Q:Is the artists claim that their work of art is site specific because it is vital to the work of art or a claim that serves the artist, attests to their uniqueness? is it a valid claim that a work of art has meaning only in the location that the artist intended for it or does it serve to promote the artist ?

Museum Highlights

A still from Andrea Fraser's video "Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk" (1989) in which Fraser portrays fictional docent Jane Castleton leading unsuspecting museum visitors on a subversively scripted tour of galleries as well as restrooms and water fountains.

In the article One Place After Another, Kwon describes Meirle Laderman Ukeles scrubbing the floors of a museum to discuss the complex class relationships (upper for funding lower for cleaning) museums are dependent upon. This immediately reminded me of Andrea Fraser (who is actually mentioned in a list of artists near the end of the article) who impersonated a museum docent at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In her docent tour she tackles the role of the museum through her elaborate and humorously twisted descriptions.

I've always loved this ad - it is a great example of body as (implied) site.

Lucy and Bart- Site

LucyandBart is a collaboration between Lucy McRae and Bart Hess described as an instinctual stalking of fashion, architecture, performance and the body. They share a fascination with genetic manipulation and beauty expression. Unconsciously their work touches upon these themes, however it is not their intention to communicate this. They work in a primitive and limitless way creating future human shapes, blindly discovering low – tech prosthetic ways for human enhancement.

I found this work in the book named "Tangible". Lucy and Bart do performances and take videos. I think those work are related to body as site. As a jewelry maker, we think about where we locate our pieces on the body. When I look at the pictures, everywhere can be site for our work.

Vaughn Bell

"Village Green" 2008

"Garment for Flora-Fauna Relationship", 2006

Here is her artist statement " l look at our need to own, control, and care for the landscape, and often find both humor and pathos in the encounter."

There is a humorous quality to her work, an affectionate absurdity that cultivates and protects nature while poking gentle fun at the act of domestication.

http://www.vaughnbell.net/garment/walk.jpg

Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc" 1981

In 1981, artist Richard Serra installs his sculpture Tilted Arc, in Federal Plaza in New York City. The sculpture generates controversy as soon as it is erected. Those working in surrounding buildings must circumvent its enormous bulk as they go through the plaza.

According to Serra, this is the point, "The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer's movement. Step by step the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes."

A public hearing is held in March 1985. Richard Serra testifies that the sculpture is site-specific, and that to remove it from its site is to destroy it. If the sculpture is relocated, he will remove his name from it.

Serra loses and on March 15, during the night, federal workers cut Tilted Arc into three pieces, remove it from Federal Plaza, and cart it off to a scrap-metal yard.

The Tilted Arc, decision prompts general questions about public art, an increasingly controversial subject through the late 1980s and early 1990s in the U.S. and abroad. The role of government funding, an artist's rights to his or her work, the role of the public in determining the value of a work of art, and whether public art should be judged by its popularity are all heatedly debated.

Lauren Kalman

The body as site is crucial to Lauren Kalman's work which blurs the boundaries of adornment. She pulls from discourses centered on the imaged body, consumer culture, body aesthetics, and illness.

She grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. She completed her MFA in Art, from the Ohio State University and received her BFA, with a focus in metals, from Massachusetts College of Art. She has taught at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design and has held the position of Assistant Professor at Watkins College of Art and Design. Her international exhibition record includes a solo exhibition at the Centro Cultural Recoleta, in Buenos Aires. Her work was recently added to the collection of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston.

She hopes to use her art to affect social thought. By creating objects and images that are unconventional in their relationship to the body she is questioning traditional values. In making her work she has become more aware of the values she ascribes to her body and the objects used to adorn it. Through her work, She hopes to communicate alternative thought about material worth, social custom, and the body.
http://www.laurenkalman.com
http://www.siennagallery.com/exhibitions_kalman2.php

site-specific

Andy Goldsworthy is a Britsih Sculptor, photographer, and environmentalist living in Scotland who produces site-specific sculpture and land art situated in natural and urban settings. His art involves the use of natural and found objects, to create both temporary and permanent sculptures which draw out the character of their enviornment.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude.. site specific work

Christo is a Bulgarian American and Jeanne-Claude is an French born American. For years their professional artist "name" was just "Christo", but in 1994 they decided to change it and be honest in representing the teamwork and amazing partnership they have by then becoming the artists "Christo and Jeanne-Claude". They create art for themselves because they have this desire to make these things they wrap, and they feel that if the public enjoys them as well, that it is just a "bonus", but they don't make it for the public.

I think their work is amazing and something I could never bring myself to do (but never say never). They make an incredible team and I applaud them for being able to accomplish some of the things they have done. Their wrappings of natural landscapes and trees I find to be the most beautiful.

Caroline Gore

http://www.carolinegore.com/site_interventions.html

This is a link to Caroline Gore's website. This link will take you directly to the section dedicated to her site specific jewelry. Not all of her work is site specific, but it is certainly an interesting way to think about the value of materials and whether or not jewelry can be site specific away from the body. Caroline brings her experience of site specificity back to the body in creating wearable works of art that are based on her experiences with various places around the world. Check it out.

Jewelry Artists Addressing Site-Specificity

An undergraduate assignment at LDSOA Georgia given by Anya Kavarkis aimed at investigating the body as site:
http://art.uga.edu/index.php?pt=1&id=475
and http://onlineathens.com/stories/020808/living_20080208006.shtml

Caroline Gore, a Kalamazoo, Michigan artist working with photography and street-scape to create objects of jewelry- see specifically her Florence series:
http://www.carolinegore.com/site_interventions.html
and http://www.klimt02.net/jewellers/index.php?item_id=9939

I located an exhibition titled, "Site Specific/Jewelry from the Metal Arts Guild" that opened on 10/6/1999 at The Collector's Gallery at the Oakland Museum of Art- but unfortunately there is no on-line list of artists who participated, nor was there a catalog printed.

Here is Tiffany Parbs a Melbourne, Australia Jeweler who uses the idea of jewelry cosmetically- a link to her exhibition at Craft Act Gallery in March 2009 with installation views:
http://www.craftact.org.au/exhibitions/2009EX2G1
and http://www.klimt02.net/jewellers/index.php?item_id=13287

Caroline Broadhead is a multidisciplinary artist. She instructs at Jewellery and Textiles at Middlesex University. Here is a link to a site-specific work titled Breathing-Space that the artist created for a medieval church in North Yorkshire, UK in 2005:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/northyorkshire/content/articles/2005/09/16/breathing_space_feature.shtml

Robert Barry

Robert Barry was born in NYC in 1936, and been producing non-material works of art, performances and installations since 1967. He is considered one of the founding fathers of the American Conceptual Art Movement. Below are some of his works.

Site Specific Artists

Robert Smithson was born in 1935 in Passaic, New Jersey, and died in 1973. He is most well known for his Spiral Jetty piece in the Great Salt Lake, Utah. He was also a film maker, photographer, sculptor and 2D artist. To the left are images from his Glue Pour Series in Vancouver, Canada in 1969, and of Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan, a work that he designed in 1970, but was followed through after his death.
See more of his work at his site: http://www.robertsmithson.com/

Art:21 | Josiah McElheny | Beauty & Seduction

Here's another artist's take on the hidden nature of objects created to be "beautiful."

Daniel Buren

Daniel Buren is a French painter and conceptual artist. He graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Métiers d’Art, Paris, in 1960. After 1966 he developed an aesthetic form that rejected all formal exploration and gave importance solely to the positioning of the work of art. In particular he devised the formula of alternating white and coloured vertical stripes. This became his exclusive mark, at first as a member of the BMPT group with Olivier Mosset (b 1944), Parmentier and Niele Toroni (b 1937). He painted his stripes on a whole range of different supports in various inappropriate settings. After abandoning the idea of painting as object he proposed a critical analysis of painting that would henceforth be like wallpaper pasted up in the streets of Paris, rather like the huge canvas stretched across the middle of the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1971). In his many installations in galleries and museums as well as in the open or in the city, he responded to the surrounding space or the context of an exhibition with great acuity. His work often has a decorative quality, as can be seen in his controversial creation in the courtyard of the Palais Royal in Paris, The Two Plateaux (1985–6).
http://www.artnet.com/library/01/0123/T012348.asp



Here is a link to the Daniel Buren website (english translation)

Emotional Design

4.   The Body as site 

Nov 4^th

^9AM-12AM

Discussion: What are the specifics of this site (the body) and how does jewelry relate to other site-specific art? How has the body been used as site and as material? The dilemma of exhibiting jewelry.

Readings:

- Miwon Kwon, One site after another (2002) chap 1 p. 11-55

- D.W. Winnicott, Play and Reality (1953) Chap 1: Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena p. 1- 27 + chap 7: The Location of Cultural Experience p. 128-139

Student presentations:

- Robert Brain, The decorated Body (1979)

- Lea Vergine, Body Art and Performance: The Body as Language (2000)

- Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and curiosity (1996) - Cosmetics and Abjection: Cindy Sherman 1977-87 chap 5

Bring: ”transitional object”

Craft as the Ugly, or bad taste

Links to the Swedish Craft Artist I was showing in connection to our discussion about rebelling against the general concept of beautiful objects.

Ugly Cute www.uglycute.com

Pontus Lindvall www.pontuslindvall.se

Frida Fjellman www.hem.bredband.net/frifja/

ugly......

It is nature to give the flower, and knitting it and making to the wreath are the arts---Goethe

To me, in any creations or process of making, it is difficult to find the ugliness because it is related to the human evolution and even if it turns out to be fault, i cannot say

the piece of arts is ugly.

I see ugliness sometimes in someone's behavior, gestures, or the way of thinking!!!!

Mapplethorpe's "art"

For Mapplethorpe “those whom the world would change must change the world... and this derived from his understanding that, if one would change the world with art, one must change a great deal of it. Thus, the axiom that the meaning of a sign is the response to it had for him a quantitative as well as a qualitative dimension.” -Hickey, "Nothing Like the Son"

This photo is not one of my favorites. I can respect his art, but this one is different, and is hard for me to call it "art".

Any thoughts?

BEAUTY

"No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly." -Oscar Wilde

From The New Sins by David Byrne

'BEAUTY' taken from The New Sins by David Byrne, New York McSweeney's Publishing 2001 (p33):

"How can Beauty be a sin? IS BEAUTY NOT WHAT MAKES LIFE worth living?

I was walking in my garden the other day–actually I was walking on a street in Pensacola Florida–and the day was bright and the air was clear. I had an impulse to say the day was beautiful, but I knew better, for I have known the tricks and masks that Beauty Wears.

The sunny day, the blue sky and the brisk breeze created the illusion that all was well. That sewage treatment plan was no longer pumping its sludge and toxic wastes into the bay, that lawyer behind the door of his office was engaged in the pursuit of justice. That the tanker anchored down the street was loading and unloading goods that were honestly made. Beauty masks the Truth of the Matter. The rotting corpse lies waiting under an impressive work of funerary art.

Beauty is deception, falsification, deceit. Buyer Beware."

Tangential Thoughts on Beauty

I thought our blog needed some videos so I went on you tube and found 3 things I respect to be beautiful:

• Joy Division performing She’s Lost Control
• An episode titled Hero from a video campaign by Italian designer Diesel
• Astronaut Don Pettit’s animated footage of the Aurora Borealis from orbit

Of course attractiveness is determined by communal ideals, but beauty for me lies in a balance of intrigue and threat without the actualization of any danger implied (qualities I found in the footage below). This seems a very primal definition for attraction and a plausible Rosetta stone for sussing out beauty.

The question for me continues to be- How do I harness this energy and imbue my work with it?

Street Poop Art

One UGLY thing that enters into my everyday life is dog poop. Rather that drag a steaming bag into class tomorrow,

I figured we could examine the topic from a safe distance. In my search for a picture of poo...Don't ask, I came across

these images of 'Street Poop Art'. Can this be considered to be art? Do we find this in anyway beautiful? Does art

have to be beautiful in some way, do we always look for beauty in art?

The images were found at: http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/sprinkle-brigade-making-poop-art-on-the-streets-of-new-york