Body Dysmorphia in Art

 @gagosian. We're all a bit insecure let's face it.  Some hate those extra few pounds they can now grab around their waist after gorging themselves on kebabs or necking copious amounts of Carling. Others are at war with their skin and some just hate everything about themselves. If you fall into the final category, it might be worth seeking some professional help.
Whatever it is, most of us are obsessed with the way we look. And we could be forgiven for being like this - just look at the airbrushed beauties that we are presented with, day after day, billboard after TV ad,
magazine after shop window.  Models, printed out to god-like proportions, silently screaming 'you want to look like me!', across our cities, through our TV sets and from the glossy sheets. So when we don't quite match up to these airbrushed gods we turn resentful  and play out an endless battle of self loathing and image fueled purchasing of new clothes and beauty products.  Dove's viral ad, 'Onslaught', a few years ago represented this idea beautifully.  And if you were deluding yourself that people actually look like 'that' in real life, the 'Evolution' ad demonstrates how, with a good camera set and Photoshop skills, you can turn plain-Jane into a stunner.

Let's get back to art.  Jenny Saville is fascinated by this idea of self-image and its physical representation. Producing works in the style of Bacon, Freud and Rubens she creates fleshly, larger than life, oil-painted visions of bodies and self-disgust.  Although her focus is the female form she often undermines the sex/gender boundaries in her pieces.  In the early 90's she spent hours observing plastic surgery operations in New York and admits "Bodies fascinate me. I find having the framework of a body essential. Having flesh as a central subject, I can channel a lot of ideas."  Her paintings, while they are grotesque in the bodily representation, superbly capture the grimy reality and extreme of body dysmorphia. The viewer is left repulsed in appreciation of these images that are in stark contrast to those on the advertising billboards around the corner - ironically hinting at exactly the same thing.

Latest Exhibition
http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2010-04-15_jenny-saville/


Dove 'Onslaught'
Greenpeace 'Onslaught-er'
Dove 'Evolution'

Phi and the Golden Ratio

φ

It sounds like it might be Roald Dahl's unreleased sequel to James and the Giant Peach, but it's not.
Is it the answer to our aesthetic dreams?  Well maybe, but whatever it is, this number has fascinated mathematicians, architects and artists for millenia now, so it must mean something right?
I don't really get maths but this has something to do with the proportions of two quantities:

"two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio of the sum of the quantities to the larger quantity is equal to (=) the ratio of the larger quantity to the smaller one"

Ok, so I don't get it but it's interesting because it's eveywhere.  Not only does it seem to be part of the design of nature, but it's consciously or unconsciously shaped many of the greatest pieces of art and architecture around us.  Some dimensions of the Acropolis, the Pantheon, the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Great Mosque of Kairouan have it, Salvador Dali used it in his  'Sacrament of the Last Supper'.  Da Vinci's illustrations in De Divina Proportione and The Vitruvian man exhibit it, and it is expressed in the structure of branches, the stems of plants and even the veins in their leaves.

So I wonder, is it in the design of your iPod?

Remember it when you're designing your next building, painting your next painting or measuring your next garment...does it look better now?

φ = 1.6180339887...

The space between our ears, or glasses.

The Japanese called it 'ma' in garden design, some people have a lot of it between their ears and others believe that it's actually dark matter.  Negative space: Whatever it is, some people just like using it for artistic effect.

So, tasked with designing an object to celebrate the anniversary of the classic Coca Cola bottle Paul Daly came up with this little masterpiece.  Using the negative space between 2 beautifully crafted crystal glasses he 'pseudo-creates' the best unmade coke bottle of all time.  Genius.


http://pauldaly.com/index.php

Here's a poem from philosopher Lao Tse about this whole negative space (ma) thing: so very profound.:

Thirty spokes meet in the hub,

but the empty space between them

is the essence of the wheel.

Pots are formed from clay,

but the empty space between it

is the essence of the pot.

Walls with windows and doors form the house,

but the empty space within it

is the essence of the house

X-RAY Images

Was having a look through a modern art book in Waterstones and found this guy, Nick Veasey.  He takes pictures using x-ray machines, airport security scanners etc. to produce some pretty cool images.

There's something a bit voyeuristic about some of them, particularly the clothing ones.  Others, that focus their attention on technological/structural objects, including people are fascinating to look at. Some, like the flower above, are just fantastic images.

A quick look at Nick's 'About' highlights how he aims to subvert our cultural emphasis on image.  He wants to add intrigue to the familar by representing the integral beauty:  "by revealing the inside, the quintessential element of my art specualtes upon what the manufactured and natural world really consists of."  He's got a short section on the process of making these things on his site - really interesting.

        http://www.nickveasey.com/

J J J J R

OK, so sadly I won't be writing about the music producer J.R. Rotem, who you may have heard in a whole host of songs combining 1 to 3 elements of 'J.J.J.J.R', a large air-horn or 'Beluga Heights'.

No instead I'm talking about JR, the French 'pioneering' photographer, 'pioneering' perhaps as much in his political motivations and ideals as he is a visualist and artist.

He's responsible for some incredible 'installations'...well, more 'mega-prints' in the biggest art gallery in the world:  The planet is his canvas.  Just like his prints, his lens isn't focused on the ordinary or the conventional. His website biog states that his work  fuses "Art and Act, talks about commitment, freedom, identity and limit."  After kick-starting his photographic career capturing the portraits of Parisian gangsters and displaying them  in the bourgeoisie districts, JR was always going to continue to make bold, politically and culturally subversive statements. The boldest of all being his 'Face to Face' project. It was largest illegal photography exhibition ever, putting photographs of Israeli and Palestinian faces side by side in cities either side of the border as well as either side of the fence that separates them.
More recently his 'Women' project aimed to represent and highlight the dignity of women who are the target of conflicts.  As with much of his work, once the original 'exhibitions' have been completed, from walls in India, trains and bridges in Kenya to the hill slums of Brazil, it's taken to European cities to be displayed and reinterpreted. The 'Women' photography was displayed along the Seine and there is a video on the site which captures its creation and its passing.

In many ways JR's work is about hope. It's about representing the unrepresented and those discriminated against (rightly or wrongly) in such a way as to be provocative and challenging.  The focus and placement of his work forces the observer to remove the boundaries of subject and object.  More than that, there is a humour in his work that subverts any political or cultural discrimination of the subjects and for that reason he creates a glimmer of a changed world for just a flitting moment.  The disposability of his installations, on piles of bricks, soon-to-be-demolished buildings', highlight the transience of these moments and are brilliantly summed up by the final piece of the Women exhibition washing into the gutter in Paris. (See video on his homepage [below]).

Whether I keep being drawn to the anonymous type or its just a popular artist's marketing trend, JR is another one keeping his identity a secret.  If the work that Bansky, Miss Bugs and JR produce is anything to go by, I'm looking forward to finding some more of the 'shy artist' types.

J.R

http://jr-art.net/

J.R. Rotem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._Rotem

Ich Mag Marc Woehr

I'm sorry Miss Bugs but I've found a German I like more. Plus I recently read about you and found out that in fact you are two people, a girl and a guy (Miss & Bugs). So, I've moved on and found Marc Woehr. It's a random story of how we met. I was in a backpacker hostel in Munich browsing all the 'tourist' guff out on reception. I spotted a small mag called re.flect with a Sin City looking fashion shot on the front. After realising it was in Deutsche I nearly chucked it. But then I saw these spraypainted, dark, moody cityscapes with his name on. I get a sense of misery and depression out of them interspersed with the lightning blots of flourescent emphasising a glimmer of hope, of creativity maybe, sparking up out of apocalyptic, monochrome highrises.

Time to hear from Marc in his interview for re.flect (the only bit not in German in the whole magazine) : "My favourite colour is black (even though technically it is not a colour)....[I use] techniques to being the 'imagined' onto our spatial plane. I always use a single line as a source, letting it develop into a shape which only seems to truly be."

Ok Marc, so you've totally lost me there, maybe they didn't translate you properly or maybe I need to sit and stare at your work for an extended period of time to see this evolving single line. Even so...ich liebe es.

http://www.marcwoehr.de

Technorati Claim - E96AG4ESYTMK

Dirty Beach Art

I had another recollection this morning; wandering along the Thames a few years ago by the Globe Theatre and doing a double-take when I saw a crew of people on the little 'beach' below us carving out a dragon and some treasure out of the sand. Not only was I surprised there was even any sand in London but I was sure some sort of tide would wash them away, dragon n all. 5m below the wall, it drew in quite a crowd. Maybe we were all waiting in some sort of sadistic expectation for that tide, or maybe we were just appreciating some modern art, after-all, the Tate Modern was just about in your peripheral from here. I think I even took a picture on some old camera phone but since then, when they only had a MySpace page, it looks like the guys at DirtyBeach have hit the BigTime. Their work is incredible and some big companies have started to commission installations: Pepsi, Cannes, C4, Glastonbury etc. Next stop, my back garden.

http://www.dirtybeach.tv/

I ♥ Miss Bugs

I think I just found a new art love...Miss Bugs. She's like Bansky but whilst there's his satirical tone leaking through some of her work with names like' Dirty Art Holding Hands With Politics', 'It's All About Advertising - Above the Line, Below the Line', she's (assuming it is a she and not just Banksy's female alter ego) got a more refined, edgy, synergistic look goin' on, blending design with screen print and classic celeb portraits...splashed with some bold colouring. I love it. Awesome. Not only has she built brilliantly on the whole 'Bansky anonynymous graffitti artsist' thing but developed that grunge feel with some hard-edged design. Simply awesome.


Website
http://www.missbugs.com/

Will Robson Scott - Urban Photography

This guy's shots stood out for me at the Homegrown Hip Hop Exhibition in Urbis. The light boxes helped but there was a griity realism and a real stylised sense of the illicit that he captured perfectly in the shots of grafitti artists hunting for a canvas

http://www.dazeddigital.com/Photography/gallery/27/3889/6/Creative_Portfolio_Will_Robson-Scott