How to Build a Raised Garden Bed

http://www.sunset.com/garden/perfect-raised-bed-00400000039550/

refreezing ice cream

Upon researching techniques for refreezing ice cream, I discovered that the air created by agitating the ice cream before the initial freezing is lost in the melting process. This causes ice crystals to form in the ice cream which considerably changes the consistency. In my experience, the chocolate chip ice cream I used formed noticeable layers of ingredients. It may or may not be "safe" to eat refrozen ice cream (depending on the temperature of the melted dairy) but I'm not intending to eat the artwork anyway.

Jessica Stoller's Spoil

from Jessica Stoller's Spoil show. Still Life, 2013. porcelain, china paint, and luster.

Jessica Stoller's work appears at first glance to be a tea party table oozing with feminine details such as flowers, frills, and pearls, but the sinister details add a tinge of the abject to these otherwise proper pieces. (the snails crawling on apples and claw-like hand atop the cake)

I was initially drawn to the combination of food and female body parts. Although this isn't the medium I'll be working in, I still take inspiration from the combination of feminine and grotesque and familiar concepts and ideas pushed in a different direction. I'm specifically interested in the forms they take and the site specificity of the buffet table.

Notes on The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art

• outlines the difficulties surrounding authorship, categorizing, temporal discontinuity, transcience, and other criteria assessments
• what power does the artist have after the work of art has left his/her possession? and what rights does the new owner now have? especially considering the piece was manufactured by a third party
• what must make a work of art suitable for a replica?
• the emphasis on idea or concept makes explicit the possibility that the work of art will be synonymous with an object. Judd made it clear that he didn't want this in his work- his work was only an idea and that idea could theoretically be conveyed in an infinite amount of ways
• Antoni's Gnaw depends on repetition in the form of the cast copy for its continued existence.
• authorship is based on unity and stylistic consistency. presentation under an artist's name ensures that not only a range of different forms of expression will be read as works, but that heterogeneity within that series of works will be read as a decision that itself carries meaning as a play on the very idea of authorship as a form of unity or internal consistency.
• consider most museums as chronologically oriented and the possibility that one could walk through them backwards.
• decision-making in art involves each format, medium, context, content, appearance, and duration as a conscious choice.

Project Inspiration

maybe Commes des Garcons?

medical drawing of a wound

Robert and Shana Parke Harrison

The Body/Embodiment:

the physical structure and material substance of an animal, living or dead. Crosses over with themes of identity and performativity. The relationship of body and mind has been explored through feats of physical endurance and the ability of the mind to suffer pain. In the 1960s women focusing on bodily themes brought to attention the physicality of the female body through exploration of sexuality. Artists use the body as a site for social discourse, as a tool or medium (could be just part of the body), and to question or define beauty. To embody is to give a concrete form to an idea or spirit.

Joel Peter Witkin

Witkin's photographs deal with themes of death, corpses, and deformed people. The photographs themselves are physically altered to parallel the physical state of the bodies. His work with corpses has earned him the nickname Modern Day Dr. Frankenstein. These grotesque bodies are marked by life events; in these works we are viewing bodies as separate from our own.

Marina Abramovic

Abramovic subjects herself to extreme physical and mental stress. In the 1970s, she started using her body as the medium for her work. In The House with the Ocean View, she lived in a gallery installation for 12 days. Viewers were invited to watch her go about her daily existence. With her partner Ulay, she challenges the limits of the physical body in pieces such as Breathing In, Breathing Out and Relation in Time. 

Janine Antoni

Antoni creates work that explores the unattainable standards of youth, beauty, and proportion. Like Abramovic, her primary tool is her own body. In Lick and Lather, Antoni creates self portrait busts of chocolate and soap. The use of these art objects removes her identity associated with the reproduction of her facial features. In Loving Care, she mopped the floor with her hair drenched in hair dye. Chocolate Gnaw, Lard Gnaw shows the artist's teeth marks in the blocks of materials. This provides visual evidence of the means, the duration, and the intensity of her sculpting process.

John Coplans

Coplans challenges ideals of healthy and beauty with the inclusion of aging bodies into his contemporary photographs. With black and white self portraits, he asks viewers to engage with bodies that aren't typically portrayed in the media. The fact that he never photographs his face allows his images to not focus on a specific identity.

Maureen Connor

Maureen Connor is the only artist I chose who represents the body without actually using the body. In Little Lambs Eat Ivy, she uses clothing and fabric to suggest femininity and control. Thinner Than You, a stainless steel and cloth sculpture, represents the female body as a changing container.

Ephemeral:

not intended to be kept or preserved. Ephemeral art is understood in the creation process that it will only  be viewed for a finite amount of time. Is true ephemerality possible when documentation is involved?

Andy Goldsworthy

Goldsworthy creates works of art of moving, growing, and melting natural materials. Some of his work changes over time, while others completely disappear. The fact that it's still worth his invested time is important to the essence of ephemerality. It addresses the process of creation itself.

Paul Thek

Thek dismantles his artworks after each exhibit and discards them. The collections of objects include candles, onions, shoes, tissues, eggs, bathtubs, plants, and stuffed animals among other seemingly banal things. This degree of ephemerality transcends the belief that works of art will outlast the artist. His installations serve as meeting grounds for the material and the spiritual, the past and the present, the personal and the communal, and the divine and mundane. This addresses ideals of immortality. Does my inability to find pictures of these installations mean they weren't photographically documented, thus reaching a whole new ephemeral level?

Felix Gonzalez Torres

In mostly untitled works, chocolates or cellophane-wrapped candies fill corners and stacks of papers are placed on floors of galleries. Viewers are invited to take the paper or candy, indicating that the work of art will never be the same once you come in contact with it. There's an implied unlimited supply which challenges the ephemeral nature of his works.

Barry McGee 

As a street artist, McGee's work will typically be removed or torn down. He says "I always thought it was a temporary thing. My stuff, in particular, I don’t give a darn about. That’s the nature of the beast" Fitting with the definition of ephemeral art, street artists understand during the creation of their art that it isn't timeless. This image is from the LACMA garage.

Damien Hirst

In The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991, Hirst uses a shark that was hunted and killed for the sake of art. This not only addresses the ephemeral nature of life, but also consider that this shark, although preserved, will fall apart over time. If another shark replaces this one, can the work of art ever be the same again? 

Abject:

a complex psychological, philosophical, and linguistic concept developed in Julia Kristeva's 1980 book Powers of Horror involving elements of the body that transgress and threaten our sense of cleanliness and propriety, and deemed inappropriate for public display or discussion. The term abject has a strong feminist context because artists are abjected by a patriarchal social order.

Julia Kristeva discusses the abject in terms of psychoanalysis. She mentions that some of the strongest loathings are that of food and of the corpse.

Andres Serrano

Piss Christ, 1987, is a photograph of a crucifix submerged in the artist's urine. The work incited quite an uproar- It's been called a deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity and has been torn down and banned. His use of the word "piss" instead of "urine" signifies anger and insult. It addresses what some viewers consider a foul excretion of the mortal body. 

Dash Snow

Snow's photos depict scenes of a sex, drug-taking, violent, art-world pretense with candor documenting the decadent lifestyle of a group of young New York City artists in the 2000s. His collage-based work was characterized by his semen splashed across photos of authority figures and newspaper articles. If his photos don't address the abject, his titles would- they imply incest, cannibalism, and rape.

Carolee Schneemann

Schneemann's works involve the undisguised presentation of female dreams, female body functions, and female genitalia. The stigmas that surround her work uncover the patriarchal credos that continue to influence the behavior of women as well as men. In particular, her use of menstrual blood as a medium of expression dramatizes deeply engrained cultural taboos. Blood Work Diary, 1971, consists of menstrual blood blotted on toilet paper arranged in a grid pattern on a wall. 

Libby Rowe

Rowe addresses the taboo topic of female masturbation in Language of Love, 2007, which features photographs of the hand positions of women. Her body of work encourages reconstruction of accepted social definitions of feminity and equality. 

Adrien Piper

Piper's street performances under the collective title Catalysis address ostracism and otherness through means of the abject. She stuffed a white towel in her mouth and rode on public transportation systems and doused herself with a mixture of vinegar, eggs, milk and cod liver oil and rode the New York City subways. They challenged the order of the social field at the level of distinction between public and private acts. 

Meme:

a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena as defined by Richard Dawkins. Memes spread through the behavior that they generate in their hosts. A meme can be modified through replication. An internet meme is a concept that spreads rapidly from person to person via the internet.

Lauren Kaelin

Kaelin paints stills from reproducible, shareable, and recognizable internet videos and images. They challenge the theories of Walter Benjamin who, in a popular essay The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction, argued that a work of art lost its true value when reproduced. Her art straddles the border of fine art and internet virality.

Eva and Franco Mattes

This sculptural work is a copy of a cat internet meme with the caption "Don't Ask" below the image. The fact that this was made for a gallery show in which the couple imitated the work of another artist provides a double entendre to the concept of meme.

Francis Alys

Alys works from reproductions with commercial sign painters. As the imitative process continues, it asks questions about artists' relationships with painting and authorship. An infinite potential is implied, with the concept of memes reproducing and multiplying throughout the process.

Fashion Trends

It's hard to ignore fashion trends when researching reproduction through imitation in art. These Jeffrey Campbell shoes are semi-affordable designer knockoffs, which in turn are imitated for an even more affordable price. Other imitations in fashion follow seasonal trends that can be grouped and divided into categories like Typography and Slogans.

Mathew Zefeldt

Zefeldt uses clip-art style copy and pasting in his artwork with techniques reminiscent of MS Paint. His paintings invite viewers to consider the crisis of individuality in an era of instantaneous image sharing and replication. Like the other artists in this category, Zefeldt's time and skill put into his pieces juxtapose the effortless ability to share an image with a single click of a button. 

Slippage:

slipping away from a secure definition of art. In contemporary art, slippage can refer to the fusion of art and science, art and music, art and "real life", etc. Slippage can also refer to uncertainty within art (identity, authorship, relational aesthetics). The following artists exemplify the ambiguity of these definitive terms.

David Thorne

Thorne labels himself as a humorist and satirist, but many of his works are strikingly comparative to that of contemporary performative artists. 

10 Formal Complaints

Shannon Eats Lunch

Gilbert and George

Gilbert and George, two men functioning as a single entity, is a living sculpture. Every moment of their lives is dedicated to their artwork; they've established a rigid daily routine that exempts them from all activities unrelated to this artistic calling. Their "sculptures" are usually classified as the work of writers and performers, so the intention is what provides slippage in defining their art.

In The Singing Sculpture, 1969-, Gilbert and George stand on a pedestal in the middle of a gallery space and sing "Underneath the Arches" over and over again.

Their art also represents sordid scenes of loathsome behavior- the tragedy of the human condition. They subject themselves to excessive alcohol consumption and record the experience with multi-panel photographs. In these works the viewer is intended to question whether being drunk can be considered art.

Vito Acconci

Acconci regularly stretched the boundaries of traditional art definitions by becoming the object himself. In Following Piece he followed people around New York City until they went to a location he couldn't go. In Telling Secrets he told incriminating secrets about himself until he ran out of secrets. In Trademarks he sat on the floor of a museum and bit his body until marks were visible on his skin. This slippage provides a question of what exactly is the artwork. The skin? The photograph? The performance?

Psychology experiments

How do these differ from the aforementioned artists? Both provide information and insight for participants/viewers, and both elicit emotional responses.

Violinist in the Metro Station, 2007

The Milgram Experiment, 1961

Allen Kaprow and other Happening artists

Happenings were literally just things that happened and for this reason they are great examples of slippage. These question the art as object and the art as made by an artist, and whether or not these needed to be present in order for the work to be successfully deemed "art". In 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, 1959, Kaprow organized a large room with people inside and the situation would switch at the ringing of a bell. Happenings could be as seemingly random as someone peeling an orange or people playing musical instruments.

Sophie Calle

Calle is another artist who provides an example of slippage by questioning art as object. Here are some descriptions of her "artworks": follows a stranger to Venice, hires a private investigator to follow her, invites strangers to sleep in her bed, sends her bed to a lonely man in California, finds a man's address book and contacts every person in it, and gets a job as a hotel maid and takes photos of peoples' stuff. She uses a narrative photography format to document her process.