This week, I became an auntie, for the first time. A gesture I'm prone to making, to clap hands, a sort of prayerful joyous notion, pops out of me when I'm really pleased, and a phrase from my Irish childhood popped into my head "bualadh bos" : to clap hands. I'm looking forward to bualadh bos and peek-a-boo with my new nephew.
This week, also, we've seen the unveiling of some site-specific art in the area. idea13.org/2011/01/farquhar That was all that was unveiled: unlike Tracy Emin, to choose the most obvious, but a still heroic stance on autobiography or, with Emin, autobiography is Art, which is only one step away from 'I am art', a Beuys/Duchamp Conceptual notion rooted in the '60's. Being in public, in the public eye ... Public art is notoriously difficult to negotiate, but I for one wasn't bualadh bos.
So I'm looking at this stuff, I'm wondering where any autobiographical content is, with this new work - absent. I can't see anything. Should it be there? Or is it a comment on what is outside the realm of primary experience, the role of the observer? And it seems to me to be a purely cerebral action, the pomp, the ceremony (the absence of)... the conventions of white plinth... in a landscape rich in rolling hillocks, seashore and urban seaside fun - a modernist man-made construct that moves us no further forward than Le Corbusier's ideal of lifting humanity and humans from the ground, creating the high-rise as we know it. As if it were that grand! So this is the high-rise of urban art... On the other hand, it's a fight with me: a deliberation on which and how to say, why to say, and how much I want others to see of me, the personal and universal (- as if I were that grand!) Play peek-a-boo, but it's a serious game.
This week, also, we've seen the unveiling of some site-specific art in the area. idea13.org/2011/01/farquhar That was all that was unveiled: unlike Tracy Emin, to choose the most obvious, but a still heroic stance on autobiography or, with Emin, autobiography is Art, which is only one step away from 'I am art', a Beuys/Duchamp Conceptual notion rooted in the '60's. Being in public, in the public eye ... Public art is notoriously difficult to negotiate, but I for one wasn't bualadh bos.
So I'm looking at this stuff, I'm wondering where any autobiographical content is, with this new work - absent. I can't see anything. Should it be there? Or is it a comment on what is outside the realm of primary experience, the role of the observer? And it seems to me to be a purely cerebral action, the pomp, the ceremony (the absence of)... the conventions of white plinth... in a landscape rich in rolling hillocks, seashore and urban seaside fun - a modernist man-made construct that moves us no further forward than Le Corbusier's ideal of lifting humanity and humans from the ground, creating the high-rise as we know it. As if it were that grand! So this is the high-rise of urban art... On the other hand, it's a fight with me: a deliberation on which and how to say, why to say, and how much I want others to see of me, the personal and universal (- as if I were that grand!) Play peek-a-boo, but it's a serious game.
How could that artist put images of womens' bodies on plinths (to be accurate, images of women from the hip to knee: woman as vessel) and then accept or invite (through the existence of these objects, by merit of the subject matter) the reaction of the local teenagers (who will deface these artworks. What an open invitation - and - they're right on the doorstep of what has been a teenage haunt since the '60's.) Then to claim it as part of the artwork? How can the implications of : subject matter + public reaction = defacing women - or will the great unwashed stand back?
I maintain the illusion that I have some kind of control over what others see, and how they see it. And everyone seems to have this anxiety... it's where artists intervene in curation, dictate terms, orchestrate their own pop-ups, show in their own homes and are generally more concerned with circumstance, or to be fair, are as concerned with context, as they are with what it is that needs to be presented. That's not including those for whom installation creates a dialogue between context and object, a much more stimulating prospect rather than the conventional artist-hissy-fit (myself included). But to relinquish control as part of the artwork is just out of control.
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