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Blu - street artist - political take on big global corporations

CONTROVERSIAL STREET ART

Blu, a secretive Italian, is famous for his amazing murals and graffiti the world over.
His distinctive comic book style sometimes deliver caustic messages against big corporations like the oil companies. One of his controversial street art creations is the smoking politicians mural, which was intended as a protest against political inaction towards pollution in Southern Italy.

Text from: http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/controversial-street-art

Do-Ho Suh (Korean) – war, identity

Looking at Some/One

An artist who has explored war through his art is Do-Ho Suh. In his piece "Some/One," constructs a sculpture made up of thousands of dog tags, which are circulated through every soldier in the U.S. and beyond. Observers first identify a fish scaled garment, made from thirty thousand dog tags, which is too resemble a soldiers garment. Suh's sculpture conveys the dehumanization of a soldiers role in society, but how can viewers put his piece into context, and understand it by connecting to their own experiences in order to relate it to their own knowledge and understanding? What do dog tags mean generally in art and to the artist himself? Suh''s interpretation is more than literal.
Before any other research was conducted I could not connect this piece to any of my own experiences. The only knowledge I could connect the piece with was war and a community of soldiers somehow formed into a rope.

An article from the online journal base called "Home in The World: The Art of Do-Ho Suh" was helpful to some questions posed before determining the guiding question. Suh's works have a lot to do with experiencing space and identity. In "Some/One," the sculptures back is turned to entering viewers. Viewers are invited to walk around the piece and soon stand face to face with themselves, when they discover that the garment has an opening that is line with mirrored foil. Like in Suh's other works viewers have to walk over the bridge, across the floor, or under seoul home. They all have double meaning concerning the construct of identity. This identity focuses on the importance of the individual as a single representative of a greater entity, such as a nation. Instead of being viewed as multiple individuals, viewers see the greater body.
In "Some/One," the gallery floor in New York City is covered with a blanket of shiny military dogs tags, bringing to mind, all the shadowed identities. Each single soldier is part of a larger military body, deprived from individual human qualities. A quote by Sollins about dehumanization of soldiers in Suh's work is present in how the dog tags used,

"swell to form a hollow, ghost like suit of armor at the center of the room. Whether addressing the dynamic of personal space verses public space, or exploring the fine line between strength in numbers and homogeneity, Do-Ho Suh's sculptures continually question the identity of the individual in todays increasingly transnational, global society," (Sollins).
The piece draws attention in a way which viewers are welcome to occupy and inhabit the space. As they walk over the piece and face the front of it they are able to see the inside of the piece, which has mirrors embodied inside the stainless steal garment. That moment is symbolic because the viewer is experiencing the piece physically by stepping on the dogs tags, and also when they see their reflection inside the front of the garment.

Text from: http://colouryourspirit.hubpages.com/hub/Do-Ho-Suh-A-look-into-his-piece-SomeOne

Picasso (Spanish) - war

An Introduction to Guernica

On April 26 1937, late in the afternoon, the undefended Basque town of Guernica was bombed relentlessly for three hours by German and Italian aircraft that were acting on the instructions of Franco's Nationalist forces. The horrific campaign experimented with the potency of modern warfare, including incendiary bombs, explosives and shrapnel and was deliberately aimed at destruction of the civilian population. Escort planes that plunged from the sky to strafe people fleeing from the town exacerbated the massacre. The town was razed to the ground. Of the ten thousand inhabitants and refugees who made up the population of Guernica, three thousand were estimated to have died and thousands more were injured and mutilated.
When newspaper reports of the brutal attack appeared the following day the world was shocked and outraged, particularly as the attack took place on market day. Also, most of the inhabitants of Guernica were women, children and the elderly, because the younger men were away fighting in the Republican army.

To access Bombing of Guernica: original Times report from 1937:

www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-2151248,00.html

Picasso had never been moved to engage in overtly political art, but his deep sorrow at the outbreak of civil war in his homeland (where his cousins were fighting on the Republican side), and his relationship with the politically charged Dora Maar, a member of the French Communist Party, had galvanized the passionate Spaniard into publicising his outrage. Early in 1937 he began the Dream and Lie of Franco, a series of fourteen etchings designed to be published as individual postcards to raise funds for 'Governmental Spain'. Resembling a comic strip, they evoked a traditional form of satiric Catalan engraving and depicted Franco as a giant, grotesque, demonic dictator in a series of ridiculous postures and costumes, including the elaborate attire of a courtesan. A nightmarish parody of civil war and a protest against Franco's claim to be a champion of traditional Spanish culture, the works show him in various frames riding a mad and disembowelled horse, destroying a classical sculpture or mounted on a pig. In each case Franco is leaving a trail of death and destruction. The key messages were in no doubt, that Franco was an oppressor of the common people, an enemy of the arts and a murderer of women and children.

When news of the bombing of Guernica reached Picasso he was stunned and horrified to such an extent that he was again driven to respond with impassioned political statements. He added four new plates to the Dream and Lie of Franco series that were first printed in the journal Cahiers d'Art in 1937, and later as a portfolio with an epic poem by the artist mourning the tragic events in Spain.

'Cries of children cries of women cries of birds cries of flowers cries of wood and of stones cries of bricks cries of furniture of beds of chairs of curtains of casseroles of cats and paper cries of smells that claw themselves of smoke that gnaws the neck of cries that boil in cauldron and the rain of birds that floods the sea that eats into bone and breaks the teeth biting the cotton that the sun wipes on its plate that bourse and bank hide in the footprint left embedded in the rock.. '

The above is Picasso's poem accompanying the Dream and Lie of Franco

Picasso was appointed honorary director of the Prado in 1936 and commissioned by the Spanish Republican Government to create a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the World Fair being held in Paris in 1937. He started on a large painting based on the theme of The Studio: The Painter and His Model. The emotional wave of horror and indignation following the barbaric attack on Guernica led Picasso to instead create what was to become one of the greatest masterpieces in the history of art – a monumental outpouring of grief and rage condemning the senselessness of war.

The Making of Guernica

Picasso moved into a new studio in the attic of 7, rue des Grands-Augustins, which Dora Maar found for him in early 1937. Originally part of a grand 17th-century mansion, it had an intriguing history that appealed to Picasso's sense of irony, particularly as he was painting Guernica. The studio was said to be the setting for The Unknown Masterpiece, a short story written in 1837 by the famous French author, Honoré de Balzac. It describes an obsession by the painter, Frenhofer, the greatest painter of his time, to represent the absolute on his canvas, a process that takes years for his creative powers to complete. When the picture, which becomes less and less recognizable as time goes on, is ridiculed by his artist friends as the work of a madman, he destroys the work and dies. The story resonated with Picasso who, like Frenhofer, also locked himself away in the same studio to create a masterpiece, although in his case it was recognized as such.

Picasso made hundreds of preliminary drawings for Guernica and more than fifty studies. In some of these the heads of Weeping Women appear for the first time.

Constraints such as the enormous size of the stretched canvas, measuring 3.5 x 7.8 metres and so had to be tilted to fit under the rafters of the ceiling, and dim lighting from bay windows on one side of the studio, failed to hinder Picasso. The painting was completed in twenty-four frenetic days. Streams of ideas, emotions, traditions, myths, obsessions and symbols of his roots deeply embedded in Hispanic and Mediterranean culture spilled onto the canvas. These were fuelled by anger and a need to express his pain.

Motifs of a woman screaming in agony as she clutches the limp body of her dead child; another woman stretching out from a window with a lamp, hoping in vain to illuminate the encroaching darkness; mutilated bodies and the gaping mouths of those hysterical with pain, fear and sorrow merge with a wounded horse and the ever-present bull to create a profound dramatic tension. The gruesome imagery encircled by burning buildings and painted in black, white and subtle gradations of grey, suggests that Picasso may have drawn on newspaper photographs and newsreels documenting the tragedy in Guernica. The fine patterning in the centre of the painting resembles words on torn pieces of newspaper, suggesting that art is as powerful as the mass media in communicating a message. Chaos and despair are amplified by sharp, angular shapes, particularly the bold triangular form at the centre of the painting and vivid contrasts of light and shade. Purity of line from Picasso's Neo-classical period, elements of Surrealism and Cubism, and a reference to Goya's famous painting of 1814 depicting the horrors of war, El Tris de Mayo (Third of May), coexist in this summation of Picasso's development as an artist to date.

Speculations about the exact meaning of the symbolism in Guernica have varied. Some insist that the bull represents brutality or the ritual of life and death epitomised by the bullfight, while the horse is a metaphor for the suffering people. Others suggest that the reverse is true and maintain that the bull signifies the people and the horse can be read as Franco's Nationalist forces. Picasso was adamant that he had not intended to symbolise in such a concrete way and it was entirely up to the viewers to interpret the painting.

       Text from: http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/picasso/education/ed_JTE_ITG.html

     For more analysis of Guernica go here

Francis Bacon (British) – war, violence

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion  circa 1944


Francis Bacon made some early reputation as an interior designer and painter in London in the period 1929-34 but then, unable to find a direction, painted only sporadically through the next ten years. Finally, in 1944 he completed 'Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion', with which, he said later, 'I began'.

It was exhibited in April 1945 at the end of the World War 2 at the Lefevre Gallery in London and in his book on Bacon published in 1964 the critic John Russell recalled: 'Visitors ... were brought up short by images so unrelievedly awful that the mind shut up with a snap at the sight of them ... They caused total consternation.'

The importance of the Crucifixion to Bacon is not as a Christian image particularly, but as a focus for a particular view of humanity. In one of a series of interviews with the critic David Sylvester, Bacon said: 'it was just an act of man's behaviour, a way of behaviour to another.'

In choosing the Crucifixion image and the triptych format as a vehicle for his vision of man Bacon is drawing on one of the central and most important traditions in Western painting of the portrayal of human suffering. But there are other touchstone expressions of suffering in Western culture and in a letter to the Tate Gallery Bacon said that these figures were 'sketches for the Eumenides'. The Eumenides or, more correctly, Erinyes, are the Greek Furies, the instruments of vengeance of the Greek gods, and Bacon's reference is to the trilogy of plays, the Oresteia of Aeschylus, one of the most unrelentingly blood-soaked and savage of the works of ancient Greek drama. The painting thus potently blends both classical and Christian frames of reference, as well as absolutely modern ones: Bacon has acknowledged the influence at this time of Picasso's paintings of the early 1930s of strange and savage pink and grey creatures on beaches. He is also already using here the photographic sources which were to become fundamental to his art. Bacon is particularly fascinated by high-speed photographs which capture human beings in attitudes invisible to the eye. One of his best-known sources, relevant to this work, is a still from the Russian Revolutionary film by Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin (1925), showing in close-up the face of a screaming woman who has just been shot.


Text from: http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=-1&workid=674&searchid=false&roomid=false&tabview=text&texttype=9

Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger (Swiss) – the environment

The Waterhole

at the water hole
in retrospect
Artwork by Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger
Text by Gabriel García

Uncoiling like a dreamtime serpent, a tunnel of foil leads the way to a land
unknown. The tunnel is supported by a canopy of branches and appears to
breathe with my every move. I look inside the silvery cavern. Do I want to
know what lies ahead …?


Steiner and Lenzlinger were back in Melbourne last year. From December
2008 to March 2009, Melbourne’s Australian Centre for Contemporary
Art played host to their thought-provoking exhibition based on the
Australian drought—The Water Hole.


Upon reaching the end of the aluminium tunnel, The Water Hole journey
begins. I find myself facing the exhibition’s main installation: a forest of
the future.
A mobile phone with canary-yellow spider legs lays prostrate at my feet,
while tiny hybrid reptiles breed from a nest of water bottles. Fertilizer
crystals grow, forming stalactites and stalagmites, the exhibition staff
feed the crystals daily doses of water. As the crystals grow, they creep like
vines, imprinting lapis blue and coral on their surroundings. Upturned
umbrellas searching for water look up to the skies, and along with sinks,
toilets and bathtubs form an entirely new vegetation. Interconnected
through a tangle of tubes and pipes, this new growth bends itself towards
its one and only life source—water.

At the centre of it all, surrounded by a luscious doona, rests the water
hole—a muddy pool. I stand in front of it and see my reflection in its
surface. The image breaks into a myriad of wavelets with a plop!—the
heartbeat of this world. Hanging from the roof like a frozen star, a medical
bag drips water into the stagnant pool. Like any other heartbeat, it will
draw unparallel attention if it becomes silent.

from: http://www.ilurapress.com/img/Feature_excerpt.pdf?PHPSESSID=4dfccdaf97dc81f05c57d8067ef4da02

unwritten, 2OO9
Although mouthless and mute, the elusively rendered figure in Vernon Ah Kee’s unwritten
speaks to the misrepresented or suppressed histories of indigenous nations. Ah Kee, a member of the Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji and Gugu Yimithirr peoples, is recognised for his unapologetic and candid explorations of the treatment of Aboriginal people in Australia.

The loosely executed black-on-white charcoal lines of unwritten trace the ominous impression of a face on the verge of perception. It is unclear as to whether the eyeless, earless and mouthless face is moving into or out of visibility and Ah Kee describes the face as depicting a state of ‘becoming human’ in the eyes of white settler society. In its irresolute form, unwritten speaks powerfully and clearly to the struggle between existence and erasure within imperial perceptions of Aboriginal people.
Milani Gallery, http://www.milanigallery.com.au/artist/vernon-ah-kee

“Ah Kee’s artistic practice has a valuable role in the discourse that is contemporary Aboriginal
art. Asserting the authenticity of urban Aboriginal identities and therefore the authenticity of
urban Aboriginal cultural production, connects Ah Kee with a proud history of urban Aboriginal
activism, a role that arguably has facilitated enormous developments in the awareness and
recognition of Aboriginal rights nationally and internationally. Aboriginal art should be as varied
as Aboriginal people, and the political strength of Aboriginal art today may be that it is an expression of contemporary Aboriginal sovereignty in action."
Gary Jones, ‘Vernon Ah Kee: Sovereign Warrior’ in Artlink: Blak on Blak vol.3O 1-2O1O, pp.5O-51

text from: Cairns Indigenous art fair resource
Go here for more info about Vernon Ah Kee