Catherine Yass

Lightbox art

Including some done for a DeLa Warr Pavilion exhibition 2010

Sleep (door), 2008

Ilfotrans transparency, lightbox

[Bear this format in mind for luminous images]

Mariele Neudecker

tank works

[works in boxes. . . a sleek aesthetic - I need to think about whether the more hand-made look I have at the moment with my boxes is approriate or not to what I'm doing]

http://www.marieleneudecker.co.uk/idon'tknow.html

I don't know how I resisted the urge to run 1998

Things can change in a day 2001

(both mixed media incl. water, acrylic medium, salt, fibreglass)

There go I 2004

Heaven, the sky 2008

Marcus Coates

shamanic art

from Frieze issue 108 June -August 2007

FOCUS

Shamanism and anthropomorphism; public art and 'getting back to nature'

‘Why do cats understand what you say?’ ‘Where does hair go when you go bald?’ ‘How can the city control illegal bicycle parking?’ These are just some of the questions that Marcus Coates has attempted to answer by descending into the ‘lower world’ and consulting the birds and animals that he encounters there. Usually they respond in cryptic clues; uncharacteristic behaviour is what he is looking out for, which he then does his best to interpret for his audience on his return.

Coates was inducted into the ancient techniques of shamanism on a weekend course in Notting Hill, London. The workshop trained participants to access a ‘non-ordinary’ psychic dimension with the aid of chanting, ‘ethnic’ drumming and dream-catchers. Coates has explained the process as essentially being a form of imaginative visualization. Historically the shaman would have been employed to solve the daily problems of the community; since these usually involved the finding and killing of animals, shamans were valued for their ability to communicate with other species in the spirit world. Shamanism’s contemporary abstracted form in the West still relies on animals as ‘guides’, but it encourages practitioners to project personal spirit worlds in terms that are familiar to them. During his trance the man sitting next to Coates met and talked to a gerbil.

Coates himself is a keen ornithologist and naturalist; the animals that he encounters in the ‘lower world’ are usually from areas of British landscape that he knows intimately. Much of his past work has reflected his sense of alienation from such places, a frustration that manifests itself in the sentimental yearning to ‘get back to nature’. Indigenous British Mammals (2000) was Coates’ ludicrous attempt to reverse the flow of anthropomorphism and subsume himself within the fabric of the natural world, emulating wild animal calls while buried under the turf of deserted moorland; in Goshawk (1999) he persuaded foresters to fasten him to the upper branches of a Scots pine so he could see the world through the eyes of a hawk scanning for prey. While the humour of these works springs from the naivety of the desires they embody, by subjecting himself to such vivid, visceral experiences Coates holds on to the possibility of personal transformation and so restrains them from snide satire.

The ambiguity of Coates’ own investment in the processes he embarks on creates a constant itch in the understanding of his position; who is laughing, and whom exactly are they laughing at? This question was at the forefront of his first shaman work, Journey to the Lower World (2004), in which he filmed himself performing a shamanic ritual in the front room of a Liverpool tower block that was scheduled for demolition. The audience of bemused residents fought to suppress their giggles as Coates, dressed in the skin of a red deer, began by vacuuming and spitting water onto the carpet, then emitting feral whistles, grunts and barks as he entered the ‘lower world’.

Despite his audience’s obvious scepticism (of both shamanism and of the contemporary art world), the question they asked Coates about the lower world was sincere and unguarded: ‘Do we have a protector for this site? What is it?’ He had gained their trust and implicated himself in an intimate system of exchange. His tentative answer, interpreting peculiar feather patterns on a sparrowhawk’s wing as being indicative of the community’s need to ‘stick together’, acknowledged this responsibility. While remaining deeply uneasy about the employment of artists in the public sphere as ‘problem solvers’, Coates has said that often the most valuable thing that comes out of such performances is the audience’s sense that they are being listened to. This in turn prompts them to begin talking objectively about issues that concern them, even if, as in the case of Mouth of God (2006), it is to a man with a stuffed hare strapped to his head.

This is Coates’ best trick; despite looming large in the production of his works, he somehow manages to usher people towards a revelation of sorts within themselves. He achieves this again in his work Dawn Chorus (2007), the most recent and accomplished of an ongoing series of works in which he teaches people how to mimic birdsong by copying slowed-down recordings of birds, filming them and then speeding up the footage to avian pitch again. The multi-screen video installation shows 19 people caught alone in quiet moments, intermittently breaking into birdsong. While the ornithologist in Coates clearly relished the challenge of reproducing the sequence and positions of a dawn chorus in the gallery, the real magic lies in the videos’ knack of not only creating highly convincing birdsong but also accelerating human movements into the nervy fidgeting of birds.

The melancholy of Dawn Chorus is born of the solitary figures’ isolation, not only from the world of the birds and the beasts but also from each other. Deceptively, Coates’ real subjects are not the outdoors and the unknown but interiority and introspection. This is the true locus of ‘nature’ in the modern world, he seems to imply; not in the open spaces of the countryside, so obscured by cultural projection and anthropomorphism, but in the withered memory of something wild and ancient, buried deep within ourselves.

Jonathan Griffin

Images :

www.google.co.uk/search?q=marcus+coates+images&espv=210&es_sm=91&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=w1SXUrDvKuKb0AXToIHwCg&ved=0CC8QsAQ&biw=1280&bih=598

heightened perception

Focusing in more on this 3rd chapter of Claire Bishop's 'Installation Art':

'Space is not there for the eye only: it is not a picture; one wants to live in it.' (El Lissitzky

Artists such as Robert Morris, Donald Judd and Carl Andre and critics in the 60s used Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology to theorise about the experience of minimalist sculpture: subject and object intertwined, interdependent, the perception by a body in particular conditions.
In minimalist sculpture there is:
1. a heightened awareness of the relationship between sculptures and space
2. a human scale - like encounters with beings
Obviously meant as objects of perception' (Rosalind Krauss) (my underlining)
A public not private experience, multi-perspectival
The interdependence of the work and viewer decentres the viewer
There is an immediate sensorial reaction to the work in its environment; this dominates over any emotional involvement.
'The better new work takes relationships out of the work and makes them  a function of space, light, and the viewer's field of vision'  (Morris) i..e. the viewer is as essential as the work and room.

Amongst west coast USA artists - Turrell, Naumann, Asher - there was an emphasis on the ephemerality, dematerialisation of the viewer's experience, 'light and space' works.
Irwin: 'all first hand now experience, feeling the act of seeing, his aim 'just to make you a little more aware than you were the day before of how beautiful the world is.'

Dan Graham in the 70s: our experience can't be pure presence, it's a continuum spanning past, present and future; it is socially conditioned.  

Bruce Nauman also in 70s created work that generated an experience of perceptual conflict - unease, anxiety, confusion 'so that you're always on the edge of one kind of way ofrelating to the space or another, and yo're never quite allowed to do either.' Never feel centred and in control.  Perception is fragile and contingent.

80s onwards: challenges to supposed neutrality of perception - conditioned by gender, race, culture. . . 

Olafur Eliasson in 90s reconnected with 'light and space' artists.  Allowed for individual intuitive - as opposed to embodied - experience; how do we subjectively locate ourselves in an institution (gallery, museum); what it means to be human in the world.

Cartsten Holler mid 90s created installations leading to altered consciousness, casting in doubt the stability of everyday perception, which is not a detached gaze on the world but a function of the whole body and nervous system; used drugs, disorienting environments in which to play with perception. 

The activated viewer.

Paris passage

Another model set, this time in a gallery shop window in a passage off the Rue St Denis.
The delight in small scale 3-d; do I want figures in my boxes?

Docteur Depargne

le cabinet du docteur Depargne
rue des ours, Paris

Caught sight of these two quirky boxes in the front window of a dentist's surgery.
Gathering them as I think about making my illuminated boxes.

the translucent image

The translucent image holds both the ultimate truth of its emptiness (the fact that it is insubstantial) and the relative truth of the story's meaning (the image that remains).
(Rodney Smith, Stepping out of self-deception p53)

Lucian Freud

'I discovered an early self-protrait with a crow in the background, and there's a way in which the main is the crow and the crow is the man.' (Ian Bostridge, The Observer 17.11.13)

Paul Klee: Making Visible

exhibition at Tate Modern
Eager to see this as Klee was one of the principal 20th century artists for whom the spiritual in art was pre-eminent, and the exhibition highlighted this aspect of his work. It began with and was curated around his 1920 declaration:

'Today we reveal the reality that is behind visible things, thus expressing the belief that the visible world is merely and isolated case in relation to the universe and that there are other more latent realities.'

I'd done some research beforehand (his 'On modern art' lecture of 1924) to try to understand what this approach meant for him.  The impression I formed was that he saw himself as in touch with sub-conscious depths of experience, what he called a 'secret place where primeval power nurtures all evolution', and that he brought up from that, like a tree draws up from its roots, experiences that he translated, through his visual practice into forms that held colour and light - he seemed to place great value on lucidity (light, clarity. . . )

I wanted to find out how he communicated this in the paintings on show:

• the forms often emerge out of a black or dark background
• clustered shapes are recognisable as e.g. a town (the hint of a roof in a triangular couple of shapes amidst squares and rectangles) but it is more the 'felt sense' of the town that is communicated
• colour pushed to its limit in terms of depth or radiance or joyful in its combinations
• diaphanous forms suggesting the immaterial, or less material than perception gives rise to
• the inclusion of moon and star forms in amongst terrestrial ones
• liveliness of composition, inanimate forms seeming to take on life

• And for me why this is so powerful is that authentic (historic personal) experience is being communicated, not purely decorative, fanciful.  Also the effect on me - at times I felt almost painfully re-connected to a depth of experience that I am often out of touch with.

I'm curious to find out if Klee explained his process in relation to a particular painting - at the moment there is a gap for me between what he said about his work in general and my personal experience.  Am I seeing what he wanted me to see?

And some interesting quotes up on the gallery walls:

'Nobody would affirm that the tree grows its crown in the image of its roots.  Between above and below can be no mirrored reflection.'

The artist is 'a creature on a star amongst stars' (Ways of study 1923)

'We construct and keep on constructing but intuition is a good thing. You can do a good deal without it but not everything. Where intuition is combined with exact research it speeds up the progress of research.  Exactitude winged by intuition is at times best.' 

(Experiences in the realm of art 1928)

'Klee, when beginning a painting, had the excitement of a Columbus moving to the disc of a new continent. he had a frightened presentiment, just a vague sense of the right course.'  (Jankel Adler, Memories of Paul Klee 1942.

That step into the unknown. . . And Klee navigated slowly, with great caution, contemplating at length before he placed a brushstroke on the canvass.

A nice parallel between his Burdened Children of 1930 and Brice Marden's recent work - the thick coiling tubey lines.

Gravity

directed by Alfonso Cuaron
It seems sadly obsessive amidst such a stellar deluge of special effects to hone in on a couple of minor ones using translucency, but I couldn't help noticing how reflections on the visors of the two protagonists (played by George Clooney and Sandra Bullock) at certain key moments rendered them translucent (as opposed to transparent) and so made their faces less substantial, fragile - which as the plot unfolded became more and more evident.  Ditto with the space module 'portholes'.

translucency research

Low-Level Image Cues in the Perception of Translucent Materials

ROLANDW.FLEMINGandHEINRICHH.BU ̈LTHOFF Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics

Extracts:

1.2 Translucent Materials

Many of the materials that we encounter on a daily basis are partially permeable to light. For example, fruit flesh, wax, cheese, and human skin are all somewhat translucent. The light that bleeds through these objects gives them a characteristic visual softness and glow that plays a major role in their distinc- tive appearance. Here, we study some of the cues that give translucent materials their characteristic “look.”

Translucency is potentially a very important physical property for an organism to identify. It can help us to distinguish between materials, such as milk and white paint, and can even inform us about the functional state of an object. For example, proteins, such as albumen or meat flesh, become more opaque when cooked, while fruits become increasingly translucent as they ripen, growing quite transparent as they begin to rot. Absinthe acquires a distinctive opalescent louche when mixed with water and transparent plastic becomes white and opaque when subjected to repeated stresses. How do we recognize translucent objects? What image cues do we use to distinguish translucent from opaque?

1.4 Subsurface Scattering and the BSSRDF

When light strikes a real translucent object, it passes through the surface, refracts and scatters multi- ple times within the body of the medium, before emerging at some other location on the surface. This phenomenon, called subsurface scattering, causes light to spread out into a diffuse region around the point of illumination.

[discusses importance for perception of highlights, colour, size of object]

Light diffuses through translucent materials, much like dye diffusing through a fluid. Translucent objects become “filled” with light when illuminated. An important consequence of this is that points on the surface that do not receive any direct illumination (i.e., they are in shadow) can nevertheless receive light from within the body of the object. Conversely, regions that receive strong direct illumination tend to dissipate the incident light by transmitting it to other parts of the object. This has the effect of reducing the overall contrast of translucent objects, as shown in Figure 16(a).

Although blur clearly appears to be related to translucency, we have found that it is insufficient, on its own, to produce a vivid percept of translucency.

To summarize our main findings, we will conclude with a few suggestions for artists and animators who wish to render translucent materials.

Translucent objects look most realistic when they are glossy. Although highlights are not a direct consequence of subsurface light scatter, nevertheless, most translucent materials that we commonly encounter (e.g., fruit flesh, gemstones, and mucos), are somewhat glossy. Thus, the visual system “ex- pects” translucent objects to have specular highlights. Glossiness also aids the perception of shape, by recovering detail that is lost by the softening effects of subsurface scatter.

Color can be used to modify the subjective quality of a translucent substance. If we wish translucent objects to look “glowing” and “warm,” color saturation should be positively correlated with intensity. By contrast, if we wish them to look “icy” or “dilute,” the correlation should be negative.

Translucent objects should generally be lower contrast than their opaque counterparts under similar lighting conditions. However, the relationship between translucent and opaque versions of an object is generally nonlinear. Thus, to portray a translucent object realistically, it is not sufficient simply to reduce an opaque object’s contrast (using Photoshop, for example). It is necessary to modify the entire distribution of intensities. As a simple heuristic, objects can be made to look somewhat more opaque by passing them through a sigmoidal nonlinearity, or more translucent by passing them through the inverse, i.e., an “N-shaped” nonlinearity.

ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, Vol. 2, No. 3, July 2005.Perception of Translucent Materials • 379

Sharp cast shadows should be avoided as they make objects appear hard and opaque, while blur and loss of detail gives translucent objects their characteristic soft appearance. However, as with contrast, we cannot make an opaque object appear translucent simply by blurring out the details. Attention must be paid to the global effects of light bleeding through the shadowed region of an object if we wish to portray a translucent material. Haze around the shadow boundary and blurry fringes around sharp corners can add a sense of diffusion and glow.

Translucency can also be exploited to indicate physical size. The thinner or smaller an object is, the more light bleeds through, providing information about physical scale.

Finally, we have found that translucent objects appear more translucent when illuminated from behind, rather than from the front. One consequence of this is that if we wish to enhance or emphasize the apparent translucency of an object, we should organize the scene lighting so that the object is illu- minated predominantly from behind. It is the light that has traveled all the way through a translucent medium (rather than scattering back in the direction of the light source) that is responsible for the material’s characteristic visual appearance.

https://dub125.mail.live.com/default.aspx?id=64855&rru=inbox#!/mail/ViewOfficePreview.aspx?messageid=16ff74f3-4562-11e3-a892-00237de3fb50&folderid=9bb6516e-dc08-404d-9e4a-c0f4424454c7&attindex=0&cp=-1&attdepth=0&n=1104402900

Yves Klein

ed Bruno Cora and Daniel Mocquay 

(SilvanaEditoriale 2009)

1952 Japan 15 months for judo, profound influence on his work.

Moved towards monochromes because viewers treated multi-coloureds as decorative.  In them can see influence of Shintoism and Buddhism. Lot of work in selecting the ultramarine blue and fixative that would preserve its luminosity. Saw it as the key to depth, to an elsewhere.   ‘D’abord il n’y a rien, ensuite il y a un rien profound, puis une profondeur bleue.’  An aid to contemplation that leads to understanding ‘The object is merely a starting point and a sign that invites the spectator to perform an action.’ ( qv Seeing the Buddha in the image)  ‘My paintings represent poetic happenings. . . My paintings are the ashes of my art.’

Research on immaterial art. – ‘The Void’ 1958.  Modelled gallery on a tea house, removing all furniture except a showcase, interior white, exterior painted IKB, parallel ritual to tea ceremony eg walking along stone path to separate self from world, entered by small door (humble).  1959 calligraphy demo which develops both technique and spirituality, talked about difference between painting as a vehicle for sensibility or as mere manifestation of matter.

‘it is not the material object that is important but the sensibility that can be obtained through it’ (BC) – by burning the certificate of ownership given to the buyer

‘le Judo m’a servi a comprendre que l’espace pictural est avant tout le fruit d’une ascese spirituelle..  Le Judo en effet c’est la decouverte par le corps humain d’un espace spiritual.’

Parallel between callig and judo, the gathering up of energy/ ki. Imprint of spirit on the surface in ink.

Anthropometries – pigment applied to body and via that to paper

Pierre Huyghe; Surrealism and the object

exhibitions at the Pompidou Centre, Paris

Seeing these exhibitions one after the other made me see really sharply how fluid the status of the art object is, how malleable its place in the relationship between creator and viewer.  I just want to clock this for the moment as something to explore (1st essay?)

Briefly, Huyghe's show presents a number of installations and artefacts that are self-contained systems in a dystopian environment, like Zoodram 4 (2011) a glass tank of water containing spider crabs and large crab in a painted shell.

 L'Expedition Scintillante, 2002. Acte 1: Untitled (Weather Score)

Zoodram 4, 2011

Untitled (liegende Frauenakt) 2012

Made Ecosystem (Centre Pompidou) 2013

L'Expedition Scintillante, 2002. Acte 2: Untitled (Light Box)

The exhibition guide says: 'The exhibition is a self-generating world that varies in time and space, indifferent to our presence.'  The weight in the artist-object-viewer triad is on the object. And yet. . . it required an artist to set up that world, and viewers to validate it.  

By contrast, the exhibition of surrealist objects throws the emphasis on the artist (the 'object raised to the dignity if a work if art by the artist's will alone' - Duchamp) or the viewer ('Objects with a symbolic function leave no place at all for formal preoccupations.  They depend only on the amorous imagination of each person, and are extraplastic.' - Dali)  And yet. . . the object does it exist, it does have formal properties. . .

I want to explore and draw out the implications of these two approaches, in part to be clearer about what I am doing in my own work.

Ed Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Pierre Huyghe (Skira 2004)

1990s shift in focus from univ truths to everyday particulars, stories not History, narrative and story-telling

Doesn’t want audience to be passive when viewing his videos. ‘He did so by keeping the audience alert and active, rendering manifest the process of vision and perception itself.  The purpose was to make the space of the spectacle not less but even more apparent, blurring linear time through both anticipation and recognition.’  ‘a theatrical space and a space of reality’

Every event singular and in flux.

‘the unthinkable nature of the image, which nonetheless initiates thought’