Narcissus edit

Maybe using this edit instead...

Blog 6

We were given some reading about Freud's theories of dreams. I found it a bit long winded but this is what I took away from it;

Freud saw dreams as wishes or repressed wishes and even connects a lot of sexual desire and frustration with this. He also shows a connection with infancy and dreams, like our minds are quite childlike and children's minds are less repressed than adults so our dreams are places where repression doesn't exist. Anything can happen in a dream, alright they're probably influenced by daily events in our lives but dreams turn these upside down. People we know are in our dreams but often have different faces; places seem familiar but look like other places. Random animals and words are all intertwined within this mixed up rollercoaster of a ride. But the point is that no matter how much we read into them, we never really understand our subconscious. Is this the same for Surrealism??

Obviously surrealism wasn't just influenced by this one idea of dreams but it had a very big part to play. Surrealism is an art movement where the artists that par took broke down barriers leading to fragmented consciousness and the endless frustration of want and desire. Surrealists believed that the mind's imaginative powers were directly fuelled by desire; they wanted people to change their perceptions of the world and succumb to their inner thoughts. They wanted people to bring their subconscious to the waking world. They enjoyed the idea of the enigma and were greatly interested in automatism. To me surrealism is a refreshing idea; they don't take themselves too seriously unlike the Futurists before them. They disrupted conventional expectations and challenged the status quo. Juxtaposing elements that would be deemed irreconcilable was a radical idea in the 1920's but I feel that we have been desensitized by this imagery, adverts, programmes and films still use surrealist elements today. This might be a bit of a dud example but one image we see every year is a Coca-Cola advertisement where we see a polar bear drinking the soft drink from a bottle. Another example is the Subway adverts where giant talking vegetables try to bully people into eating them, these two have taken things that were know and placed them into extraordinary circumstances and as consumers we clearly enjoy and buy into this idea as they are two of the biggest corporations in the world.

One thing I have noticed about some surrealist images is the quite nightmarish objects, like dismembered body parts, influenced by the two world wars, but surely these aren't wishes or repressed wishes of sexual desire. Fear is more of a word that comes to mind but Freud sees nightmares and fear as being wish-fulfilment of a masochistic nature, the people having these have a desire to be humiliated or tortured. Now, I have had plenty of nightmares that I really would not wish upon myself in real life.

I suppose in conclusion to what I'm saying or trying to say is that I think it's easier to decipher surrealist art than it is to decipher a person’s dreams and/or nightmares, maybe we’d need to know a little about the artist’s background but surely the awoken unconsciousness is more telling than the sleeping unconsciousness. In some ways I think Freud knew what he was talking about but in others, I think even he got a bit confused.

Visage of war, 1940, Salvador Dali.

Narcissus

This is a photograph I have done, to replace the mirror version of Vanity, I thought mirrors were a bit too obvious and you have to go more out of your way to look at yourself in a pond/lake/river/whatever and it's based on the Greek mythology of Narcissus... hope this one is better than the mirror one as the deadline is tomorrow! Eeek!

Blog 5

Futurism was the only Italian art movement in the 20^th Century, it was pioneered by poet F.T. Marinetti in 1909.

“We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung from clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with the glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.”

-Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944),

“The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” 20 February 1909.

Firstly from the manifesto you can tell this man was a poet, you can get caught up with the poetic wording but when looking closer it reads as quite a raw and violent piece of writing. Marinetti expresses a passionate loathing of everything old; he despised history and believed that it mustn’t have an everlasting domain; society must make way for the young. His main men whom signed this manifesto were Carlo Carra, Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini , Giacomo Balla and Luigi Russolo. Marinetti used the newspaper to find these like-minded people which showed that he was a great manipulator of the media. The idea of Futurism was based upon violence, war, anarchy, nationalism, glorification of urban life, technology and speed and a hatred of the past and scorn of academic values. They celebrated automobiles, airplanes, machine guns and other industrial technologies and denounced moralism and feminism. They saw museums, galleries and libraries as “static institutions of an obsolete culture” and even tried to have these blown up.

Futurists used every medium of art, including sculpture, painting, architecture, theatre, literature, industrial design and even gastronomy to help with showing and enforcing their ideals. In terms of painting, it was very similar to the structure of Cubism and this gave them a means to analyse movement, industry and speed and sometimes even sound in later Futurist works. Now, writing a manifesto on the technical aspects of Futurist painting seems like a decent idea, kind of like do’s and don’ts for future Futurists but writing a manifesto on Futurist cooking shows a desire for them to control everyday life of those who agree with their beliefs and I think that is a journal entry itself.

Although, I don’t believe in the violence and hatred that Futurists believe in I do really like the art and the idea of incorporating movement and speed into what was quite a static movement before that. I am definitely going to look into Futuristic artwork more and find out more about the way Marinetti’s mind works; as one of my housemates has said that he wanted someone to kill him and overthrow him as the leader of the Futurists to fit in with his idea of rejuvenating society and ideas, out with the old and in with the new.

“A change in values-that means a change in the creators of values. He who has to be a creator has to destroy.” – Friedrich Nietzsche.

Funeral of the Anarchist Galli by Carlo Carra, 1911, oil on canvas.

Playing...

Playing with a ring-flash, never used one before so it was quite interesting, you probably think they're pretty boring shots...

Blog 4

The week's CS lecture I'm talking about was about Modernism and we had some reading based on critic Clement Greenberg and the aspects of Modernism ideals. I'm not entirely sure what Modernism is but I'm aware that the beginnings of it are not really known, it's hard to pin point and maybe this is because it's such a broad idea. Some think it began with the Industrial Revolution around 1750, others think it began with Neo-classical and Romanicism. Some think it began around the time photography began to take off and paintings depicted everyday life, others think Modernism began with the avant-garde, artist like Manet pushing forward new ideas, subjects and ways of making art. Others believe it began with Cubism, by breaking things down into 3D structures such as cubes, cones and cylinders, cubist artists created a new way of making art by reconstructing these into sometimes figurative images. Maybe it confuses me because there are so many different styles of art that come under this category.

It does seem that Modernism is much bigger than an art form, it's idea of the new. New art, new media and new inventions that were meant to improve the way we lives our lifes. Modernism aims for an ideal future where form follows function, I think, I'm still not really sure but I hope that as I look at more works of art and read more literature about it I'll begin to understand it more.

other word...

For the second image I wanted to do the flip side of Vanity and shoot in a way that suggested that someone wasn't happy with their appearence and wanted to change themselves, the best way I thought of this was to shoot a semi naked women with pre-op cosmetic surgery markings on them.



My other word that I have chosen is Vanity, we have to show two different interpretations of the word, my first one is of the side of vanity where somebody loves themselves, always looking in the mirror, grooming themselves...