81,203 research outputs found
Five (failed) attempts at a feminist revolution
This discussion will draw upon histories, or at least stories, of performance and other transient art practices by women in Toronto from the late 70's to the present. Instances and questions about performance, re-performance, and re-embodiment have special significance for feminist practitioners. Performance art has also had an important effect on how we approach contemporary art, and how performative gestures infuse contemporary institutions.
The unruly bodies of women and performance artists have made work outside, inside alongside, in opposition to and in complete ignorance of the mechanisms and institutions for the collection and exhibition of contemporary art.
The world famous artist-run centre movement of Canada developed in part in order to allow publics to intersect with this work and other new and otherwise marginal practices. Throughout the 80's feminist artists continued to work in anew forms and forge new contexts; the Womens' Cultural Building is an example. Subsequently the archive of the WCB was exhibited, and the construction of this exhibition may be an interesting case study.
I replaced the word ephemeral with the word transient in the title of this discussion because as many times as I have heard performance art referred to as ephemeral, I've never quite believed it. Fairies and wood nymphs are ephemeral, posters, leaflets and flyers may be ephemeral, my car keys are ephemeral – but performance is corporeal "meat joy", and sometimes demanding, and therefore its intersection with an institution is protean
Envers une stratégie de conservation pour oeuvres éphémères: entre le materiel et le conceptuel
This article examines the context in which Joseph Beuys’s work Wirtschaftswerte was created over time by researching the method of production, the meaning of the foodstuffs, and the techniques that the artist used. Draw¬ing on the development of new conservation strategies of modern and contemporary art, where the focal point has shifted from mate¬rial to immaterial aspects, and by introduc¬ing food-preservation techniques into the decision-making process, the article presents the concept of a material and conceptual conservation strategy for ephemeral works of art. The aim of this essay is to reexamine the strategies and methods of traditional art conservation in the light of new strategies that have been used for temporary works of art, and to present a methodology that offers a framework to manage the specific prob¬lems linked to the conservation of ephemeral works of art
Art and money: experience destruction exposure
In no other area of human activity is the relationship between production and money as perverse as in the art world. The peculiarity of this relationship may be responsible for the appreciative failure of much of contemporary art and in particular conceptual art. If value is attached to ‘intrinsic’ qualities of an object it would be hard to justify the high prices attached to contemporary artwork. This however raises interesting questions as to the extent to which it is possible to separate economic from other values in art. There have been numerous attempts to break the link between art and money - Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop experiment, offered participants a guaranteed minimum income to free them from economic pressure. Commencing with Art and Commerce in 1926 Fry explored this relationship in a series of publication. In 1971, the Art Workers’ Coalition produced a statement of demands which asked for a small measure of what Fry had offered artist fifty years earlier. In the 1960s and 70s, there was a proliferation of highly politicized work challenging the art/commerce relationship, focusing on the dematerialisation of the artwork as a decommodification strategy. In this paper I will explore these strategies, concentrating mainly on the work of three artist:- Lygia Clark, whose ephemeral artwork, made of easily available cheap material, questioned notions of value and the interaction between the object, the spectator and the artist: Hans Haacke whose 1971 exhibition highlighting the hidden relationship between the art world and commerce, was cancelled by the Guggenheim for fear of offending the museum’s patrons: and the auto destructive work of Gustav Metzger. I will analyze the success or failure of the strategies employed by these artists in light of the art world’s tendency to turn anything into a commodity
Billy Elliot The Musical: visual representations of working-class masculinity and the all-singing, all-dancing bo[d]y
According to Cynthia Weber, ‘[d]ance is commonly thought of as liberating, transformative, empowering, transgressive, and even as dangerous’. Yet ballet as a masculine activity still remains a suspect phenomenon. This paper will challenge this claim in relation to Billy Elliot the Musical and its critical reception. The transformation of the visual representation of the human body on stage (from
an ephemeral existence to a timeless work of art) will be discussed and analysed vis-a-vis the text and sub-texts of Stephen Daldry’s direction and Peter Darling’s
choreography. The dynamics of working-class masculinity will be contextualised within the framework of the family, the older female, the community, the self and
the act of dancing itself
Fugitive Objects
This paper considers, from a personal perspective, the intersection between decorative arts, craft and sculpture and the opportunities and challenges provided by making ephemeral work, particularly in the context of museums.
There has been a tendency for ceramics to be critically isolated from sculpture and fine art in western cultures in the 20th century, and whilst there is currently a renewed interest in clay as a material within contemporary art, such work is often positioned, collected and theorised from a separate perspective to ceramics viewed in the context of craft. There is much to gain from greater integration of the two, moving away from a linear understanding of ceramics, towards an approach as plastic and three-dimensional as clay itself, and part of a broader understanding of sculpture.
How may ceramics operate as a site of live production, learning, and performance? What are the implications of documentation and the collection of ephemeral works through visual and non-visual media; such as photography, film, re-performance and writing? Materiality, land art, craft theory and museology provide useful in roads to exploring this territory and defining ways in which ceramic sculpture may be understood outside traditions of the artist as lone author, making as a studio practice and the permanence of objects
To Archive or Not to Archive: The Resistant Potential of Digital Poetry
This essay addresses the much discussed problem of archiving digital poetry. Digital media are labile, and several writers of digital poetry are incorporating the media’s ephemerality into their poetics. Rather than rehash arguments that have been taking place within the field of digital media and digital poetics for years, I turn to the field of contemporary art curation and preservation, a field in which curators and archivists are struggling with the very immediate concerns, ethical and otherwise, related to archiving works that are made from ephemeral media. One particular digital poem that has recently broken, has recently become unreadable, is Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia. Memmott composed the poem in 2000, and he incorporated the poem’s inevitable obsolescence into the text of the poem itself. He has since refused to “fix” or “update” the poem, because he contends that that would make it something other than what it was intended to be. Rather, he is choosing to let the poem die because that is what the poem is supposed to do. This essay concludes with a discussion of the political implications of acknowledging the ephemerality of digital media, the resistant potential of the poem when its ephemerality is embraced, and some ways in which archivists can preserve the memory of the poem without necessarily preserving the poem itself
When the image takes over the real: Holography and its potential within acts of visual documentation
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes discusses the capacity of the photographic image to represent “flat death”. Documentation of an event, happening, or time is traditionally reliant on the photographic to determine its ephemeral existence and to secure its legacy within history. However, the traditional photographic document is often unsuitable to capture the real essence and experience of the artwork in situ. The hologram, with its potential to offer a three-dimensional viewpoint, suggests a desirable solution. However, there are issues concerning how this type of photographic document successfully functions within an art context. Attitudes to methods necessary for artistic production, and holography’s place within the process, are responsible for this problem. The seductive qualities of holography may be attributable to any failure that ensues, but, if used precisely, the process can be effective to create a document for ephemeral art. The failures and successes of the hologram to be reliable as a document of experience are discussed in this article, together with a suggestion of how it might undergo a transformation and reactivation to become an artwork itself.
Available in the edited book, 'Holography: a Critical Debate Within Contemporary Visual Culture' by Andrew Pepper.University of Derb
The ephemeral aesthetic of spontaneous design on the streets of São Paulo, Brazil
There are few opportunities when the poor and prosperous can be spoken about with respect to the same, shared cultural experience. And yet, visual culture, and the design process that contributes to its materialisation in specific contexts, offers an opportunity to recognise a socially inclusive activity that reveals similarity rather than difference. This paper celebrates an ephemeral aesthetic that is appreciated by people at different ends of the economic, political and social spectrum. A mutual appreciation for the medium of collage differs only in terms of the environment within which the recycled object is eventually revealed. This paper explores some of these different contexts, and those who recognise and practise this phenomenon in a South American and European context. The conclusion of this speculative and exploratory study is that there is potential to develop this unique medium as an accessible and inclusive visual language, giving voice to those who often do not have the opportunity or the means to speak and be heard. Collage is recognised as a channel that mediates between social exclusion and inclusion when political and economic means have been exhausted. The resulting ephemeral aesthetic is proven to have visual appeal, satisfying low- and high-order human needs.
Keywords:
Bricolage; Ephemeral Aesthetic; Urban Poor; Human Need; Graphic Design</p
Ephemera in the art library
Art libraries acquire a large amount of ephemeral material which creates a unique resource on the history of contemporary art. Librarians have to decide what should be retained, how it should be stored, and how the material can best be accessed. Increasingly there is pressure to digitise in order to promote collections, but how effective this process is in terms of ephemeral material remains a real question. A survey of prominent collections in London and New York has helped to inform future plans for the ephemera held by the library at Chelsea College of Art & Design
Ephemeral art: telling stories to the dead
Abstract: The endurance of the form of storytelling and the compulsion to tell them suggests that telling stories is not merely an entertainment, an optional extra which we can chose to engage with or not, but a fundamental aspect of being. We tell stories to construct and maintain our world. When our sense of reality is damaged through traumatic experiences we attempt to repair our relationship with the world through the repeated telling of our stories. These stories are not just a means of telling but also an attempt to understand. Stories are performed and performative; they do not leave us unchanged but can in fact motivate us to act. They are not merely about things that have happened, but are about significant events that change us. Through our stories we demonstrate that we have not only had experiences but that those experiences have become part of one’s knowledge.
In this essay O’ Neill will explore the potential of objects to tell a story, the object that is both the subject of the story and the form of telling. Two ephemeral art works will be considered: Domain of Formlessness (2006) by British artist Alec Shepley and Time and Mrs Tiber (1977) by Canadian artist Liz Magor. Both works embody the process of decay and tell a story of existence overshadowed by the knowledge of certain death and the telling of the story as a means of confronting that knowledge. The ephemeral art object tells a story in circumstances when there are no words, when we have nothing left to say
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