Skip to main content

'Breezeblock' (Untitled) 2018/19

AS CHANGED FOR THE UPCOMING CONCRETE EXHIBITION 

 “Untitled” 2018 – Breeze Block, 2018/19
(Part of Ba2a submission)

The work will comprise of an on-going investigation and installation in which the gallery space will be used to document how a material can be subverted aside from its original function. I will be changing the forms of breeze blocks over the course of the exhibition, manipulating them within the space to see how people react to these everyday objects. 

Breeze Blocks are a feature of a vast reservoir of usually unnoticed and trivial materials that comprise a seemingly common aspect of the everyday. The rise of the everyday in contemporary art is usually understood in terms of the desire to bring the mundane and overlooked aspect of society and life into visibility. So if the everyday is the realm of the unnoticed it might be asked; just how do we attend to it? How do we drag the everyday into view? The materials act as a speculative, unsystematic and ambiguous form of these questions, playing a fundamental role in bringing this idea of the everyday and life its self into sight. The idea is not for these materials to act cohesively within an institution or gallery space but to adhere to normality, it is to be interrogative rather than assertive. By means of and reproduction the works elaboration is to relentlessly displace the original, in the means of subverting the intention of the material.

‘There is a type of tension which resides in a form so industrial. This tension is strikingly political as much as it is physical as the narrative of such an industrial item forces itself to be considered. The movement juxtaposes the material. What emerges is a type of concrete poetry in which the audience interaction becomes the lines in which the words are written. An invitation to interact with the work, echoes labour-use value which is undetermined in the work. There is a purely mechanical notion also to this work as there is form to the found objects. The series of works created poses questions of interconnection. Is each sculpture independent from the last if the same material is used?’

 From the initial investigation to merely see how the audience reacted to these everyday objects within a gallery space and the invitation to interact with them as an art work I wanted to explore more into the idea of the labour and object value of these breeze-blocks which ties in with my on going project (the restoration of a boat). The breeze-blocks as an object cost £1.75 - I had managed to salvage around 12 whole blocks and 5 broken blocks. Which amounts to around just under £25. The slight change in approach to this investigation was to try and configure a relationship between material worth and the worth of an art piece and also to see if there is a coherence of labour value and hourly wage. 

 In my view the exhibition a small step towards reaching an understanding of this ongoing thesis, the fundamentals of where i am going in terms of artwork are still fairly unclear. The breeze-blocks didn't really optimise what i was trying to achieve, I feel they stood more as objects in their own right without any layered contextualisation. It's hard to gage the labour value and object value of a breeze-block when it is already established, I guess through changing the blocks and arranging them each day offered some form of insight into my own physical labour but it still doesn't have the legitimacy of the step by step process of renovating something that has been salvaged and maintaining a functional object. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CORNELIA PARKER - THE STORY OF COLD DARK MATTER

Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View  is the restored contents of a garden shed exploded by the British Army at the request of the artist Cornelia Parker. The surviving pieces have been used by Parker to create an installation suspended from the ceiling as if held mid-explosion. Lit by a single lightbulb the fragments cast dramatic shadows on the gallery’s walls.  In an interview with Tate curator Michaela Parkin, Parker suggested that an explosion was something she had wanted to do for a long time. To her, an explosion is an ‘archetypal’ image, familiar to us from childhood to adult life:       Somehow the idea and imminence of the ‘explosion’ in society seemed such an iconic thing. You were being constantly bombarded with its imagery, from the violence of the comic strip, through action films, in documentaries about Super Novas and the Big Bang, and least of all on the news in never ending reports of war. Parker liked the idea of something that happened...
Post a Comment
Read more

CLAIRE BISHOP - COLLABORATIONS AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Claire Bishop’s short paper begins with a curious quote from Dan Graham: “All artists are alike. They dream of doing something that’s more social, more critical, and more real than art” (60) . A brazen comment, this generalisation gives Bishop’s discussion a provocative start. It also anticipates her assumption that all “real” art is necessarily concerned with aesthetics. This helps to explain her interest in discussing “the social turn” as Art—or, more accurately, a lack thereof . After briefly describing both the recent proliferation of publicly engaged art practices and their value as therapy for repairing the social bond , Bishop maps prevailing perceptions of this art as polarized. There are the “non-believers,” the aesthetes who dismiss the art as uninteresting, and there are “the believers” the zealots, the activists who, according to Bishop, “…reject aesthetic questions a s synonymous with the market and cultural hierarchy ” (61). Curiously, Bishop fails to identify a third ...
Post a Comment
Read more

REFLECTION ON PUBLIC COLLABORATION !.

For this piece the initial artwork wasnt documented digitally by film or phtograph, i wanted to let the objects and the piece exist on their own within the space and allow the interactions and participation to happen without there being any sense that it is an art work. I feel like the results are completely different by just writing about the interactions as a reflection and a time lapse done in the simplest form by using text.  I found that the audience were rather confused about the obejcts as they were so precariously placed and people are used being informed about the art works or public art pieces. Knowing this the first investigation of this project was a success, i was able to gather an understanding of how people would interact with my art work and how it would display my concept.  After this investigation I do feel as though i need to reconsider how i document these installations, I still want them to be discrete and have a sense of the unknowing but also wo...
Post a Comment
Read more