Working on my essay @ Tashkeel's library, Dubai
Monday, March 3, 2014
Read an essay on the evolution of story telling which discussed two questions.The first question is whether storytelling is an adaptation in the evolution of human history and secondly how storytelling is changing with the change in culture and technology.
Storytelling is a distinctive human trait .We love to tell stories whether it is history, fiction, mythology, dreams, daydreams but does storytelling give us a certain evolutionary advantage?or is it like consuming sugar a evolutionary accident and just a maladaptive practice that serves no purpose
The lesson here is that even if a trait is maladaptive now, it might once have had an adaptive function. It might have given our ancestors an evolutionary edge, so to speak. Which makes sense, because biological evolution is a slow process, whereas changes in human lifestyle can happen quite rapidly, as we know from the last few hundred years.
So, when we think about the human habit of telling stories, we need to ask whether it evolved because it gave our ancestors an evolutionary edge, and if so, whether it's still adapative in our modern, technological world. We also shouldn’t rule out the possibility that it’s just an evolutionary byproduct with no particular purpose at all. But let’s at least consider some possible evolutionary advantages storytelling might bring us.
Here’s one idea: From the Pleistocene to the Information Age, human life has always been full of stress and strain. These days we’re more worried about paying bills and meeting deadlines than we are about getting eaten by a tiger, so the causes of our stress may be quite different, but the fact that life can be stressful remains the same. Maybe the function of stories is to give us a way to avoid our troubles by entering imaginary worlds. Stories engage us, they distract us, and they entertain us. Getting lost in a good story is a great way to relax and escape reality.
"I am interested in a certain type of narrative.Interested in moments that are insubstantial to be a grand narrative,those that are incidental and unplanned.I am interested in fragmentary events or moments,parts of biographies that are understood or not.Interested in the gaps, moments that are in between the main narrative.There is a relationship between materiality and meaningfulness.How discrepancies can open meanings, precarious moments that sustain an idea and help me see past the main narrative.Its presence is about the absence."
Fraser Stables, Associate Professor Smith College, USA
Sunday, March 2, 2014
A closer look at POSTMODERN STORYTELLING (Eleanor Heartney,Art & Today)
Unlike story telling in the past(History Painting) which focused on portraying dramatic, newsworthy events, postmodern storytelling involves the creation of alternative universes or the intimate inspection of everyday mundane life using peripheral characters.The point is to not so much the story itself but how it is told.
The various conventions and techniques used by artists are-:
1. An artwork comprising of a collage of disparate images .These images might be made by different hands and might use vaguely familiar genres like porn centerfolds, cartoons, advertising , fashion photos, film noir, Renaissance portrait paintings etc.Films use other methods like starting one or more genres say the Western or horror film but then shuffling the genres.
There is always something skewed,defamiliarizing, incomplete about this imitation.There is no evident narrative objective from any specific source.The artist is not setting out to convey a repository of ideas but is making an open ended statement.
Artists David Salle, Cindy Sherman,Alex Katz
2.Incomplete,disjointed stories in which there is a sense of inhorence. Dreamlike images or staged photographs that have impossible fictional events.The viewer is left to fill in the story, to imagine what happened before each frame and what might happen next.These stories be be in the form of a film.
Isaac Julien ,Gregory Crewdson, Anna Gaskell
3. Films that have multiple sections,produced or released out of order or different segments screened in multiple screens to make them seem totally out of context.
Artist Mathew Barney
4. Films using inconclusive, looped videos which do not end but go back to the beginning.
Artist Rodney Graham
5.Films or videos which start with a realistic journalistic style footage interspersed with strange happenings which render the footage completely false, fictional or staged.
6.Multiple versions of the same narrative filmed or performed live.
Artists Catherine Sullivan,Stan Douglas, Pierre Huyghe
7.Unreliable narrators undermine the authorship of the story and severe the link between surface perceptions and inner realities.
Artists Eija Lisa Ahtila, Nedko Solakov, Ilya Kabakov
8.Intimate ,candid pictures that radically breakdown the barriers between the artist and the subject to the point of being a voyeur, a stalker, a photo terrorist.
Artists Nan Goldin,Sophie Calle,Tina Barney
9.Making the audience an important part of the work....makes other people create their own narrative using performance
Artists Matthew Richie, Janet Cardiff
Thursday,20 February, 2014
Finally found the answer to the question "What is Contemporary Art?"My Eureka moment!!The answer was a very satisfactory one from ART 21's lecture series.
DEFINITION-:Contemporary art is the work of artists in the 21st century.It mirrors contemporary culture and society,also provides the general audience a rich resource through which to consider current ideas and rethink the familiar.The work of contemporary artists is a dynamic combination of materials used,methods, concepts,subjects that challenge traditional boundaries and defy easy definition.Diverse and eclectic , contemporary art is distinguished by the very lack of a uniform organizing principle,ideology or ism.It gives voice to the varied and changing cultural landscape of identity, values and beliefs.
Contemporary Art is
- GLOBALLY INFLUENCED
- CULTURALLY DIVERSE
- TECHNOLOGICALLY ADVANCED
Contemporary Art
- is referenced from the past,building on timeless themes, critiquing outmoded models, researching forgotten histories or borrowing traditional methods and techniques to realize new ideas.
- uses many different methods and processes,in isolation or in collaboration with other artists, assistants, specialists, fabricators or audiences
- can serve as a form of critique reframing ,redefining or disrupting traditional ideas and expectations about art or society such as beauty,originality,representation and authority.
- often references elements from multiple disciplines and sources-pop culture, mass media, humanities (literature,intellectual history,natural history,art history) and fine art, architecture, craft
- can unfold overtime -can be process based (performative,collaborative,spontaneous),experiential or interactive (video,multimedia web based ) or it can respond to environment (public art, environmental art)
- can exist outside traditional exhibition forums public spaces, site specific locations, non art sites and is often presented in innovative ways (installation, performance, online events or as a documentation of an important work)
- blurs boundaries between art and everyday life often an artwork will purposefully intersect with an environment such as home,work, school,politics and entertainment.
- the audience plays a very important role in the art work experiencing it, interpreting it and responding to it
On the basis of the above definition,how would I place my art in the contemporary context?
Yes my art falls under the umbrella of contemporary art because it references elements from multiple disciplines and sources(natural history, literature, architecture) and is referenced from the past using techniques like ceramics, papercut to construct new ideas.
Storytelling in Contemporary Art
The stories of contemporary artists are extremely diverse in both subject and intent.Like History Painters of old,today's artists may take on grand subjects drawn from history and mythology even to the extent of creating whole alternate universes.Or may put a microscope on the intimacies of everyday life.Some narrative paintings and sculptures are instructive or designated to impart moral or ethical judgements.Others offer nothing more than pleasurable diversions like cheery Hollywood films.In short,today's narrative artists create stories out of personal experiences ,history,past art and literature,popular culture,fantasy or anything else they might dream up.
The narrative has returned with a postmodern difference.Just as representation in contemporary art is full of knowing allusions to its own artificiality so too have artistic narratives become self conscious,subtly signaling the viewer that the stories they tell may be biased,incomplete or completely fictional.
Art critic Craig Owens describes the postmodern version of the narrative as a form of allegory.Allegory describes a work in which characters or events symbolically represent a deeper meaning.Owens expands this definition,incorporating the notion of the "palimpsest",which allows for infinite layering of meaning and recognizes the symbolic relationships are not simply one on one"In allegorical structure,then,one text is read through another,however fragmentary,intermittent or chaotic their relationship maybe,the paradigm for allegorical work is thus the "palimpsest"." As allegorical work's link to its source has been severed.Emptied of original meanings,Owens allegory hangs by a thread-the new image or narrative has no direct relationship to its original source.
Drawing on film and literature,literary critic Fredric Jameson invokes the idea of "pastiche" as a governing principle of the postmodern narrative,distinguishing it from old fashioned parody in its lack of clear referent.Parody he argues is a mocking imitation of the original style that is immediately identifiable."Pastiche" is also an imitation but its source is less obvious and its purpose less evident. It suggests something that seems familiar but no longer has a living presence in our lives.
French literary critic Barthes acknowledging the apparent illegibility of the contemporary narrative, he finds a new principle of order by turning not to the creators intentions or the works relationship to some concrete reality but to the actions of the receiver.Barthes encourages us to consider the text as a web of ideas ,images,written passages that preexist the author and form the raw material for any new work of art..He describes the text as "multi dimensional space in which a variety of writings,none of them original,blend and clash.The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture."Conceived in this way,no work of art or literature has a real author,if by that we mean a privileged figure who rises above this chaotic mix to create something new.Whatever sense of coherence an artwork possesses comes not from the author but from the reader who engages with it and activates it"
These theories and tendencies emerge in the work of a range of contemporary artists who deliberately invoke the narrative tradition while undermining it at the same time.Artists tend to borrow from a number of genres including soft porn magazines, cartoons, advertising, paint by number pictures, needlepoint designs, existing famous paintings, Hollywood scenes, television footage of real life events etc.
Eleanor Heartney,ART & TODAY , Art & Narrative
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