Monday, 1 November 2010
WILLI DORNER’S “BODIES IN URBAN SPACES” IN NEW YORK
Art reflected through the movement of the Human body...
Sam Taylor Wood...
Sam Taylor-Wood, Ivan, C-Type photograph,
TAYLOR-WOOD, Sam, "Brontosaurus", 1995.
Sam Taylor-Wood makes photographs and films that examine, through highly charged scenarios, our shared social and psychological conditions.
Taylor-Wood’s work examines the split between being and appearance, often placing her human subjects – either singly or in groups – in situations where the line between interior and external sense of self is in conflict. Her languid and silent film portrait of David Beckham, for example, which was shot in a single take, offers a serene alternative to this most intensively photographed celebrity. In Prelude in Air (2006) Taylor-Wood filmed a musician playing a piece of cello music by Bach, but the cello itself has been erased. Likewise, in Breach (Girl and Eunuch) (2001), a girl is portrayed sitting on the floor in the throes of grief, but the sound of her tears has been removed. In the celebrated film Still Life (2001), an impossibly beautiful bowl of fruit decays at an accelerated pace, creating a visceral memento mori. Taylor-Wood has also explored notions of weight and gravity in elegiac, poised photographs and films such as Ascension (2003) and a series of self-portraits (Self Portrait Suspended I - VIII) that depict the artist floating in mid air without the aid of any visible support.
Bram Stoker's chair
My Thoughts....
So far the Artist's work I have looked into I feel represents both consious and subconious thought processes of the human mind. These thought patterns have been translated through movement of the human body, movement and the suggestion of movement using artist materials, communication both through language and visually. Communication of thoughts and feelings through light and technology.
Bruce Nauman - Feed me!
Bruce Nauman has been the most influential American artist in contemporary art in the last forty years. His work raises existential questions of life and death, love and hate, pleasure and pain. The recurrent ideas in his work deal in such concepts as body and identity, the role of language, spatial awareness, the artistic process and the participation of the observer. By means of a strict and revolutionary approach Neuman explores varied expressive avenues – neon walls, sculpture, photography and film, video, installation and painting. Nauman is also considered one of the pioneers of installation art.
In the piece “Anthro/Socio” 1992, a man’s head revolves on its axis and sings in changing tones:
“Feed me/Eat me/Anthropology”
“Help me/Hurt me/Sociology”
“Feed me/Help me/Eat me/Hurt me”
The cries heard from different directions relate to the most basic physical needs of the human body and pose a doubt regarding them. The repetition of the cry, and multiplication of video images of the figure crying, create a most distressing feeling which involves the viewer in the work, and bestirs him to consider the relationship between subject and object, man and society.
The piece examines the role of language as agent in the most basic human physical experience. The figure appears trapped and torn between inseparable existential states: anthropological or social body, phenomenological or cultural body, abstract or material body.
How should one regard the human body – as a neutral biological phenomenon, a natural form which has not changed in the course of history, or alternatively as an object laden with cultural and linguistic meanings, linked to questions of race, identity, pleasure, religion and ritual, and changing our approach to nature? These are two sides of the coin in the exchange of roles which lies at the bottom of power politics.
www.mots.org.il/Eng/Exhibitions
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