Talking About Art

Inside the Red Cube: Rothko’s Seagram Paintings, a case study of obsessive practice. Response to The artist studio exhibition, Tate Modern 2018. (Visited 220318). This post considers: Practice through historical research - The role of contextualising practice in the Laurentian Library and Rothko’s Seagram Mural Project, practice through performance   - the staging of the ‘room’ with scaffolding to get the space right, practice through communication - link with White Cube Thinking article, How to Exhibit Practice? The Narrative continues, new stories about the paintings. Continuing from the post ‘ White Cube Thinking ’ , Rothko in his Seagram commission, was absorbed by and wanted to express the feeling of being in (time, space, memory, time-based, Decartian body in space, in the Ingold taskscape of the library) Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library (1525) – a Medici quattrocento building next to il Duomo in Florence. This library was purpose built for study, acad...

Narrative Art:  T elling Tales About Art Practice;  part 1 Narrative Art; Pre- Modern A narrative is simply a story (Tate, 2018a) and narrative art practice produces art and design work that tells a story. Much of Western art until the twentieth century has been narrative, depicting stories from religion, myth and legend, history and literature. Audiences were assumed to be familiar with the stories in question. A good example of this is the life of St Francis depicted in the Basilica San Francisco, Assisi by Giotto 1300. Prior to the advent of literacy most narrative art was done in a simultaneous narrative style with very little overarching organisation. Once literacy developed in different parts of the world pictures began to be organised along register lines, like lines on a page that helped define the direction of the narrative. Modern Narrative art The Modern era in art is generally taken to begin around 1860 to 1960. Beginning with Manet’s Ol...

White Cube Thinking : How to Contextualize and Present Practice? Response to Tobias Green (2017) The Witworth. Brian O’Doherty in his book, Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space (2000) frames the term White Cube as a metaphor for the modern gallery. The Whitworth with its recent renovations (2014 by MUMA architects) with influences from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater 1964, the new build spans glass rectangular projections into the natural environment, connected to gallery spaces, lofty and multileveled, the traditional white cube. The Gardens so beautiful even now in the dead of winter, sharp cold sunlight, everything has died back and it is such a life struggle to make new green shoots, new beginnings, new connections and leave the old dead past behind. But it’s not completely behind, it’s the structure of the future, it is the pylon and armature of what is to be created. Black stumps of WW1 trees, poked, black, mouldered and wet out of the mu...

My story of Resistance Part 2 I became an Education Refuser. I rejected reading, writing and number. It did not make sense. I was put in the Special Needs Class. I couldn’t read well and not out loud and not the books they gave us which I thought were facile, pointless and uninteresting and teachers didn’t have time to explain. ‘ Students with dyslexia may avoid reading because it can be stressful and tiring. As a result, they can end up missing valuable reading practice and fall behind their classmates. This can hurt their self-esteem.’ (Gavin, 2013). In the special needs class, we coloured-in and laid tables (the wrong way round) for dinner. It was not really a class but about five of us pupils, some with downs-syndrome or autism and me, who sat with a dinner lady, we didn’t really do anything, we observed, marked time, waited for lunchtime.   I wondered why I was there. Gavin (2013) believes that, ‘ With the proper assistance, most students with dyslexia can ...

Thinking Through Practice, New Ways to Record Learning: Speaking and Listening, Joint Practice Development.   “I have a practice where I don’t have to speak.” Gaffney (2017) I never broke it down like that before, but I too have an art practice where I don’t speak and a teaching practice where I do a great deal of talking, discussing, reviewing, debating and counselling, non-verbal – all visual art practice, speaking and listening teaching practice. Gaffney has a point, as practicing artists and designers we sit dead silent, making, painting, drawing, designing. We don’t speak. As Emin said in her BBC Arts video, What Do Artists Do All Day ? Emin, is loath to break off from practical work to talk to accountants, “sometimes I get up in the morning and think, “I really want to paint today” and then I remember I have meeting with the accountants and it’s really important but also really dry…and it’s the last thing I want to do, it’s almost like it’s killing me, phy...

Embodied knowledge, A Case Study: Thinking Through Practice. An artist and senior lecturer talks about her practice. Susan is a sculptor and Director of Fine Art Studies at a Northern University. What was formerly a college has recently earned university status. All the lecturers as a result of the upgrade have had to alter the way they think about their art practices and how they reflect on teaching practice and where the two might intersect to benefit the institution, the students and the individual. This culture change has been a slow a difficult one. My FE students are resistant to writing, which is the focus of my MPhil; possible reasons are, they just want to make art, they don’t want to write or be asked to think or spend time reflecting that could be spent making. Other reasons could be a learning barrier such as dyslexia and being on the autism spectrum. They are adults and may have dependents to care for and part time jobs that fit around study. Many art...