PETER STUPPLES

Room 102

peter.stupples@op.ac.nz

Email for appointment

Always happy to talk to any student – but email first

Class timesVA602001

Lecture Wednesday 9.00-10.30

Tutorial 10.40-11.30

You need…A green course book for notes on assessment

To be able to use Moodle

All lecture Powerpoints, all tutorial reading texts, all assessment details are on Moodle as well

The course SMS Code is VA602001

All assessment tasks are submitted to me through Moodle drop box

If you have problems with Moodle go to http://moodle.op.ac.nz/mod/book/view.php?id=6

First assignment due

Assignment 1: Illustrated written assignment: ‘My Identities’, 750 words

15 March 4 pm

Send through Moodle drop box

Help with Moodle? http://moodle.op.ac.nz/mod/book/view.php?id=6&chapterid=12

Anna Maria Maiolino. Desde A até M (From A to M), from the series Mapas Mentais

(Mental Maps). 1972–99. Thread, synthetic polymer paint, ink, transfer type, and

pencil on paper, 49.8 x 49.5. The Museum of Modern Art

http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/209/2063

A reminder –don’t forget drawing

Audio-ink:

Identity 2Portraying the Self

Ema Tavola

http://www.flickr.com/photos/colourmefiji/2881369347/

Subtitle‘An HomageToAotearoa’

This link has flikr images of other works by Ema Tavola and from VASU: Pacific omen of Power

Dürer

18, 20, 22, 29

Malevich, Self-Portrait, 1910

Frida Kahlo, Self-portrait with Thorn

Necklace and Hummingbird,

1940, University of Texas at Austin

Self-Portrait dedicated to Dr Eloesser, 1940

http://www.fridakahlofans.com/c0350.html Milagros are in the form of the

part of the human body a person wants to be healed, placed on altar of the Saint they pray to.

http://www.fridakahlofans.com/c0360.html

Lois White, Ode to Autumn, 1945

Oil on board 595 x 396 Private Collection, Auckland.

Self-portrait as allegory

Robert Arneson

Giddens 1: The Self as a Reflexive Project

We are not what we are, but what we make of ourselves. (Which becomes ourselves)

Building/rebuilding a coherent and rewarding sense of identity (but… unpack those words ‘coherent’ and ‘rewarding’)

From Anthony Giddens, ‘The Trajectory of the Self’, in Identity: A Reader (London: Sage, 2007), pp. 248-266

What we are ?

What have we made of ourselves?

Reflexivity‘Art, together with other socially transformational forces, may try to initiate social change, or be used to reinforce social cohesion, to mark a perceived heritage. At the same time art is itself altered by the very social changes or cohesion it is, in part, responsible for setting in motion or maintaining in active discourse. Perhaps we may speak of a mutuality of social and artistic interactions. Artists are under the influence of social structures and developments at the same time as they are trying to influence them.’ Stupples

Things to Think About

How might you create an image of ‘What you are’, ‘What you have made of yourself’, ‘What art is’, ‘What art has made of itself’

‘But what about altermodernism?’

Putting ourselves in (an altermodern) contextNicolas Bourriaud, 2009 Altermodern

POSTMODERNISM IS DEADA new modernity is emerging, reconfigured to an age of globalisation – understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodern culture

Increased communication, travel and migration are affecting the way we live

Our daily lives consist of journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe

Multiculturalism and identity is being overtaken by creolisation: Artists are now starting from a globalised state of culture

This new universalism is based on translations, subtitling and generalised dubbing

Today’s art explores the bonds that text and image, time and space, weave between themselves

Artists are responding to a new globalised perception. They traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs and create new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication

Remember – ‘nomadism’. http://www2.tate.org.uk/altermodern/explore.shtm

Laura Cumming The Observer, Sunday 8

February 2009 Altermodernism, if I understand it, is international art that never quite touches downbut keeps on moving through places and ideas,made by artists connected across the globerather than grouped around any central hubsuch as New York or London. You might take theworldwide web as a model and think in terms ofhyperlinks, continuous updates and culturalhybrids. It is most definitely postcolonial,transitional and to some extent provisional, butwhat it is not, …, is a movement.

Let’s get the genealogy clear

The Modernist Trajectory – Modern Art releases the mind and hand from the conventions of the past Academism

Modernisation equals progress

But the 20th century – that of Modernism/Modernisation - was a disaster

Postmodernism rejects the binaries of Modernism but is still ‘progressive’

Postmodernism is in the minds of a few when the world is hell bent on ‘development’, a development that is destroying the planet

Not Postmodernism but Altermodernism – what we are

Franz Ackermann, Gateway-Getaway, 2008-09

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/franz_ackermann.htm

Micah White http://www.adbusters.org

/magazine/88/birth-of-altermodern.html

‘And now, entering a new era of humanity where postmodernity is slipping into altermodernity, we find that the binaries we rejected are not only blurring but finally collapsing. Unable to say with any certainty what is real or virtual, human or animal, organic or genetically modified, some wish to resuscitate again, but this time with nostalgia, the failed antimodern project of shattering distinctions. While the chorus – composed now of cyberpunks and activists joined by capitalists and technocrats – rejoices in the indistinguishable difference between online and offline, organic and synthetic, man and machine, the most crucial distinction of all – that between resistance and complicity – is collapsing as well. Unless we can discover a way to critique the system without furthering the system, we shall be lost.’

ADBUSTERS

Giddens 2:

‘The past forms a trajectory of development from the past to the anticipated future’ (but isn’t that Modernism and Postmodernism? Where has that positive outlook gone? Does the ‘alter’ hide a fear/a confusion/or bravely look at a reality?)

Remember Benjamin’s take on Klee’s Angelus NovusWhy does everybody

(everybody?) read Benjamin now and his take on Angelus

Novus?)

Think…

How does the past act as a creative trajectory for your past…and anticipated future?

Or are you entirely in the present?

Self?

Giddens 3: The reflexivity of the self is continuous

and all pervasive

Giddens 4: Self-identity

Coherent

Presumes a narrative

‘Like any other formalised narrative, it is something that has to be worked at, and calls for creative input as a matter of course’

Chuck Close

Mark (1978 - 1979), acrylic on canvas. took fourteen months to complete, was constructed from a series of airbrushed layers that imitated CMYK colour printing.

Chuck Close

Close suffers from Prosopagnosis, also known as face blindness, in which he is unable to recognize faces.1988 also paralysed from neck down.

Giddens: 5: Holding a Dialogue with Time

durée – on-going time

Longue durée – the long term

As if it were

the last time 2009

‘And this is precisely what you do, you send them an email,download a track to your phone/mp3, get a map to where to go, get a time and syncronize your clock with them. Don't hear the track before you go, it spoils things (they say).

You show up at the place in the map, at the time they tell you, with the track and a partner (I did it without partner). The performance starts at the hour, through your MP3, the music and voice narrating what is happening on the street, and then gradually you have a place in the performance itself.’

As If It Were The Last Time

‘As if it were the last time’ by Duncan Speakman, uses the concept of the subtlemob.

“Putting on a pair of headphones you find yourself immersed in the cinema of everyday life. As the soundtrack swells, people in the crowd around you re-enact the social world of today. Sometimes you’re just drifting and watching, sometimes you’re creating the scenes yourself. This is no requiem, this a celebratory slow dance, a chance to savour the world you live in.” Duncan Speakman

altermodern.blogspot.com

As If it Were the Last Time

Re-telling space, time and participation

‘What the performance did, and did so beautifully well, is that it gave its participants a narrative. Furthermore, it gave the participants the possibility of re-narrating the event, among themselves, through twitter, in the videos, through blogs and so on. In that sense for me it fulfilled some of the altermodern features very well. I was impressed by some of the comments, they were very reflexive, intelligently articulated, felt, and involved. …, it was good for the streets, the urbanity of our lives.’

‘Three altermodern features: the atomisation of emotional experiences, the performance impact on 'time' itself, and the re-narrativisation of the stories met also the transformance of space, a theme that I feel, altermodernity is exploring further and further as it moves on.’

Intensity Duration

For Henri Bergson duration is not an objective mathematical unit

How do we experience ourselves through/in time?

How do we see the self through time?

How can we express these feelings/senses creatively?

Giddens 6:

‘The reflexivity of the self extends to the body, where the body…is part of an action system rather than merely a passive body.’

Jenny Saville, Torso 22004, oil on canvas

360 x 294 cm

Jenny SavilleTrace 1993-94 Oil on canvas 213.5 x 165 cm, Plan 1993 Oil on canvas 274

x 213.5 cm  

Jenny Saville,Shift 1996-97 Oil on canvas 330.2 x

330.2 cm

Jenny Saville‘I have to really work at the tension between getting the paint to have the sensory quality that I want and be constructive in terms of building the form of a stomach, for example, or creating the inner crevice of a thigh. The more I do it, the more the space between abstraction and figuration becomes interesting. I want a painting realism. I try to consider the pace of a painting, of active and quiet areas. Listening to music helps a lot, especially music where there’s a hard sound and then soft breathable passages. In my earlier work my marks were less varied. I think of each mark or area as having the possibility of carrying a sensation.’

Lucian Freud  - Self-

Portrait, Naked Man with his Friend 1978-80, 537 × 468

Lucian Freud died in2011 aged 88. There was a retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, London in 2012. http://lakhimich.blogspot.co.nz/2012/04/lucian-freud-portraits-review-of.html

‘JUST WHO does Lucian Freud think he is? A bit of a devil, on the evidence of his most recent self-portrait. Painter Working, Reflection is Freud turning the tables on Freud: the observer observed; the painter of nudes painted in the nude. It is not a pretty sight. Freud looking at his own reflection sees a pallid satyr getting on in years, palette in one hand, palette knife in the other. Self-observation is tinged with self-mockery. Painting himself, the painter acknowledges his own mortality. Under the glare of an electric lightbulb in a barely furnished interior he looks himself in the eye.’

Giddens 7

The role of art as a self-actualising agent

Self-actualisation is understood in terms of balance between opportunity and risk.

the tendency to actualize, as much as possible, [the organism's] individual capacities

Self-actualisation and art – limits?

Do these ideas apply to all fields of art – painting, sculpture, printmaking, textiles, jewellery, ceramics, photography, the electronic media?

Wouter Dam

Giddens 8The moral thread of self-actualisation – authenticity – being true to one’s self

‘One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again.’ Rodchenko

Giddens 9Life course – a series

of passages

Picasso – Self-Portraits

1896, 1901, 1972

Giddens 10Identity – internally

referential/keeping the integrity

but seeing the range

and change

EmaTavola

Anna Maria Maiolino. Desde A até M (From A to M), from the series Mapas Mentais

(Mental Maps). 1972–99. Thread, synthetic polymer paint, ink, transfer type, and

pencil on paper, 49.8 x 49.5. The Museum of Modern Art