• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Bricks, Dung, Sharks & Unmade Beds: The World Of 'Modern Art'

A

Anonymous

Guest
Last edited by a moderator:
I found them extremely unsettling . . . :confused:

Carole
 
i wonder what they are made of..look soft but maybe they arnt.
 
ah, that somhow makes them more desturbing..knowing they are clamy..
 
It looks like she took something halucenogenic and then read 'The Island of Doctor Moreau'...

The meerkat humaoid looks like Dobby.

In fact they mostly look like film special effects, a la Henson...
 
Maybe I'm on my own here (and judging by the relative lack of response to my original post - well I guess I must be). But I reckon this work is kind of brilliant. It's got so many reference points. You'd have to be really clever and unique to come up with something so odd.

I really like that feet - like - hands (one of my own particular fears).
 
reminds me of a dead pig i once found in a disused sewar bed.. twas floating and all wrinkled, white and the skin sloughing off... i didnt report it at the time as it just seemed odd and prity disgusting, but a week or so latter they had the murder squad out as someone else found it and thought it was human....
 
yes i found them disquieting... and not somthing id look at intentionaly ...but then i like to be presented with unexpected things now and again.
 
Hugo's hit the nail on the head. They are unsettling, but fascinating nonetheless . . .

Carole
 
I see your point 'Hugo'. But the obvious 'touchyness', IMO, takes them far beyond mere film prop stuff. They're much too disgusting for the world of happy - clappy children's movies.

Also - the reference points make them more intelligent than simple kid - movie effects.

Imagine actually touching or feeling one of these things. You're in the world of something much darker. IMO.
 
Hmm.. the 'Superevolution' picture is clearly ripped off from Voyager when the Janeway and her first officer get artificially super-evolved.

It's all a sham!
 
I think all sculpture of this genre is unsettling because they're so realistic, and as such they remind us on a very deep level that we are still animals, basically, and as Alb said utterly unlike the anthropomorphised cuties which grace Henson movies etc (not a criticism of Henson et al, as if they were to put a figure like this into one of their movies there would be consternation). Yes, it is deeply dark - but then, that's the intention. At least the skill involved in creating the models is immediately apparent, as opposed to the pickled cow/ unmade bed/ pile of bricks stuff whch grabs all the headlines (and the prizes, and the money..)

It reminded me of Tim Noble & Sue Webster's "New Barbarians" (caused a stir because they openly didn't actually sculpt it themselves but got all the credit - big debate about intellectual copyright ensued). Same sort of idea, slightly different realisation.
 
Hmm. Carl Andre: The Tate bricks still make sense to me.

Interesting how the " pile of bricks " entered the language during the 1970s as the common shorthand for idiocy in art. Now it's 1990s seedy conceptualism. No comment.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, conservatives railed against the abstract expressionists. Now that kind of stuff is considered good taste. Tony Hancock made an excellent movie entitled 'The Rebel' (1960) - a parody of modern art :)

Respectable conservative society denounces every generation of art. Think of Picasso and co. And then at least as far back as the impressionists and the fauvists. Probably back to the cave painters. I'm sure that 2d wooly mammoths were fairly controversial in their day.

Now you will find Francis Bacon's in expensive company boardrooms high above the City.

Personally - I'm not very interested in the surrealists. But - undeniably - their influence is all over advertising. Surrealism is a common currency.

Incidentally - people always blame Marcel Duchamp for conceptualism. Fair enough. But worth remembering that he also painted Nude Descending a Staircase .
 
alb said:
Hmm. Carl Andre: The Tate bricks still make sense to me.

Interesting how the " pile of bricks " entered the language during the 1970s as the common shorthand for idiocy in art. Now it's 1990s seedy conceptualism. No comment.
..which is why I said "At least the skill involved in creating the models is immediately apparent.." - I'm not attempting to debase the works of others. I had a looong conversation about this with an art lecturer not long ago, wherein I learnt an awful lot about artistic intent: I do tend to look a lot closer these days. That's not to say that there isn't a strong thread of "Emporer's new clothes" in artistic circles today, it's just not as clear cut as we may believe.
ibid
In the 1950s and early 1960s, conservatives railed against the abstract expressionists. Now that kind of stuff is considered good taste. Tony Hancock made an excellent movie entitled 'The Rebel' (1960) - a parody of modern art :)
A quite brilliant film, I agree entirely - I used to have "Aphrodite at the Watering Hole" as my wallpaper :).
 
We should have a permanent modern art thread. Perhaps you could rename this as - the pile of bricks ... and move it to the culture section.
 
stu neville said:
..which is why I said "At least the skill involved in creating the models is immediately apparent.." - I'm not attempting to debase the works of others. I had a looong conversation about this with an art lecturer not long ago, wherein I learnt an awful lot about artistic intent: I do tend to look a lot closer these days. That's not to say that there isn't a strong thread of "Emporer's new clothes" in artistic circles today, it's just not as clear cut as we may believe.

Yes, there is the recurring problem of the commercialisation of art - an 'art market', etc.. In London for example, people tend to focus on the somewhat wackier side of Turner Prize, but this basically gives more oxgen to the Saatchi brothers publicity machine. So that part of culture tends to get defined by the rich - but that's not exactly new. The same thing has happened in the past.

WRT to the use of Surrealism in advertising, etc. - that tends to be quite conservative in it's use, inspired perhaps by Dali and Magritte (both not very good surrealists IMHO).

As I may have said elsewhere on this board, the problem is that when anything is placed in a museum or gallery, people seem to expect it to have some obvious meaning. 'The Pile of Bricks' thing is a good example. The problem is that galleries very rarely provide any insight into the thinking behind any peice, so it just hangs or sit there with no reference points. At other times, other work is put on show which was perhaps never intended to displayed, perhaps because it was simply an artist experimenting with a few things and what you're seeing is basically a sketch for something else.
 
WRT to the use of Surrealism in advertising, etc. - that tends to be quite conservative in it's use, inspired perhaps by Dali and Magritte (both not very good surrealists IMHO).
Modern advertising is hugely influenced by surrealism. I don't simply mean that specific symbolism is sometimes derivative.

See, for example, the way television and movie adverts are cut and edited. Look, even, at the surreal juxtapositioning of images you will see on TV.

The public understand that kind of filmic language without having to have it explained. They don't need to be told that it comes from surrealism. Because the culture has absorbed surrealism.

In my ****ed up world, incidentally, the adverts are more interesting than many of the programmes.

And what is the collective noun for the people that advertising is aimed at?
 
Hmm, I'm still not convinced that advertisng is hugely influenced by Surrealism. The term tends to get bandied around alot for no adequeate reason. Sure, there may be the odd nod to some aspects, but alot of the time it's using a wide variety of other filmic styles too. A weird idea about what makes up Surrealism may have been absorbed by culture, yes, but it hasn't taken it on board in it's true form. I bet most people think it's based around stuff by people like Dali and Magritte, if asked - which is probably why you see people looking confused at the Tate Modern when watching 'Un Chien Andalou' ;)

As for the collective noun, I believe it's 'punters' :D
 
I'm fairly certain that adverts would look very different if it wasn't for Luis Buñuel. So would pop videos.

Repeat - I am not thinking about the specific symbolism - I am thinking about the sudden juxtapositioning of imagary, in general. Also the dramatic cuts and the fast edits.

I'm absolutely certain that what "most people think" is insignificant, in this context. The people who make adverts know, very well, their art and advertising history. And no coincicence that many influential artists and filmmakers have also worked in the world of advertising.

Meanwhile, the 'punters' are the people who don't know what they know. Isn't that sort of how it works?
 
RE: Vong Phaophanit

Thanks for posting that stonedoggy. I shall be Googling to find out more about him later.

Tate is such a fantastic organisation. I always forget that.
 
Have a look at the Artes Mundi website. There's some good stuff in the exhibition - 's showing in Cardiff, hint hint... ;)
 
I guess part of the problem is that art has pretty much turned full circle - from the manipulation of conventions, through the breaking of concentions, back to the manipulation of new conventions.

Problem is (and it is an enormous problem) breaking convention has become a convention - it had all been done by the 1930s, with a few exception like the extreme minimalism of Rothko and co.

The Dadaists did a thorough job :)
 
Back
Top