This month, we're delving into the realm of discourse, contemplating whether art or writing possesses the power to reshape or influence the very systems of knowledge that shape us, and in turn, are shaped by us.
From a structuralist viewpoint, one might question whether we're too deeply entrenched within societal constructs to break free. Yet, even thinkers like Michel Foucault, who dissected the fabric of society and its structures, hinted at the potential for disruption. He suggested that moments of discontinuity or rebellion could spark significant shifts in discourse. "At certain junctures, within certain realms of knowledge, there are these sudden leaps, these accelerations," remarked Foucault in an interview with Rainbow in 1984.
Could art and writing serve as the catalyst for such leaps? These texts ventures into this inquiry, offering a platform for diverse and thought-provoking perspectives.
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Artist name
Helen Birnbaum
Instagram account
https://www.instagram.com/helenbirnbaumceramics/
Youtube or Vimeo video link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfhzdgwq3u0
TERRA FIRMA Leaky Boat - waves on a beach
Shedding Salty Tears, 2024
DESCRIPTION
The statue is one piece from a 50 piece installation called Shed Salty Tears which is a triptych depicting the bleaching of our oceans and the rubbish pollution our beaches. The title piece of the work she stands 50 cm tall. Each section of the triptych has approximately fifty white, grey and blue shells, corals and other sea life surrounding three large central sculpted figures; a telephone; an African harp and this crying figure shedding her salty tears. In striking contrast to the grey and blues she is glazed in brightly coloured ceramic made red, orange and green drinks cans, milk bottles and baked bean cans litter the ground beside her suggesting the detritus causing damage to our seas and beaches. Shed Salty Tears also includes a selection of bizarre sea creatures envisaged as part organic and part metal debris suggesting that because of the rubbish we throw into the sea this is what the creatures might even become - part organic matter and part the rubbish we humans have left behind. Salty Tears draws attention to the bleaching of the sea bed and pollution and consists of many ceramic pieces which are integrated with found objects. Through assemblage and ceramic hand building methods I explore different materials and engage with conversations about the ecological crisis. The sculptures I produce are in part made of the rubbish we discard and are symbolic of the way we treat our precious environments. I am currently on an artistic residency at Blackpool & Fylde School of Arts and my installation and mixed media project Shed Salty Tears brings our attention to our damaged oceans and beaches.
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Artist name - Imogen Perkins
Instagram account
Imogen Perkin
Motorway Bridge
MEDIUM
oil on canvas
DESCRIPTION
This is a painting that describes a significant part of our modern landscape, and the feelings produced as we traverse it. it was part of an exhibition that explored environmental issues.
Paintings in Particular and Changing Discourse.
The recent tv drama “Mr Bates vs the Post Office” was watched by millions and galvanised public opinion against the perpetrators of injustice. Mass and social media reach unprecedented numbers of people and film, writing, photography, illustration and graphics can all be influential in this sphere.
But it seems a little more complex for the so-called Fine Arts. Paintings in particular and many sculptures are one off , stand alone pieces. Hard to reach and see in the flesh, the numbers encountering them are bound to be fewer. Reproductions and photos of these are a valuable resource; you can learn so much about artists and their work online. The problem is the work can never cast its proper magic unless you come face to face with the real thing. Who could possibly experience the immersive and emotional properties of a Rothko from a photo?
The most obvious pitfalls are things like scale and nuances of colour. There should always be a point to scale. Once I saw a small print of a seascape by John Brett on a hospital clinic wall; a depressingly anodyne and typical offering for the sick. Later I came across “The British Channel Seen From The Dorsetshire Ciffs” at Tate. A confrontational painting the size of a wall with a huge and glittering ocean and a tiny ship. I also thought I knew the work of Pieter Breughel the Elder, and to be honest didn’t much like those bumbling peasants. Walking into a room of them on a trip to Vienna, these beautiful shimmering pictures, ringing with colour, could not fail to bowl you over. We can’t feel the properties of the material art object itself – how it owns the wall or dominates the room - unless we are up against the real thing. But when we do encounter a great work of art it shifts our perceptions and makes us ask questions.
I don’t set out to redress issues in my own work, but I have taken part in exhibitions that do. One example is “Motorway Bridge” , which was included in an exhibition called “Breathe”. Environmental concerns were not at the forefront of my mind as I painted it, but more with transience and insecurity in an inhospitable and dwarfing landscape. The creative impulse is complicated and intrinsically bound with the subconscious. Renoir, who said many things, once said “There is something in painting that cannot be explained, and that something is essential.”
Paintings are the slow burners of the art world. “The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine”. They can outlast more immediately available offerings in the media and elsewhere and continue to make us ask question and change.
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Artist name -Claire Ong
Instagram account
A medieval theological argument
MEDIUM
printed & laser cut textile collage
DESCRIPTION
ECHR: The arguments used to sell the concept of loss of our human rights as brought to us by a range of irrational politicians. The words enter the news cycle and seep into society as ink soaks fabric.
Subterfuge
This is not a business meeting
But a swarm of games competing
Lions waking to sirens’ call
Burning lace before the fall.
It’s falling over, cascade quick
A demolition, brick by brick
Pawning out unlikely stories
Once of glory cut to quarries.
Lipstick lies at every turn
Seductive virtue, how she burns
How she spins and what she churns
A learned lifetime to unlearn.
Legacies lapped up in lies
Pretty liars, glassy eyed
Bought and sold and in disguise
Truth for sale beyond the spies.
In a war not on the news
Every day a new milieu
Coronated to confuse
The Fifth estate is subterfuge.
All the constructs getting heavy
Another day a brand new levy
Taxed and strapped and more boxed in
Restrained and shamed, locked out, locked in.
Tuned in, turned on by poisoned feed
Corrupting soil, seed by seed
Highway soundbytes, brain stampede
One world mantra, a one world deed.
Georgia Guidestones feigning good
Leaving clues where granite stood
Self-destruction, purpose-built
Thelema’s law do what thou wilt . . .
Living in a world inverted
All that’s good is what’s subverted
Being groomed away the path
Don’t read, don’t write, don’t do the math.
Don’t look up to crisscrossed skies
But clap your hands for crooked prize
Beware the Stanzas of Dzyan
Warnings from the life of Bryan
Fear the tigers, bow to bears
Come red, come blue, come musical chairs
Blackrock, Vanguard, Club of Rome
A hidden hand in every home.
Complacency emergency
Division cloaked in courtesy
Choose the sword by which you’ll die
Never mind those doves that cry.
What is truth is circumstance
The downward spiral dressed in a dance
Want your anger, want your fury
The system doesn’t want a jury.
This is not a manifesto
A post-it note from a 5G ghetto
A neon slice of bread for soul
To dead man circling dressed-up pole.
By Erika Loch
Bread and Circus
State your place and
When appropriate, your purpose
But keep me in your pull of dazzle
Bestow me bread and circus
I’ll stand in any gated queue
Camera fingers to my hand
I’m the centre of the universe, where
we come to see and come to stand
We wait in line for lights to shine
Rosing for the camera
While lights go out across the realm
On Saturdays we’ll go to Hampshire
And through the week I’ll go my places
I’ll cruise about my business
I’ll tag myself each place I go
But I won’t bear witness
I’ll spend my pounds on liquid fancy
I’ll story novel purchase
My escapades live in the cloud
My bank of bread and circus
I’ll ride the winds of progress
Put coal in AI’s furnace
I’m leading edge into the future
I know not the god I service
Though the wars they multiply and
Blood boils beneath the surface
I raise my glass and bellow a toast
Good health and bread and circus.
Not in my name
Not with my vote
The only mandate there is
is to stop
She is mercy
And there is nothing else to be done before her.
- Erika Loch
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Artist name Maja Spasova
Instagram account
Rebellion and Take-Off
In my work I let the place, the moment, the unpredictible chance speak and reveal their hidden core. I believe the ideas are born by a kind of conversation, intensive listening and talking to the place, to its countless segments like geographical position, historical and cultural heritage, people. A dialogue with a place is nurtured by intuition and imagination, by using all invisible antennas humans are equipped with. The rebellion, the take-off is an art outside the white cube, art in the open urban sphere and in a continious interaction with the environment, art unrestricted and unhinged, art as an organic entity of life itself. Maja Spasova, 2024
BED & BREAKFAST, 2006
MEDIUM
Urban site-specific installation
DESCRIPTION
10 wooden beds, in each bed 90 kg bread-dough growing and changing shape under the sun, duration 1 day. Part of Dak'Art Biennial, Senegal. Support by IASPIS, Sweden.
Artist name - Iza Nez
BIO- Whilst I do not see myself as a writer as such, my artwork is effectively a work of writing and so I wondered whether it may fit better into the writer category. I am currently close to completing an MA in Fine Art at the University of Hertfordshire. On the MA, I looked at the topic of time and specifically the idea of wasting of time and I would like to share a bit more background to the artwork I have submitted:
In a productivity-orientated culture, time is a commodity. According to the contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han (The Burnout Society, 2015), our focus on achievement and constant multi-tasking changes our attention to time and our lives feel fleeting as a result. We lose the ability to experience duration.
The inability to manage one’s time effectively can be seen as a shortcoming and wasted time is seen in a negative way. However, Boris Groys (Comrades of Time, 2009) has suggested that contemporary art is a domain where wasted, unproductive time can be seen more positively.
Could wasting time on purpose perhaps be a way to reclaim time and the experience of duration? What is wasted time, when even rest can be seen as having utility. Rest allows us to maintain our productivity.
My embroidered Instructions to an artist how to waste time effectively came out of my thinking about how one might go about truly wasting time.