I'm not driving nails in nothing. But you can use other ways of arriving at this accretion. And every image that's in the accreted encrustation on that matters because each one of those images is selected because it performs a particular function.
You can end up with something that performs the same way without it having to mimic or having it look exactly like the thing that it's based on. And so this is the way in which you can use photography. Doing photography and using photography are two different things. I mean, and that gives you some idea of the kinds of things you can embed within an object like http://casinoslots-sa.co.za/neteller. William Tucker was the first black child born in the United States. He was a child of one of that first 19 sold in Jamestown in 1619. Of course, that was me, one of my high school photographs. But since we don't know what William Tucker looked like, he could have looked like me. But anyway, various kinds of configurations-- power to the people. More vignettes. Paintings about the ways in which paintings as objects become commodified, "Red Hot Deal." You know , this says, low, low price. And I'm going to go faster actually. I just wanted you to get a close up view. So anyway, these coins are actually part of a sculpture piece called "The 99 Cent Piece." It's 99 cents in change. The 99 Cent Piece, also known as $136,000 in change. So it's the discrepancy between what the image that is represented and what it cost to produce it, because those pennies are actually four feet in diameter. The quarter is five feet in diameter. And they are also gilded brass finish. Those two things have something to do with each other. And then what's up with that? What's up with that? We'll talk about it. I had a funny story about that, but maybe I'll tell you later. So anyway, you get the picture. Back to photography again, this is a piece that sort of-- it's like a video, but it's a video that you can see all at once. So it's a series. These strips of photographs are 4 inches by 8 feet long. And it's about 140 feet in running length. And it has all of the features that a video that runs on any kind of device, like a DVD or videotape. It has white noise. It has glitches. It has jump cuts. It has repetition. It has all of the things, but you can stand in one spot and see the whole thing from beginning to end all at once. And you can rewind by walking backwards through it. You can jump to one spot or another. But it's all out there available to you. And this is just a collection of those things. And it's all images that are taken from the neighborhood in which I live. Everything that's within a block of my house or two or three blocks from my studio. So part of the whole point of projects like is you can make fantastic work from wherever you are. You don't have to be in a special place to find incredible things that are worth paying attention to and then making some work about. Photo installation, those two photographs, the big photographs are these images. This is another piece, one of the first pieces that I did when we moved into the neighborhood we live in Brownsville, which used to be overrun by gangbangers. You know, these are all tags on buildings that were in a within a block of my house.
0 Comments
So anyway, I've played around with a lot of things like that. And for me the glitter, the color, all those things-- that pink-- all of those things are reflective of this kind of florid kind of quality that people seem to despise so much in Rococo painting. But we know everybody loves that stuff.
And you see those Bouchet paintings and those Fragonard paintings, and that stuff is masterfully done. There's no denying it. So anyway-- I do have some things that are in here several times-- but you can see how stylistically I'm sort of moving through a variety of different treatments of the subject, while at the same time incorporating, not only elements of the way in which culture is transferred through the diaspora, the way black communities are linked through certain religious practices, through certain beliefs, through certain mythologies, the way they are linked, but also the way in which there's a kind of confrontation with another kind of idealized form that is not yourself and not an idealized form of you're making. And how periodically, you know, the way in which history repeats itself gives artists an opportunity to engage with history and with culture, but not in a way where you can do pictures about current events. I mean, to do pictures about current events always leads to political cartoons and/or propaganda posters. But if you really want people to take advantage of the thing that an artwork can do, which is allow you the kind of space for a certain kind of meditation on a subject, that requires a lot more investment of time, that's not about something that's happening in the immediate environment or in the immediate moment. This is all that paintings and artworks can do really. I mean, photojournalism does a much better job at getting you fired up about things that happened today and yesterday. Paintings don't do that so well, because they take so long to make in the first place. So if they take so long to make in the first place, then-- yes-- OK, so anyway, OK, here we go. Come on. You can come up. You can come up because I'm going to stop. But anyway, I'm sure a couple of these things. There's a lot of stuff in that painting. It's a black painting, but there's a lot of stuff in it. Just installation as an art form is just another modality. And a group of paintings, there's a triptych that are based on a Barnett Newman painting called "Who is Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue." I did a painting, an exhibition at the Vienna Secession, called "Who's Afraid of Red, Black, and Green," in which these are all paintings that are exactly the same size as the Barnett Newman painting. And they do all the same things that the Barnett Newman painting do, but then they add another dimension besides. So it's a text-based painting, all red, black, green, red color field painting. But it's a way in which you don't allow for the pure transcendental experience that color field paintings are supposed to elicit. So the red one, the black one, and there's a green one. And there are things about James Baldwin that figure prominently in this one and the first one. Then photography, that color, there's something important about that color. That's Naomi. That's Cheryl. And then, so you make objects that perform a certain kind of way. You know, so those Nkisi figures from the Congo, the things they call nail fetish figures, I mean, those things that accumulate all this material over time. So can you make contemporary artworks that look like that but don't try to do the same things those do? Or more. But Without Sanctuary was a book, a collection of over 150 postcards that were collected by a man who saw some and just thought they were interesting and started collecting them. And he did this exhibition. And then they published a book. And in that book, it's just a collection of the postcards of lynching incidents, but wherein you can see how in these incidents-- I mean, a lynching event was like theater on the one hand, but it was a form of entertainment for a good segment of the population that attended those things. And the fact that these people who were at the lynching are all accessories to a double murder-- they are all accessories to a double murder-- but they are not at all concerned that their picture is being taken by a photographer who is standing outside the frame and that these people are looking at.
Now, this picture of a lynching doesn't foreground the trauma and the violence that's done to the black body. It foregrounds the participation of the spectators who benefit from that kind of terror and that kind of violence that's visited on the body of a black person. So it's like where you properly locate the focus of attention is important. So everybody knows it's tragic and traumatic for the victims of lynching. But what we don't really spend a whole lot of time asking questions about is what about all those people who are standing there getting their picture taken while they're at the double murder. And since there is no statute of limitations on murder-- there's no statute of limitation on a capital crime like that-- those people, you know, if they were still alive are still subject to prosecution. But the piece is called "Heirlooms and Accessories," which sort of tells you everything. So you can do that and then you go back to doing-- I mean, it is not inconsistent for me to go back and forth from one of those things to the other thing, to move from one mode of representation to another. I think these are in here twice. Or am I going-- let's just make sure I'm not going backwards. Oh, here we go. But that's the thing. So it's not inconsistent for me to go from one thing to another thing, because everything that I'm doing has a reason for being made. It has a purpose. And I think it has a utility in terms of the way it operates in relationship to, the way it inserts itself into the narrative of our history. And so this is kind my meditation on a Fragonard painting, called "The Swing." And this is the fun part, the kind of motion picture part of my presentation, because I always like to do this. It's a series of five paintings that constitute one painting. But the thing is it's that swing around is the embodiment of the idea of the swing. But it doesn't have to look like Fragonard's picture, "The Swing," which is also another key element in terms of my approach to making artworks. So these vignette paintings have a lot to do with the way in which they engage the idea of the Rococo paintings, as a kind of 18th century French genre of pretty pictures. Wherein the device that's used, apart from the subject matter, but the device that's used is the vignette. These are all called vignette. But the vignette as a device was something that was an approach that was designed during the 18th century in France as a Rococo device. And it's a way of creating a kind of irregular shape that's primarily a decorative function, but in some ways isolates the image from the field on which the image is painted. |
AuthorGambling review writer and live dealer casino online player. Archives
March 2019
Categories |