British artist David Hockney discusses the nature of photography as an artistic medium and the role it plays in his artistic practice. BBC documentary, 2010
Tag Archives: ART
NUNO SOUSA VIEIRA
In sculptures made out of an array of discarded factory materials and old office furniture, the Portuguese artist Nuno Sousa Vieira confronts opposites: consumption and usefulness versus refuse and obsolescence; the mass-produced versus the handmade; function over form versus form over function. Sousa Vieira renders utilitarian materials useless, while referencing their former functions and investing them with new life as sculptural works. Utilitarian objects are repurposed and recycled into poetic, deconstructed geometric forms which subvert yet still refer to their original functional forms and milieus. The transformed objects, devoid of original purpose, often are placed within their original “useful” environments, highlighting the transgressional aspect of their transformations.
“The media daily bombs us with images of ruin and large scale human and urban devastation. The idea of ruin interests me but not its aestheticization or displacement into a sheltered context, be it the exhibition or the comfortable screening in front of our sofas. What interests and concerns me is to recuperate and understand how we can use that physical and symbolic material without causing more waste, re-edifying it, raising it from its ashes. In this context, I choose objects developed for human use like tables, chairs, typewriters, or architecture and construction materials – doors, windows or floor pavement. I consider them raw materials for my sculptures. Although these objects are capable of being used, they were abandoned when the factory shut down. What I want is to get them reintroduced at a visible level. In my practice I replicate industrial procedures because, in my studio as in the factory, the process starts by thinking and experimenting the context – the work space.”
Vieira’s studio is located within an abandoned industrial building in Lisbon, a location filled with items for “relocation and reintegration into a platform of discussion and visibility within the art sphere.”
“The objects I have been developing have an address, Plásticos SIMALA, S.A., Estrada dos Pousos, Pousos, 2410 Leiria, Portugal, and that is the place where they can fully reach their meaningfulness. The elements intervened come from an industrial structure which is now my studio and this is where, along with their fellow objects, that they find their measure and fitting. That space is doomed to disappearance because urban developed so predicted but there is, on my part, an attempt to save and inscribe that place on the map of my artistic practice. On the other hand, this place allows me to achieve an awareness of issues and situations paralleled in our daily lives, such as ruin and abandon. What interests me is not an “aesthetisation” of each one of them but their relocation and reintegration into a platform of discussion and visibility within the art sphere.”
Vieira trained at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon University, where he obtained a master’s degree in Painting and studied for a doctorate. Nuno Sousa Vieira has had a multidisciplinary international career and includes in his projects drawing, sculpture, and the installation of objects he finds.
An interview with Vieira, originally published in Juliet magazine, can be found here.
Nuno Sousa Vieira was born in Leiria (Portugal), in 1971. He currently lives and works between Leiria and Lisbon (Portugal). http://www.nunosousavieira.com/
Sources:
Galerie Emmanuel Herve, Paris
Drawing Room, Madrid, Feb 2018
João Silvério, notes for exhibition at Empty Cube, Lisbon
October 2008
Vik Muniz: Equivalents, an artist profile by MoMa
“When you look at a picture with a certain degree of ambiguity, your perception heightens it,” explains artist Vik Muniz in this short film about the inspiration behind his “Equivalents” series.
THOMAS NOZKOWSKI
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” I have never thought of myself as a geometric painter, but I have always thought of myself as an improviser. The geometry in my work has increased over the years and I’m not completely sure why this is so. It isn’t by conscious intent, I can assure you. Improvisation, however, is essential to my work. I want my ideas to be located at the tip of my brush. I want my materials to talk back to me. I want to be surprised.”
“Every artist has little rules or devices that enables them to move a painting forward. I’m not thinking of great and meaningful exercises of desire, but simple, quotidian, almost mechanical procedures. I mean, one of the strategies that I’ve always used in different permutations is to, as a first step, go to the opposite of what the logical move would be. So if a painting would seem to have a source that is anthropomorphic or organic, you know, start geometrically. If a painting has a source in a city and architecture in the urban, let’s do it with curves and juicy paint running all over the place. And this is not out of perversity, but out of a desire to challenge any kind of received wisdom. In other words, if a city has to be geometric, well, okay, let it prove itself, let it become geometric in the process, in the procedure of thinking about these things. This interests me—looking for the core of things. What is essential? What is at the bottom of it?”
-Thomas Nozkowski, in conversation with John Yau, just prior to his exhibition at The Pace Gallery, NYC, The Brooklyn Rail, November 5, 2010
PIETER HUGO AND NIGERIA’S HYENA HANDLERS: PORTRAITS OF THE GADAWAN KURA
“These photographs came about after a friend emailed me an image taken on a cellphone through a car window in Lagos, Nigeria, which depicted a group of men walking down the street with a hyena in chains. A few days later I saw the image reproduced in a South African newspaper with the caption ‘The Streets of Lagos’. Nigerian newspapers reported that these men were bank robbers, bodyguards, drug dealers, debt collectors. Myths surrounded them. The image captivated me.” -Pieter Hugo
Pieter Hugo first learned of Nigeria’s Gadawan Kura, or hyena handlers, in 2003 when he received an image taken on a cell phone camera depicting several of these men with their beasts in the streets of Lagos. A newspaper in Hugo’s native South Africa published a similar image and identified the men as debt collectors, drug dealers, and thieves who enlisted hyenas as muscle in support of their criminal activities. With the help of friends in Nigeria, Hugo found the group in a shantytown outside of the capital, Abuja. They were not necessarily criminals, but rather what Hugo describes in an artist’s statement as “itinerant minstrels… a group of men, a little girl, three hyenas, four monkeys and a few rock pythons,” who subsist by staging performances and selling traditional medicine. Hugo traveled with the group for weeks at a time over the course of two years, taking a series of portraits of the men posing with their animals.
Much of Hugo’s work documents life on the peripheries of African societies, addressing the complex political realities of race and identity through the conventions of portraiture. The circumscribed scope of the genre forces an engagement on the level of the individual, an approach that skirts both sentimentality and the journalistic impulse to explain. He has photographed inhabitants of border towns and civil war zones, farm workers, and migrants, in each case rendering social flux and marginalization with reference to the human face and figure.
In Hugo’s series on the Gadawan Kura, entitled “The Hyena and Other Men,” the subjects are also animals. The titles of the photographs include the names of both the humans and animals depicted along with a reference to the various cities in Nigeria where the images where taken. These double portraits describe a trans-species relationship unfolding in a setting of poverty and uncontrolled urbanization. They constitute a stark tableau of life on the margins, but also raise questions of how and to what extent this life can be something shared by human and non-human subjects.
– Will Smith, The Hyena And Other Men, Museomagazine.com
MICKALENE THOMAS interviewed by Alexander Benrimon, artnet, 2013
Video Notes:
Brooklyn-based Mickalene Thomas, well known for her rhinestone, enamel, and acrylic paintings, as well as her Blaxploitation-style portraits of black women, explores modern notions of beauty and sexuality, drawing heavily from pop culture and Pop Art. She received her BFA from the Pratt Institute in 2000, and earned an MFA from Yale University in 2002. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, including at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, and The Renaissance Society in Chicago. The artist famously painted the first individual portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama, which was shown at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. During the interview, Thomas discusses her experiences as an art student, how interiors factor into her works, how being a mother has affected her, and her various recent projects, such as her mural at the Barclays Center.
ANDY WARHOL: THE COMPLETE PICTURE, documentary, 2002, 2hours 57min
Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture is director Chris Rodley’s three-part documentary series originally broadcast on Channel 4 in the U.K. The program profiles the life and career of pop artist Andy Warhol, starting with his early days as an advertising designer to his death in 1987. Narrated by Julian Rhind-Tutt.
LAWRENCE WEINER:: THE MEANS TO ANSWER QUESTIONS, interview, Louisiana Channel, 13 min.
A revealing and informative interview with Lawrence Weiner. A seminal figure in the post-minimalist conceptual art of the 60’s, Weiner’s art practice spans over 50 years.
Jesper Bundgaard’s interview with the legendary conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner discusses the connection between cruelty, hierarchy and rationality. The artist must ask questions past ordinary logic, he says.
In this interview Weiner philosophises on how the artist can present things people might not have noticed. Art is not meant to answer questions, but rather to ask them. Art is about things you don’t know. Art is a means to answer questions. The artist must go beyond logic and risk madness, he explains: “You have to re-adapt your own logic just to be able to communicate with somebody else.” Continue reading LAWRENCE WEINER:: THE MEANS TO ANSWER QUESTIONS, interview, Louisiana Channel, 13 min.
FRANK STELLA :: WOLFEBORO I , 1966
Wolfeboro I is a 1966 abstract painting by Frank Stella. It is currently in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
ALEX COUWENBERG: SESSIONS: THE MAKING OF LA FONDA, documentary, 20min.
A very well-made and engaging mini-documentary on the working process of Alex Couwenberg. Continue reading ALEX COUWENBERG: SESSIONS: THE MAKING OF LA FONDA, documentary, 20min.
The Incubator 