clarrrise

[clarrrise]

IRMA BLANK

Artiste allemande-italienne.

Originaire du nord de l’Allemagne, Irma Blank s’installe en Sicile en 1955. Ce déracinement est fondamental pour cette grande lectrice, passionnée par la forme écrite : elle réalise que « le mot juste n’existe pas », même dans sa propre langue, les mots ne pouvant refléter pleinement l’exactitude de la pensée. Elle entame en 1968 la série Eigenschriften [Écriture pour soi-même]. Elle répète dans ces dessins au pastel de couleur sur papier un signe, une écriture asémantique, qu’elle explore jusqu’en 1973. Cette date marque son installation à Milan, qui entraîne un changement radical dans sa vie et son travail. Elle entre en contact avec la scène très active de la poésie concrète et commence à exposer dans des espaces d’art et des librairies. Le cycle Trascrizioni émerge en 1973 (jusqu’en 1979), transcriptions à l’encre noire sur papier transparent du matériel imprimé que l’artiste a sous la main : journaux, traités de philosophie, poésie… Elle place son papier sur l’original, dont elle reproduit la mise en page à l’aide de hachures répétées et régulières, tout en le lisant à bouche fermée, émettant un son monotone. Professeure d’arts plastiques au lycée, elle se consacre à son propre travail dans le silence de la nuit et prend ainsi conscience du son produit par le dessin en train de se faire. Elle décide de s’enregistrer au travail, ce qu’elle systématise dans l’ensemble de ses séries, et envisage dès lors sa pratique comme un cycle sensoriel total, qui, outre la vue et l’ouïe, inclut le toucher – avec les livres uniques (des dessins à manipuler) qu’elle réalise dès les années 1960 –, ainsi que la présence corporelle avec des actions et des lectures performées depuis 1979. Elle participe à la documenta 6, à Cassel, en 1977 et à la Biennale de Venise de 1978.

[clarrrise]

Mona Hatoum

[clarrrise]

Jenny Saville

http://www.actuart.org/page-jenny-saville-les-anatomies-de-l-ame-ou-l-aventure-dans-l-intime-5279354.html

“

Jenny Saville est une artiste peintre contemporaine anglaise née en 1970, elle a été révélée en 1992 dans le mouvement des Young British Artists, soutenu par Saatchi. Les corps qu’elle représente nous racontent une histoire, ils sont des livres ouverts, des anatomies profondément graphiques. Sur ces visages, il nous arrive de lire l’ennui, la tristesse, la provocation, la fierté…

Ces modèles ne sont jamais ceux que la société nous prescrit ; ils sont imparfait, parfois hors norme, ils nous ressemblent, nous indiffèrent, nous dégoûtent peut être, nous émeuvent, nous blessent… Il reflète une créature humaine très contemporaine, isolée et en mal d’affection, tourmenté par les obligations corporelles de la société actuelle. Malgré tout, ces corps ne sont pas vaincus, il s’affirme et renvoie des formes et des couleurs aux yeux de ceux qui les épient dans la rue comme devant la toile, ils sont poétiques et peuvent évoquer des souvenirs au voyeur que nous sommes.

Nous ne pouvons pas dire que ces tableaux sont un reflet mais ils nous renvoient à chaque fois à un des multiples spectres qui habitent nos corps. Oui, les peintures de l’artiste anglaise sont sensuelles de part le rapport qui se crée entre le modèle et le spectateur. Jenny Saville s’aventure dans l’intime ; sans vraiment devenir exhibitionniste, elle arrive à suggérer les pensées personnelles de ces modèles aux lecteurs/spectateurs qui ressentent les oeuvres plus qu’ils ne les contemplent.

La chair est omniprésente dans l’œuvre de Saville, opulente et monstrueuse, elle se répand à la manière d’une peinture épaisse que l’on déverserait sur la toile et qui s’étalerait lentement. Pourtant cette peau étendue par la graisse donne des formes inédites aux corps, lui donne de la consistance, de la matière et du charme.

Il s’agit donc d’un geste picturale critique qui déplore cette interdiction d’être à l’image et cette exclusion des désirs d’autrui, mais affirme aussi la puissance de la singularité ainsi que la beauté de la différence et du particulier. Les mots qui viennent à l'esprit sont grotesque, monstrueux; bien sûr, cela remet en question le regard de l'homme sur le corps des femmes, la notion de Beau et son importance. Jenny Saville se réfère à de Kooning, qui, lui aussi traitait les corps de femmes en peinture avec violence et acharnement.

“

[clarrrise]

[clarrrise]

[clarrrise]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2ktmQ2-D04

[clarrrise]

SARAH LUCAS

“

Over the past thirty years, Lucas has created a distinctive and provocative body of work that subverts traditional notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. Since the late 1980s, Lucas has transformed found objects and everyday materials such as cigarettes, vegetables, and stockings into absurd and confrontational tableaux that boldly challenge social norms. The human body and anthropomorphic forms recur throughout Lucas’s works, often appearing erotic, humorous, fragmented, or reconfigured into fantastical anatomies of desire.

The exhibition will address the ways in which Lucas’s works engage with crucial debates about gender and power, along with the legacy of surrealism—from her clever transformations of everyday objects to her exploration of sexual ambiguity and the tension between the familiar and the disorienting or absurd.

“Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel” will feature some of Lucas’s most important projects, including early sculptures from the 1990s that substitute domestic furniture for human body parts, and enlarged spreads from tabloid newspapers from the same period that reflect objectified representations of the female body. Alongside the photographic self-portraits that Lucas has produced throughout her career, the exhibition features biomorphic sculptures including her stuffed-stocking Bunnies (1997–ongoing) and NUDS (2009–ongoing), the Penetralia series (2008–ongoing), and selections from her installations at the Freud Museum in London (2000) and the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2015). These works, which complicate inscribed codes of sexual and social normativity, have never been shown together in the United States. Lucas is also creating new sculptural works for the exhibition, which will be exhibited in an installation on the New Museum’s Fourth Floor.

The title of the exhibition, “Au Naturel,” is taken from a sculpture Lucas created in 1994, in which an assemblage of objects suggestive of sexual organs adorns a mattress that slumps in the corner as if it were reclining. In an art historical context, “au naturel” commonly refers to paintings of female nude figures, and literally translates from French as “in the nude.” Applying the term to Lucas’s greater body of work, the title speaks to the immediacy, intimacy, and directness of her images and speculates on the possibility of a natural state, perhaps without the limitations of established social structures and gender conformity.

Drawing on art historical references, cultural stereotypes, and tabloid culture, Lucas’s works take a demonstrative stance against puritanism, conformism, and misogyny with distinct irreverence and wit. The combination of these strategies results in a powerful evocation of the themes of death, sex, and religion as they continue to influence contemporary life.

The phallus — whose depiction in Western art has been one of the most persistent taboos since the end of the Classical era — is a ubiquitous form in her work. (You might think that she wants to equal the attention male artists have lavished upon female breasts throughout history.) Intercourse is frequently intimated, and a tender sarcasm is the prevailing tone. Titles can include profanities and other slang learned on the streets of Islington, the London borough where she grew up. Her materials are cheap and familiar: old furniture, toilets, cinder blocks, underwear, cans of Spam and the stuffed pantyhose. Cars, traditionally a male obsession, also figure in: variously crushed, bisected, burned or carefully collaged with a layer of cigarettes, as are other objects. Fruits and vegetables, kebabs and whole raw chickens do double service, portraying erotic body parts.

In contrast, there are the eggs, those perfect little female miracles, full of hope — and in Ms. Lucas’s favorite shade of yellow — with which she covered the interior of the British Pavilion during the 2015 Venice Art Biennale. In her work, fried eggs function as breasts or eyes; throwing eggs can half-seriously approach pagan ritual or figure in participatory performances, in which they’re smashed against gallery walls in Twomblyesque splatters. Ms. Lucas seems to see the yellow splats as female ejaculations, noting that in life, “men do that all the time with sperm.”

“

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/arts/design/sarah-lucas-new-museum.html

https://inferno-magazine.com/2018/06/15/sarah-lucas-au-naturel-new-museum-new-york/

[clarrrise]

Valie Export  

“

(born May 17, 1940 )[1][2] is an Austrian artist. Her artistic work includes video installations, body performances, expanded cinema, computer animations, photography, sculptures and publications covering contemporary arts. Like her male contemporaries, she subjected her body to pain and danger in actions designed to confront the growing complacency and conformism of postwar Austrian culture. But her examination of the ways in which the power relations inherent in media representations inscribe women’s bodies and consciousness distinguishes Export’s project as unequivocally feminist.

Export’s early guerrilla performances have attained an iconic status in feminist art history. Tapp- und Tast-Kino (Tap and Touch Cinema) was performed in ten European cities in 1968-1971.[6][7] In this avowedly revolutionary work, Valie Export wore a tiny „movie theater“ around her naked upper body, so that her body could not be seen but could be touched by anyone reaching through the curtained front of the „theater.“ She then went into the street and invited men, women, and children to come and touch her. The media responded to Export’s provocative work with panic and fear, one newspaper aligning her to a witch. Export recalls, „There was a great campaign against me in Austria.“[5]

Some of her other works including, „Invisible Adversaries,“ „Syntagma,“ and „Korpersplitter,“ show the artist’s body in connection to historical buildings not only physically, but also symbolically. The bodies attachment to the historical progression of gendered spaces and stereotyped roles represent Export’s feminist and political approach to art.[8]

GENITALPANIC 

En 1969, les cheveux crêpés serrés dans le bandeau, brillante dans son sky moulante et découpées à l'entre-jeans de ses pantalons, la mitrailleuse entre les mains, l'artiste nous donne, du monde des années 60, sa pose en figure de magazine : volontaire et outrancière ; elle est en guerre dans la société du spectacle."Genital Panic a été présenté dans un cinéma porno de Munich. Je portais un pull et un pantalon qui laissait voir mon sexe. J'étais armée d'une mitrailleuse. Entre deux films, je disais aux spectateurs qu'ils étaient venus dans ce cinéma-là pour voir des films sexuels, mais que, maintenant, je mettais à leur disposition de vraies parties génitales et qu'ils pouvaient en faire ce qu'ils voulaient. Je suis passée lentement dans chaque rang, face aux gens. Je ne me déplaçais pas de façon érotique. Tout en marchant le long d'un rang, je dirigeais l'arme sur les spectateurs du rang de derrière. J'avais peur et je n'avais pas la moindre idée de ce que les gens allaient faire. À mesure que je passais d'un rang à l'autre, les spectateurs de chaque rang se levaient lentement et quittaient la salle. Comme ils n'étaient plus dans le contexte du film, cela devenait complètement différent pour eux d'établir un rapport avec ce symbole érotique particulier. " SIC

V. EXPORT

[clarrrise]

FRANCESCA WOODMAN 

“

The exhibition will explore Woodman’s fusion of Italian classicism with aspects of narrative and performance. In Italy Woodman extended her development of classical subject matter, predominantly the female nude and tropes of still life and classical composition. At the same time she was enhancing and extending her use of narrative and performative strategies. This is evident in her use of series of images, crucially in Self-deceit, 1978, which features scenarios where Woodman refers to classical and surrealist sculptural poses using her own naked body and a single prop, a rough-edged piece of mirrored glass. Further important series Woodman worked on during this time include the Angel series, which she commenced in Providence but extended in works made in the Cerere, and Eel Series, 1978, likely created in Venice on one of her frequent visits to the city.

“

Francesca Woodman is best known for photographing herself. But her pictures are not self-portraits in the traditional sense. She is often nude or semi-nude and usually seen half hidden or obscured – sometimes by furniture, sometimes by slow exposures that blur her figure into a ghostly presence. These beautiful and yet unsettling images seem fleeting but also suggest a sense of timelessness.

The images convey an underlying sense of human fragility. This fragility is exaggerated by the fact that the photographs are printed on a very small scale – they seem personal and intimate.

Francesca Woodman’s entire body of work was produced as a young person and created over just eight short years. Her photographs explore many themes that affect young people such as relationships, sexuality, questions of self, body image, alienation, isolation and confusion or ambiguity about personal identity.

Most people are conscious of how they present themselves and how they would like others to see them. Francesca was no different. Although photographs are often seen as showing the truth, Francesca’s pictures are thoughtfully staged. She created an imagined reality through her use of locations, lighting, clothing, props and her own body.

Typically her photographs show disintegrating empty rooms, with cracked and broken masonry, dust, flaking paint or peeling wallpaper scattered with damaged fixtures and fittings. Props are often dark, gothic single items of furniture such as a chair, a mirror, a piano or a cabinet filled with stuffed animals.

The photographs have a cinematic quality that reminds us of films or music videos.

In many of her photographs Francesca wears vintage clothing that confuses our sense of time. She does not obviously belong to a particular era or place. Fashion has always had a fascination with the past. Elements of fashion from a particular era will make a come back – often in a thirty-year cycle. In the 1980s we were intrigued by the 1950s and fashion in the 2010s looks back nostalgically at the 1980s. Francesca’s photographs were taken in the 1970s yet she takes her inspiration back to the 1800s and 1900s, defying the usual cycle of fashion.

[clarrrise]

NAN GOLDIN

“

American photographer.

An icon of the 1980s, Nan Goldin revolutionised photography, transforming her life into art. For more than forty years, she photographed the private lives of her loved ones: fits of laughter, parties, sex, drugs, tight embraces, children, illness, and burials. The artist sought to hold onto each moment shared with her friends, struggling with all her might against time and oblivion. She also created many self-portraits, including the very famous Nan one month after being battered (1984). In the late 1980s, with many of her best friends succumbing to the curse of AIDS, she photographed them as they died. Her work, which she presented as a “visual diary”, became the story of an entire generation. Unlike Diane Arbus, with whom she is often compared, she abolished the conventional distance that separated her from her subjects: “I want to show exactly what my world looks like, without glamorization, without glorification” (The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 2006). Coming from a bourgeoise family from the Washington suburbs, she was traumatised by the suicide of her older sister Barbara Holly at the age of 18, a highly gifted pianist, her soulmate and paragon. Her parents attempted in vain to make her suicide pass for an accident. This drama was determinant in Nan Goldin’s artistic orientation, her libertarian lifestyle, and her concern for truth: “Photography and drugs saved my life,” she affirmed. At the age of 15, she ran away from home and taught herself photography.

“

+ 

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency 

“

Comprising almost 700 snapshot-like portraits sequenced against an evocative music soundtrack, Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a deeply personal narrative, formed out of the artist’s own experiences around Boston, New York, Berlin, and elsewhere in the late 1970s, 1980s, and beyond. Titled after a song in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, Goldin’s Ballad is itself a kind of downtown opera; its protagonists—including the artist herself—are captured in intimate moments of love and loss. They experience ecstasy and pain through sex and drug use; they revel at dance clubs and bond with their children at home; and they suffer from domestic violence and the ravages of AIDS. “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is the diary I let people read,” Goldin wrote. “The diary is my form of control over my life. It allows me to obsessively record every detail. It enables me to remember.” The Ballad developed through multiple improvised live performances, for which Goldin ran through the slides by hand and friends helped prepare the soundtrack—from Maria Callas to The Velvet Underground—for an audience not unlike the subjects of the pictures. The Ballad is presented in its original 35mm format, along with photographs that also appear as images in the slide show. Introducing the installation is a selection of materials from the artist’s archive, including posters and flyers announcing early iterations of The Ballad.

“

[clarrrise]

Marianne Wex, Let's Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, 1977

“During the 1970s Wex began focusing on what she perceived as unconscious "female“ and "male“ body languages. Her research culminated in the artwork: Let's Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, 1977. Living in Hamburg between 1972 and 1977, Wex took more than 5,000 photographs of women and men, most of them in the streets of Hamburg and nearby. These images illustrated her observation of vastly different body language between the two genders. Wex's own photographs were complemented with images taken from mass media (advertisements, films, tabloids magazines and newspapers). Further, she examined and photographed sculptures dating back to 2,000 B.C., finding that idealized body postures and body forms for women and men were far more divergent in the present than historically. Wex incorporated these historical examples into her work. The resulting artwork comprises over 200 panels featuring the photographs arranged into different categories of pose. Since then, the artwork has been exhibited globally and is regarded as a pioneering work of feminist art. The resulting publication about the artwork has been translated into English and French and the project is still used as an important example in women's and gender studies. The FrauenMediaTurm documents the piece in his chronicle of the New Women's Movement.

“

[clarrrise]

Rauschenberg, Blue Prints

[clarrrise]

[clarrrise]

Paul Thek Technological Reliquaries

Technological Reliquaries, or Meat Pieces (1964–67) is among Thek'smost notable body of works, wax sculptures made in the likeness of raw meat and human limbs encased in Plexiglas vitrines.

[clarrrise]

https://www.exporevue.com/magazine/fr/journiac.html

http://www.journiac.com/

[clarrrise]

[clarrrise]

Christian Boltanski. Personnes - Monumenta 2010

Le vêtement, une métaphore de l’homme, sa seconde peau. L’œuvre, une métaphore du doigt de Dieu, du jugement dernier, de l’inexplicable. Pourquoi lui et pas moi ?

“

C’est un projet que j’ai depuis longtemps, dont je t’avais parlé il y a quatre ou cinq ans, mais que je ne pensais pas pouvoir réaliser, en tout cas pas dans cette forme. Il y a d’abord l’idée d’une masse de corps transformés en objets, en objets presque industriels.Et il y a aussi la présence de la main de Dieu, c’est-à-dire d’une puissance qui prend et qui rejette ces corps, sans raison apparente. Il choisit ou il tue, on ne sait pas. En tout cas, cette puissance sans raison, représentée par une pince qui prend et qui rejette, plane au-dessus de milliers de gens qui sont matérialisés par des vêtements.

Ce que je pense, c’est qu’il y a un maître du temps, un maître de la vie et de la mort : on peut l’appeler Dieu ou le hasard. Il n’a aucun lien avec nous et rien ne permet de comprendre son agissement, qui n’a aucune raison apparente : l’enfant pur et gentil sera tué, la crapule survivra. La beauté d’être homme, c’est d’essayer de se révolter contre cette fatalité, contre ce Dieu. Et le christianisme, pour moi, c’est ça, c’est une révolte de l’homme contre Dieu. Mais naturellement on ne peut pas vaincre Dieu ... Donc, être humain c’est essayer de se battre contre cette fatalité, tout en sachant qu’elle ne peut pas être vaincue.Je m’intéresse aussi beaucoup au hasard, ce qui est la même chose. C’est très lié à mon âge, même si ça a toujours été là puisque La Maison manquante était déjà une œuvre sur le hasard. Je m’y intéresse de plus en plus en vieillissant, parce que j’ai beaucoup d’amis qui sont morts autour de moi. Pourquoi untel meurt et pas moi ? Est-ce que je vais mourir dans cinq ans, dix ans ?

“ C. Boltanski.

[L’importance du vêtement dans la construction d’une identité.]