today's most seminal visionaries, from the late Corinne Day, to Wolfgang Tillmans, Juergen Teller and Ryan McGinley, and her work is instantly recognisable.

O IS FOR OUTRAGE, CONTROVERSY AND CENSORSHIP

Much of Goldin's work has come under scrutiny for its controversial nature. It was only in 2007 that the police were called into Goldin's exhibition at the Baltic arts centre in Gateshead, under the pretense that Goldin's "Klara and Edda belly-dancing" photograph - part of a series owned by Sir Elton John - breached child pornography laws. Later, the Crown Prosecution Service deemed that the photograph was not indecent. Meanwhile president Bill Clinton famously made a statement accusing Goldin of promoting and glamorising heroin chic at a time when the entire fashion industry was put under a microscope for its use of skinny, emaciated looking models.

P IS FOR PAIN

It was while working behind the bar at Tin Pan Alley on West 49th Street that Goldin met her lover Brian, an ex-marine turned office worker who came to feature heavily in her work. Both drugs and their physical attraction to one another consumed them. Physically, with his hairy chest and his crooked smile, Brian was a vision of the textbook American man, while his behaviour was not. Brian used strength as a weapon, beating Goldin to the point that her eye nearly detached from its socket. Following this, the worst period of abuse, Goldin stitched her own eye back up and the self-portrait, " Nan one month after being battered ", followed in 1984. The abuse also entered the emotional space when Brian burned many of Goldin's journals.

Q IS FOR (DRAG) QUEENS

Goldin has been documenting America's gay and transsexual communities since before her first solo show in Boston in 1973. It was the drag queens she fell in love with, and while many of them hated the way that photographers like Diane Arbus portrayed them - some might say exploited - Goldin represented her contemporaries in a respectful and honest light. Her book The Other Side is testament to this. As one of the first photographers to suggest the need for gender fluidity in her work, Goldin accepted the drag queens that made up her New York family as a third gender. When it comes to herself, Goldin is pansexual. In an interview with Sleek magazine in 2012 she said, "I'm bisexual so I can't really come out as gay. When I'm gay, I'm very gay. And when I'm with men then, you know, I'm with men. I don't fall in love with people because of their gender."

R IS FOR RECORDING THE AIDS ERA

While much of Goldin's work unintentionally romanticises drug use, it also portrays the darkness, death, abuse, pain and survival associated with it. As Goldin wrote in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, "I want the people in my pictures to stare back. I want to show exactly what my world looks like, without glamorisation, without glorification. This is not a bleak world but one in which there is an awareness of pain, a quality of introspection." Released in 2003 after a seven year hiatus, Goldin's book The Devil's Playground is a particularly significant example of this. From her own abusive relationship fuelled by drug use and the moment she personally crossed the line from use and abuse, to the deaths of some of her nearest and dearest friends as a result of the 1980s Aids epidemic that ran through New York's gay community. The book captures the pain endured by those who weren't afraid to practice and endure the consequences of their American freedom. Goldin has even been known to talk about survivor's guilt in interviews. As she told The New Yorker last year "I felt so guilty in '91, when I tested negative. I was disappointed that I was negative, and most people don't understand that".

S IS FOR SELF PORTRAITS

Aside from the harrowing image "Nan one month after being battered", many of Goldin's portraits are an extremely personal and somewhat intrusive snapshot of her life. It's the images before her break-up with Brian that speak volumes. Taken in 1983, "Nan and Brian in bed" sees the duo resting in a New York apartment after having sex. While Brian looks at the wall while smoking a cigarette with his back to his lover, Nan is lying in the bed wearing a silk dressing gown staring at Brian longingly - a symbol of two lovers in a dying relationship. Another earlier image that illustrates Goldin's personal affairs is "Nan and Dickie in the York Motel, New Jersey" (1980). Showing Goldin naked, being embraced from behind by a fully clothed, older, balding man, the image is painful to look at, like a dark secret. Goldin also showcased a series of never before seen portraits in an exhibition at San Francisco's Fraenkel Gallery, titled Nine Self-Portraits in 2014.

"During her older years, she realised that there was no one-fits-all mould for a relationship, that sexual attraction and love could be different things, and that marriage could result in violence, pain and re-marriage"

T IS FOR THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

Filled with shots capturing the lawless bohemianism of her peer group, Goldin's 1996 book I'll Be Your Mirror, chronicles two decades of her life, from her time in Boston through to her move to New York. I'll Be Your Mirror is also the name of a documentary Goldin made in collaboration with the BBC before being released in 1996. The short film directed by Edmund Coulthard chronicles her life and career to date, while painting a portrait of the generation Goldin is best associated with. As Goldin told Sleek magazine in 2012, "Everybody, including Lou Reed, thinks that the name came from the Velvet Underground song. Lou Reed even wanted to meet and give me permission to use it. But actually, the name came from a letter someone had written me saying that the picture I had taken of them was like a mirror to their soul."

U IS FOR USING HER VOICE

As an in-demand speaker and lecturer, while Goldin is now able to discuss her work in great detail, it was in 2007 that she told the Tate, "I would learn about my work from what other people said about it". Aside from lecturing in educational institutions, Goldin has also used her voice as a photographer to raise awareness about, and change, perceptions of disease. Her 2010 collage titled Positive Grid, originally exhibited in Berlin at an exhibition at The Berlinische Galerie, that demonstrates this. Featuring 16 images of Nan's subjects in a grid, of which all were HIV positive, Goldin's work offers a different perspective to the image of HIV and AIDS widespread in the media in the 80s and 90s.

V IS FOR VOODOO PHOTOGRAPHY

Goldin's most recent work seen in Diving For Pearls, the book she released this year, revisits her personal oeuvre from the last 40 years. Featuring 400 photographs, many are new images alongside a series of previously unpublished works. In this book Goldin invites us to admire the beauty of unintentional photographic fuck-ups made with an analogue camera, - think double and triple exposures, or clip marks on the negatives. Named Diving For Pearls in memory of Armstrong who used to say that getting a good picture was like diving for pearls, Goldin closes the book with the statement, "Will voodoo ever work on digital photography?" While so many of Goldin's images exist with photographic mistakes, her work would not be the same had it been done digitally.

W IS FOR WORLDWIDE

Speaking about her work in a video for the Tate in 2007, while it was not her last interview, Goldin says it was the last time she would talk about her work because she was "sick of being compartmentalised as a New York artist when there is no reality in that". Expressing her frustration and hurt about such comments Goldin continues, "I am so tired of being continuously put there". While it's a common misconception that her work does now move out of New York City, her work is in fact global. From her collaborative work with Nobuyoshi Araki on Tokyo Love and her time spent photographing gay and trans communities in Bangkok and Manila, to her extensive body of work taken in Berlin (where she lived for a time with Brian), Zurich and Boston - to peg Goldin as just a NY photographer is undermining her worth and her relentless work ethic as a creative.

X IS FOR E-X-PERIENCING THE LIGHT

Following the two years she spent in rehab at the end of the 80s, Goldin undertook her first work without drugs. Coming out of the darkness both literally and metaphorically, this change paved the way for a new chapter in her work. Taking a more introspective, quieter approach to her art, Goldin's work from this point onwards has a differed energy thanks to a newfound focus and sense of clarity. With both darkness and light present, the medium of photography proved redemptive for Goldin on her road to recovery.

Y IS FOR YOUTH

In 2014, Goldin released a book titled Eden and After, in which the photographs centred on children. Featuring hundreds of photographs, taken by a woman with no children herself, the subject matter in Eden and After comes as a surprise given her previous work, however, the themes remain similar. Capturing the short-lived magic of childhood and the freedom that comes with it, along with the idea of transformation, the images in the book range from photographs of Goldin's friends with their children, to those of little ones dressing up, playing games and riding on rocking horses. She has been known to say that children remind her of her first muses: drag queens.

Z IS FOR ZURICH HOTEL ROOM

Goldin's blurred shots of interiors became almost autobiographical for the photographer, or something of a vehicle through which she could reveal more about herself, or disclose more about her personal journey through life. Works like "Hotel Room, Zurich" taken in 1988 and "My Room in Halfway House, Belmont Ma" taken in 1996 are examples of this. While the settings vary from an abandoned attic-like room, to a European hotel, each image captures a moment in time, and the unconventional yet intimate shots have became intriguing memoirs of Goldin's life for her audience.

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Few photographers can boast a body of work as deep and uncompromisingly honest as that of Nan Goldin. Internationally renowned for her documentation of love, fluid sexuality, glamour, beauty, death, intoxication and pain, Goldin's photographs feature her life and those in it.

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Helen Chadwick (18 May 1953 - 15 March 1996) was a British sculptor, photographer and installation artist. In 1987, she became one of the first women artists to be nominated for the Turner Prize. Chadwick was known for "challenging stereotypical perceptions of the body in elegant yet unconventional forms. Her work draws from a range of sources, from myths to science, grappling with a plethora of unconventional, visceral materials that included chocolate, lambs tongues and rotting vegetable matter. Her skilled use of traditional fabrication methods and sophisticated technologies transform these unusual materials into complex installations. Maureen Paley noted that "Helen was always talking about craftsmanship-a constant fount of information". Binary oppositions was a strong theme in Chadwick's work; seductive/repulsive, male/female, organic/man-made. Her combinations "emphasise yet simultaneously dissolve the contrasts between them". Her gender representations forge a sense of ambiguity and a disquieting sexuality blurring the boundaries of ourselves as singular and stable beings."

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Helen Chadwick (18 May 1953 - 15 March 1996) was a British sculptor, photographer and installation artist. In 1987, she became one of the first women artists to be nominated for the Turner Prize.

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Goma attempts to commit his life to paper while undergoing rehabilitation. With the didgeridoo, Goma is attempting to embrace it as a source of inspiration and strength while creating a cultural bridge.

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In his youth, the Tokyo born Goma travelled to the Northern Territory in order to study the didgeridoo under master Djalu Gurruwiwii. During his stay, Goma lived with the Yolngu people and was adopted into the Galpu clan. Under the tutelage of Djalu, Goma became the first non-indigenous person to win the Northern Land Council prize at the Barunga didgeridoo competition.

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Cardiff creates various video walks, using audio and video to guide the participants. A sense of reality and fiction is merged and the body is present and absent.

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Gonzalez-Torres uses everyday, inanimate objects to represent the human body and relationships.
http://www.andrearosengallery.com/artists/felix-gonzalez-torres/

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Atkins mainly works with High Definition video and text. His work draws attention to the way in which we perceive, communicate and filter information, while experiencing the physical body within his work.

http://www.serpentinegalleries.org/exhibitions-events/ed-atkins-0

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This New Zealand artist takes complete control over the image they portray online and through photograph and film, documenting the self as an act of defense as both the photographer and artist.
https://www.kollektivgallery.com/artists/jordana-bragg/

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'Gillian Wearing’Signs That Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say (1992-1993)

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Gillian Wearing first attracted public acclaim when she exhibited this series of photographs at City Racing, a small artist-run gallery in London in 1993. She had been using video and photography since the early 1990s, but this was her first significant collaboration with members of the public. Standing in a busy area of South London, Wearing stopped passers-by and asked them to write down what was on their mind. With their permission, she then photographed them holding their statement. As indicated by the title of the work, Wearing has written that this collaboration 'interrupts the logic of photo-documentary and snapshot photography by the subjects' clear collusion and engineering of their own representation.' (Wearing 1997, p.3.)

The complete series of Signs is comprised of over fifty colour photographs. A broad cross-section of people participated in the photographs and the series provides a fascinating social and historical document. It refers to the economic decline in Britain in the early 1990s, manifested by statements such as 'Will Britain get through this recession?'. However most of the signs express intimate thoughts or personal convictions. This selection of five photographs shows the wide range of responses Wearing elicited from the collaborating members of the public. One of the photographs shows an elderly couple, standing on the curb of a busy street, holding a sign saying 'I like to be in the country', while another photograph shows a homeless man bearing the poignant statement: 'I signed on and they would not give me nothing'. Among the group is one of Wearing's best known images which depicts a smartly dressed young man with a mild, even complacent, expression holding a sign saying simply, 'I'm desperate'. In a 1996 interview Wearing described how 'People are still surprised that someone in a suit could actually admit to anything, especially in the early 1990s, just after the crash... I think he was actually shocked by what he had written, which suggests it must have been true. Then he got a bit angry, handed back the piece of paper, and stormed off.' (Unpublished interview with Marcus Spinelli, South Bank Centre 1997.)

Like many of Wearing's later works, such as Confess All on Video. Don't worry you will be in disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian. 1994 (Tate ), the Signs series examines the relationship between public image and private identity. Wearing often cites the influence of early British 'fly-on-the-wall' television documentaries such as Michael Apted's pioneering Seven-Up (Granada Television 1964), which charted the progress of a group of children at seven year intervals, or Paul Watson's raw investigation of family life in The Family (BBC 1974). In these television programmes intimate experiences were presented to a nationwide audience as apparently unmediated 'real life'. However the tradition of 'fly-on-the-wall' documentaries, as well as confessional TV chat shows, imply an authenticity which Gillian Wearing persistently questions. In an attempt to break down social stereotypes and masks, Wearing frequently works with people marginalised by mainstream society, such as homeless people. She has said: 'A great deal of my work is about questioning handed-down truths... I'm always trying to find ways of discovering new things about people, and so in the process discover more about myself.' ('Sign Language', Dazed and Confused, no.25, 1996, pp.53, 55.)

Further reading
Gillian Wearing, Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say 1992-1993, London 1997.
Donna De Salvo, Russell Ferguson, John Slyce, Gillian Wearing, London 1999.
Sacha Craddock, Spotlight on Gillian Wearing, exhibition catalogue, South Bank Centre, London 1999.

Jemima Montagu
March 2001
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

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'I'm desperate'', Gillian Wearing CBE, 1992-3 | Tate

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'I'm desperate'', Gillian Wearing CBE, 1992-3 on display at Tate Britain.

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Jenny Saville - Artist's Profile - The Saatchi Gallery

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Phonopoetica 1 0:00 Phonopoetica 2 4:36 Phonopoetica 3 07:34 Phonopoetica 4 10:55 Katalin Ladik is a Hungarian poet, performance artist and actress. She was born in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (today Serbia) and in the last 20 years she has lived and worked alternately in Novi Sad, Serbia, in Budapest, Hungary and on the island of Hvar, Croatia.

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Ms. Ivekovic's art is itself undergoing what might be called an un-erasing: it belongs to the ever-expanding history of art by women that is being added to every day by curators, art historians and critics. She is fairly well known in Europe and has also exhibited in Canada, but this exhibition, which has been organized by Roxana Marcoci, the Modern's curator of photography, is her first sizable exposure in the United States.

The art on view spans from 1974 to the present, with an assortment of photo-based works that offer impressive variations on the image-text combination so basic to Conceptual Art, as well as performance documentation, videos and video installations. The economy of means is often striking. For the "Paper Women" series of 1976-77 Ms. Ivekovic simply took images of models from magazines and scratched, tore and defaced them in surprisingly effective ways, cryptically implying acts of violence. For the 1974 video "Sweet Violence," the earliest work here, she applied bands of black tape, suggestive of jail-cell bars, to a television screen and then shot a propaganda program promoting Tito's Third Way, a mix of socialism and free-market economics. Fluffy pillows, wine, Pepsi-Cola and glamorous couples enjoying recreational activities are featured; a materialistic lifestyle beyond the reach of most Yugoslavs is cheerfully encouraged. Ms. Ivekovic's intervention makes visible a prison house of desires.

The most flamboyant and public piece is "Lady Rosa of Luxembourg," an insouciant sculpture installation that has taken over the museum's atrium. It consists of a Classical obelisk atop which balances a life-size statue of a very pregnant Greek-goddess figure, and the base of which is imprinted with a jarring combination of epithets and historic catchphrases (Whore, Kitsch, La Résistance).

Named for the Marxist philosopher and activist Rosa Luxemburg, who was murdered by Berlin police during the thwarted German Revolution of 1919, this work caused a furor when it was exhibited in Luxembourg in 2001, in part because it was displayed in a public park within sight of a nearly identical but unpregnant sculpture that is a war monument. Wall vitrines lined with newspaper clippings attest to the extensive press coverage it received, as do excerpts from television news interviews playing on monitors. "Lady Rosa" clearly functioned as a kind of lightning rod, as interesting for what it set off as for what it actually was. In one television interview a young man points out that people were more offended by the words on the sculpture's base than by the fact that countless women and children are beaten and abused every day.

In the catalog Ms. Marcoci creates a vivid picture of a Yugoslav art scene in which avant-garde tendencies dating back to the early 1950s reflected a country that saw itself as "a multinational state unique in its defiance of Stalin," more inclined to form cultural ties with Italy and Austria than with the Soviet Union. After the 1968 student uprisings in Western Europe, young Yugoslav artists were even less interested in official art channels, or in conventional art making.

Ms. Ivekovic figures only intermittently in this narrative, and it is easy to see why. For one thing the scene was largely dominated by men. And her early work has a strange home-alone quality and an intense focus. It is clearly made by a woman dealing with her emerging feminist consciousness, making the most of materials immediately at hand. In the 1978 video "Make Up-Make Down" we see the artist's neck, chest and hands as she languorously, and somewhat suggestively, picks up and opens tubes of foundation, mascara and lipstick. The face to which these substances are applied - the focus of the desire for improvement - never appears on camera.

Even at her most sensational Ms. Ivekovic maintains a certain discretion. In the 1979 private performance "Triangle" she sat on her apartment balcony as an official parade passed on the street below, pretending to masturbate, knowing that she would probably be observed by security officers with walkie-talkies on the roof of an adjacent building. She was shortly ordered off the balcony by another security officer calling from her building's lobby. Photographs show the triangle: the artist sitting rather primly on her balcony, the silhouette of the first officer on the roof and the crowd below. The piece offers fleeting yet chilling evidence of the intrusive power of the state, something like the novel "1984" in extreme miniature.

In the wake of "Triangle" Ms. Ivekovic's work has been more expansive in its ominousness. In the video re-creation of her 1982 performance piece "Practice Makes a Master," a female performer in a black dress and heels with a white plastic bag over her head repeatedly falls, stands up and falls again, as if rehearsing an execution. On the soundtrack the recording of Marilyn Monroe singing "That Old Black Magic" repeats at ever slower rates, until she sounds like a man. This adds a touch of vaudevillian slapstick, but the suggestion that women's relationships with men are often just gentler forms of obliteration is not exactly funny.

Also effective is "Resnik," a 1994 installation named for a mostly Muslim refugee camp near Zagreb. It involves a small room filled with potted plants and a video projection showing a barren countryside seen from a train. The landscape goes black, and words pop onto the screen conjuring alienation and isolation: "Exotic" "Mistake" "Strange" "Dangerous" "Other." The contrast between the open fields and the claustrophobic space, between the unkempt land and the hothouse plants, is gripping, as are the strange ways the words hit and miss, link up and don't.

And in "Rohrbach Living Memorial," a 2005 installation, Ms. Ivekovic effectively triangulates a small Nazi-era photograph of Gypsies rounded up for deportation to a concentration camp; a video of a group of current citizens of Rohrbach, Austria, sitting in their village square and silently reliving this situation; and us, the viewers, standing in a small gallery between the sepia-tone photograph and the video. The villagers look somber, but also intermittently restless and bored, which is also how you may feel. Then it may dawn: It is difficult to imagine facing death when you're not. Suddenly the piece evolves into a very pointed lesson not just in history and memory, but in the importance of empathy and the ability to put yourself in other people's places. Ms. Ivekovic's spare, selfless art is full of such unexpected twists and thought-provoking turns.

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Sanja Ivekovic's 'Sweet Violence' at Museum of Modern Art - Review

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Ms. Ivekovic's art is itself undergoing what might be called an un-erasing: it belongs to the ever-expanding history of art by women that is being added to every day by curators, art historians and critics.

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FRANKO B: I'm Thinking of You: Version 2

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FRANKO B: I'm Thinking of You: Version 2

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"She's just someone who's always been on the periphery of art-historical scholarship on the '60s," explains Block Museum curator Corinne Granof. "She appeared in the context of Fluxus and in the context of Nam June Paik, as his partner, collaborator, and muse, but no one had ever written her history, or taken a serious look at her contributions, until her archive came to Northwestern."

In 2001, 10 years after her premature death following a 12-year battle with cancer, Moorman's archive was purchased by a foresighted curator at the Block. It was an apt fit for the unorthodox collection, which includes other strong avant-garde and Fluxus material, like the John Cage and Dick Higgins archives. "It came in a big truck packed with over 170 bankers' boxes, 50 or so rolls of posters, and another 30 huge crates," explains Granof. "Moorman was somewhat of packrat, it was just a massive amount. The library's curator, Scott Krafft, who was tasked with organizing it all, had no idea who Moorman was at the time. He's now one of the world's foremost Moorman experts," she continues, laughing. The truck, having made an 800-mile journey from New York City to Evanston, Illinois, contained the many vestiges of Moorman's chaotic, albeit wildly prolific, life.

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"The Topless Cellist" Charlotte Moorman Finally Finds Her Place in Art History

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"She's just someone who's always been on the periphery of art-historical scholarship on the '60s," explains Block Museum curator Corinne Granof. "She appeared in the context of Fluxus and in the context of Nam June Paik, as his partner, collaborator, and muse, but no one had ever written her history, or taken a serious look at her contributions, until her archive came to Northwestern."

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Kusama's unique imagery spring from the recurring hallucinations that have haunted her since childhood. In her hallucinations the world appeared as covered by dots and repetitive shapes, like an infinite starry sky. Art, for Kusama became a method of giving form to these inner landscapes. In an effort to put words to her experiences, Kusama talks about the concept of self-obliteration - the idea of becoming one with the surroundings, dissolving the boundaries of the Self, and disappearing into an all-embracing emptiness. To share her experiences, Kusama creates works of art that invite visitors to lose themselves in the infinite nets, mirror rooms and thousands of polka dots with which she covers the world.

In the late 1970s, Kusama left New York. Some years later she resumed her artistic practice in Tokyo, making monumental paintings and sculptures. Yayoi Kusama still works in her studio every day and now, she is one of the world's most beloved artists.

Yayoi Kusama - In Infinity is the first major retrospective presentation of Kusama's oeuvre in Scandinavia, spanning her entire artistic career from the early 1950s until today. The exhibition features a rich selection of paintings, drawings and sculptures, including spatial installations and performance-related material, paying particular attention to works from the late 1980s, after Kusama's return to Japan. It is also the first comprehensive exhibition featuring Kusama's interest in fashion and design. On view are works never shown previously, as well as a series of paintings made especially for Yayoi Kusama - In Infinity.

Curator: Jo Widoff
Assistant curator: Olga Krzeszowiec Malmsten

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Yayoi Kusama | Moderna Museet i Stockholm

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Yayoi Kusama's (b. 1929) remarkable artistic practice has fascinated the public for over six decades. Like few other artists she moves resolutely between painting and sculpture, between art and design, and between East and West. Moderna Museet and ArkDes are now featuring Kusama in a retrospective exhibition covering her oeuvre from early nature studies to installations that suspend time and space.

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Slaven Tolj is one of the most important artists of the Croatian art scene. His radical and minimalist practice, which encompasses performances, photographs, and ready-made situations and objects, often deals with specific social facts and historical events. At his beginnings, in the nineties, his work focused on the situation of his own country, i.e.

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Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin

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Conceptual artist & philosopher Adrian Piper's website: View bios, images, videos, soundworks, statements, articles, books, interviews, yoga practice, archive, and APRA Foundation Berlin fellowships.