:02//12/11: War/Art

War affects art as it affects everything else. After the second world war there was a lull - "There [was] nothing else left to say" after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our perceptions changed from glory to death, and now from death to life - those caught in the conflict as soldiers or civilians. The art has taken a more vernacular form as the only sufficient way to represent a reality. Trauma changes the sensibilities of a nation entirely, and is displayed in their art, literature and film. Russian constructivists, Surrealists and their 'crazy' time. Civil war, Futurists. Dada anti-war - If society thinks it can handle high concepts and go out to shoot each other in the head then really we're still base. Dinos and Jake Chapman's 'Goya's before and after Iraq and stuff. The first world war had a profound effect on the art world - as it did on all of society. It fostered a negative view humanity that was new in it's scale and breath - Such massacre was a new sight to those away from the front line who heard an account of war not tailored by the victors. People were drafted (?) so there was more artisits (?!)
Otto Dix, Paul Nash

:23//11//11: Home?

Where the sense of place is subtle and creepy. Creepy as is ‘it creeps’.

It is something unique to the home and to the people who live there. They are places of particular time/space significance and very mutable places all the same – at least in my case there is rarely a room that has just one function or specific kind of ‘memory’ attached to it. Even hallways constantly change to suit the occupants. Mess or tidy? In or out? A good place for phone calls and quiet nothings. The sense creeps in with the artful and incidental arrangement of things, the space they occupy and the space that they don’t.

A tacit knowledge of the home seems to surface when a new something is to be introduced into a person room of how things just should be that is not entirely removed from the passively absorbed orientation that allows you to cross the room with the lights off avoiding all the mess and protruding furniture without fear. There is an emotional sense that haunts hallways and stairs especially, bathrooms and other unobserved places that allow for a passing and intense privacy, allowing things to linger in secret, quite distinct from the communal spirit of kitchens and living rooms.

It is these myriad experiences that make up the entire spirit of ‘home’; the small spaces that you hid in and the large ones we meet in, their relationship to each other and their overlapping uses as escape routes. That these places are used makes them. They are made differently for every perspective. It would be odd to try to pin such an elusive concept securely down.

:16//11//11: A Sense of Place?

.Space.

Space vs. Place - My Place, Your Space

Types of Space:
rooms, houses, external world, nations & localities, temporal space

Spatial Confusion:Where is Here?

Home is often something to be disrupted in stories, tales, films - The sense of home as no longer safe etc. is something many forms of media use and distort to build tension

.Non-Places.

hotels, airports, lifts, roads - Places where no one has memories, there is no genius there

:09//11//11: Superflat!

Mr Dob and the Rainbow

[Takeshi Murakami & Kaikai Kiki]
international kitsch

"But what was my identity? The answer is that I didn't really have one. So I felt that the only thing I could do to explain that acsence of identith was to pile up all the formatibe layers that had contributed to my background..."

- Murakami, interview with Hélene Kehmachter

Murakami thought that a more individual form of expression was needed for the Japanese, seeing all the American Holzer's and Kreuger's that we popular in the galleries at the time. He created "Mr Dob" and his other characters not to express any particular message he had but to "[Crystalise] this or that image." The describe a kind of scream, frustration and are a homage to the metamorphosis that takes place in animated film. Shigeru Mizuki's Hyakume character particularly influenced him. The influence is visible.

In true postmodern style, Murakami was actively aware of his effort to become a 'contemporary artist', identifying as an 'artist, an 'Artist' and an otaku - a part of himself that he had given up while studying formal art. There is a connection in his work between the technical aspects of Western art and the actual flatness of a painting, sometimes stripping away and sometimes using the illusion of perspective but always Superflat - superficial.

[see Hokusai, Yumeji Takehisa's mushrooms and Koru Ogata's irises/flowers]

:09//11//11: Postmodernism

[My own Influences/Sources]

:02//11//11: Culture Quake Redux

an introduction to key concepts
in Postmodernism
"Death of the Author" - "Birth of the Reader"

• No longer is the artist in charge
  
• A mix of high and low art, such as in graphic novels (among other post-modern things)
• Egotistical artists & celebrity artists become common
• Postmodernism is about the consumer, youth culture and capitalism
• Irony & parody - "pastiche" - and the lack of 'realities' (see Baudrillard)

:19//10//11: Culture Quake?

Modernism, 1900-1950(ish) Experimental, Radical, Ready-Made, Primitive, Expressive Truth, Art + Individuality, Internationalism.

• Art for art's sake, and a rejection of the 'notion of truth'; Abstraction. High vs. Mass culture
  
• Utopia vs. wartime, healing after WWI, it precluded global awareness and ground zeros
• Particularly, in the late 1800's photography became accessable which left fine art to take another direction - something photography can't do