Year Two

Indifferent Matter: From object to sculpture. Henry Moore Institute Leeds.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres
'"Untitled" (Placebo)'
1991
Candies, individually wrapped in silver cellophane (endless supply)
"Indifferent Matter: From Object to Sculpture pairs four key twentieth-century sculptures by Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-96), Hans Haacke (b. 1936), Andy Warhol (1928-87) and Robert Smithson (1938-73) with a series of ancient objects including Neolithic jades, a yet to be named mineral, fragments of Roman sculpture and a collection of eoliths.
Each pairing explores how objects resist the origins, names and histories humans accord to them. Each of these American artists made radical shifts in the understanding of what sculpture might be, using acts of naming and rethinking ways of displaying artworks. The ancient objects, all held in museum collections, challenge boundaries of classification, their histories and meanings ambiguous and unknown.

Indifferent Matter: From Object to Sculpture explores how matter can be both indifferent and contingent on encounter, exploring the malleability of meaning and the ways in which objects are accorded cultural and historical value."

Andy Warhol
'Silver Clouds'
1966

I was really intrigued by this installation. Interacting with the audience to explore the juxtaposition of continuance and contradiction.

Berlinde de Bruyckere’s Cripplewood (2012–13)

Venice Biennale.

"For much of her career, the artist has used wax to form misshapen, tortured bodies that are the antithesis of the heroic bodies of classical art. These cadaverous, tragic figures are at once hyperrealistic and impossibly contrived; composed of absences, often lacking heads, they also appear to have been deprived of innards and bones. They are marked by the touch of real bodies; De Bruyckere makes casts of body parts that she reworks and combines in assemblages that connote the presence of a real body whilst presenting incontrovertible evidence of its absence.
De Bruyckere robs monumental sculpture of its grandeur through the unsettling material of wax, a gummy, fleshy substitute for the traditional materials of sculpture—bronze and marble—and the inglorious, recycled furnishings that her figures squat upon or drape across. The uncanny effect of De Bruyckere’s waxes is considerable; they inspire horror and pity in the viewer, who is confronted by an object that suggests the disquieting presence of a corpse. This waxen residue appears to be the substance of a history of atrocity, a monument to a mute, traumatic past that trespasses on the present, unsummoned."

“Property of a Gentleman” at SVIT

RAW

M.GOLDSTEIN PRESENTS
REGINALD ALAN WESTAWAY
(b.1928 d.2008)

BEYOND THE VEIL: Nasreen Shaikh Jamal al-Lail.

"Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind"

"All our knowledge begins with the senses, process then understanding ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason."

"In Law a man is guilty when he violates the Rights of others, in ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so."

"A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in it self, without reference to any other purpose."

Kantian quotes and masked faces of several colourfully dressed Muslim women. Exploring the juxtaposition between vivacious styling's and the rigid esptemological references that challenge our preconceptions about the modern role of the veil as well as the individual underneath it.