Bloomberg New Contemporaries

Just a quick mention that I entered my work for selection in the Bloomberg New Contemporaries. I choose my best piece this year, Skin Flick, together with my best second year work. Below are the six works I submitted. In retrospect I wonder if it might not have been better to submit more than one of my multimedia collages, instead of perhaps the last two paintings, but that is the nature of any kind of selection process -once you have entered its inevitable you will wonder if you should have done things differently. All I can do now is sit back & wait.

Skin Flick, 2014

Feed Me, 2013

Transfat, 2013

Mother, 2013

Warhead, 2013

02/04 Update!! Shortlisted!! I received an email today telling me that I have been shortlisted for the New Contemporaries show. I'm so excited, its fantastic news that I have been chosen for round 2 out of the 1400 applicants who entered.

01/05 Update!! This is the best news ever - !!SELECTED!! Wow, what an incredible treat for International Labour Day.....I'm through!! I got an email today telling me that I have been chosen for the 2014 Bloomberg New Contemporaries Show. Fantastic! I can't tell you how excited I am by this news, it is quite simply, the best news ever! Also, to answer my question about what I should have submitted, it seems I got it dead right -every single one of the pieces I submitted were chosen for the show.

Who's The Daddy Now? [Stretching Canvas]

I've been stretching some canvas for a new piece, and I discovered just how hard work it really is. It takes strength & perseverance to get it right....lots of elbow grease is needed.

Its a sheet of heavy black canvas that I was fortunate enough to find lying on the pavement one morning as I set of for the Cass, just right for the paintings I am doing at the moment on black backgrounds. This is the first time I've stretched canvas, have previously grounded my work either on cardboard, preprepared or recycled canvases, so I've been learning as I go along. I bought the stretching tool a few weeks ago, and finally got a chance to use it.

My method was to staple the canvas midway along on of the long side, the stretch & staple it on the opposite side. Moving round to the shorter sides I did the same thing, so that the canvas was held at the midpoint on all four sides. I then went back to the starting point, stretched & stapled it a couple of inches to the left, and again on the opposite side. I did the same thing on the short sides, and once I had four new fastenings in place, I did exactly the same on the right hand side. Then the left, then right, left, right, working y way around the canvas until eventually I arrived at the corners, which I folded the canvas & pinned it down.

When I finished, the canvas seemed as taught as a drum skin, and I was really pleased, so I sized it with 25% PVA in water. Unfortunately, when I returned to it a couple of days later, the surface had slackened in some places, and had many dimples & waves from where the PVA had dried. I asked for some advice on how best to resolve it, and Pete said the best thing was to unpick it and stretch it again. "Show it whose the Daddy" were his words, and then once I'd got it nice and taught again, spray the back of it with warm water to try & even out the dimples. It seems to have worked, but I'm wondering how it will be when I look tomorrow. Will it have slackened again? If so, what is the best way to stretch it? What if anything am I doing wrong? Like so many things I have done during my degree, stretching canvases is another learning process, and the best thing I can do is ask for advice and get help when I need it. I will update this with some pictures of the results in due time. Watch this space.

03/04/2014....When I came into the studio this morning, I was pleased to find that my efforts have paid off! The canvas had remained taught over the weekend, and I was able to get two coats of black acryclic down on its surface as a base for the next piece, [which I've uploaded a sketch of below].

Inspirational Artists No.2 Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville's work has always been inspirational for my practice. I love the boldness with which she presents bodies which do not fit the conceptual ideal of body politics, the fit slim youthful body of advertising agency, a cultural zeitgeist which all too often leads to the rejection of those whose bodies do not match up to the cultural ideal. A large part of my work is about challenging these cultural stereotypes, by presenting bodies which are not ideal, flesh which is distorted and grotesque. As a figurative painter I have tried to learn from Saville's work, by looking closely at how she paints flesh, and trying in my own way to emulate it.

Mark Stevens, "Fresh Meat," New York Magazine (December 13,1999):

"Saville's art is the dark reflection of contemporary fashion. In the mind of many
people, the power of the mass media—as they present their array of svelte
bodies—creates a tyranny of perfected form. What is left for art, then, but to
disturb the shiny abstractions of advertising with a gutty touch? To remember
that not all bodies are beautiful and to declare, rudely, that in our culture the body
is treated as meat? Even the models in the magazines and the talking heads on
TV are just something to be consumed. That Saville's work should itself become
fashionable, taken up by advertising magnates, is not surprising in this world of
mirrors. Her work invites the paradox; it sends contrary signals. She shows off
an unflinching eye, but also has a silky brushstroke that's sometimes reminiscent
of Sargeant. These are not just bodies—they are our body politic."







Maria Joscelyne Castaneda -In Trace, for example, Saville paints the back of a woman wearing "trace" articles of clothing. The back of this anonymous figure becomes an intimate portrayal of an
aspect of the body that is not often surveyed. Her arms appear to squeeze tightly to her
sides as if she wants to fit within the proportions of the canvas. Her skin is mottled,
speckled with bits of grey and white and the occasional shades of pink and yellow. The
skin is uneven in coloring, especially where the paintwork appears to have been applied
in varying quantities. This stylistic quality is also evident in Plan where her skin color is
not one shade but many. The skin is so pale that it is almost transparent conveying the
vulnerability and permeability of flesh; though these bodies may be solid they are also
fragile. Saville understands the human body and women who are so dissatisfied with
their shape that they ultimately turn to surgery. Saville, in turn, "uses the paint as if it is
flesh, sculpting it as if she is a surgeon."[Loren Erdrich, "I am a Monster: The Indefinite and the Malleable in Contemporary Female Self-Portraiture," Circa 121 (Autumn 2007)]

Linking to Maria Joscelyne Castaneda's Thesis for Master of Arts in Art History, University of California Irvine

Abstract:

Jenny Saville's unusual take on the figure has framed her paintings within a context all too receptive to the cultural biases constructed around fat and female bodies. In order to rethink the fleshy, expansive bodies that Saville portrays, I position her art historically within a contemporary shift away from traditional figuration towards a new, more visceral focus on the body. The broader body politics within which she works are also examined through a historical study of how hysteria has become aligned with eating disorders, resulting in a cultural affliction that makes the female body a site of public domain and critique. Rather than reading Saville's bodies as examples of fat and repulsion, I suggest that her oversized female bodies be viewed as embodiments of Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the grotesque body—a liberating and boundless body capable of subverting hierarchical systems and standardized norms.


Full thesis available for download here

http://gradworks.umi.com/14/72/1472266.html

 
 

Mike Stubbs Tutorial 20/02/2014

Enjoyed a very productive tutorial with Mike Stubbs this morning. Mike said he felt my figurative work at the moment didn't have a squidgy, fleshy feel to it, that the paintwork was too flat, too hard. We looked at the oil pastel sketch of my next work, and he pointed out how the pastel tones had a much greater sense of fleshyness than Skin-Flick. Likewise we also looked at some of my work from last year, & Mike pointed out how they had much more of a fleshy round appearance, which he feels is lost in my latest work.

A lot of what he said links in with Mel's comments on my skin-tones, and how she felt that they were not accurate, and that I should either embrace the overly pink tones I was creating, & make it a feature of my work, or really try to improve the accuracy of my rendering of fleshtones in my work. This is what I tried to do in Skin-Flick, to recreate skin as accurately as possible, and although I think to some extent I succeeded, [especially in comparison to previous pieces like Feed Me], the comedic element has been lost. Without doubt Skin-Flick is a cold work, especially when its compared to pieces like Transfat and Mother

We also looked at my Photoshop collages, which he was very enthusiastic about. I explained how I my final project was intended to be a mixture of both paintings, and prints of the collage pieces, & we discussed the importance & effect of their eventual framing for exhibition display.

Mike's feeling was that the solution is drawing, that I need to draw more, especially life drawing,

Inspirational Artists No1, Maria Raquel Cochez

Decided to do a series of posts on artists I come across whose practice I find influential. There's no hierarchy, I'm just posting them as I discover them.

Maria Raquel Cochez is a Panamanian artists whose figurative practice extends across many media. Much of her work deals with body dysmorphia, self-loathing, obesity and binge eating. Her painting style is hyperreal, which although dissimilar to my own style, is a useful research tool to learning how to paint flesh-tones more accurately, which is an issue within my own work.

Her BINGES series of paintings hit a note with me, firstly because I also have eating disorder issues, and also because fat, self-loathing and addiction are issues which I try to mediate into my own work.

Peanut Butter, The Binges, Acrylic on canvas, 60" x 80", 2007

McFlurries, The Binges, Acrylic on canvas, 60" x 80", 2007

She has also produced some interesting video work which I really like. The videos are actually much closer to the styles which I try to create in my paintings, and as such are really important for me

Skin-Flick

Skin-Flick is the latest canvas I have been working on. Its a large figurative piece, 300cm x 100cm, which I have grounded on canvas. I deliberately used an old canvas, which I painted over, as after scraping away the remains of the previous work, the residue left enough texture on the surface of the ground to give the impression of flaking & bumpy skin.

I used a plain black background, without any feature, as this focusses the viewer's attention onto the figure itself, without distraction, and the body seems to hang in space unsupported, which also helps to increase the prominence of the foreground figure, especially as the dimension of the work is almost life-size.

 

 

In the work I have made use of collage elements to replace body parts, as is typical of my practice. In this case I replaced the head with an image of a television set, and a leg with an antique water pump. The shape of the figure is distorted almost beyond recognition, with indeterminate bumps across the surface of the body.

Here's the sketch which began it all

GG Allin & The Culture Wars

GG Allin, [August 29, 1956 – June 28, 1993], was an extreme performer/punk rock singer. His performances involved defecation, coprophagia, blood, self-mutilation, and attacking audience members. AllMusic and G4TV's That's Tough have called him "the most spectacular degenerate in rock & roll history"^[2] and the "toughest rock star in the world", respectively. so he can rightly be seen as a practitioner of abject art. Allin's performances attracted notoriety, and he served prison time in 1989 for the US equivalent of GBH, as a result of extreme sex acts. Below is one of Allin's live performances.

Allin featured on an episode of the Geraldo Riviera show, which is a good look at the phenomena known as the 'culture wars', whereby right-wing groups attempted to impose censorship over art an music in the name of decency.

I've linked to the show, as it includes contributions from a many other artists who practices are transgressive, either by confronting and breaching Sexual taboos, eg Jeff Koons' series of photographs of having sex with his wife, or offending religious sensibilities, as in the case of Andreas Serrano's Piss Christ. Today, in the YouTube age of instant media, where it is possible to see live beheading videos online, [if you should choose to do so], it can reasonably be argued that it is no longer possible to shock an audience, and therefore the age of transgressive art has come to an end. Although I agree that it has become increasingly hard to create shock, I do not believe that trangression no longer has a role in art. Challenging social taboos, cultural religious or sexual, is still a valid direction for artists, and one that I attempt to make use of in my own work.

In my pieces I try to comment on the effects of our economic system on the body, especially the sense of dispossession and alienation that this produces in people; which is manifest in such things as addiction and obesity. By distorting the body in my firgurative paintings, & joining painted elements with collage, I try to create an image which is disconcerting and upsetting. As an aid to creating these kinds of works, the extreme performances of the underground punk scene are informative for my work.

Violence in Art 2, Viennese Actionism...

I'm looking at transgressive performance artists as part of my dissertation research, though obviously their is a huge amount of overlap between that and my studio practice. My practice is a painting & collage at the moment, not performance, but studying artists like the Viennese Actionists definitely helps inform my own work.

The Viennese Actionists were a group of four loosely associated artists working in Vienna & West Germany during the 1960's. Their work was a reaction against the political & social climate in 1960's Austria, which was never de-Nazified in the same way as West Germany was, and therefore the same political actors & bureaucrats who had been in charge of the Austrian regime under National Socialism remained in place after the war. Their work was a direct challenge to the status quo and saw them being arrested and jailed numerous times.





          



The Viennese Actionists  used simulated violence to shock their audiences out of complacency & bring about a cathartic realisation of their own nature & that of the society they are part of. For myself, researching the work of the Viennese Actionists has given me a greater understanding of both the effect of shock and disgust upon the viewer, and how that can be used to generate deeper contemplation of personal and wider issues, as well as an appreciation of the plastic nature of the body, and just how far a figurative representation can be distorted, yet retain its intrinsic corporeal qualities. This has allowed me to push the boundaries of my work much further, and create wildly distorted fleshy mounds, which are both impossible distortions of the human form, and at the same time instantly recognisable as bodies.                                    

Missing Mind Map -Think Tank Session Identity

[Originally Posted on Weblearn by  ADAM WALLACE  at Sunday, 16 February 2014 20:56:58 o'clock GMT]

Unfortunately when I created my previous blog entry for the Think Tank sessions, I forgot to include the mind map for the Identity session, and this Weblearn blogging tool does not allow us to edit our entries once we have posted them, [perhaps this is something which could be changed in future!]. Anyway, below is the mind map which Mel kindly produced for the Identity session.

Figurative Painting & Collage, [2013 work]

[Originally Posted on Weblearn by  ADAM WALLACE  at Sunday, 16 February 2014 20:25:31 o'clock GMT]

I have just completed the first in a series of new canvases, some of which I intend to put into the graduation show. The piece is a further development of the ideas I began to use in my practice last year, of combining collage with figurative painting, to create a hybrid body, in which body parts, limbs, heads & orifices are replaced with prints of found images taken from the web. Personally I find the most successful of the paintings I created in this style last year is the piece Transfat, which is shown below.

Lacking arms, with a head composed of a foghorn and industrial pipes, and with a section from a meat mincer for an anus, Transfat is an abject piece, intended to represent the mindless greed indulged in by millions of people in today's society in order to numb the pain of their existence. My intention in making this work was to mediate the rage I feel inside at the alienation which is created by our current economic system, with its insistence on profit and loss as the only measures of worth, and the personal feeling of impotency and waste I experience in my own life.
This year I have attempted to continue to work with these ideas, and to refine them further in my work. I find the combination of collage with painting works extremely well to produce a sense of abjection, because by replacing body parts with images of either everyday household items, or strange, rusted industrial machinery, it challenges notions of self-hood. If my mouth is a foghorn, and my eyes industrial pipework, am I really a complete individual?

Think Tank Sessions, Process, Around Town, Identity

[Originally Posted on Weblearn by  ADAM WALLACE  at Sunday, 16 February 2014 14:19:31 o'clock GMT]

1. Recently our studio have been holding morning seminar sessions on a range of subjects related to the practice of various individuals in the group. The first session was on Process, and interesting presentations were given by Christiana, Max, and James on the relevance and centrality of process to a number of artists' practice. Melanie very kindly kept a visual log of the discussions, and produced a useful mind-map after the sessions, which is an interesting way of viewing the nodal nature of process based art, and the connections between various practioners of the type of practice.

The following week the seminar's subject was About Town, and given the nature of my practice as a figurative artist, and the city as an agglomeration of millions of human beings -bodies- living out their lives and interacting with one another, it was natural that this would be the session at which I would make a presentation. In preparation I created a Powerpoint, which I have attached here, as well as inserting screenshots of each slide, with a written summary of my presentation relating to each one.


William Hogarth [1697-1764] is regarded as the originator of Western sequential art. His depictions of urban life in the 18th century in works like The Rake's Progress & Industry & Idleness depict were intended as morality lessons, albeit with much humour included. Above is his well known work, Beer Street & Gin Lane, which was a commentary on the degardation caused by spirit alcohol. On the left, Beer Street, the people are happy and prosperous, while on the right, gin drinking has brought the people to ruin.



Joel Peter Witkin's work is often gruesome & disturbing. Here he photographed cadavers in a Mexican morgue. I chose to include this image for two reasons. Firstly because death is an aspect of urban life that we cannot avoid. Every second within this city, London, somewhere a human being is reaching the end of their mortal existence, and passing across the frontier to the unknowable beyond. We have a real taboo about death in our society, and it is kept hidden and secret, almost as if we are ashamed of our fear of dying. At the same time the decay and eventual death of the human body is a metaphor for the processes we see continually around us in the urban environment, where buildings, roads, and open spaces constantly go through a process of creation, maturity, decay, demolition and rebirth. Its important to realise that our environment is contantly in flux, never static and become part of the process of change, by involvement in our local areas and communities, so that we can try to help shape the city around us.

I believe this photograph by Sophie Ristelheuber of lead water pipes was taken underneath buildings in Marseille. I love the organic, fleshy nature of the piping, the way it appears to be alive, almost as if it is an alien creature which has taken root beneath the city, spreading its tentacles through the spaces between our human habitations, burrowing ever upward seeking out the fleshy morsels above to devour them! When I saw it it instantly reminded me of Berlinde de Bruyckere's piece, Kreupelhout – Cripplewood, exhibited in the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2013. Displayed in a darkened room, the limbs of trees had been bound together with rags, and had wax poured over their surfaces. The result was striking, producing a similar organic feel to the pipework in Sophie Ristelheuber's image above. The feel was of a living being, constrained by human forces, bound together in sometimes willing, sometimes unwilling associations, which of course is very similar to the processes which we experience as citizens of a huge urban metropolis today.


I wanted to include the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) as a quintessential contemporary urban artist. His works are very much a product of the environment he lived in, [New York City].

Basquiat was responsible for the SAMO© graffitti which appeared across Manhattan in the late 1970's. SAMO© was a collaborative effort between Basquiat and Al Diaz, and usually contained a political message about the environment they lived in






Although BAsquiat died tragically from a heroin overdose, SAMO is still being used by contemporary grafitti artists whose work can be seen in any modern urban environment, as a reminder of the creative potential of those who reject the current economic system, and want to express themselves in their own communities. Grafitti is a contentious issue, as it challenges the control of public space, and the expression of opinions to a wider audience. We are used to seeing billboards advertising goods for consumption, but many feel threatened by the appearance of anarchic messages which subvert this paradigm, and create a new reality of self-expression.

Unfortunately, much grafitti is mindless tagging, often reflective of gang culture, which is in itself a symptom of economic decline and lack of education and opportunity which is the reality for the poor in today's cities.

Alphabet City in New York was an area which was run down and derelict during the 1970's and 80's. As with much poor urban areas, it has now been redeveloped and is now high value real estate. The communities which lived there previously have been displaced to other areas, and many have become victims of the United States war on drugs, which disproportionately affects black and Latino communities, with imprisonment rates as high as 1 in 10 for black males. It is accurate to describe America's drug policies as The New Jim Crow, or Slavery 2.0.

Hannah Hoch @ Whitechapel Gallery

[Originally Posted on Weblearn by  ADAM WALLACE  at Sunday, 9 February 2014 22:08:51 o'clock GMT]

Went to see the exhibition of Hannah Hoch's work at the Whitechapel Gallery, which I found immensely inspiring.Hoch was a supremely skilled collagist, whose work spans most of the 20th century. She was influential on the Berlin Dada scene, holding her own as the only female member of the Berlin dada group; she was also the only female artist to show at the First International Dada fair in 1920.

"...one of Höch's primary preoccupations was the representation of the 'new woman' of the Weimar Republic, whose social role and person identity were in a complex process of redefinition in the postwar period. ... Juxtaposing photographs and text to both endorse and critique existing mass-media representations, Höch parodied elements bourgeois living and morals and also probed the new, unstable definitions of femininity that were so widespread in postwar media culture." (Dickerman, 2005)

Cut With the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany.(1919-1920)

Dada Review 1919

Much of Hoch's work is figurative, and thus an important influence on my own practice. Many of her collages involve composite figures, in which the scale has been violently distorted, fractured and fragmented. Her work in the Weimar period was often a satrirical comment on public figures & the militarism so prevalent in German society at that time. The image below, Heads of State, shows the President & Defence Minister of the Weimar Republic in beach trunks, with paunchy bellies, collaged onto a pictorial beach scene from a children's book.

In the piece below, High Finance, she critiques powerful financial interests and the military. Even though the Treaty of Versailles had stripped Weimar Germany of the vast majority of its military power, denying it an airforce or an army larger than 100,000 men, powerful figures in both finance and industry desired re-armament for Germany, and would eventually see their plans brought to fruition through their financial support for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

Hoch's collages are particularly important to me as an inspiration in how collage can be used to deform and distort the body in a figurative practice. Much of her work relies on arranging bodily elements in new configurations which produce not only a completely new figure, but show new emotional states & project a sense of personality. Her work is extremely vital, and buzzes with energy. Pieces like Dame, 1923, English Dancer, 1928, Russian Dancer/My Double, 1928, Self Portrait, 1926, German Girl, 1930, Made For a Party, 1936 have helped me in developing work which plays with the proportions of the body, as well as creating entirely new figures through combinations of separate bodily pieces. This is especially true of my electronic collages, and makes me wonder everytime I am working in Photoshop what Hannah Hoch would have been able to produce had she had computer technology available in her time!








During the Weimar period Hoch's also commented on issues of colonialism and race, though she never directly criticised the prevailing racist attitudes which existed at that time in German society. In her series of collages entitled From An Ethnographic Museum, she created a series of grotesques by combining figurative elements of both contemporary Europeans with tribal fetish obects and non-Europeans. The results are both startling, and a powerful commentary on racial stereotyping, [although Hoch did not directly criticise the prevalent racist attitudes current in Germany during that period, today these pieces offer a powerful statement against colonialism and racism].

Peasant Couple, From an Ethnographic Museum 1931

Sweet One, From an Ethnographic Museum, 1926

Hannah Hoch, together with Francis Bacon and Paul McCarthy are three extremely important artists which influence my practice. Hoch's work has shown me the possibilities of collage, its playfulness and energy. I feel extremely fortunate that the Whitechapel Gallery hosted this exhibition and even bought a copy of the book so that I can reference her work whenever I wish.