Design’s intuitive relationship with history has now gone beyond the so-called “art of appropriation”, which naturally implies an ideology of ownership,
The work that I’m attracted to often uses images of real life that are not always real life; statements that don’t necessarily reveal their sources or intentions; art that’s not always art; graphic design that’s not always graphic design; but this work still manages to communicate to each of us on an individual level.
Sixty years removed from Duchamp’s nomination of ordinary objects to high art status, punks styled their fashions with common household items. Chain stores followed by using the graphic symbolism for a mall-rat aesthetic while high-end magazines reinterpreted the look for an even further removed audience. Across this trajectory exists an awareness of the coded construction of popular culture—whether through the eyes of the subcultural artist, the countercultural punk, the low-culture caterers or the high-culture stylemakers.
A designer’s role is to create meaning out of this ambiguity.
Pop art resulted from the realization that all modes of representation were ideological constructs.
The work that interests me blurs the distinction between high and low, art and non-art, and past and present. The work that I make is an attempt to question those Modernist utopian ideals that characterize the fundamental principles of design, a tradition born out of Pop art’s subversion of the mass culture.
This version of juxtaposition forces a somewhat violent dialectic between the two modes of sophisticated advertising and the brash art of the streets. An example of ad “correcting”, the posting of the missive in an advertisement with intended purpose to attack capitalist fallibility.
Does the separation of the tree artificially from nature — presenting it on an immense white ground taped crudely and conspicuously into the landscape questions the concept of representation, reality, environment, art and perception?
Inspired by Silomäki’s work, I see an opportunity to articulate my own experiences on race, religion and politics in more personal ways.
The ability to redefine a person, place, thing or text through small alterations has a strong tradition in art and design. This sort of formal exercise is important because it allows the designer to challenge certain cultural dogmas through simple design moves.
Blogs have emerged as a powerful medium to share one’s thoughts.
Every day between 1998 and 2002, Paul Perry has embedded his routines on the blog Alamut.com. As such, a huge body of texts, art and design have been catalogued and accessible to the public.
I like this electronic diary format because it allows ideas to be noted, expanded upon, put in motion, or deconstructed relatively easily.
The infiltration. These images are from Andrea Fraser’s performance Museum Highlights, which is a critique on institutions involved in the commerce and display of art. Posing as a tour guide at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fraser leads a group of increasingly frustrated visitors on a tour ridiculing the language and value system of the institution by describing commonplace elements of the museum such as a water fountain and the cafeteria in the same terms as the art on display.
Similarly, when Andrea Fraser put on a uniform, she was able to pose as a museum tour guide at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in order to promote her own subversive agenda.
Duchamp and his fellow Dadaists sought to shift perspective by placing found objects into new surroundings, a transformation from everyday object to High Art.
The critic Roger Caillois noted that ‘mimicry’ is the most basic stimulation in developing our social instincts. As children we learn language by means of mimicking our parents and siblings.
In a similar way the basic elements of culture, including art and design, are founded in mimetic forms of imitation.
Space can present itself as form of stage and viewing can sometimes become a kind of theatrical experience. ‘In the Lights going on and off,’
Martin Creed looks at museums as a place to experience art with an installation that offers, unlike Flavin’s work, both a beginning and an end.
Photography is a language of light.
The problem is, because the act of seeing is so natural to us, we, the viewers, usually forget that seeing is always intertwined with the active concerns of our minds, as opposed to being a passive recording of stimulus.
The history of visual art gives us many examples that attempt to reveal or explore the gap between what we see and what is actually there.
Cowboy series, Richard Prince extracts the images from Marlboro ads, re-presenting them as large-scale art photographs. Untethered from the brand that bore them, the cowboy-scapes remain deeply recognizable, the purified iconography of a frontier that exists only in the mind.
If modernist art followed modern science in reducing the mediums of art to basic elements and simple shapes, contemporary software abstraction instead recognizes the essential importance of complexity in the world. Here, the code composition from JODI.ORG has evolved into a physical expression as Theo Jansen transforms genetic algorithms into physically scaled complex systems.