My main interest in making art is to portray the most important things that go on in human life, things which i believe are predominantly unseen and invisible- human connection, experiences- the visceral, spiritual, conscious experiences we have that don't physically LOOK like anything.
whats kind of interesting is that in the world we only have physical things as representations of feelings or of experiences to relay them to other people, or to be able to explain them- physical external things are our means of expression, but they are not how things actually ARE when the are experienced and felt.
So far all the work I've made is pretty much just visual representations of things that have happened, what they physically looked like in my head. when what i want to portray is deeper, what goes on in the spiritual and conscious/ subconscious levels when things happen, meaningful things.
IDEAS:
ethereal, 'whispers' of colour- pale, whites
transparent
translucent
wispy
faint
giant white panel with a tiny bit of bluish scratching/ distressing in the surface
maybe paintings can never accomplish what I'm trying to achieve because they are not human, they are not real, just mere representations and physical object things.
with the small canvases, stick onto each one a physical piece of some kind of memorabilia, like some hair, blades of grass and clovers.. bodily fluids.. ?!
or do very large paintings that have faint images that have been brushed over with white paint.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
the ego is the main obstacle of the artist
what you see is the body sitting there but there are so many things happening on the soul/ consciousness level. - (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUWQCKZsSp4)
'she engages people in a way that a painting on a wall will never do'- HBO
The Artist is Present (2010) at MoMA in New York, many scientists became interested in why so many people who sat across from me began to cry. I was incredibly moved by this experience also, and was very curious to know what happens in our brains when we spend time not talking, just looking at one another. So I have done a number of projects now with neuroscientists that include a re-staging of The Artist is Present with me and the audience wearing electrode caps to monitor what is happening. What they have found is that there is an incredible amount of activity that happens when you take the time to really look at another human being without any verbal exchange. The scientists are now using all of this data from these experiments to try to understand more about non-verbal communication between human beings.
The Artist is Present: through being observed by others, the public not only becomes a part of the work, they also have no place to go but inside themselves.
'The Artist is Present', Marina Abramovic.
"The painting seemed to represent space, but also many other things...the line was like me in space, but then it seemed to be about coming together, as though the two panels of white were converging at the line. Then it was about coming apart, then about what is might mean to be unborn or in afterlife, or how it feels to kayak in the fog. You get my drift. It seemed to be everything while being nothing". Suzanne Northcott
'Linda' by Suzanne Northcott
'The Stream' by Suzanne Northcott
'Black Shoes' by Suzanne Northcott
Below: excerpt from Henri Art Magazine
The absolute truth is that we can not do anything more to painting. The 600 or so years of Western painting has gone full circle. It’s ALL been done – from a to z. And after the excesses of the 20th Century upon the body of painting what we are left with is the horror of a recombinant corpse. We’ve even dematerialized the fucking thing, made it into a ghost for other media where it reappears as a “moving” painting or a “still” backdrop. We’ve unstretched it, hung it like laundry, ripped it to pieces, sewn it back together, unpainted, anti-painted, photo-painted, well Christ, you get the point. Yet all of that nervous desperation to get to the last painting or the Ur-Painting is unsatisfying to those of us who love the medium, its history and possibility, but remain unwilling to join the current Postmodern monolith or the reactionary academics.
What might be done to get out of the Postmodern cul de sac or beyond the reactionary nay sayers? Part of the answer lies with our current relationship to Postmodern culture and the way our thought processes use the past. When we follow the tropes of logic inherent in these institutional systems, when we constantly shift the context of our understanding of the subject of our thought 3 or 4 times in a single paragraph, then we are limited by a lack of depth and structure within our own critique. The ground, the words, the contextual bricolage become the subject, rather than the thing we are talking about or thinking about or looking at. As we work with the past, as we MUST if we are painters, ESPECIALLY at this moment in time, we have to remove our automatic impulse to replicate authentic engagement THROUGH nostalgic impulses. It is imperative to understand that the past IS the inauthentic thing that we must confront. In other words we must drain our own preconceptions concerning the authenticity of the past. Our answers to our problems can not be solved by a feel-good trip down memory lane. For instance – Why are we so enamored with the brush stroke, still? Why is the drip so prevalent in even the most accurate of photo derived replications? Why are we still working with “cartoon” mannerisms rather than “cubist” mannerisms or “rococo” mannerisms when we are drawing? The truth is it’s difficult. Back in 2001 Sean Landers made a valiant attempt at trying to find cubist painting in our Postmodern age.
Today we have an opportunity. I’ve come to believe that HOW we question is more important than what we are questioning. We all have to approach this conundrum in our own manner. We haven’t any other choice. The days of concerted movements and shared experiences is done. Van Gogh’s imagined artist colony will never exist for us. We are at a zero point – Postmodern thought has had it’s day and we’ve been left with an unwieldy Mannerist culture that no longer makes sense. We can begin, right now, by thinking about and questioning the paths of our past in a different way, and in so doing, make a new way into the future, understand a new way of seeing. I keep thinking that the contemporary philosopher Graham Harman’s idea about the primacy of things is very important – object-oriented philosophy. It gives us an opportunity to see, not through words or contextual arrangements, but in direct confrontation with something that isn’t contingent on our “perspective,” as something primary and other, as a rising subject. “The sensual object is a unity over against the swirling accidents that accompany it”. We are not concentrated on the vastness of the shifting ground per se, but on the thing itself, the reality of the thing. This switch of one’s perspective is very interesting to me as a painter at this very moment. And I think it offers us many exciting theoretical visual possibilities
Maybe it is not the crisis of painting, but the crisis of the image. Any image seems so absurd to us and so truly incidental. It is not able to transport any truth to us, so it is boring by default.
It’s like, if one can not love humans anymore, neither a woman or a man. As if love became impossible,
"From this perspective, organic relationships with others
- .
Below: film stills
'The Baby' by Marlene Dumas
"I am interested in creating formal and conceptual tensions; faces which in appearance seem gentle and pure can hide a soul embodying the exact opposite. The final result is that the represented characters seem to be a little like aliens yet want to reflect their very own formal codes and who only in appearance are like human beings. The face becomes a map which if deconstructed can make us understand the origin of emotions, starting for example from the formal study of the eye, or from the relationship between the cheek and the mouth. The technique of painting has a sense in a context, open to a philosophical conceptual reflection on Man and the world. In this context, the very act of painting and of drawing itself can be seen as a method of acknowledging reality, filtered by the mind and by the 'stomach'. Maybe, this is the most simple and direct way yet the one most prone to misunderstandings." © Federico Lombardo (1970, Castellammare di Stabia/Italy)
i want to portray the connective moments that we have as human beings where everything else is shown up for how empty and small it is, and where the particular moment where two people connect transcends everything else in the world and in existence. focussing more on materials (and maybe colors but mainly materials) than subject matter might be a better wday of portraying these things because materials are physical things in the world.
on the other hand this is totally contradictory to what i'm trying to do.. since materials are physical things and im dealing with non physical things.
but, at the same token, connection does incorporate many physical things.
hug, holding hands, sex etc. how do i visually represent what happens when a connection takes place?
electricity
colors
scents
grass
damp clover
sunlight
summeryness
laziness
wind
air
brightness
soft yellow and green
skin, body, bones, fingers, limbs
lips, hair. coarseness
heat
saliva
darkness
clothing
anxiety
visceral
coursing
night
cold, glinting water
racing
surging
still
(http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/marina-abramovic-the-artist-is-present-sundance/#_)
grey concrete surfaces, walls, buildings
industrial concrete
light grey overcast skies
big, empty, open areas and surfaces, spaces, where unseen things can 'hang' in the atmosphere
atoms, molecules.
photograph grey industrial buildings and spaces, use architecture.
infiniteness, humanness.
use mostly very large canvases, and stick to pale, misty colors that look whitewashed- like whites and very pale grey. make everything almost transparent. not too much figurative detail, keep the subject matter to a minimum.
im looking at how to represent things that are not visible- what happens when we look at each other without speaking (the artist is present), what happens when people touch each other, hug, etc, have interactive experiences- body language etc. not words or exterior things.
Kate Love's article seems to say that art is a connective experience, or should be, and that we should be able to have an experience from the work itself.
images have replaced experience. relationships with others are lost and all that remains is APPEARANCE. this is why perhaps painting is lost and performance art has some advantage- its not even exactly art but real things happening between real people (even though they have been orchestrated at first), real and often profound, connective experiences come out of them.
Some thoughts on modern art, life etc:
Man has regressed into a state of being where we live through images and screens, our values are in empty things- physical appearance, clothing, wealth, status, ideas of success. these things have all worked together to create disconnectedness and disillusionment, and are means for people to create identities through which they live and interact- but these identities are false, not the 'real' person- meaning that we exist have relations with people that are based on exterior, false, superficial and empty things, instead of things that are real, human, visceral, vulnerable, spiritual, honest and authentic. it seems that politics, war, media, sociology, religion, almost everything encourages and works towards this state of being and relating.
As a result of all this, we are lost- disillusioned and disconnected, and much of contemporary art reflects this, this truly low level of being that we have regressed to.
There is something bigger than all this, to be found in something higher- whatever that is- and to be found in each other.
Both far away and close together. Both separated by the inevitable fact that being two different people separates us, and yet connected entirely beyond everything else, defying any odds. The invisibility of connection is to me present/ reflected in the colors and spaces of the industrial buildings ive been looking at.
at the moment im being inspired by concrete and industrial looking spaces- the color of concrete and the large, openness of these particular buildings.
the colors of these buildings and the spaces around them- mostly dull and pale tones, grey, white, beige- are what im using in the work i've done so far.
although color has a significant place in art, i feel like with what im trying to do with this work it is best to restrict the colors i use. artist caio ferndandes uses a neutral palette- greys, whites, skin colors like flesh and peach etc. they feel kind of pure and are not distracting- these colors and their paleness feels infinite.
Big, open, kind of empty spaces really inspire me and the colors of those spaces and the industrial buildings in them.
an overcast sky, a sky that is going to rain later on, that is not bright and harsh but light and pale and almost dull looking.
maybe my paintings should get lighter and more ethereal and less 'there' as they go on. the whole point of marina abramovic's MOMA performance was to connect with the people who sat before her.
Quotes from interview with Marina Abramovic:
(http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/12/marina-abramovic-ready-to-die-serpentine-gallery-512-hours)
There is no illusion in what she does; when she cuts herself, it's real. The whole point is it's real.
My whole idea at MoMA was to give out unconditional love to every stranger, which I did.
I only learn from things I don't like. If you do things you like, you just do the same shit. You always fall in love with the wrong guy. Because there's no change. It's so easy to do things you like. But then, the thing is, when you're afraid of something, face it, go for it. You become a better human being."
The whole point of the exercise, she says, was to be fully present, concentrating on connecting with whoever came in to sit down opposite her, and "I never saw so much pain in my life." The huge number of people who wept, she thinks, was brought on by this staged situation in which "there is nowhere to go except in yourself. It was shocking. But how simple it was."
Abramović came out of a tough background. Her parents had close ties to the post-war communist regime of what was then Yugoslavia and her mother raised Abramović in a home run more like a boot camp than a family. In 2011, she turned what amounted to an abusive upbringing into a stage production called the Life and Death of Marina Abramović, co-starring Willem Dafoe and Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, and in which she played both herself and her mother. "Every rehearsal I cried from the beginning to the end," she says. "Then one day Bobby [the director] said, enough of this bullshit crying. The public has to cry, not you. After three years of touring in Europe, I was free. All these stories don't affect me any more. An incredible feeling."
Marina said in an interview that 'the studio is like a trap, that the worst place for an artist to be is in the studio. Art comes from life, not from inside a studio". (james franco interviews marina abramovic)
Of performance art, she says that a kind of chemistry happens between the artist and the observer when she does a performance piece.
'Suchness', a Tibetan word for an emptiness which is not an empty emptiness but a full emptiness. This is something i am trying to capture in my own work, and is something that i feel is reflected in the large, open spaces i've been looking at and their colors (industrial buildings).
"If we have such a fast life, we need 'long art' to understand the here and now, how we can live in the present. Performance art is all about being present". (marina abramovic)
Tibetan concept of 'suchness':
In Zen stories, Tathatā is often best revealed in the seemingly mundane or meaningless, such as noticing the way the wind blows through a field of grass, or watching someone's face light up as they smile. According to Zen hagiography, Shakyamuni Buddha transmitted the awareness of Tathata directly to Mahakasyapa in what has come to be rendered in English as the Flower Sermon. In another story, Shakyamuni asked his disciples "How long is a human life?" As none of them could offer the correct answer he told them "Life is but a breath".[3] Here we can see the Buddha expressing the impermanent nature of the world, where each individual moment is different from the last. Molloy[4] states, "We know we are experiencing the 'thatness' of reality when we experience something and say to ourselves, 'Yes, that's it; that is the way things are.' In the moment, we recognize that reality is wondrously beautiful but also that its patterns are fragile and passing."
The zen master Thich Nhat Hanh wrote "People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child--our own two eyes. All is a miracle."
Clary Stolte
canvases can never seem to hold the magnitude of what i want to express, none of them seem bigger, i want to find some way of capturing what i want to capture in the very molecules of the environment, of the air, whatever- space and beyond physical space seems only able to contain it/ hold it, rather than any art medium like a canvas or an object.
transcendental
metaphysical
fragile
brittle
about to break, yet also stronger and heavier than anything else in existence
weightless
PHOTOS OF BUILDINGS:
im looking for something, some way to portray experiences that physically and literally transcend everything else. i feel like the buildings and places ive photographed, and the feeling i get when im in those places, somehow connect to the limitless, expansive nature of meaningful experiences that we have.
the drop of space between the ground and a high rise building, where anything could just 'hang'- moments that have occurred there, feelings that have been felt, words that have been spoken, etc. physical space is connected to human beings in that sense, it is the 'thing' where our experiences remain in a way, its the thing that our experiences are 'held' in- not just in our memories and our minds.
Roanna Wells
Excerpt from an interview with artist Roanna Wells, whose ideas here relate to my own work and ideas.
"Because the majority of us have everything we need on a basic level, we turn to other ways to connect with others and this is mainly through the freedom of speech we see in social networks etc. While I believe this is extremely important in today’s society, I do also wish that there could be a greater understanding of the need for physical and wholesome connection with the people around us". (http://blog.jerwoodvisualarts.org/?p=1576)
Roanna Wells
Excerpt from interview with Marina Abramovic:
In the last performance, when I lived for 12 days, totally exposed, in the Sean Kelly Gallery, almost nothing happened. But just being there, with this openness—there is just skin and bones; there’s nothing else but being there for them. I was there to be projected on. The whole thing has to be almost an invisible exchange. You asked what the connection was like in that performance. I really looked at the people in the gallery. To me the eyes are a door for something else, and whatever is happening in their lives, I pick it up. You can’t imagine how much I cried in that piece. This sadness comes because they project their own sadness onto me and I reflect it back. And I cry out in the saddest way, so they are free. People would come like drunks—instead of a shot of vodka they came to have a shot of this connection with the eyes. They came in the morning; at quarter to nine they were there waiting, in business suits. The gallery would open at nine, and they would come in, look at me for 20 minutes and go away. A lot of them told me later that they are not even connected to art. I was thinking that people usually don’t look at them in this intimate way, so maybe they just needed to be looked at in that way before going to work.
LA It reminds me how much of a defense language is. And how distancing it is—it’s called communicating, but often it’s not. Sometimes it’s just these clever things that we set up, and often they actually get in the way of what we mean.
(http://bombmagazine.org/article/2561/marina-abramovic)
i guess in a WAY i want to or am trying to do something like the painting version of marina abramovic's MOMA piece. kind of. at the moment i feel like ive come to a weird place where although i know what i want to do and can mostly see it in my head, im not really feeling things, or feeling the things i should feel in the way i should feel them in order for this work to come to fruition properly? after looking at the abstract works ive done, i felt kind of like they portrayed my intentions better than the ones with subject matter, which i've never felt about work before. i'm irritated that i can't use literal air or molecules or matter or something that actually IS space, i can't grasp what it is i want, having to use paint and a canvas feels restrictive and i keep thinking it's not actually getting across what i want to get across, even though at the same time it's my only favorite medium. although i love color, i think there is a time for it and the work im doing now just doesn't need color- it would destroy it. i want it to be as pared down as possible and kind of ethereal, even though ethereal is not really the right word for how i want it to be.
the actual happenings of things, the feelings/ energies these happenings produce.
"emptiness to me is expansive"- marina abramovic, interviewed by laurie anderson
We have lost a sense of connection with others, this i think is the biggest problem in the world, one that affects everything, and is possibly the root cause of all our problems in society. laurie anderson (marina's interviewer) makes a very accurate observation about how language is one thing that can get in the way of true connective experience with others. often properly connective moments come in moments of pure physicality between people, with no words, or even just being in each others presence in space, not necessarily touching at all.
what marina provided to all the people who sat before her during her performance was connection, the one thing that is more valuable and enriching to human beings lives than anything else.
Through making art i endeavor to bring people back to the most valuable thing we have- connection between human beings, the value of which i believe has been lost and replaced by superficial, exterior things.
Society has taught us to build our identities around physical appearance, possessions, wealth, social status, ideas of success. As a result, we end up existing beneath these veneers of constructed identities, relating to each other through them, instead of honestly as our true selves.
Connection between people takes place in physical spaces. Space is tied to human connection/ experience in the sense that both are invisible to the human eye, exist in many dimensions and somehow have the ability to transcend everything else. I have looked at large industrial buildings around the city, and the space the exists around, in between and inside them, as they seem to capture the limitlessness that is space, which i feel is reflected in human connection.
Space and everything beyond it seems to contain and 'hold' human experiences- events, spoken words, emotions and connections, all kind of hang in the physical space where they occur. Like connection and experience, space is pure and raw, free of the exterior trappings of modern life and has an unexplainable energy.
I have used the restricted, ethereal colors that i find in these physical spaces, because i feel these particular colors and tones do not distract from the subject matter, but they mirror human connection as it is felt- as the most real, assuring, honest experience we have in life, yet like space it is untouchable, invisible, indefinable.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Anderson, Laurie. "Bomb." BOMB Magazine — Marina Abramović by Laurie Anderson. http://bombmagazine.org/article/2561/marina-abramovic (accessed October 24, 2014)
Notopoulic, Katie. "Marina Abramović Made Me Cry." Marina Abramović Made Me Cry. http://marinaabramovicmademecry.tumblr.com/page/2 (accessed October 24, 2014).
Vollmer, Deenah. "Marina Abramović Makes Sundance Shut Up." Interview Magazine. http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/marina-abramovic-the-artist-is-present-sundance/#_ (accessed October 24, 2014)
Debord, Guy . "The Society of the Spectacle." (1) (Debord). http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/1.htm (accessed October 24, 2014).
Northcott, Suzanne . "suzanne northcott news: March 2012." suzanne northcott news: March 2012. http://suzannenorthcottnews.blogspot.co.nz/2012_03_01_archive.html (accessed October 24, 2014).
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