Thoughts after research tutorial meeting
Look at my own work – pick one piece, then pick three strands and three artists for each strand.
pipes, waste, dirt, woods
Object – pipes – material – transitional
Domestic Waste – dirt – feminism
Woods – symbolism – psychoanalysis
Domestic Waste
Mary Douglas – Purity & Danger – rituals of dirt and death, religion and society, spirituality – search for purity – discard of things,
- rituals of dirt & death – ‘central act in the art of mourning is actively to welcome filth’
- Nyakyusa – live North of Lake Nyasa – associate dirt with madness,’those who are mad eat filth’ – ‘madness brings filth and is a kind of death’
- Also look at Martha Rosler, Louise Bourgeois
Woods – Symbolism – psychoanalysis
- what do the woods stand for? what do they mean?
- a place to get lost, senses heightened, reinvigorate, fairytale, magical and spiritual
- Freud – symbolism – surrealist art, the unconscious, autobiographical – analytical thinking – the uncanny
- Louise Bourgeois – returned to the theme of ‘house’ as the root of fear and anxiety – ‘home’ as site of protection and repression
- Poetics of Space – Gaston
- Rachel Whiteread – homes, memories, index, object, spatial experience – casting technique echoes of what is not there – ‘House’ 1993 – victorian house in cast in concrete, preservation of the past – index – ‘Shul’ impression etc
- Cornelia Konrads – site specific – magical – uncanny – woods – nature
Object – Transitional objects
- Winnicott theory of transitional objects and transitional phenomena
- process of disillusion that an infant makes from inner fantasy to outer reality
- independant journey to transition from mother who is the main influence to that of a person – disconnecting
- could be breast, toy, blanket, doll
- known as the first creative act to have a transitional object
- transitional space – contains ingredients for magical thinking, hallucinations and obsessions
- Winnicott says, ‘eventually parents insist that the infant makes judgement between what is proper and clean and what is dirty’.
- Robert Gober – american sculptor – domestic objects