Contemporary Art Part 3

                                                    More Types

                                                         Disclosure Art

        The most notable practitioner of disclosure art is the French artist Sophie Calle.  We use the word "artist' freely because Calle is referred to that way and writers, singers, and people in the arts are allowed that term. 

         For some simple keywords to open the door to her activities consider voyeurism, show and tell, spying, investigative journalism, self realization, and perhaps manipulation.  Some examples follow.

           In Paris she began taking candid photographs of people on the street.  Other photographers do this, but she continued photographing particular people, following them around, surveilling them, perhaps stalking them.

        She met a man at a party in 1979 and unknown to him she followed him to Venice and photographed and kept notes of his activities. Her documentation of the tracking ‒ she calls it an artwork -- she named Suite Venitienne.

    She took a job as chambermaid in Venice and riffled through guests personal belongings and made an artwork of the activity. She found an address book on the street, returned it by mail, but used the people named in the book to find out about the owner of the book without ever meeting him.

          We could go further, but I think we may be getting it.  This is a kind of performance art, but this particular kind is clandestine as it takes place.  The later documentation in photos, notes, and books, recounts the performance and becomes a permanent record and then it is altogether called an artwork.

        

                                                           Participatory Art

                                                          Participatory Making
        The French artist Sophie Calle received a letter from a male friend-lover expressing that he was breaking up with her. He ended with the sentiment “take care of yourself”.
        She sent out a request to many women in different professions to frame a response for her. This could be a response to the former lover or a reassuring response for Sophie. The women were to use their profession somehow in the response, which they did quite artfully. The edited responses were both clever and original. The women’s responses were made into an artwork by Calle organizing, editing, and displaying them.

                                                            Participatory Using

         Let’s now consider art that caters to a different kind of participator, one who doesn’t help to make the art but enjoys the finished artwork in an active way.  Of course, the art must be of a special type to permit this. 

Please look at a work from 2006 called Test Site by the German artist Carsten Holler.  It has the character of an amusement park ride by combining fun and fear and consists of large twisting enclosed slides inside turbine hall at the Tate modern museum in London.  Note how long and steep the slides are.  People actually rode inside them.  Further photos show that the tubes have plexiglass tops so the riders can see out and a decelerating portion near the end for safety.  Carsten Holler writes about the history of slides including his own in an article titled Carsten Holler on the Magic of Slides. It appears on Artsy.net.

                                        

                                             Creating a Whole Environment

  Some examples will illuminate the category.  Roger Hiorns made an installation called Seizure, by forming a thick layer of blue crystals inside an entire apartment in a condemned building in London.  The crystals on all surfaces came about from pumping 75,000 liters of copper sulphate into the apartment.  An arts council rescued the apartment from demolition and it is now in a sculpture park.

The effect was said to be beautiful but disturbing.  

The Weather Project by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson was an installation, in 2003, in the Turbine Hall of the Tate modern museum in London. The role of the sun is played by a bank of hundreds of mono frequency lights, which emit a narrow color range of light.  As you see it is a kind of yellow orange such as used in some street lamps.  That light source does not render colors well, in fact, it renders everything in lighter or darker shades of  yellow orange.  The hall also had sugar-water mist making machines and ceiling mirror foil to enhance the light effect.

You likely didn’t experience the actual exhibit, but from the photo what do you think?  It looks suffocating, but some people are lying down soaking it in.

                                            Spectacle and Gigantism

Less may be more in some contexts but in modern art a large work gets more attention and a higher price.  The magnitude is the message.  

In wall paintings, David Hockney and others have made module paintings, that is, a very large picture assembled from adjoining sub pictures ‒ similar to a jigsaw puzzle except the pieces are all rectangular.  In Hockney’s case he made an oil painting comprised of fifty individual canvas panels, each 3ft. by 4ft.  It is called Bigger Trees Near Warter and is 15 ft. high by 40 ft wide, which amounts to five panels high and ten panels wide.  Warter is the name of an English village near where Hockney was raised.  Notice in our photo from 2011, because of Hockney’s use of panels, the Warter painting was able to be folded into a wrap-around shape for display in the  Ferens Gallery in North East England.  Another, and time honored method for large wall works is the use of fresco ‒ water paint on fresh plaster ‒ for murals.

In sculpture, Anish Kapoor produced a 100 ton colossus from 168 welded steel plates.  It is called Cloud Gate and is in a large downtown open plaza area, near Millenium Park, in Chicago, hence Public Art.  Due to its smooth mirror finish it appears to float.  It is approximately 33 by 42 by 66 ft.  Its nickname is the giant bean.