Current work in progress

Slowly building myself a cupcake army.

Some more thoughts on Cupcakes.

HIDEOUS

I've been thinking about cupcakes too much and now I'm just beginning to really despise them. I want to make more art about them. I want there to be people suffering and terrible things happening and then I want there to be icing everywhere and cupcakes covering their heads, because cupcakes make everything better.

But they don't, they are just these self indulgent, horribly sweet little things which are so trendy right now and with the glitter and the over the top icing and accessories they are just hideous. They have curds inside and glitter and gold dust and hundreds and thousands, but what tops it all off is that they are individual, personal desserts. They are self indulgent, you don't share a cupcake, it's all for you. Miniature desserts, Ugh.

(image via: http://cutestfood.com/)

Installation experiments

Last week I did a few quick experiments in the installation room with the film that Tess and I shot during our first experiment.

I first tried to project onto the floor by angling the projector toward the ceiling and then mirroring the projection onto the ground. This didn't really work in the way I wanted it to. So I projected onto the wall.

I then found that projecting onto the wall actually worked well for what I was trying to do. Although the video was on the wall, it still felt as though the viewer was looking down onto the scene.

I then played with the idea of adding the silver tray, which we had used to put the cakes on in the original experiment, to project onto. There is something I really like about this, however I felt that it made the work harder to understand as you can no longer properly see what is going on.

So next I placed the tray on the floor. I liked this as it showed what was left after the experiment and was itself physical evidence that the experiment had taken place.

I sat in the room and thought about how the projection could become an exhibition. We had previously thought that we could have a picture of the cakes in the exhibition as a reference back to the original experiment and to show the audience how they tempted people. Whilst sitting there though, I thought it would be a much better idea to have the physical cakes there, much like the way that in 'Making a Scene', the way in which viewers walk through the room in Gillian Wearing's piece is similar to the original performance.

Thus I would like to host an exhibition with Tess in which there is a performance within a performance. I am hoping to do this before Christmas, just need to get some other work out of the way first and wait for the space to become available.

Repetition

I was recently thinking about the nature of repetition within art.

I am currently casting multiple identical cupcakes. Other artworks with multiple 'copies' have been:

Anthony Gormley's 'Field' series:




And Ai Weiwei's 'Sunflower seeds':
This last photo is one I took at the Tate this summer, of Ai Weiwei's Sunflower seed installation in the turbine hall.

Although their themes differ somewhat from mine, I feel there are similarities with the ideas and the method in which I want to display my work. Like Weiwei's my work will all look identical (although they are not), whereas Gormley's differ more significantly.

By making lots of identical cupcake pieces, I want to play on the cupcake culture and the way that cupcakes have become such a big part of society, it's a strange phenomena really, the way that people try to make lots of perfectly identical cupcakes, adorned with an excessive amount of decoration.

This seems to me to have similarities to the work of Weiwei, where he plays on the idea of 'made in china', as though his seeds look identical, they are all handmade and therefore are not. Nothing is really ever identical, yet we try to make series' of identical things.

Gormley's work too, although each figure is different, their identities are lots in the vast sea of figures. This makes me think of the way cupcakes have become popular and everyone has to have them. By following the trend, everyone becomes the same. Their identities lost.

My cupcakes will be like a sea of people who are all indulging in the same thing, whilst also being almost perfectly identical revered objects.

Experiment #1 (Collaboration with Tessa Gray)

We did an experiment last Tuesday. We left the above cakes unattended in the Foyer at our University to see what would happen. We filmed and observed from above.

Still #1

Still #2

The experiment worked well. The cakes were eventually taken but it took a long time for the first one to be taken. I think because when one was taken, it was easier for other people to justify taking one themselves as they knew someone else had done it.

We also found that many people were not morally opposed to taking something which was not theirs, but were afraid of getting caught, some people almost took cakes, only to be reprimanded by their peers.

We are hoping to complete similar experiments in the future, however for now I will be looking into ways to display and present the work.

Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage

On Saturday I went to the Hayward to see the work of Pipilotte Rist. She was not an artist I had heard of until a couple of weeks ago, when I saw her work on the Timeout London website. Later that week, both a friend and a tutor recommended I go to see the show, so I did.
Rist is a video artist and has an interesting and unique way of displaying her videos. As with Making a Scene, although I enjoyed the work, I was more intrigued by the methods of installation that she has used for her videos. Some you had to lay down to see, some you had to sit for and others were tiny videos on the floor which you had to kneel down at to best appreciate.

I had a lightbulb moment when I realised that a good way to display Tess and I's current video work would be to show the video on the floor looking down, rather than on the wall, as when videoing, we were looking down.

Rist also displayed her videos in other unique ways, such as installing them inside other objects or projecting them onto different materials and surfaces.

I really enjoyed the work itself too, it was happy work, celebratory and I felt as though I had entered another world or a dreamland. The way in which she used video and editing to project her themes were rough and exciting.

I would really recommend anyone to see her show. It's really been very useful for my work and I can't wait to experiment with different techniques now, when installing my own videos.

Making A Scene

So I recently went to see the Making A Scene exhibition at the Southampton City Art gallery. The piece I was most interested in was Gillian Wearing's video; Dancing in Peckham (1994) - Still above.

Basically it was a performance in which the artist herself danced as if in a nightclub, but in a shopping centre.

The work was interesting, especially Wearing's video, which, like the work of Tess and I, is cheeky and makes a comment about social etiquette, she is behaving in a way which is unexpected in the location that she is in, breaking the rules.

What I really got from the exhibition though, was the way in which the work was presented. It was large scale, so Wearing was almost life size. Also the benches for viewing the work were placed at the back of the room and there was a walk through for people to go from the entrance hall of the Museum, to the rest of the exhibition. So people wandered back and forth through the room in which the video was showing. I thought this was beautifully reflective of the video itself and the way in which whilst she was dancing, people wandered past.

It really made me think about the way in which we document and display our work, particularly video evidence from a performance.

Studio

Had a bad day today, not feeling to great, just one of those days, I have been over exhausting myself with late nights and early mornings, but I took a picture of some of the work I did yesterday and signed up for a workshop on Wednesday - Wet Darkroom, which I am looking forward to. I have a tutorial tomorrow and there is a guest artist lecture so I will relax today and get on with it all tomorrow. This weekend I am going to Southampton City Art Gallery to see a video by Gillian Wearing, so I'm excited for that.

Next week I need to:

- Make Canvases
- Continue with Gum Arabic transfers.
- Clay coins?
- Purchase Icing piping bags
- Scan Negatives
- Develop films

Gerhard Richter: Panorama

On Saturday I went to see Gerhard Richter: Panorama at the Tate Modern.
I have to say, it was one of the most interesting exhibitions of painting I have ever seen, Richter really tests the medium of paint, from painting freely and abstractly to painting highly detailed photographic imitations, like that above.

Richter uses photographs to paint from, but unlike many other artists, he paints them as photographs, keeping the focusing point of the original focus. This works well as it draws your focus to the main subject within the painting, however you can tell it was painted from a photograph. Richter likes to use photography in his work, painting over photographs as well as painting from them.

I think the fact that some of the paintings were from photographs creates more of a narrative, it makes them fact and it makes them a memory, a static slice of a life. He is looking at his personal history and choosing significant moments from it to paint. Because of this some of his work can be compared to that of Emin, whose work is hugely biographical. The difference is that Emin's work is about herself and is hugely open, whereas Richters work is more private, like stolen moments we never seem to get to know the whole story.

I enjoyed the show but I wish I could have seen more of the process of his work, where everything came from. I guess that's the danger of seeing an art exhibition as an artist, you really want to get inside their mind and find out what their process is.

This summer I was distracted.

I flittered about, working, reading books, seeing a couple of gallery shows.

Now I have to decide what I want to do with my practice, my artwork and my career. I am actually not going to think about the career for a bit. It will distract me.

So, thinking about my practice. I want my work to be personal, but I also want it to be about other people, people in general. I don't want it to be about the masses though. I think what I want is for it to be about people, personally. I want it to be about social etiquette, rudeness, pushing the boundaries of human behaviour, but also about people's personal struggles in life.

I think I want to basically marry up my performance work with Tess with my work in general. I want it all to be about humanity. What I really want to do is look at things somewhat psychologically. I often remember things or use things that I've learned from my psychology A Level and recently I've been reading Love's executioner by Irvin D. Yalom which has brought a lot of it back.

Ach, I don't know what to do. I think I'll start by looking at artists who looked at human behaviour and emotion.