What are your feelings regarding provocation?
I never intended to provoke. I always looked for intensity. The intensity in historical art always fascinated me. The tragic plays of antiquity, the Passion of Christ… intense art always had my love. If one of my actions provoked the people at one point, well, so be it. But provocations were never cooked up at the drawing board.
Month: January 2017
Virginia Verran tutorial
Notes made:
Richard Long, Herman Kitsch, Franko B (explored before but should look further), Lee
Natural material, raw material, abnormality of art materials. Not using the standard mediums. Is this what creates the reactions?
What drives the compulsion to shock? Why am I so interested in the abnormal/obscene?
Intention to provoke
Visceral reactions
Cognitive reaction – relating to, being, or involving conscious intellectual activity
Visceral reaction – characterized by or proceeding from instinct rather than intellect. Not connected with the emotions, but the body’s physical immediate response. A visceral reaction is instinctive and a gut deep response to a stimulus or experience. Visceral reaction examples: adrenaline rushes, heart beat speeding up or slowing down, stomach tightening, a flash of nausea, a slush of heat, a shiver/sweating, sexual feelings.
Visceral responses arise immediately and spontaneously. The weight of which a visceral reaction occurs depends on our own personal history and experiences. (Could fetishes be linked into this?) For example, something which isn’t in our own previous experience and interest could produce more of an visceral reaction. Whereas someone with an interest in the matter could envision themselves in the situation.
“Our personal history gives us awareness of our own visceral reactions, not those of others.”
“you can’t wrestle with yourself against visceral reactions and responses. It feels so real in the moment like nothing else matters, except the immediate reaction that you’re feeling.”
“once you stop and think about it, you realise that you’re able to make a cognitive evaluation of your feelings. Your visceral reactions have no reasoning behind them. They are often over exaggerated and slightly irrational”.
– people’s past experiences and their personalities mould their visceral reactions.
How am I attempting to create visceral feelings from the viewers? Should I use more extreme materials? Bring sense into the equation – the beetroot I’m currently using produces a mild smell that some people like and then some dislike, if I were to use a material like meat or a medium with a strong smell that could be offensive to some, would this create larger and more powerful visceral reactions?
My own visceral feelings to the beetroot/if there were any?
When I first started ‘painting’ with the beetroot, I found it unappealing and almost disgusting, however I don’t feel like any visceral reactions were produced from it. I feel like these were my initial and instinctive feelings to having what was quite an abnormal material covering my skin. I feel that I used my own cognitive feelings to figure out that the material I was using was strange and slightly unpleasant, therefor making me receive these feelings.
I was instantly disgusted by the smell of the beetroot, however with visceral feelings, they are more powerful and stronger than knowing that I was disgusted. I wasn’t having a bodily reaction to my feelings. I was simply realising that what I was doing wasn’t the most enjoyable.
Beetroot large canvas
Beetroot
On the floor process and result:
On the wall process and result:
Process of the work – painting
Focusing on a previous photograph of meat covered in shower gel to recreate ‘paintings’ made out of different materials. In the first photo of the meat, it’s hard to figure out what the image is showing, this also occurs in the image made with the berries. Both the materials used in the pieces are slightly confusing, however they’re contrasting in terms of their appeal to the viewer.
Small experimentation with defrosted berries on A4 paper. Using the berries in thick amounts to create colour and tone. Reproducing the photograph of the chicken but with the berries. Although berries compared to raw meat, would not commonly be viewed as repulsive, the process of squashing and mashing the fruit up created what looked like an unpleasant material.
Similar A4 berry painting but made with less fruit, more focused on creating shadow and highlights similar to the chicken photo.
Increasing the size of the work to A1.
Stephanie Spindler workshop
Notes made during workshop:
(“Latex as an inner skin.” Changes the shape of boxes with the force of her body. Co-immersive, collaboration between the box and her body.
How to communicate the experience between ‘me’ and the box.
Performance – art form, audience watch and engage. Performative – qualities that direct us. Material itself. Can you walk around artwork? Relationship between you and the thing.)
Using paper as our focus medium, we spent the day manipulating paper into diverse forms. Stephanie explained her work as performative, and gave us examples of her previous work where she had wrestled boxes and transformed them from the original shapes into something absurd. The process of deforming the boxes was a major factor in her work, with Stephanie stating that it provided the communication between her and the box. The process also made the work a collaboration between herself and the material, compared to her producing a piece of work made by her; it involved her.
Reflecting on this workshop, it’s made me consider whether my work is more of a co-immersive relationship between myself and the material. I am manipulating materials in an attempt to receive some sort of reaction with the final result. However, I feel that I should focus on the process of making the work, more so than the final result. This could involve film, in a similar way to Stephanie’s work, then also presenting a final result alongside this.
Charlotte Paris 