The 15th January all stage 2 students participated in a symposium at Tate Britain. Each Territories of Practice presented the topics they have been working on during the last few weeks as well as some of their own work. It was interesting to find out what my other mates are interested in and how their art practise is developing. It also gave a brief summary of the main topics in today's art world, a thing always necessary to be aware of in order to keep your mind and work updated to our context. We could also see very creative ways of presentations which made the whole day much funnier.
Above everything, in my opinion, was the fact that the Tate education department and other staff of the gallery showed interest in what we were into, organized this event and explained to us some of their current projects in this area, such as their learning activities, collaborations with artists inside the museum and everything related with the digital media. In my case, that I am used to Spanish museums where all these activities are very rare not to say they do not exist at all, was an amazing experience to se that in other countries not very far from home things work on a different way, for better in this case. The lack of connections between University and art museums and cultural institutions is jeopardizing the future of many young art students in Spain. There has to be a will from both sides, but neither in University nor in the professional world exists, at least not as much as in the UK.
These are some of the drawings I have created during the first term of the year. I try to represent in images the ongoing process through which our experiences, memories and spatial and temporal context generate our individual identity and behaviour. From my own or found images of the everyday life I translate them into drawings mixing abstract representation with realism. For this series, I focused on the portrait of the human figure in a routine pose and attitude.
For further works, I am using my own taken photos and I will add architectural elements (space) to the main subjects in the images, as another important fact in that process of creating our selves. Along with the drawings, I will add a series of analog photographies about the same thematic and see how the whole pieces work altogether.
Awakenings is a film directed by Penny Marshall in 1990. It is based on a true story, that of the British neurologist Oliver Sacks who wrote it in his 1973 book of the same title. The film is starred by Robin Williams, who plays an American neurologist working with catatonic patients who suffered from encephalitis lethargica some decades before. Dr. Sayer begins using a new discovered drug, L-DOPA, which was prescribed for Parkinson patients, with his own patients, and suddenly, all of them "awake" and recover consciousness. The film focuses on the story of Leonard Lowe, played by the great Robert De Niro, and how his new condition thanks to this medicine affects his life.
This film has made me reflect about the importance of our senses in acknowledging the real world in order to provide information to our brain so it can translate it into our perception of reality. If there is no previous contact with reality, it is impossible to create an image of it so the whole process is never complete and as we don't have experience of it, we don't have memory either. Also, in a sensitive or even moral level, this film thinks over the importance of living in our world, participating from culture and society as key elements of our own enjoyment of life, instead of being isolated. Furthermore, as Leonard says, we seem to have forgotten about the things that make life worth living it; we might think that those are always there, until they are gone. So those little moments and things are very important for our lives and we must enjoy and appreciate them. It is about being awake, rather than being alive.
One of the most beautiful secuences in the film is when Leonard and his girlfriend farewell dance. Leonard is aware that the the drug will not keep doing effect on him for too long but while dancing with Paula his spasms dissapear, for a brief moment.
By the way, De Niro deserved his third Oscar by his role in this film, though he lost it.
The visit to the Campoli Presti Gallery in London has been very interesting to me because I have really enjoyed the works of the American artist Liz Deschenes. Not specially because of the images themselves, as I am not a great lover of abstraction, but of the process she uses in making them, which relates perfectly with the idea of registering reality (light) through a continuous lapse of time and how by using different chemical products this images keep distorting and developing into new ones. I think that the use of mixed media in this specific work shown is very creative and reflects perfectly the idea of continuously registering reality into a two dimensional frame. It reflects the process through which our brain builds reality from sensory experience (view, taste, touch...) and creates our image of reality.
In this brief interview, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo talks about the importance of memory and human tragedy in her work, the hypocrisy or maybe the impossibilites of political engaged art, and the importance of beauty.
From all of the new young European painters that have become relevant in the last decade, the most interesting and prolific one is Adrian Ghenie. He usually creates big paintings where he mixes abstract forms and figurative representation, generally portraying people in bizarre and uncanny contexts and situations. In 2010, he was commissioned to make a portrait of former Romainian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. For this purpose, he based his work on the latest moments of the Ceaușescus, when they were arrested and quickly judged by militars in an unfair trial. This trial was broadcasted all over Romania, in Christmas 1989, and every Romanian then saw on television the murder of their long time dictator and his wife, an image that will live forever in the colective memory of Romania and that has conditioned the perception of the dictator in everyone's mind. Here's a brief interview of Ghenie talking about his painting The Trial, and what interests me the most is the process that the artists uses to create his work (documentation from mass media), and of course the fact that this powerful image has made an impact in that society. Furthermore, I add a fragment of the broadcasted trial of the couple, which is necessary to understand the complete sense of the painting.
Gerhard Richter is a very well known contemporary artist. His work includes hyper-realistic and abstract paintings, sculputre and installation and digital print, among other media. He is known as one of the main post-war German artists, as well as his peers Anselm Kiefer and Sigmar Polke. He always paints from photographies, found or taken by himself, and part of his statement is related with the dialogue between photography and painting. He collects all this documentation as part of an Atlas which is sometimes exhibited with his main works. One of his most important series of paintings, the cycle October 18, 1977 represent the murder of several German terrorists from the Red Army Faction, showing in a way the failure of the reconciliation of the BRD and the GDR (the Federal and the Democratic Germany) during the 1970s.
Gerhard Richter, Tote, oil on canvas, 62 x 67 cm, 1988
Here is a link to his website where all his entire works can be seen.
