1 post tagged “favorite artist”
Show us something by your favorite artist.
Submitted by Miss Parker.
The idea of a favorite artist is a bit difficult for me. Like a favorite singer or a favorite author, it's hard to pick one person who consistently hits home with me, whose every work/song/word resonates.
This doesn't mean, however, I'm going to let this opportunity to blither about art to pass me by. Instead, I'll limit myself to talking about ten artists/artworks that do affect me. I'm going to bypass what I consider to be some more well-known artists/artworks that also qualify (eg, Jackson Pollock's Lavender Mist, Gustav Klimt's Beethoven Freize, Henri Matisse's Dance (Hermitage version), Maxfield Parrish's Aquamarine, Mark Rothko's Untitled (1953)...just to name a few...) in order to draw your attention to some lesser-known-but-still-outstanding people and things.
In alphabetical order, because any other way would fry my brain...
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80 Backs by Magdalena Abakanowicz. Her use of materials makes me think of a (much) less abstract Eva Hesse. Both artists make very tactile works that benefit from detailed viewing. Often I feel as though my touch might be a comforting gesture to Abakanowicz's subjects, while I think of touching Hesse's works to be an invastion of their space. Abakanowicz's sculptures often make powerful use of multiples, as in the piece I've selected here. There's something interesting to me--emotionally, as well as intellectually--about taking intimate feelings of pain and isolation and scaling them up to a number of figures. Often, loneliness in a crowd is suggested by showing an "odd man out," but in Abakanowicz's work, all are suffering. It's a powerful way to represent humanity.
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Still Light by Caroline Broadhead. I saw this work while studying abroad in England more than five years ago, but it stays with me. The piece is pretty simple in its fabrication: clear threads run from the window to the floor creating a permanent sunbeam. The effect caught my breath, however. Later, as I turned it over in my mind, it seemed like such a brilliant way to achieve this particular effect, more so than taking a photograph of that moment or painting a picture of a sunbeam; instead, Broadhead managed to give the viewer the sensation of stepping into a space where time had either slowed or stopped alltogether. If I ever thought I couldn't find mere monofilament beautiful, this piece proved me wrong.
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The Ballad of Sexual Dependency by Nan Goldin. Seeing this work as part of the "SlideShow" exhibition was probably one of my favorite museum experiences of the last few years. It's not uncommon to see a couple of Goldin's photographs blown up and exhibited as part of a photography collection, but seeing the entirity of Ballad as a slideshow (how it was originally shown) was really far more appropriate and moving. Unlike so many documentary photographers, Goldin didn't go somewhere and appropriate another culture, another identity, someone else's pain. The photographs in Ballad are of her life, her friends, her joy and, often, her pain. The resulting collection is an emotional narrative about a time (the '70s and '80s) and a place (NYC, for the most part) that's hard to put into words.
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Guerilla Girls can do no wrong in my book. I love their witty take on the culture world--from galleries in NYC to the Oscars, they're always reminding us of what's not seen. It's a valuable service, and it was thinking of them that inspired this woman-centric post.
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Photomontages by Hannah Höch. Höch's appropriation of images from adverts and the earliest women's magazines make for powerful, inventive collages. I particularly love the way she takes images made to play on women's fears of inadequacy or self-consciousness to make bold statements about gender and women's roles. Her work always seems before it's time to me.
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Cut Piece by Yoko Ono. A woman sits on a stage. Nearby, a pair of scissors. Members of the audience are invited up to come to the stage and snip off pieces of the woman's clothing.
Like some of my favorite works by Félix González-Torres, this work offers something to its viewers; a gift is extended. In fact, Ono herself suggests this and stated she often wore her favorite dress when performing this piece. Her work, however, also has a darker side, an edge of violence and vulnerability that differentiates it from González-Torres' gifts of candy. While obviously simple in its execution, this work brings to mind a variety of issues relating to women's bodies, what control women have over their bodies, how reactions to nudity vary depending on circumstances, and what the role of the audience is. Are the people cutting apart Ono's dress collaborators or symbols? -
Ceci n'est pas un bong. by Elaine Reichek. Among other things, Reichek makes witty recreations of famous works of art in needlepoint. While I like her work in general, I definitely get a specific pleasure from how these recreations tickle different parts of my brain, engaging in a surprisingly fun comparison of art and craft. Reichek's pieces aren't dogmatic on this often contentious subject--it's fun to see what a Chuck Close painting has in common with crosssttich or how it would look if Andy Warhol had skipped the paint and really made a Pollock out of yarn.
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The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems by Martha Rosler. Like Caroline Broadhead, I was first introduced to Rosler whilst studying in England; I caught her retrospective "Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World" at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. I liked most of her work; it combined feminism, documentary efforts, mixed/new media and even humor. In her Bowery series, Rosler combines photography and text to document the area of Manhattan known as The Bowery, basically a skid row. Rosler has said other photographers at the time were focusing specifically on the areas drunks, taking pictures of their beat-up faces or as they lie wasted in doorways and alleys, and that the resulting photos took advantage of their misfortune. Rosler's photographs are completely void of any human elements, instead focusing on boarded up windows or doorways covered in graffitti. The photos are arranged in a minimalist grid with notecards featuring typed words that could be used to describe the alcoholics and addicts who generally could be found in The Bowery. The result is a unique portrait not of a place or a group of people, but larger social issues like addiction and homelessness, as well as the overly simplistic ways we often attempt to label or solve those problems.
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Creation of Birds by Remedios Varo. Beautiful, fanciful, mystical, I love being transported by Varo's paintings. I'm unable to quite explain why, but she is my favorite Surrealist. Something in her dreamy images just rings true for me. (I guess I must have used up all my good words talking about Martha Rosler, eh?)
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House by Rachel Whiteread. A work I love in concept and form, and a scale I'm glad Whiteread had the opportunity to explore. I love the idea of the artist drawing our attention to something, usually something we don't notice (like O'Keeffe's reasoning that she painted her flowers large in order to force others to see them). In the instance of House, Whiteread has cast the inside space of the house in concrete--making it not only visible, but also a very strong form. So you don't see the walls of this particular structure, but she has made the space between the walls physical. Though the work has since been demolished, it was pretty obsessively documented both in process and response in a 1995 book published by Phaidon.
