Definition:
Main Entry:
phys·i·cal·i·ty Listen to the pronunciation of physicality
Pronunciation: \ˌfi-zə-ˈka-lə-tē\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural phys·i·cal·i·ties
Date: 1660
1 : intensely physical orientation : predominance of the physical usually at the expense of the mental, spiritual, or social 2 : a physical aspect or quality
Artist 1:
Artist Name: Kate Gilmore
Reason for Choosing:
Kate's work resonates with me in terms of her use of her own body in her art at the cost of her flesh. I think that with the artist I have chosen there is a sense of being present in their work. A sense of guts- at the expense of the flesh.... I think what sets her apart from the rest is the empathy one feel after and while watching her work.
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Outside Review of Artwork: A 2-3 paragraph quote
Kate Gilmore loves a challenge. For her performance-based video works, she sets up a difficult physical task—a precarious tower of strung-together furniture to climb, for instance—dons lipstick and a fancy dress, and documents herself making the attempt. She has jumped rope on a perforated wooden platform while wearing stilettos (Double Dutch, 2004), ascended a slippery ramp in rollerskates (Cake Walk, 2005), and forced her satin-clad body through a tiny tunnel (Main Squeeze, 2006).
The dogged persistence of Gilmore's protagonists suggests the obsessive behavior that can characterize daily efforts to cope with high expectations. These dolled-up women seem desperate for success, love, or attention—desires traditionally bound up with gender and the condition of artmaking. In all of her projects, Gilmore strives for compositional perfection, and her incongruous party clothes are always perfectly coordinated with the installation itself. Combining physical comedy, palpable effort, and a whiff of real danger, Gilmore's work evokes time-based "endurance" work of the 1970s, such as that of Vito Acconci, and expands on feminist and performance art in the tradition of Joan Jonas and Marina Abramovic.
Bibliography of Review:
ICA: Institute of Contemporary Art. University of Pennslyvania.
Artist 2:
Artist Name: Chris burden
Reason for Choosing:
I don't really care if he distancees himself from most of his early work, it is still very visceral and seems to tempt the concept of life. Sure it's from a very young minded perspective, very male perspective, but I think there are a lot of people in the world that very much align themselves to this way of thinking or at least spirit. For good or ill.
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Outside Review of Artwork: A 2-3 paragraph quote
Burden's reputation as a performance artist started to grow in the early 1970s after he made a series of controversial performances in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central. His most well-known act from that time is perhaps the performance piece Shoot that was made in F Space in Santa Ana, California in 1971, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters. Burden was taken to a psychiatrist after this piece. Other performances from the 1970's were Five Day Locker Piece (1971), Deadman (1972), B.C. Mexico (1973), Fire Roll (1973), TV Hijack (1972), Doomed (1975) and Honest Labor (1979).
Several of Burden's performance pieces were considered somewhat controversial at the time. Shoot, for example, involved Burden allowing an assistant to fire a loaded rifle at his arm. Another such "danger piece" was Doomed, in which Burden lay motionless in a museum gallery under a slanted sheet of glass, with a clock running nearby. Unbeknownst to the museum owners, the concept of Doomed was that Chris was prepared to remain in that position until someone from the museum staff interfered in some way with the piece. Forty-five hours later, a museum guard placed a pitcher of water next to Burden, thus ending the piece.
Bibliography of Review
"An introduction to Chris Burden." Thomas Moronic.
Artist 3:
Artist Name: Joseph boeys
Reason for Choosing:
The mythology of Joseph Boeuys is vast, but it is the combination of the desire to be in the world, and apart of living in this world that is most interesting. Again it is this sense of being physically here-present with in the work that comes out and extends this sense of artistic mythology, the ability to be so at times misunderstood or perhapse mysterious but at the same time often be so clear and direct.
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Outside Review of Artwork: A 2-3 paragraph quote
This is a dense, evocative exhibition that presents Beuys as both teacher and artist; it is accompanied by two videotapes that demonstrate the considerable charisma he brought to each activity. It gives us an artist of rich, not always resolvable contradictions, a man as interested in ancient myth as in television, who used videotapes to mythologize himself. It reveals an artist who deployed eccentric, often decaying materials like felt and fat in his sculptures and performances, yet who was a consummate draftsman in the traditional sense of those words.
As Beuys says in one of the videotapes on display here, he believed in ''creativity as a revolutionary means existing in everyone,'' and his frequent use of multiples - art objects produced in large editions - made his work widely and, for a time, inexpensively available. Yet, with the ego and assurance of a great artist, he also turned such things as Polaroid negatives and felt blackboard erasers into artworks simply by adding his own signature.
Bibliography of Review
SMITH, ROBERTA. "Review/Art; Joseph Beuys asTeacher and Artist." New York Times. 25 Nov. 1988.
Artist 4:
Artist Name: Ana Mendieta
Reason for Choosing:
Anyone that play with blood has my ear. playing with blood sounds cliche until you realize your actually playing with BLOOD! The nectar of life the driver, the conduit for the pulse. There is a obviously a problem with the concept of primitive other however there is rightfully so a place who do it well. Ana seems to my mind operate as some sort of ghost rather than some primitive shaman(or priestess) someone working in between the here and now and the past, emotion and reason reminding us of the connectedness to all things....in a really disturbing way.
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Outside Review of Artwork: A 2-3 paragraph quote
Mendieta sought to establish a "dialog between the landscape and the female body return to the maternal source." She envisioned the female body as a primal source of life and sexuality, as a symbol of the ancient paleolithic goddesses. Between 1973 and 1980, Mendieta created her signature series, entitled "Silueta" or silhouette. Here, Mendieta used her body or images of her body in combination with natural materials. The pieces were transient, created and then photographed just before or during their destruction. The materials used were highly symbolic. In one work from the "Silueta" series, she outlined her figure with gunpowder, creating a shape reminiceint of prehistoric cave paintings. By setting it alight, she incorporates the ritualistic use of fire as a source of exorcism and purification. Mendieta also used flowers as mediums in her series, quoting the folk traditions of Mexico. Her primary material was the earth itself. In her "Tree of Life" series, she covered her naked body with mud and posed against and enormous tree. Ridding herself of her color and form, she is visually united with the tree, arms raised in supplication.
Bibliography of Review
"Ana Mendieta." Women's Issues In 20th Century Art. Keller Clark University.
Artist 5:
Artist Name: Matthew barney
Reason for Choosing:
His work seems so body centered as it is, not to mention the theatricality of how the body moves seems to superceed all else. His concepts are very obtuse at times but are pretty. However it is the fact that his films are a circus for the body to work out all these different stories, conflicts, puzzels, etc.
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Outside Review of Artwork: A 2-3 paragraph quote
Barney has an eye for a certain kind of repellent modern beauty, the look of the cyborg age. His love affair, as an artist, is with the inorganic. He has discovered a new sculptural material, a range of sophisticated modern plastics that look weirdly fleshy: "prosthetic plastic", in his words. It's not hard to see the contemporary pertinence of this. Today, with science-fiction fantasies of robots and artificial intelligence no longer fiction, he's the Jean Cocteau of this cyborg age.
Some kind of cyborg does seem to have been at work in the Serpentine. In the big, domed central gallery, you come across the detritus of a sinister ritual act. There is a metal pole soaring straight up from the floor into the dome. Around the floor are bizarre, clumsy shoes, oil drums full of vaseline, a bunch of umbilical cord-like appendages and hoists; at the four corners of the room, tiny climbing footholds; and four rough, shaky drawings high up. This room is by far the best in the exhibition. It shows the sceptic why Barney matters: no one else has captured the aesthetic of our mutant age so well. It's just as well it works - because nothing else does.
Bibliography of Review
Jones, Jonathan. "Barney's rubble." The Guardian. 20 Sept. 2007.
Artist 6:
Artist Name: Carolee Schneeman
Reason for Choosing:
Because there seems to be an abandon about her in terms of her art and use of the body. Not recklessness but a willingness to give herself over to art and explore from a very 1st person point of view. It also seems that it is a very "I will show you" sort of mentality-"I will teach you" I feel might not go into how I feel about beuys but still very close.
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Outside Review of Artwork: A 2-3 paragraph quote
Carolee Schneeman's artworks can have the impression of innocence. The viewer, upon first glance, see's red dye dripped on snow in heart shapes or sees red paint applied to delicate sheets of tissue. The viewer then looks at the gallery tag and reads the media involved in the work. Blood. Menstral blood on tissue. Blood as a feminine symbol of power and beauty instead of a symbol of violence.
Schneeman's art work originates from the female body's urges and it's media is the body's functions. Through interior contemplation of the rythmns and desires of her body, she creates artworks that are shocking and physical. Primarily a performance artist, her body explorations are varied experiences. She writhes naked with a group of others amidst chunks of raw meat or she pulls a scroll stained with menstral blood from her vagina. By shocking the audience, in a subtle way or not, Schneeman has created compelling works that challenge the taboos associated with the female body.
Bibliography of Review
"Carolee Schneeman." Women's Issues In 20th Century Art. Keller Clark University.
Artist 7:
Artist Name: Francis Alys
Reason for Choosing:
Pushing a block of ice through the streets seems like a great and powerful statement without having to articulate any sort of intellectual viewpoint. But Alys work especially centered around community and connectivity on a social side is very interesting and I admire true street artists (as I call them) as it seems that what the represent is not a random or obvious comment on society but seems to encompass so much more.
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Outside Review of Artwork: A 2-3 paragraph quote
The procession took place on June 23, beginning at MoMA's midtownlocation at 11 West 53 Street and moving across the Queensboro Bridge, up Queens Boulevard to MoMA QNS on 33 Street. Participants in the procession carried palanquins holding representations of works in the Museum's collection by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Alberto Giacometti. The event-with its rose petal-strewn route and brass band-had the feel of a religious procession, like the one in Little Italy's famous annual San Gennaro festival. "Francis Alÿs has responded to this moment of transition for the museum by devising a timely and provocative performance," said Ms. Montgomery. "With this piece, he has encouraged us all to reflect fondly on our relationships with modern icons and to find mystical meaning in unexpected contexts."
For Alÿs, the street is a site of invigorating possibility and confluence, a space where the complexity of popular life collides and interacts with the practice of making art. Since 1991, going on paseos (walks) has been the centerpiece of Alÿs's artistic practice, and the urban streets, especially those of Mexico City, have been his primary context. His works in various mediums are born out of these walks, during which he often carries a prop and adheres to a whimsical route or pattern of behavior. He records his path and the results of his walk, collects artifacts, and stores images, all of which he later uses in his drawings and paintings.
Bibliography of Review
"MoMA Projects 76." Postmedia. Museum of Modern Art.
Artist 8:
Artist Name: Vito Acconci
Reason for Choosing:
Part of the physicality of thereness I think is a wierd sort of spectre of myth and playing with a flimsy sense of reality in reality of being. The seem to be very few people that challenge the fabric of the way we percieve things-especially in art and I think that in an age where even what we do "see" can be justified as fiction, it is important to be physicaly present and tangeble that as views change there is a visceral quality that cannot be escaped.
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Outside Review of Artwork: A 2-3 paragraph quote
In a side gallery, Other Voices for a Second Sight offered another version of this obsession with the presence of the artist. Originally shown at MOMA in 1974, the installation is built to resemble an audio recording studio, complete with walls paneled with brown acoustical board and a swivel chair facing a bank of audio equipment. On either side of this studio is a reflective window looking onto another room, where images of Acconci, projected by means of slides or film loops through translucent plastic sheets and fabrics, are rendered barely legible by flashes of light. In the central room, the sound of the artist's running autobiographical recitation competes with other, assorted recorded noises.
In this work Acconci's body is placed largely outside the field of vision, leaving only audible traces of his presence. Is it the artist or the viewer who is meant to assume the role of sound engineer? In any case, in this "theatricalized" setting the distance that usually separates scene and audience, artist and viewer, effectively collapses.
Bibliography of Review
Marino, Melanie. "Vito Acconci at Barbara Gladstone." Bnet. Nov. 1998. Art in America.
Artist 9:
Artist Name: John Bock
Reason for Choosing:
To a certain extent it is his absurdly reality that makes him interesting. In all manner and shapes and sizes humanity exist. To exist is to reaffirm being and to confront and overcome the average, the status quo, everyday that is john Boch. Again like I said before you can fake somethings just with CG and a TiVo. John Boch's videos are so grounded in a way that me pause to say "that is really wierd...but I can relate to it."
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Outside Review of Artwork: A 2-3 paragraph quote
John Bock's Lectures are performances where the artist uses his own sculptures as sets and props and his own manipulated words and invented language as a means to challenge and confront human relationships. Admittedly frantic and devoid of 'proper' syntax, his Lectures integrate theories and terminology from psychology to economics and from art history to popular culture, while Bock engages in a continuous role-playing of different illogical personae, interweaving stories and situations that emerge as absurd, often hilarious, sometimes threatening or violent, and poetic.
Bibliography of Review
"JOHN BOCK A Lecture & Film Retrospective." E-flux. 22 Oct. 2008.
Artist 10:
Artist Name: Paul McCarthy
Reason for Choosing:
It pretty much the same sort of thing. I am still kind of learning about him but it goes back to the idea that the body does something and is important-the physicality and the presence that comes along with is powerful. I am not talking about how the statue of david is a body and has presence rather the way bodiess react and cerate space by being and moving in real time, it isn't simply about the body but what it does, and what it means to be present and active.
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Outside Review of Artwork: A 2-3 paragraph quote
In short, professor McCarthy, who has taught art at UCLA since 1982, continues to annoy, and in the process resists either art-rag or art-establishment packaging. A West Coast rather than an East Coast favorite, he is neither the last of the Destruction Artists nor the first of the shamans. "Paul McCarthy: Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement" at the Whitney until Oct. 12 offers up a disconcerting chunk of his sometimes clownish but almost always provocative/evocative anti-art displays. His 2001 New Museum extravaganza was nearly destroyed by faint praise. His most disconcerting works - e.g. a performance involving sticking a Barbie doll into his rectum or the 2007 Santa Clause with a Buttplug inflatable --- are nowhere to be seen. Someone is cleaning up his act.
Nevertheless, even Whitney curator Chrissie Isles when she tries to confront the pared down McCarthy can't quite pin him down. In her catalogue essay, she traces McCarthy's work to the influence of Destruction Artists such as Ralph Ortiz and Hermann Nitsch, but then connects him to everyone under the flag of darkness, from Francis Bacon to Vito Acconci. Isles does her best to weave all available references and citations together in a critical fiction that almost reaches coherence, yet still misses the convulsive nature of McCarthy's art. Convulsive art deserves a convulsive text. If it can still be said that there are Dionysian and Apollonian extremities of the art spectrum, McCarthy belongs with those of the Dionysian persuasion.
Bibliography of Review
Perreault, John. "Paul McCarthy Spin; Eliasson Falls; Bourgeois Fails." Artopia John Perreault's art diary.
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