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The attached image is of an advert the British government created and published. Its aim was to get people to consider going into cyber/computing, when their job becomes obsolete because of technological advancements or covid. However this image from their campaign was the most poorly received and it caused a lot of controversy, particularly in the arts industry. Many believe that it was a patronising and ignorant jab at those who decide to join and work in the arts.

This image caused so much controversy because it is implying that the government doesn’t think that the arts industry is important and that jobs within the arts industry are not as important as a job in cyber. They do this through their “Rethink. Reskill. Reboot” slogan, the ‘rethink’ in this context seems condescending and rude and implies that Fatima needs to rethink her whole life and her career because they don’t feel like it is up to their standards.

Because of this many people who are or where in the arts industry showed their outrage on social media platforms, such as Dr. Jenifer Cassidy (shown above) who clearly states her outrage towards this campaign on twitter and also hi lights the fact that there are plenty of other things that could stop Fatima’s career, such as an injury, and that the government doesn’t need to be another, patronising, thing against people like Fatima and herself. Dr. Jenifer also repeats ‘matters’ because the poster makes you feel like the government doesn’t think that the arts industry matters.

And injury isn’t the only problem professional dancers like Fatima will have to face according to Roger Dobson’s article on a survey of dancers in the uk (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1215583/) “16% of dancers had an eating problem in the previous 12 months and that 25% reported a problem at some point in the past. It also found that 10% of dancers had a body mass index below that recommended for good health.” Many people in Fatima’s profession have eating disorders and mental health problems and telling them to just change their career would not only make these worse, but it would show that the government do not care about the well-being of the people they are pushing to change career.

The poster also isn’t showing  Fatima’s opinions on this decision and is quite clearly showing that they will try to decide for her. This makes Fatima seem like, a mindless follower who the government wish to bend to their will, or a child sitting and listening to their parents make the big decisions for themselves which is again patronising and implies that people in the arts industry aren’t smart or strong enough to voice their own opinions on topics that are important.

Ironically this poster couldn’t have been made without the arts industry even though the government is trying to make them seem like they are quickly becoming obsolete and desperately need to change careers. The picture was taken by a professional photographer of a professional ballet dancer and the text and editing was done by a graphic designer. Who are three of the groups that the government are saying will lose their jobs as they prove that even they themselves need them just to put out their message to the British people.

The government also didn’t ask either Fatima or the photographer for their permission to use this image.           This further shows that they do not care of the opinions of those in the arts industry and they believe that they can do anything they want with others art/work. The ballerina is Desire'e Kelley from the Vibez in Motion Dance Studio in Atlanta and the photographer is Krys Alex an Atlanta based photographer, and the photo was posted to Instagram in august of 2017.

They also chose a picture of a ballet dancer that is a woman of colour for this picture which furthers the poor message that this poster presents. People of colour struggle with racism in their everyday life and with the government using this dancer they are bordering on racism with again their ignorance to the model’s opinion and choices.

The messages that the government send though this advert will also make less young people want to peruse a career in the arts as it will make them believe that they will have to take another job soon anyway which will demotivate them and stop them from pursuing career in the arts. It also gives people that dislike the industry validation that they are right in what they believe, which is that jobs arts are not proper jobs an age old belief that is heavily outdated now.

Many people in the arts industry also have what the government call a proper job to help support themselves because the government does not help businesses in the arts as much as they support computing business and the like. This is shows that the government has only paid attention to the facts that help their argument and not the truth that most people in the arts are so under appreciated that they cannot I’ve doing the thing they have sometimes dedicated their lives to.

Since the release of this poster the government has put together a “£1.57 billion rescue package” for the arts industry to help keep venues and businesses alive during the pandemic but this is not enough of an apology to the people they have affected with this advert.

In conclusion this advert was incredibly crass and damaging to the arts industry. And the government should know better than to attack a group of professionals whose jobs are some of the most important not just to the people of Britain but, weather they want to accept it, the government themselves. Maybe next time they should ‘rethink’ their ads before the publish them, ‘Reskill’ whoever came up with the idea for this poster as they clearly do not understand the importance of the arts industry and hopefully ‘reboot’ both their opinions and the opinions of many others that might see it.

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Bibliography:
Denison, E and Cawthray, R. (1999), Packaging Prototypes, Switzerland: RotoVision SA.

In text citation:
(Denison and Cawthray, 1999)

Denison and Cawthray (1999) say…
This is repeated (Denison and Cawthray, 1999)
Denison and Cawthray (1999)
“(Denison and Cawthray, 1999,p.33)

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Bibliography:
Willoughby, A.(2005), The best of Brochure Design, 8th edn, Massachusetts: Rockport Publishers, Inc.

In text:
(Willoughby, 2005)

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Living colour: how Mark Rothko found light in his dark final years

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ark Rothko's final decade is typically thought of as a journey into darkness, when the American abstract expressionist's furnace-bright hues of the 1950s all but vanished. His canvases, huge as stage curtains, grew doomy with maroons, browns and blacks. The great smouldering Seagram murals, commissioned for a corporate dining room but withdrawn by the artist and donated to galleries, were followed by the Rothko Chapel in Houston: this fusion of art, spiritual architecture and a clear-eyed confrontation of death was his crowning achievement, and what pushed him to the limit. By 1968, after years of heavy drinking, Rothko's health was in ruins. Marital breakdown was followed by suicide in 1970.

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But a new exhibition of little-known paintings from the late 1960s looks to expand our understanding of his art and even counter that bleak narrative. Realised in a fresh medium, acrylic on paper, the works in Mark Rothko 1968: Clearing Away were prompted by a doctor's warning: after an aneurysm, Rothko was ordered to quit booze, smoking and painting big oils. He managed the last. The show explores what Christopher Rothko, his son and overseer of the Rothko estate, describes as "the necessity that he change the scale of his thinking, but also a fresh chapter".

These late experiments include a return to a brighter palette, as well as furthering the innovations with texture that he had been developing in his public commissions. Even when the painting was at its darkest, it was never one-note, Christopher says: "He'll create a painting that looks like it's a step from the abyss, and yet he'll nearly always give you something that creates light."

Christopher was five when Rothko began using acrylics. He recalls how his dad, known for being particular when it came to gallery installations, would bring work home and put it up apparently at random. In one of 20th-century art's great scandals, the pieces that surrounded the artist's son as a young child disappeared from his life when his father died: his estate executors sold Rothko's work at less than market value to London's Marlborough Fine Art, thereby defrauding the family. Christopher's older sister Kate was compelled to fight a lengthy court battle against the executors and the gallery; although many considered the action doomed, she was successful and they were ordered to pay the estate millions. Christopher was 12 when the case ended. "Miraculously," he says, "we prevailed."

Many of the works in Clearing Away come from Marlborough's ill-gotten haul, including the very first one, "a little green and blue painting" that Christopher put up in his first apartment after he graduated from college.

"I was thrilled to come home from work each day and see this painting there," he says. "Some sort of order to the world had been restored."

These late paintings are also a reminder that, like his art, Rothko's final years had moments of luminous energy.

"He was juggling tremendous internal and external difficulties and yet painting more than he ever had and not stagnating or winding down," Christopher says. "He was continuing to work in a life-affirming way."

Mark Rothko 1968: Clearing Away is at Pace Gallery, London, 8 October to 13 November.

Christopher Rothko on his father's late works

[Main image, above] "This is most reminiscent of his earlier works. The white is bright, the yellow is brilliant. I'm cautious to say the paintings reflect mood. Rather, it's that even though he's in terrible health and is often quite depressed, painting is 'everything' for him. He's very open to what it brings out in him."

"At first glance the work is dark and there's not much to see there. All it takes is a tiny blue band to let you see that this [above] is not a gloomy painting by any means. The more you look at the blue, you realise how soft the blacks are. It's a serious painting, but with passionate feeling."

"This [above] has the feel of some of my father's canvases, in how these very dynamic rectangles are interacting with their background. He is known for his use of red and it's one of the few red paintings you see from these works on paper. It also shows the power of white and its tremendous impact in his painting."

"Because the Rothko estate was defrauded, for years my sister and I had no works to hang. This [above] was the first painting I hung when the litigation was finally settled. Justice had been served and we had a new connection to our father. It always brings back that happy glow."

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Living colour: how Mark Rothko found light in his dark final years

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ark Rothko's final decade is typically thought of as a journey into darkness, when the American abstract expressionist's furnace-bright hues of the 1950s all but vanished. His canvases, huge as stage curtains, grew doomy with maroons, browns and blacks.

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How Feminist Artists of the 1970s Used Art to Condemn Sexual Violence

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Article about how sexual harassment and assault has been expressed through art over the years

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Suzanne Lacy, Three Weeks in May,1977. Photo courtesy Suzanne Lacy Studio.

Everyone has a body. Aside from all our biographical data-age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, religion-we're all just structures of skin and bones, with blood coursing through us. This fact has long enchanted artists, who have responded to their bodies, and those of others, through painting, sculpture, new media, and performance. Art history is ripe with people making sense of the embodied experience: from stick figures in caves to Michelangelo's David (1501-04), from Marina Abramović's The Artist is Present (2010) to video games that interrogate humanity. As our future on this planet becomes increasingly uncertain, ideas about the body-and what it can withstand-are ever more relevant. In this column, I'll look at new publications and exhibitions and speak with writers and artists to analyze how art influences our understanding of the body.

For centuries, artists celebrated rape in allegorical paintings. Roman mythology, after all, cites two stories of rape as absolutely foundational to Western civilization. A member of the Etruscan royal family decided to rape Lucretia, inciting a rebellion that led to Rome's establishment. And Roman men raped the Sabines because there weren't enough Roman women with whom they could procreate. The Sabine women's offspring allowed the republic to thrive. Artists including Titian, Rembrandt, Nicolas Poussin, and Jacques-Louis David commemorated these violations in their paintings. Looking at their canvases, and considering the tales behind them, you'd be forgiven for thinking rape was a romantic, dramatic encounter that ultimately led to the betterment of society.

To the contemporary reader, that is (or should be!) an infuriating conclusion. The implicit lessons-that women must be pawns in men's political games, that women's lives and desires should be sacrificed in favor of a common cause-are the purview of proud misogynists. Yet throughout much of Western art history, women's objectification was both aesthetic and legal. "Rape was a crime of property, and specifically a crime against the woman's husband or guardian," writes Nancy Princenthal in her new book, Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s (2019). Princenthal explores how feminist artists, from the 1970s through today, have offered alternately grotesque, funny, vulnerable, and media-savvy counternarratives. Through radical performances, paintings, and photographs, artists including Yoko Ono, Suzanne Lacy, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, and Naima Ramos-Chapman, among others, have developed revolutionary new ways to speak about violence against women's bodies.

Throughout the 1960s, the emergence of performance art offered women a potent new medium for discussing rape. Ono took both vulnerable and predatory positions in her work. In Cut Piece (1964), she sat on a Kyoto stage and invited audience members to snip away her clothing. While the piece may sound like an invitation for harm and an encouragement of passivity, Princenthal believes otherwise. "To shine a light on environments of sexualized threat is, at least implicitly, to refuse unquestioning acquiescence," writes Princenthal. By taking control of dangerous environments, "artists help conceive a safer world." For a 1969 film, Rape, Ono and collaborator John Lennon filmed a young woman as they chased her around London. The title underscores the boundary between a bodily threat and a violent actuality as it turns the camera into a weapon. Filming and chasing someone is not the equivalent of raping her, yet an artist-or anyone, for that matter-who wields documentary equipment can be a fearful aggressor.

Ono's protofeminist work anticipated the burst of feminist art throughout the 1970s. In California, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro co-founded the California Institute of the Arts's Feminist Art Program and organized the legendary project Womanhouse (1972). Situated in an abandoned Hollywood home, the installation gave its female participants space to make work and discuss gender-related struggles. Theatricality and spectacle reigned. Women adorned themselves with exaggerated stage makeup, wielded genital-shaped props, and acted out the process of giving birth.

Lacy, a student involved with the Feminist Art Program, took this dramatic, fit-for-Tinseltown approach a step further. She harnessed the camera, and media attention itself, in a brand-new way. Her socially oriented project Three Weeks in May (1977) featured performances, self-defense demonstrations, and artworks about Los Angeles's rampant rape epidemic-in 1977, the LAPD received 2,386 reports of rapes and attempts. Lacy actively sought media attention and issued press statements. Six months later, she and fellow artist Leslie Labowitz staged In Mourning and in Rage, an explicit "media event" that comprised a symbolic funeral for the women who were rape and murder victims of the recent "Hillside Strangler."Princenthal writes that each detail-"the literally larger-than-life actors; the anger-fueled sound bites; the clear symbolism of the funeral cortege; the control of the scene so that every photograph would capture what the artists intended"-was chosen in order to "carry a clear meaning via mass media." Perhaps the first artist to ever harness the press in this way, Lacy took complete control of her messaging and its public image. Though women discussed violence and victimhood in her work, they ultimately appeared powerful and potent to the camera lens.

While Lacy took a hyperlocal approach to her subject, Holzer adopted an international view in her photography series "Lustmord" (1993-94). The German title of the work, which means "sex-murder," "names an act of homicidal violence that is converted into sexual satisfaction," Princenthal writes, "an inversion of the common understanding that rape is sex converted into a gratifying (for the assailant) act of violence." A genre of German Expressionist work in this vein, by artists including George Grosz and Otto Dix, glorifies these acts.

In a particularly disturbing picture, Dix's Sexual Murderer (Der Lustmörder) (1920), a diabolical man in a checkered suit holds a bloody knife in one hand and a leg in another. Hacked off, female body parts ooze blood around him. "They are among the nastiest things I've ever seen," Princenthal told me. The sheer ingenuity and number of ways that men have delighted in depicting violence against women truly boggles the mind.

Holzer, a poet of an artist, reclaimed both the concept of "Lustmord" and the visual and written language used to discuss rape. Addressing the rapes against Bosnian women during the Bosnian War in the 1990s, Holzer created texts from the perspectives of a victim, a perpetrator, and an observer. She projected them on walls, photographed them as tattoos on skin, and etched them into metal bands that circled human bones. "I AM AWAKE IN THE PLACE WHERE WOMEN DIE," reads one. Arguably as visceral and disturbing as depictions of violence itself, Holzer's work reconsiders what kind of visual language we need when considering rape-must we show the act itself to convey its horror?

For a counterexample, one might look to Kara Walker's black-and-white silhouettes, which regularly depict slave owners violating their charges. Both bodies of work are powerful; the divergence of Walker's and Holzer's aesthetic strategies evidences the growing plurality of voices and perspectives addressing rape. These complications may ultimately be a good thing. While feminism fractures, a growing number of women are able to enter the conversation.

"Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, the artists and writers who represented sexual violence were almost entirely men. And it was men whom they addressed," Princenthal writes. She notes that these men's work entirely elided the victims' experiences. Over the past 50 years, daring, creative women have changed that.

The #MeToo movement has similarly helped women find language for their experiences, though Princenthal is careful to note its limitations. The hashtag hardly helps elucidate what "sexual violence" actually means, and entirely omits the fact that women living in poor, minority communities are the most vulnerable-not white women on college campuses, who are the most vocal about such issues. For artists, these gray areas aren't problems, but invitations to address an endlessly complicated subject with unique, individual points of view.

One of the most recent artworks Princenthal includes in her book is Naima Ramos-Chapman's short film And Nothing Happened (2016), which follows a young woman struggling to explain her assault and its emotional repercussions. The video exemplifies one of the greatest challenges, and most important issues, still facing women artists who want to address sexual violence in their work. "It's still about finding language," Princenthal said. That's the point.

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How Feminist Artists Have Condemned Sexual Violence | Artsy

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In the first article of the new column "Body Issues," I examine the revolutionary ways artists have discussed and addressed violence against women's bodies.