Mona Hatoum
Hatoum has developed a language in which familiar, domestic everyday objects are often transformed into foreign, threatening and dangerous things.
Her work explores the various ways in which the human body interacts with and relates to the world, in all its vulnerability and the institutional constraints to which it is subjected. Her sophisticated and often paradoxical portrayals of these phenomena address the viewer first and foremost on a sensory level, triggering feelings of dismay, fascination, fear and loathing – or even a mixture of these.
Mona Hatoum,'Dark Matter', 2019
Mona Hatoum, 'Mouton', 1994
I think Hatoum utilizes her body or the bodily element is to try to clarify the meaning of territory and to question the personal identity under the tendency of worldwide displacement.
To use those daily objects and human rejects as a small part of a whole site to link the individual with a massive collective consciousness. I admire the way that she uses a relaxing, simple way with tangible and easily-found objects to convey an abstract and broad subject and makes the reading of her works more reasonable to everyone's surroundings.
Hairs, nails make viewers feel close and connected, especially for females who mostly have been used to manicure and clean those all the time. Also, it can be seen some certain tension in the site that she created. I think life is also full of potentials of uncertainty and vulnerability, and we can see tensions everywhere as well. Because humans tend to feel life from their own perspective and as long as we live a life we can feel things around us and that differs, depending on our ages.
Mona Hatoum,'Hair Grids with Knots', 2006
Mona Hatoum,'Rest Assured', 1952'
As for the form of Hatoum's artistic products, I can see there might be a story to tell. Hair balls in a box or scattered on the floor, the spherical cages tilting at a specific angle, and a delicate curtain made of hair netting, those all can be a symbol of a verse expressing the lyrical sense of daily life.
I believe life is full of poetry. Time can be reflected in every corner of life.
Mona Hatoum,'Hair Receiver' 2012
Mona Hatoum,'Sala 3'
Kiki Smith
Kiki Smith's works can be another sample, proving an aspect of concerning life itself. She uses a broad variety of materials to continuously expand and evolve a body of work that includes sculpture, printmaking, photography, drawing, and textiles.
Smith says that she chose the human body as a subject because ‘it is the one form we all share’ and there is a poignant universality of experience in these sculptures of the human form fashioned from bronze, porcelain and crystal amongst many other materials.
Kiki Smith, Tail', 1997
Kiki Smith,'Veins and Arteries',1993
I felt touched when I saw those pieces of body parts. I can see the materials which Smith tends to use are usually thin, light and delicate. Like the blue and red glass beads in 'Veins and Arteries', the cast glass of her 'Tail', she makes the reading of her work so easily connected to the flesh and blood, especially from female's perspective.
Also, in her artworks, the vulnerability of the body can turn to visible and tangible. There is only one wire to string the small beads and the glass is so easy to be broken. All of the texture and appearance of the medium are able to show viewers the potential of the passing time and leave a kind of poignant universality and then memory left to everyone. That creates a space that we might be able to think about what is the components of our existence, how they work, how time changes us and then cherish the days we have got and the meaning of being at every moment. I can see in her work it provide a kind of certain space that we can share our common empathy.
Kiki Smith,'Moon Three',1998
Kiki Smith,'Healer', 2018
Kiki Smith,'Daisy Chain', 1992
William Blake
Blake cares for the splendour of human love, or the rapture of the sun and the sky, only so far as it carries him to experience the state of some inner illumination.
E.H. Gombrich considers William Blake as an artist of symbolism with the great importance of innovative inspiration to European modern art. He can be regarded as not only a pioneer of English romantic poetry and also of modern painting. His poems are lyric and his spiritual field ranges wide.
To the world and human life, he has his own unique understanding. With the strong affection of his religion, William builds a radical, complicated and theoretical system of symbolic mythology to present his thoughts and the methods of thinking.
So to Blake orthodox Christianity was, essentially, Devil Worship. William Blake's true God was the Human Imagination. He did not need to be saved by Christ. Rather, through the salvation of his own imagination, which allowed him to engage in right-thinking and proper actions, he was his own Christ.
He believes that to understand the human world people should learn from the sight of themselves instead of the aspect of reason. The energy constitutes human with a good side and an evil side.
In his realm of poetic symbolism, The ideas of 'Experience' and 'Innocence' play a very important role. The 'Tiger' is the representative of 'Experience' and the 'Lamb' is the one of 'Innocence'.
William Blake,'The Lamp', from 'Songs of Innocence' 1789
William Blake,'The Tiger, from 'Songs of Experience' 1794
Multiple identities of William Blake
Unlike some mystics, he did not seek after the spirit world because he despised the world of sense, but because he loved it so well he felt there was more in it than a man could fathom here. His mysticism was not an inspiration for the future; it was a realization of the present. ‘The kingdom of God is within you’: we have only to free ourselves from what is base and paltry, and we live in this realm of this spiritual beauty now.
William Blake,'Proverbs of Hell' 1929
I start to think about why I can be moved by reading William Blake’s works, how I can see the images behind those words and signs of symbolism, what symbolic language mean to my art practice, and how I adopt and feed into my art.
-
Based my own experience, somehow, I have got a kind of natural sensitivity to characters, words and phrases and I have had a habit to write some poems or verses time to time since I was 20. Before I understand the meaning of a text I can see pictures or scenes behind it. So when I have an impulse to write down some words or sentences I see some images first. And I believe that those images are not just imagination or illusion, they are also a kind of real-world beyond reality and this real-world is also rooted in my daily life.
-
The symbolic language can build a structure and space where I can be a theatrical director to arrange those imaginary narratives as a theatre of symbolism which would be presented as a site with a kind of certain artistic conception behind. This has become my basic way of thinking during the process I output artistic creation.
-
So, those symbolic signs simply coming from my imagination turn to contextual elements in my writing or art practice. And they become a part of my artistic symbolic language in my creation. So I can get nutrients from my textual poetry to feed into my art practice and also take the nutrients from my artistic poetry to enrich my writing practice.
Landscape in the Mist
Speaking of applying symbolic language in artistic creation, I think no one would have ever doubted that Landscape In The Mist, directed by Theo Angelopoulos, could be an extraordinarily impressive example.
In this great film, Angelopoulos tells the audience a bizarre, tragic and poetic story about an unpredictable adventure of an adolescent girl and her younger brother, Voula and Alexander. This film is full of symbolic signs or scenes. For example, A massive stone hand rising above the sea level disappears into the distance; There is a tree in the mist with doubt of its existence always being talked about; Some actors and actresses from a theatre company are rehearsing a play with no hope of a chance to find a stage to perform. Also, the symbolic figures or objects create an atmosphere of mythology and enrich the metaphorical expression of the storyline. What mostly makes me impressed are the following one: A crying escaping bride, a dying horse, a massive stone hand, the truck and the driver, the trains... I would say Angelopoulos is a master of applying the artistic language of symbolism.
-
Symbolic moment/scene: A massive stone hand rising above the sea level disappears into the distance.
-
Symbolic moment/scene: Awakened at the darkness, Voula and Alexander find a tree in the mist. They gradually approach to it and hug it.
-
Symbolic moment/scene: The way a snowfall slowly freezes everyone in a town.
In this marvellous film, I can see a lyrical long verse, philosophical thoughts and a brutal surreal tale of growing up. There is a kind of certain understanding of life and time - when we try to approach a tree in the mist (being more specific, the metaphorical meaning of the tree in the mist could be a lifetime goal), we may have already experienced some compromise, sacrifice or even the price of life. However, like the beginning of this film, Voula ask Alexander, 'Are you afraid?', after giving the same answer as Alexander's, 'No, I am not afraid', we still choose to slog our way on this somehow endless journey of life.
Constantin Brancusi's Endless Column
This most famous work of Constantin Brancusi, Endless Column, more than 98 feet tall, anchors the Endless Column Park in a Romanian mining town, Târgu Jiu. The earliest extant Endless Column, 10 feet tall, which was created in 1918 and carved from oak seems to the artist's first attempt to use the form of a succession of pyramids. This module has become highly monumental since it turned to a massive sculptural monument in 1937, high soaring into the sky. It can be regarded as the form of purity, perfection and the possibility of infinite expansion.
'Endless Column' 1918
Constantin Brancusi 'Endless Column' 1937
Through this form of poetic simplicity, I can see it might have something similar to the human body. This constant erecting expansion shows me a kind of energy that can provide a certain strength to lift something up toward the high top. Compared to the human body, this kind of energy might be able to link to some bodily elements within, like DNA and spinal column, with a similar feature that provides a pattern with the potential of endlessness.
The original sketch of the Endless Column drawn by Brancusi
The pattern of DNA endless column
Anatomy of the spinal column
Detailed anatomy of the spinal column
So, I partly adopted the mould of a succession of pyramids (with upright and downright shapes of triangles) and created a spine with part of the firm and stable, and part of the relatively soft and flexible. Given a straight erecting trend, it could be seen as a spiritual appearance of a spinal column with abstraction, perfection, and subjectivty, rather than simply resonant to the physical and neutral human spine. Because I think it important to present the reading of this work: The spiritual nature of this inbuilt energy that we all possess naturally.
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Nowadays, contemporary art seems to have no limitation in the application of media. Since the early 20th century, when a porcelain urinal signed by Marchal Duchamp was submitted for an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, as a piece of artwork and called Fountain, the artistic circle then started to follow his step, more and more readymades are utilised to be a part of art creation. By simply choosing the object (or objects) and repositioning or joining, titling and signing it, the Found object became art.
So, how can we distinguish between Art and Found object? I ask myself. I think Walter Benjamin might have already given an answer.
In 1935, Walter Benjamin description tries to explain how daily things can be seen as very special and unique in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. To him, the concept of 'aura' can be defined as ().I similarly want to capture the moment of 'aura' in my daily life as a kind of a sense of poetry. I believe this is the nature of art.
Perhaps, the 'aura' should be a basic quality of an appealing artwork, because, according to Benjamin's argumentation, it has the meaning of (). But what I might be able to interpret is that perhaps Benjamin was trying to tell us, we should pay more attention to our daily life, to seize every moment and hour, to capture the living beauty, poetry and vitality just spread in front of us. I think if we just ignore or avoid them then something surprisingly attractive is not existing and they may become less and less visible or even be unconsciously destroyed in the end.
The exhibition at Fold Gallery
A solo exhibition of Benjamin Cohen
Something that isn’t, FOLD Gallery, London, UK / 2019
From my point of view, I think the way the artist arranges his exhibits is very elegant and appropriate. He gives this exhibition a kind of kinship to viewers. Also, the materials he utilises are soft, light and thin which gave me a sense of tenderness and poetry. I think all of the details of his presentation on this site would make audiences feel free to look at it.