Recently I have fallen in love with (all over again) with disposable cameras. Here are some photos I took on a disposable camera in Glasgow and on my trip to Northern Ireland.
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27 May 2012
14 May 2012
A paper I submitted this term on 'The art of the Everyday'
Q: “Mostly, I believe an artist doesn't create something, but is there to sort through, to show, to point out
what already exists, to put it into form and sometimes reformulate it.”
(Annette Messager, Word for Word, 2006)
Discuss Messager’s sentiment with
reference to the art of the everyday.
A:
The everyday surrounds us; we are inside it
and outside it. The everyday includes the ordinary, the mundane routines that
we take part in each day and each week, even the observations and reflections
of our day to day actions are part of the everyday. All of us take part in
repetitive actions, rhythms and cyclic time schedules that organise and dictate
our daily lives. But the everyday is not the same for all us; the everyday in
Paris is different from the everyday in Milan, Mumbai or Sweden, in 1950 and in
1990. It is also different for you and me. Factories, schools, work places and
relations between colleagues also have their own everyday experience. Yet all
the different ‘everyday’ co-exists in the same space and world. The
overwhelming everyday which includes everything and everyone we interact with
on day to day bases changes when put in the context of art. The concept of
everyday is then found in the “in between space, the interstices, the margins
and the distinctive zones of the social”[1].Where
there is a possibility of understanding the everyday interactions, instead of
studying them, to find opportunities for social transformations. The ‘art of
the everyday’ is not searching for the deeper understanding of the society or a
system of escape from the usual but it is interested in the relationship
between the individual and the overall. As Nikos Papastergiadis writes in ‘Spatial Aesthetics: Art, Place, and the
Everyday’, the ‘art of the everyday’ recognises “the way workers seize the
moments that brakes their drudging routines…the transformation of a foreign
space into private place called home, or even the deep embrace of a pop song as
the personal anthem”[2].
‘Art of the everyday’ focuses on the everyday realm to find opportunities for
adaption and alteration in the everyday through the use of art. As Henri
Lefebvre believed, the everyday provides us with opportunities, perceptions
into the weak points and gaps through which social transformation is possible.
A theory that was previously ignored by the structuralist theorist of social
and cultural studies.
This
new concept of the everyday encouraged new starting points and intrigued the
creative minds to consider how it may fit into the context of art. Before the
1980s art, mainly paintings, were generally used as a medium for propaganda. By
using art the government wanted to alter the social, Soviet Realism is an
example of how the government can approve a type of art to serve the
dictatorship of the proletariat. Due to this practice of art artist were concentrating
on understanding the link between art and political struggle. But the new
understanding of the art of the everyday brought into focus the politics of
representation, with better understanding of “the local and the global, the
materiality and location of art as well as a new framework of interpreting the
so called popular art forms like video and photography”[3].
This new understanding also meant that art no longer had to be read in the
classical form of paintings and the process and concept of the art work was
appreciated more than the technical execution. Art work by artists such as
Tracy Emin, Sophie Calle, Richard Billingham and Garry Winogrand were no longer
seen as trying to represent political struggle but were recognized as pieces
that were trying to create art work that changed the rules of representing
cultural identity and social studies by engaging the everyday.
Annette Messager’s believes that the
role of an artist is to ‘sort through, to show, to point out what already
exist, to put it into form and sometimes reformulate’. Tracy Emin, for example
is an artist who sorts through everyday objects and forms them in a gallery
space, she does so by using mediums such as neon
signs, drawings, notes, video appearances, installation/sculptures and
photographs. The installation that brought her to public attention, and is her
signature piece, is ‘Everyone I Have
Slept With’ (c.1995). This piece consisted of a tent inside which Emin had
carefully sewn and embroidered the names of everyone she had ever “slept” with.
Another one of her famous installation was ‘My
Bed’ (c.1999). This installation shows Emin’s bed after a nervous
breakdown, there are empty alcohol bottles, cigarette butts, the sheets are
stained with worn panties on the bed. By using materials that she has
interacted with every day and by reformulating these materials and private,
intimate experience in a gallery context – a public space Emin’s shocks the
viewers. By placing objects such as cigarette butts – an object that she has
had an intimate connection she allows he audience value their own interaction
with everyday objects as souvenirs, showing they hold as much value as
something else that is considered as important.
As Tracy Emin said about ‘Everyone I Have Slept With’ “It’s about
conception, sleeping in the womb with my twin brother, up to my last friend or
lover that I slept with in 1994. That’s what the tent’s about. It’s about
sleep, intimacy, and moments” (Tracey Emin)[4].
Emin collects, sorts out and reformulates objects of her every day and ask
viewers to recognize the everyday objects that we invaluable and moments that
we do not consider, in this case sleep and intimacy.
Sophie Calle, like Emin, sorts
through the everyday interactions and reformulates them in a photographic
documentation. For example ‘Suite
Venitienne’ (1979) was a photographic documentary of a stranger – “Henri B”
she followed travelling to Venice. She followed this stranger for fourteen
days, during this period she photographed him walking, taking photos, sitting
in a café and other normal interactions. She observed the city from his
perspective; this resulted in a collection of black and white photographs and a
narrative that resembles “Henri B’s” itinerary. By documenting these daily
movements Calle had sorted through and recreated a stranger’s everyday away
from the original context. Similarly Richard Billingham used photography as a
way of documenting other’s everyday. Billingham spent six years from 1990 to 1996,
while he was a student at Sunderland, photographing his family. First he only
photographed his alcoholic father. Later, when his parents re-united he
photographed both of them. These photographs are not staged, they are not the
generic family photos that one would take, and they are more of a documentation
of his parent’s day to day routine. He captured intimate moments, emotions and
poverty of his family. He captured his father Ray and mother Liz doing mundane
boring things in a council flat with menagerie of pets. Billingham did not have
an agenda for taking such intimate photographs, as he said “'it's not my intention to shock, to offend,
sensationalize, be political or
whatever, only to make work that is as spiritually meaningful as I can make it…I just
used the cheapest film and took them to be processed at the cheapest place. I was just
trying to make order out of chaos”[5].
Another
photographer of the everyday is Garry Winogrand. From 1960 to 1965 Winogrand
photographed women walking on the streets of California. One of the famous
photographs from this period is ‘Los
Angeles,California’ (1969). This photograph captures people and their
surrounding so we are put in context. The focus is on three young, beautiful
women who are taking a quick glance at a man in a wheelchair with a begging cup
between his knees. The way Winogrand captures the momentary glance the women
give the man makes it the focus of the photograph. We immediately notice the
contrast between the women’s youth and well-being and the man’s poverty. This
makes the photograph thought provoking. It captures an everyday incident that
happens on the streets almost everywhere in most cities. The contrast and the
activities of this photograph convey and reconstruct an everyday incident into something
meaningful.
The
artists mentioned above worked under the influence of modernism, the time when
‘the everyday’ was beginning to redefining itself in the context of art. Thus
the artists’ works discussed above are generic of that era, making it easy to
justify their work as pieces that observe “in between spaces, the interstices,
the margins and the distinctive zones of the social”[6].
However, their work does not necessarily justify Annette Messager’s belief;
“artist doesn’t create something, but is there to sort through, to show, to
point out what already exist, to put it into form and sometimes reformulate it”[7].
What Messager describes is part of the artistic process, it helps artist to
opinionate, but putting into form and reformation in my opinion is to merely
re-create or represent an incident. Therefore I consider Tracy Emin as one of
the few artists of the time who prove Messager right. She sort through and
showed us the objective and use materials that she directly interacted with,
sort through them and reformulated - recreated it in an odd, unexpected for the
context, environment. Even Richard Billingham’s and Sophie Calle’s photographs
can be considered to be true to Messager’s words as they documented people they
were directly interacting with everyday and most importantly they photographed
these people interacting with everyday objects and people. However, other artists although they sort
through and point out what already exist, have an agenda. They do not simply
remake an everyday interaction as they experienced it and leave it to the
audience to take whatever they want to, they add their agenda to it. Barbara
Kruger’s ‘Your Body is a Battleground’
is an example of how artists remake everyday experiences and hide their thought
behind it. Kruger’s ‘Your Body is a
Battleground’ plays on a topic that most females deal with everyday by
layering the found photograph from existing sources with aggressive text makes
the beholder see the right thing, not what the mass-consumerist society wants
the society to see.
I
take Messager’s belief to be one of the many perspectives of analysing modern
and contemporary artists and their work. Her belief, to me, seems to be an
indefinable generalisation of the artistic process. We live in the everyday, it
surrounds us, we are besieged in it therefore it only seems apt that artists
are influenced by the everyday. To sort out and reformulate the everyday, as I
comprehend it, means to simply re-present it not analyses it or create a new
meaning. However, most artists are trying to achieve an awareness of a
situation amongst the public. “meaning and sense are the outcome of an
interaction between artist and beholder”[8],
the viewer’s always take away opinions and thoughts from art exhibitions
therefore an artist always does more than sorting through the chaos of the
everyday The artistic process may include Messager’s idea of the role of artist
but I believe artist do more than just sort through and “point out what already
exist”[9].
They convey something bigger than that, “artistic practice is always a
relationship with the other, at the same time it represents a relationship with
the world”[10].
[1] Nikos
Papastergiadis, Spatial
Aesthetics: Art, Place, and the Everyday, pg.22. Taken from an electronic
document,
(Last accessed on
1/03/2012 at 15:23)
[2]Nikos
Papastergiadis, Spatial
Aesthetics: Art, Place, and the Everyday, pg.23-24. Taken from an electronic
document,
(Last accessed on 1/03/2012 at 15:23)
[3] Nikos
Papastergiadis, Spatial
Aesthetics: Art, Place, and the Everyday, pg.31. Taken from an electronic
document,
(Last accessed on 1/03/2012
at 17:00)
[4] Adrian Gargett. “Going Down” the Art of Tracy Emin for 3
A.M Magazine. Taken from an electronic document, URL: http://www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/oct2001/going_down.html
Last accessed on 12/03/2012 at 18:00)
[6] Nikos
Papastergiadis, Spatial
Aesthetics: Art, Place, and the Everyday, pg.28. Taken from an electronic
document,
(Last accessed on 1/03/2012 at 18:23)
[7] Annette
Messager, Word for Word, 2006. Taken from the essay question above.
[8]
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics,
(Les presses du reel, France, 2002) pg.80.
[9]
Annette Messager, Word for Word, 2006.
Taken from the essay question above.
[10]
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics,
(Les presses du reel, France,2002) pg.80
30 Mar 2012
Here are some pieces I did in 2011 for an exhibition at Hung Art Gallery, Inverness.
The theme was "more than tartan and shortbread" - two things that Scotland is often associated with. However there is more to Scotland than that.
For this exhibition I focused on Glasgow.
Most of the pieces have the new skyline of Glasgow layered on old city maps and informatics charts of Glasgow. The old maps put Glasgow in a geographical context; it also paints a hazy picture of old Glasgow. But the skyline represents its new industrialized and urban side. The tartan represents Glasgow’s Scottish heritage and the skyline represents the present. The skyline illustrates cranes once used on ports; you can see new buildings and new icons of the city such as the Clyde Arc and Armadillo. Altogether the pieces are supposed to represent Glasgow’s past and present – “more than tartan and shortbread”.
25 Feb 2012
Design as a driver of economic growth and well-being
One of the biggest changes of our time is the realisation that creativity has become the new valuable resource. The economy is no longer based on production of goods and services that could be exchanged and consumed. The economy measures the amount of resources that can be converted into money, and growth is dependent on doing that. This was an appropriate method of calculating economic growth during the industrial revolution when humanity was dependent on the manufacturing of physical products, which was the situation during the first 150 years of the industrial revolution. However, that is not the case anymore; during the 1900s the creative economy would have been dependent on industrial designers who engaged in the making of physical products for consumption, but today the creative economy is based on knowledge. John Howkins in ‘The Creative Economy’ talks about a new economy that uses knowledge and information as tools and materials for creativity. In our society today knowledge is created through services; networks are created through communication; our relationships are created through our experiences with services. Thus our society is starting to value experiences over physical products therefore a good design is no longer a design that sells but a design that can be valued for the experience it helps us to achieve.
Before this new demand for valuable experiences, there was a demand for new physical objects that enhanced the quality of life – a pseudo-demand created by industrial designers for fuelling the depressed economy. The products of 1930s America saw styling of products as a medium to increase consumerism to relieve the Great Depression. So in the early 1930s America embraced streamlining which soon became America’s hallmark of design. Streamlining products was the new, modernistic style that promoted new buying by displacing good and still functional products to become boring and out of fashion. This stylistic obsolesce disappointed consumer with their possessions and encouraged new buying. Some of the pioneers of streamlining were Walter Dorwin Teague, Norman Bel Geddes, Henry Dreyfus and Raymond Loewy. They revolutionised design and as streamlining commercialised, it spread from non-vehicular objects to everyday generic items, for example Lowey’s Teardrop pencil sharpener to Teague’s service station for Texaco. One of the most influential pieces of the time was Norman Geddes’s ‘Horizons’ published in 1932, it was filled with science fiction visualisations of objects shaped as a teardrop. Horizons struck a responsive chord in the automotive industry and amongst the railway executives. Companies such as Chrysler Corporation used Geddes’ Horizons to make streamlined automobiles such as the Airflow automobile (1934). Airflow pushed the streamlining fad among people and convinced companies, such as Ford and General Motors, to employ it as a styling device to sell their cars. It also inspired the railway executives who aimed at saturating rail travel with modern, in fashion design to pull consumers away from the futuristic looking automobiles. Streamlining spread rapidly affecting everyone; Americans were buying modernised products and re-decorating their standard of living. Although streamlining was an excellent medium to get rid of the depression it gave industrial designer power and regard (something they had not experienced before) that allowed them to corrupt the design world. Some thought of it as a “blind concern with fashion… (that) made it difficult to take the ordinary industrial designer seriously”[1]. Designers of the time could defend their work on a technical level -the materials they used, such as sheet metal and plastic allowed objects to have rounded edge making products durable but it was seen by some as a popular style that developed in America. Although the designers liked to justify streamlined designs as using science and fast moving vehicles it was commercial styling that was used as a fuel for the American economy.
Since the 1930s the creative economy and so has our society has changed. Before, designers were able to manipulate consumers by using styling as a medium to raise the goods from being boring to being distinctive, but today consumers are no longer influenced by the “distinctive”. As Robert Foster said in ‘The Work of the New Economy’ “Value is: connecting with the world’s passions”[2]; “to create experiences for new consumers, that are rewarding and true”[3]. So where did this new significance of value of experience evolve? Richard Florida’s ‘The Creative Class’ suggests that as the creative class in our society rose, their behaviour, norms and values were reflected on rest of the society. The creative class believed in individuality, meritocracy, diversity and openness. This attitude of the creative class, I believe, inspired the rest of the society to shift their attitude from “survival” to “self-expression”. This means there has been a shift in what people want out of life, work, religion and family. Also today we live in an economically developed society where we have a variety of choices. We do not live in a world of scarcity but in a world of abundance – known as “postmaterialistic…means that we no longer have to devote all our energies just to staying alive, but we have the wealth, time and ability to enjoy other aspects of life”[4] Thus consumer’s expectation from object that contributes to all aspect of life has changed, they expect products to help them achieve more than a higher standard of living. They demand products to be “distinctive” that is: products that can be valued for the experience it provides.
To deliver this demand designers are using knowledge and information to come up with new and innovative products. For example, Coors Light Bottles now have labels that turn blue when the beer is chilled and Huggies’ hand soap bottles flash light to show children how long they should wash their hands for[5]. The fashion industry is another example of how mass manufacturing can have a “fordist” aspect to it. For example Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger they are designers, they do not manufacture clothing but are believed to manufacture state of the art pieces. Other examples, that have not yet been mass manufactured, are projects such as bio-jewellery (2003 – 2005) by Tobbie Kerridge, Nikki Scott and Ian Thompson. This was a project for couples who wanted to exchange more than their wedding vows and wedding bands. Couples donated their bone cells which were seeded onto a bioactive scaffold. This encouraged the cells to divide and grow, resulting into tissue that took form of the scaffold, which was ring shaped. This tissue was then combined with precious metal giving couples rings that were made with the tissue of their partners. Similar projects such as Elio Caccavale’s Utility Pets (2003) and Biopresence by George Tremmel and Shiho Fukuhara (2003 – 2005) have been conducted, although these products are not widely available, they show the direction in which design is heading. These projects help customers to connect with the product and help them to express themselves rather than the designer; thus increasing the interaction with the product and so increasing the value of the item.
Designers have always had a vital role to play in our society, during the 1930s they helped with the Great Depression and now they are trying to revive the economy again. The economy is fuelled, an always will be fuelled, by consumer’s demand and capacity to spend. Although the system of an economy will always be the same, the definition of good design might change. Designers could either cater to the needs of a society or they can influence a society to follow a design trend. In 1930s America designers influenced the society and forced the idea that good design was a design that sells. Today good designs are the kinds that enhance the value of a product by providing an enriching user interaction. This attitude is still in process. But I believe it will certainly play out once the society decided what kind of life and what kind of society they want to pass on to the other generations. This could either be influenced by the creative class who control the creative economy or this could be negotiated by the society itself. But good design will always be the type that supports a society’s need.
[1] Jeffrey L.Meikle, Design in USA,( Oxford University Press, Oxford,2005) pg.124
[2] Robert Foster, The Work of the New Economy, consumers, brands and value creation, pg.719. Taken from an electronic document,
(Last accessed on 1/12/2011 at 20:11)
[3] Robert Foster, The Work of the New Economy, consumers, brands and value creation, pg.719. Taken from an electronic document,
(Last accessed on 1/12/2011 at 20:11)
[4] Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class. (Basic Books, New York 2005) pg.81.
[5] Louise Story. Product Packaging Now Shout To Get Your Attention for New York Times.
Taken from an Electronic Document, URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/10/business/10package.html.
( Last accessed on 30/11/2011 )
15 Jan 2012
Re-Newed
My book sculptures. This is my way of making new again. I use old,second hand books that often have pages missing, or are damaged or the text is too old to read. By turning these books into art, I feel, they get a new value; they become renewed.
I had the chance to exhibit these at the Glasgow School of Art Shop during Christmas. I also hope to be doing a book sculpture making workshop at The Queen Bee and the Damsely soon (www.damselflycrafts.com)
Winter:
Valley:
Christmas:
Prism:
28 Sept 2011
Mirror Image
Recently I have been exploring the realm of prayer and trying to comprehend the relation between humans, prayer and God .It is during this exploration that I came across this quote from Thich Nhat Hanh: "We and God are not two separate existences; therefore the will of God is also our own will...Between the subject and the object there is a close relationship just as there is a close relationship between left and right, night and day, satisfaction and hunger; just as according to the law of reflection, the perceiver and the perceived have a close link".
Once I had accepted the idea that one praying and the one being prayed to is the same, I imagined a bit of God within me. Similarly there must be a bit of God in everyone.
A mirror shows what is true; it reflects who you are and exactly how you are. But who you are is who you want to be; it shows who you percieve yourself to be. 'Mirror Image' is a set of paintings which is trying to potray God and humans as a reflection of each other.
Once I had accepted the idea that one praying and the one being prayed to is the same, I imagined a bit of God within me. Similarly there must be a bit of God in everyone.
A mirror shows what is true; it reflects who you are and exactly how you are. But who you are is who you want to be; it shows who you percieve yourself to be. 'Mirror Image' is a set of paintings which is trying to potray God and humans as a reflection of each other.
14 Sept 2011
You can see more of my paintings from the series Tribute to a Mother on: http://harshadapatil.carbonmade.com/projects/3002020#5
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