Wednesday 19 September 2012

Andrei Costache

Animal Safari
LOOKOUT ALDEBURGH

20 October to 21 October 2012

12 noon to 6pm daily

Opening View: Saturday, 20 October, 12 – 18 pm

Open to public - admission free



For more information please contact caroline@carolinewiseman.com

LOOKOUT/31 Craig Path/Aldeburgh/Suffolk/ IP15 5BS
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7622 2500 / + 44 1728 452754

Please click here for the event page on Caroline Wiseman Modern And Contemporary


Research Study
‘In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.’
                                                                                                                     Ernst Fischer

‘Animal Safari’ is a research study for my summer project at University Campus Suffolk, consisting of three 6 foot square paintings concentrated on the idea of human behavior being evaluated with animal characteristics. The perspectives of childlike characters depicting real life stories conclude the triptych. My summer project evolved from my childhood memories painting the walls of my bedroom with Super Mario and Turtle Ninja figures. And now I have come to realize that my actions do not differ from what I was doing back then. Although I experiment a little more, juggling with science, it seemed to be a perfect occasion to take a closer look at what I was doing. It is incredible how a bit of school research has opened my mind widely and made me focus more precisely on where I am heading with my practice in art. The triptych which I made is called ‘Animal Safari’ and represents the jungle of emotions that I felt during summer. The title is inspired by LA’ rapper Tyler the Creator lyric ‘Animal Safari/ If I offend you I’m sorry’ from the song Tron Cat.

I believe art in its own right is a coral absorbing the world. There may be a decaying world or there may be a world that is changing in its complexity. What an artist can contain inside are dreams and landscapes of the changing world from where a different reality is pushed to extremes. The record of what is produced may be images of dangerous scenes. The images transfer moods of calm introspection to horrible wars of the inner self. Van Gogh had his ear chopped off by inner demons or so some people say. There are demons, evils that itch and twist you around and make the brush go daisy on the canvas, and then you feel the universe is transparent in front of you, and then it turns into something good. I am talking about emotions which present alternative ways of making art. Every artist is different has a different life and so it has come that he produces a different art throughout history. Exploiting boundary regions between and across various existing forms of painting, I am trying to resume in a contemporary way my actions in art.

The knowledge connecting man and nature, human behavior and animal instincts, theory of systems and information in a narrow sense but a philosophy of life which inspires me continually to render an insight of the near future. The technological aspect of evolution may inflict the path of things to come so does the art intended to emphasize the things that are already there. The issues of the day, love, war and poverty as put and densely explained in Christopher Hitchens book ‘Love, poverty and war’ are such a cut view of the world and need even more a brief recapitulation, that I will try to stage my theoretical analysis of art becoming what it is today looking through the above three set elements in my life although not referencing them directly.  I am exploring the arena of making art counterbalancing to the stream of consciousness, and what goes on in the mind while creating such works, perpetrating the moment of creation and trying to describe the part that is unseen.

The studies of my summer are pursuing the beauty in art and the anesthetic understandings of evolution and cultural selection - how species precede through the selection in nature. There is the idea that animals are attracted to special features of other animals, so it is about qualities and perseverance, how human beings present themselves and the artistic looks of contributing to sexual selection. Art is a means for bringing together people, and how this leads to groups and how those groups lead to communication, relations and going to movies, or on dates, or talking about a television show, or going to a restaurant where a certain food is prepared in a certain way.  It is a very profound notion in what we believe that the art work plays an important role in our society. It is also about science and how we talk about our reality. We may be doing things which sometimes are so different from the way things were when we evolved, that we have set up some tensions. A classic example that is often used would be we are equipped to respond to emergency situations with what Walter Cannon called ‘the fatal flight experience’ which is adrenaline, pumping round, blood sugar raised, giving us instant energy and we are ready to fight natures marauders and are ready to contend our genes to other generations. Our body changes in pain, hunger, fear and rage, on account of recent researches into the function of emotional excitement. We are driven to a program which is inevitable and debatable at the same time. Our behavior continues to attract me furthermore as it is a profound study on the language of life.

In a recent study of animal behavior, bio scientists Drickamer, Vessey and Meikle from 3 different Universities in America have come to the conclusion that ‘carnivory has been suggested as one of the key elements in the development of social behavior in humans’. The relevance for humans may be poetical in any comparison with other forms of life, although the animals are the single creatures appropriate to the life of humans.

Marc Bekoff a researcher, who studies animal behavior, tells how we can understand our own emotions studying the behavior of animals. Charles Darwin a very famous biologist said that ‘there is continuity in evolution’ so the differences among species are differences in degree rather than differences in kind, as the shades of gray, say for example if we have joy, dogs have joy. If we feel jealousy, wolves, dogs, elephants and chimpanzees feel jealousy, but it is not the matter that they are identical (e.g. my joy and another person’s joy are unlikely the same but it does not mean I have it and they do not). Another good argument is common sense; we bond with animals like dogs and cats and other animals because they are feeling, people do not bond with trees and rocks. So behavior is what I have tried to pay attention to. Whatever its evolutionary origins, the ritualization of agonistic displays into contests instead of struggles has occurred in practically all species with aggressive behavior. There have been a lot of studies in humans that shows when humans are fair to one another and co-operate with one another the reward centers in the brain fire - when they do magnetic resonance imaging FMRI – there is reason to think that dogs and cats, and lions feel the same too. People have tried to find animal models for fairness, cooperation, forgiveness, apologies, and justice, just from watching dogs play.

The paintings in ‘Animal Safari’ employ a sense of voyeurism to highlight collective fear, desire and fantasy.  Through the use of masks, fruit and the nude body, the work evokes folklore as each fragment completes a picture from an imagined narrative. These images exist in an in-between space that both connects and disengages with reality, forging a suspension of disbelief as a way to explore body politic and representations of memory. In a recent lecture artist Nina Chantel Abney was considering the animal subject in painting as being symbolic. She said: ‘The animal represents the divine side of the human psychic. He is in contact with nature. The animal follows its own laws beyond good and evil’. 

Following my ‘100 Improbable Characters’ which were selected for a visa student participation in the ‘Saatchi Revisitation Exhibition’ at Ipswich Art School this year, the work for the ‘Animal Safari’ series is progress-making concluding thoughts in a changing world that resides on a combination of moods and sensations.  ‘Animal Safari’ is a cluster of characters that may exist in the postmodernist crisis. Psychologically speaking the characters are built from the inside of the mind. They all seem to correspond to a sort of feeling that lives in the world today and reacts. Then, reality is mixed with the alteration of its image in the mind.

The works define moral abandon where characters become nicked by their true identity and take the animalistic features of the self. Dark and innocent, humorous and horrific, the paintings become the playground of a whirlwind chaos. The 3rd painting in the series concentrates on Freudian subject and male pathos. The work explores raw symptoms of human behavior. In the style of modern fascinations with female libido the painted figure of the girl illustrates a corrupted vision. Her face is a transgression of Munch’s Scream, which bears memorial reproduction. When I showed the picture of this painting to my tutor Ian Charlesworth in History of Art, he said: ‘It looks like a big orgasm - a monster rape.’ The whole scene is violently set up into the void. Is this a nightmare, or a fantasy?

I have found that as my research in contemporary art evolves I feel the urgent need to express myself more and more differently. My body of work is as diverse as painting, sculpture, architecture, digital and prints the main modules in my Fine Art BA at University Campus Suffolk. In conclusion, it is very appropriate to say that I am living on the edge of madness at a fast speed and in parallel with the characters I produce although my transformations reflect a new world that is blossoming like flowers do.

References:

Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art, ch. 2 (1959, trans. 1963)

Christopher Hitchens, Love, poverty and war (Nation Books, 2004)

L.C. Drickamer, Animal Behavior  (Dubuque, IA: W. C. Brown, 1996)

Sara J. Shettleworth, Behavioral and brain sciences: Cognition, evolution and behaviour (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Bonnie J. Ploger, Exploring animal behaviour in laboratory and field; an hypothesis-testing approach to the development, causation, function, and evolution of animal behaviour (Elsevier Inc, 2003)

Nial Shanks, Animal and science: A guide to the debates (Santa Barbara, CA : ABC-CLIO, c2002).

Tyler the Creator, Tron Cat single of the album Goblin (XL Recordings, 2011)

Antony and the Johnsons, Cut the World single from the album Cut the World (Rough Trade Records, 2012)

 

Jason Haye

rumi




Who could be so lucky? Who comes to a lake for water and sees the reflection of moon.


Please click here to see Jason's blog

                                                                                                                                    


THE FUTURE MANIFESTO
There is no nation in art. The artist is the ruler of all arts. Art is the future!
1. Art is a concept of somebody feeling life and reacting. 2. Life is a moment we live in. 3. If somebody wants to paint or write about the moment of life the art he is composing can be a mix of everything he wants to express in that moment in any format. 4. A moment is an expression of past, present and future connotations. 5. The medium in which one is creating is not assessable by any restrictions or moods. 6. Only the mood of the mind can be intentional during which one creates or investigates the characteristics and politics of life. 7. Reality is a permanent dictum of one’s nature. 8. The nature of one’s own is constructed in shapes of thoughts and feelings. 9. Society is a big emotion with which one starts to grow up and understands the meanings of creating a good artwork that challenges its own roots and meaning. 10. Because the artist who engages in creating life of something different than life itself is someone who understands the meanings of life and chooses to do that by applying aspects of sensibility. 11.The culture of today’s society is shaped by artists who tangle with the thoughts of the romantic mind. 12. Logic and alienation is relevant to the point of existing together in society - as the rogue culture of the present perpetrates the multiple doubts of society’s identity. 13. By creating a piece of art in literature the artist abandons the rules of contemporary society. 14. By singing a song the artist must always transfer into the song the energy and the vibrations of its generation. 15. To go further, the artist paints the dystopian effects of living life on earth as a human being. 16. This period is intellectual - it doodles around ideas of identity and world transformation. In an era of environmental developments and technological evolution an artist embarks on a new journey to change the world and its visual perceptions. Implementing the free will of his nature and the logical elements in his upbringing the artist conceptual metamorphosis of his surroundings can be brutal and childish at the same time. The mystic of his founding can be childishly epic or rude embarrassment. This character never leaves a revolutionary artwork that lives through the emotional character of its period. 17. The artist is the epicentre of human behaviour. 18. He does not criticize the medium of his surroundings but rather exemplifies it in an abstract form or reality context. 19. The form is governed by emotional content. 20. The artist believes in changing the world and in the emotional freedom that needs to be authorised by all performing arts that preach a concept. 21. The future manifesto is directed towards the artist of the future which corresponds to a new way of thinking and seeing reality. 22. The artist’ actions are the sum of all happenings until the very moment. 23. Only he can encapsulate all actions into one action that is his creation and transfer it into his creation which is his action. 24. This action is emotional and can contain explicit or violent truths. 25. These truths must have narrative progression in an artist development – then the public can relate to the new experience. 26. The experience of artist behaviour must be gained through a life of learning activities including sexual encounter, philosophical theories and engagement in developing own actions and political views of the world. 27. The emotional engagement of the artist must reflect his always working capacity, relaying on an urge of fulfilment/nonfulfillment and/or satisfaction/no satisfaction of a general condition/situation. 28. A condition which may have patterns of different themes like love and war. 29. The artwork produced manifests the artists’ trials and corrections, the world seen from a hypersensitive persona who can be a monster or a genius, a nerd or a fool, a male or a female. 30. The congestions of one’s creativeness are emotions of his interactive time spent in today’s society. 31. The artist may take everything from his surroundings and present/incorporate it in his art, even a thought, a perception or an emotion. 32. The artwork itself should be a catalyst of all said in this manifesto and overcome political pastiche. 33. This artwork is critical and can aim at every existing subject in the world.







Society is the

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IN PRAISE OF PLURALISM
 
An introduction by Jonathan P. Watts, May 2012



Pluralism n. 1 a state of society in which members of diverse social groups develop their traditional cultures or special interests within a common civilization. 2 the holding of two or more offices or positions. plurality n. the state of being plural or numerous.



In the face of Pluralism in the early 1980s, American art historian Arthur C. Danto declared the ‘end of art history’. As Danto explained, Pluralism carried with it the ‘implication that there was no longer any historical direction. That meant that there was no longer a vector to art history, and no longer a basis in truth for the effort to spot the historically next thing.’

Notionally, the coming of Pluralism would be liberating: a final blow for category distinctions between what art is and what art is not; between good and bad; worthy and unworthy. Politically, Pluralism is democratic — inclusive. Fractured, lacking cohesiveness, it can be contrasted with its opposite: Monism — a philosophical view that attributes oneness to reality, a unity to all existing things by a single concept or system.

In 1985 the filmmaker Tina Keane and film historian Michael O’Pray curated The New Pluralism, an exhibition at Tate Britain that surveyed British artists’ moving image made between 1980-85. No singular dominant narrative emerged, leading to Keane and O’Pray claiming that the sheer diversity of work was ‘in a state of flux’. Boundaries between video and film had dissolved. Work presented variously ripped and remixed television imagery; personal issues became prescient; issues of race, gender and sexuality made the agenda.

Pluralism is not merely limited to art. It had widely been used to describe a diversity of forms and voices in other media too, including music, philosophy, politics... To pick one recent example from literature (20 years after The New Pluralism exhibition): describing recent developments in British nature writing, last year the writer and broadcaster Tim Dee called it the ‘New Pluralism’. He calls it this because so many genres seem to qualify as nature writing, they ‘tumble together’, as he says. Biography melds with travelogue, fiction blends with fact, hokey speculation with scientific tract.

To what extent is the issue of Pluralism a live one? Pluralism is not ‘new’ as could be deduced from Dee’s naming. Arguably, it is the very basis of our lives today in a diverse multicultural Britain. In art terms the cliche that ‘art is art if I say it is art’ might be a consequence of Pluralism, but more importantly its effect has been an end to ‘pure’ artworks, an end to ‘isms’ and easy historicization.

In 2010 the New York-based art journal e-flux published their ‘What is Contemporary Art Issue?’ The editorial begins with a story. It tells of how e-flux’s attempt to develop a wiki archive for contemporary art is thwarted by... Pluralism. When it came to designing a simple menu structure to allow readers to navigate the archive there seemed no coherent organising principle. The archive could not be structured around a movement — there have been no significant movements in the past 20 years. It could not be a medium — contemporary artists work with many different materials, often combining them in hybrid ways. The lack of apparent objective structure or criterion that would make the archive intelligible ‘completely derailed’ the project. It was abandoned.

The intriguing point at play is that art works continue to go into museums and galleries, are bought by collectors, is taught in art schools. Although there may be no obvious way to classify the diversity of works produced by artists today, work enters into very concrete settings for continued reception and production of art, where its identity, it seems, is taken for granted.

The e-flux editorial accepts the difficulty of historicizing the recent-past. One can interpret a group of artworks — draw on a frame of reference — in order to situate and understand. Yet, to impose a narrative on a group, a story that unifies, might stop meaning short (as Keane and O’Pray recognised early on in ’85). Interestingly, a proposed solution by editors of the What is Contemporary Art Issue? call for some way of determining what is art and what is not art: Perhaps it is time to approach the notion of contemporary art as a fully formed cultural project with certain defined parameters, complete with logics of inclusion and exclusion not so different from those of the modernist project.

If Pluralism heralded a radical — liberating — dissolution of boundaries, would it not be a conservative gesture to call for a logics of inclusion and exclusion? The editors of e-flux suggest that such a move need not necessarily direct contemporary art back towards Monism. It would instead develop new criteria for valuing contemporary art, make it intelligible, and in theory affirm the possibilities for new directions in art production. Yet, how does one close the floodgates? Rather than understanding Pluralism in art as ‘anything goes’ (besides, a lazy position) I would agree with the co-editor of Frieze magazine Jörg Heiser who values art with an identity that is not clearly distinguishable, does not try to be ‘pure’, that does not allow itself to be historicized — a vision of art continuous with Pluralism that is Impure and, as such, rich and radical.

Why this little-archaeology of Pluralism? It strikes me that the work in the Future Exhibition resists this archival logic described by e-flux editors. In the best way.


 Please click here to see Jonathan's blog

...

This introduction was part of the Future Exhibition publication of May 2012 which received great response from institutions and organisations in the arts such as: University Campus Suffolk (UK), Snape Arts Festival (UK), Lookout Gallery (UK)



THE FUTURE IS WOW!


The Future Exhibition was one of years 2012 groundbreaking exhibition in Ipswich, UK. Please view below the exhibition' roster of students and their work which was publicised on-line in art magazines and in various art related news agents such as: IP1 Magazine, Grapevine.






Sian Roxburgh
   




Thomas Webster








 


Andrei Costache









 
Anna Stollery

DREI

STOLLER
  



Alexander Osborne












Cat Fuller











Jason Haye




 
Karen Quinton







Kayleigh Esteller








 
Rhys Wilson






 
Jenny Butcher









Peta Hillier









Jamie Limond









Sarah James