Lecture 4. 25th February - Body Art

In this lecture we looked at Body Art, how the body is a place for art and how different cultures modify their bodies using tattooing procedures, and scarification. Tattooing of the skin has been around for many years and is used by different cultures to decorate the body but is also used to distinguish members of tribes or gangs by the different markings on their skin. In Africa, scarification is a mark of coming of age, and in The Yakusa, the Japanese mafia, members would have a tattoo to distinguish them as people of the gang.
Body Painting is also an art form, for example Henna tattoos are semi permanent tattoos, the Henna stains the skin a brown colour and can be painted on the skin to create different patterns.
Body Reshaping is also an extreme form of Body Art, this is where silicone implants are inserted into different parts of the face or body in order to reshape it, Orlan is a very famous artist who has used her own body to display this, by having pieces of silicone implanted into her face, and showing this to her audience by documenting it, she was also awake for these procedures.
Dr Gunther Von Hagens is a very controversial artist because he embalms bodies which have been left to medical science and has stripped them of their skin and shown the public their insides, he preserves these bodies by replacing the bodily fluids with plastics which means the bodies do not decompose and can be displayed for long periods of time. His work is controversial because these bodies are displayed in different positions which may be percieved as disrespectful but then they can be very interesting to doctors or students studying the body, because they can look at the body in much closer detail.
Performance artists also use their body as art, Orlan is one example, by recording her operations. Marina Abromovic is another performance artist, she liked playing with the past and present, in one of her works called Rhythm 10, where she made use of 10 knives and 2 tape recorders and played the game where she stabbed the area between her splayed finger, going back and forht through each space, and each time she cut herself she would pick up a new knife and start again. After she had cut herslef 10 times she would stop the tape and listen to her reactions to being cut and would then attempt to recreate this again and by recording it again.

Lecture 6. - 11th March - Time-based Art, Guerilla Art and Wearable Technologies.

In this lecture we spoke about different types of Time-Based Art, Guerilla Art and Wearable Technologies. we looked at examples of these and the body is related to theses fields in art. I was interested to find that Andy Goldsworthys work was time based, I really like his work, as its natural and ephemeral. I have been to see some photographs of his work before, and I've always found it interesting. I also found that time based art is not a new thing and that artists have been creating it for many years, like Muybridge who created multiple photographs depicting movement back in 1887. We also looked at Blast Theory which relates to all three of these themes, it involves playing a game, making a statement and people actually wearing the technology that allows you to play the game, it involves a group of people wearing a GPS system which tracks their movement around a city. You play the game on your computer, watching your chosen player move around the city while it looks for other players. We also looked at Guerilla Art (Activist Art/Political Art/Street Art) I liked how there were different forms of this Art theme, in contrast, Banksy with his graffiti art and Barbera Kruger with her Graphics, which reflect on Advertising and Commercialisation.
Other types of this art work may include :
To hack into a popular website and change certain things.
Library Books (to leave things in there)
Spray Paint/Stencil
Chalk Pavement
Fly Posters
T-Shirt Giveaway
Then we looked at Post-Modernism and how artists take something from the past and change it to become modern, taking something and giving it a new meaning. Art is for everyone, the wider audience and that its accesible to everyone. We then looked at Wearable technologies and how technology is moving forward rapidly, and we will soon be wearing computers into the fabric we wear and how there are 3 stages of technology. Ubiquitous Computing, which is the 3rd stage which means the calm stage of technology, where the technology receeds into the background of our lives and is not a massive part of our lives.
I'm not sure how these different Art form influence my work as such, but they do open my eyes to the different types of Art around and how I could take elements of these artists work and make it my own.

Lecture 5. - 4th March - Land Art, Earth Art and Environmental Art

In this lecture we were intorduced to the art movement known as Land Art, Earth Art and Environmental Art. We looked at how the body interacts with these art forms and one aspect of it is that the public can only really see these art forms from the air, and many people do not have access to this mode of transport and cannot really appreciate these works unless they see photographs of them which may not be as effective or may not impact the viewer as much as if it was seen in the real setting. I think this lecture was a real eye opener, I had heard of Land Art before and only really related it to the works of Andy Goldsworthy and his ethermeral pieces, where as in this lecture I saw how Lancelot "Capability" Brown was called an artist of the land because he change lanscapes to make them "more natural", which I didnt think was classed as some sort of art form but it makes sense now, he was changing the landscape to make it maybe more beautiful, by creating view points in which to stand from and look at the view and to see the vast land below. We looked at a lot of different types of land art and the one that interested me most out of all of them I think are the Nazca Lines, in Peru, i thought it was amazing how they could only be seen from the sky and were straight lines and shapes all over this plateau. From this lecture I learnt that there is a lot more to Land Art than Andy Goldsworthy (even though i like his works). I'm not sure how Land Art could link to my work, maybe the straight lines of the Nazca Lines could be incorporated as lines of stitch in my work, i'm not really sure but it bears thinking about.