Alex Katz

"Anna Wintour" 2009

An american artist primary associated with the pop art movement, Alex Katz is a figural american artist with a recent installation at the National Portrait gallery. Described as "fresh and flat", Katz obsesses over surface details such as hats, sunglasses and hair. stylized, superficial, painting the high end bohemian whirl of society- I'm not convinced. His work was dull and conveyed nothing. A work in the National Portrait Gallery show, called One Flight Up (1968) consists of 31 portraits on aluminium, cut out and mounted together. The effect of looking at it is of stepping into a New York party. When Katz was painting it he felt, he says, “like a casting director” trying to work out who would fit into the scene. Influenced by Ukiyo-e japanese prints aiming to show the present world, he succeeds in portraying the latter half of the 20th century as baseless and frivolous with no substance. Maybe this is a nod to the social circle he was a part of. Commenting on a portrait of Anna Wintour created for the exhibit, he claims he had been friends with her a long time - 20 or so years - yet was only compelled to paint her after her rise to fame and fortune - this kind of disgusts me.

"One Flight Up" 1968

The Serpentine: Nairy Baghramian and Phyllida Barlow

Phyllida Barlow 2010


Nairy Braghramian - "Klassentreffen" (Class Reunion), 2008

Last week or so I visited the Serpentine in hopes to see the work of two female contemporary Sculptors. I find the Serpentine can have pretty hit or miss exhibitions- this one I am still on the fence about. FirsT, i found it pretty difficult to distinguish the two Artists' work. The gallery claimed the work was set up to "interact" with the other artist's pieces, which was total bullshit - each artist had a couple of rooms in the gallery, with only the entrance area combining their work. The serpentine gave vague descriptions and aims of the artists. "The exhibition will offer a new perspective on these two artists, who, though strikingly different in their approach, each examine questions related to the context in which their works are shown, while addressing the art-historical debate on the politics of form." Admittedly they both created abstract forms on varying scale addressing space and form, yet what sculpture doesn't in this age?
Nairy Baghramian is a Berlin-based artist known for her sculptural installations and photographs. Her work encompasses questions of context, institutional framing and the production and reception of contemporary art. Key to Baghramian’s work is how theoretical concepts, drawn from art historical debates around Minimalism, literature and design history, are translated into specific decisions about materiality, manufacture and display. - I found her work pretty dull and overdone. Plastic mold forms that often went unnoticed due to their small scale and positioning in corners, while her other featherweight spindle forms failed to impress.
Phyllida Barlow is an English artist practicing since the 1960s. Her sculptural installations are characterised by their large scale, often made quickly in the same place that they are to be shown and with materials that are subsequently recycled for future use. Their rough appearance conveys the urgency with which they are produced. Her work felt raw, worked and emotive, with effort put into them unlike Nairy's work. scale, texture, malleability, variety of materials with their original form still clear, protruding into the viewers space - all these things turned me on. Although after investigating her further online, I was a little disappointed in the selection of work she constructed, considering some of her previous works which looked fanatastic, and I also failed to find pictures of the work I liked the best in the exhibit. Fail.. Guess which artist I preferred.

Yinka Shonibare

what a blog hiatus. newest post in on the above who I noticed in timeout London the other day and was peeved by the familiarity of that particular name. Now i remember seeing his awesome work at the turner prize exhibition several years ago in 2004.
Shonibare has become well known for his exploration of colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation. His work explores these issues, alongside those of race and class, through the media of painting, sculpture, photography and, more recently, film and performance. He examines in particular the construction of identity and tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe and their respective economic and political histories. Mining Western art history and literature, he asks what constitutes our collective contemporary identity today. Having described himself as a ‘post-colonial’ hybrid, Shonibare questions the meaning of cultural and national definitions. He uses fantastic african prints on dutch cotton that he buys in Brixton, London. He is currently responsible for the 4th plinth in Trafalgar square.

The Circumcision

Circumcision - Parmigianino
c. 1523-1524
Oil on Panel

Chris Ofili

The Holy Virgin Mary - 1996

The Upper Room - 1999-2002

Pimpin' Ain't Easy - 1997

So while at home i went to the Chris Ofili exhibition at the Tate Britain. He is a Turner Prize winning British painter best known for artworks referencing aspects of his Nigerian heritage, particularly his incorporation of elephant dung. He was one of the Young British Artists, and is now based in Trinidad. I'm having a hard time forming an opinion on his work. not that any of the other posts so far have really addressed my personal opinion.
Ofili, who is of Nigerian descent, studied cave paintings there which had some effect on his style. He sometimes applies Elephant dung directly to the canvas in the form of dried spherical lumps, and sometimes, in the same form, uses it as foot-like supports on which the paintings stand. He claims that by propping the work up with the dung, he resonates the connection of the work with earth and the ground that they come from, while denying traditional forms of artwork display. Ofili's painting also reference blaxploitation films and gangsta rap, seeking to question racial and sexual stereotypes in a humorous way. His work is often built up in layers of paint, resin, glitter, dung (mainly elephant) and other materials to create a collage.
Up close his work is quite interesting. One can really see the forms layering and stages of the painting, while significant details seem lost in the grand scheme of the works. The images verge on crude, with cut outs of pornographic images of black women pasted to the canvas, while the overall images encompass black stereotypes while employing bright colours and patterns. His works bridge the gap between the sacred and profane, and he is constantly tying to rework the concept of what defines beauty, art and profane. his earlier work is amusing, the elephant dung innovative, while specifically addressing personal issues. Also one must always chuckle at titles such as "the adoration of captain shit and the legendary black stars" or "pimpin ain't easy" - depicting a giant phallus with a clown head. His later work shows care towards religious themes, as shown through the upper room - a large wooden room constructed within the Tate displaying 12 monkeys facing towards a large monkey, each in a different colour scheme drawing from both Hindu and christian last supper imagery. He really pulls out the stops to make the experience of the viewer sacred and intimate, the entry to the room through a dark echoing passage along with the room itself do possess a certain religious fervor atmosphere one experiences in a church or other holy places.
Later in his career he abandoned the elephant dung and somewhat simple themes to explore more through painting as he moved to Trinidad. His later work i found to be not anything outstanding, although his exuberant colour palette, clearly influenced by his life in Trinidad, is exciting to experience. I suppose I liked his room of watercolours and drawings, symmetrical intricacies made up of tiny heads of afroed men and women.

Nobuyoshi Araki

Nobuyoshi Araki (荒木 経惟) is Japan’s most iconic photographer and its most controversial cultural export. Araki has been described as a pornographer, a monster, a genius, a "dirty uncle" and much else besides. He makes much of his persona as a somewhat cartoonish, priapic little devil like a character in an erotic 18th-century drawing of the Floating World. Having published over 350 books, Araki is considered one of the most prolific artists alive or dead in Japan and around the world. Some of his most popular photography books are Sentimental Journey, Tokyo Lucky Hole, and Shino.
Influenced by Shunga, the erotic art of the Edo period, as well as the glossy imagery of contemporary culture, much of Araki’s work confronts taboo subjects such as sex, nudity and death head on. Subjects range from poetic scenes of old Tokyo, to sensual close-ups of exotic flowers and erotic photographs of kimono-clad women bound in rope. Araki's art is all about movement and restlessness, even though he returns again and again to the same fixations. The images abutted into a continuous tracking shot. One moves from glistening images of food to an eyeball; from a snail crawling on the lips of a woman's vagina to wilting flowers, a woman's ass to a fish's head, and then to a breast bound and squeezed with rope. The fact that some juxtapositions are alarming is part of the point.
Araki´s curiosity for this world is manifested in his insatiable need to explore the Woman. Araki is not only concerned by the specific atmosphere in the pictures of their naked bodies. It is the idea of pleasure itself; about the pure sensuality and extreme eroticism, which has nothing to do with vulgarity, neither could it be the fruit of pure voyeuristic pleasure. Work is at once shocking, mysteriously tender, deeply personal. Not all viewers digest his work smoothly, especially because of his depictions of women: women in Kimonos bound and suspended in Japanese rope bondage, women's bodies smeared with what appears to be blood, women masturbating, women with lipstick and cigarettes, women with Araki's bestiary of plastic dinosaurs and lizards. The women look at the man behind the camera, and their gaze reaches us. Often it is a look of severity, as if the spectator was really the one being objectified. What we are watching is the complicit menage-a-trois of photographer, model and camera, a kind of ritualised theatre of objectification.
His libidinous images are driven by subjectivity and desire, along with getting to the bone of bereavement, nostalgia and loneliness, their pathos being all the more affecting for being set in a body of work full to the brim with life's pleasures and excesses. In Sentimental Journey / Winter Journey Araki brings together a famous series of photographs he took recording his wedding and honeymoon, with a later series that documents his wife Yoko's illness and death in 1990. What Araki’s work mostly reflects are the sexist and regressive aspects of the reality in which we live. One must take Araki and his view of the world entire; we find ourselves at one moment in the sado-masochistic sex club Tokyo Lucky Hole, the next in the anonymous streets of the modern city. It is like being inside the camera obscura of someone's head, on whose walls everything is projected.

Miyazaki Tsutomu

Somewhat of an 'off the beaten path' post. After the case of Miyazaki being mentioned in an article on Contemporary Japanese art, i investigated this Japanese serial killer, also known as The Otaku Murderer, The Little Girl Murderer, The Cannibal Nerd, and Dracula.
Between 1988 and 1989, Miyazaki mutilated and killed four girls, aged between four and seven, and sexually molested their corpses. He drank the blood of one victim and ate her hands - an interesting fact, considering Miyazaki's premature birth left him with deformed hands, which were permanently gnarled and fused directly to the wrists. During the day, Miyazaki was a mild-mannered employee. Outside of work he randomly selected children to kill. He terrorized the families of his victims, sending them letters recalling in graphic detail what he had done to their children. To the family of victim Erika Nanba, Miyazaki sent a morbid postcard assembled using words cut out of magazines: "Erika. Cold. Cough. Throat. Rest. Death." He allowed the corpse of his first victim, Mari Konno, to decompose in the hills near his home, then chopped off the hands and feet, which he kept in his closet. They were recovered upon his arrest. He charred her remaining bones in his furnace, ground them into powder, and sent them to her family in a box, along with several of her teeth, photos of her clothes, and a postcard reading: "Mari. Cremated. Bones. Investigate. Prove." Police found that the families of the victims had something else in common: all were bothered by silent nuisance phone calls. If they didn't pick up the phone, it would sometimes ring for 20 minutes.
On July 23, 1989, Miyazaki attempted to insert a zoom lens into the vagina of a grade school-aged girl in a park near her home and was attacked by the girl's father. Fleeing on foot, Miyazaki eventually returned to the park to retrieve his car, promptly being arrested by police the father had called. A search of his two-room bungalow turned up a collection of 5,763 videotapes, some containing anime and slasher films (later used as reasoning for his crimes). Interspersed among them was video footage and pictures of his victims. Miyazaki, who retained a perpetually calm and collected demeanor during his trial, appeared indifferent to his capture.
The media soon came to call him "The Otaku Murderer". His bizarre killings fueled a moral panic against otaku, accusing anime and horror films of making him a murderer. However these reports were disputed.Miyazaki's father refused to pay for his son's legal defense, and eventually committed suicide in 1994. The trial began on March 30, 1990. Often talking nonsensically, he blamed his atrocities on a "rat man" alter ego, a character that he often drew in cartoon form for the court. Believed to be insane, Miyazaki remained incarcerated throughout the 1990s while Saitama Prefecture put him through a battery of psychiatric evaluations. Teams of psychiatrists from Tokyo University diagnosed him as suffering from dissociative identity disorder (multiple personalities) or extreme schizophrenia. However, the Tokyo District Court judged him still aware of the gravity and consequences of his crimes and therefore accountable. He was sentenced to death on April 14, 1997. He described his serial murders as an "act of benevolence" and never apologized. Miyazaki was hanged on June 17, 2008.

Deceased:
今野真理 Konno Mari: Four years old
吉沢正美 Yoshizawa Masami: Seven years old
難波絵梨香 Nanba Erika: Four years old
野本綾子 Nomoto Ayako: Five years old