Chris Ofili at the Tate Britain - Titles

Popcorn Tits

Blind Popcorn

7 bitches tossing their pussies

Before the Divine Dung

Spaces Hit

Blossom

No women, no cry

Afrodizzia

The Adoration of Capitan and the Legend of the Black Star

Foxy Roxy

Pimpin ain't easy

Two Doo Voodoo

The Holy Virgin Mary

She

Prince amongst Thieves

Third Eye Vision

Afro Love and Unity

Afro Sunrise

Triple Beam Dreamer

Afro Daze

Afrovoid

Albinos and Bros with Afros

Afro

Afro nude

The Healer

TED Lecture Impact Lectures 1

The Beginning of the Life Cycle

"out of all industries, the textile industry is the second more polluting in the world."

The key issues:

• chemical pollution
• energy inefficiency
• unethical production
• transporation
• consumer use
• over consumption and waste ( fast fashion)

What are the issues in the different stages of the textile production:

grow/ manufacturer: labour, chemical, water

ship to spinner: transportation

dye fabrics: labour, chemicals, water, package

dye, finish, embellish: labour, package

cut and sew product: labour, package

different fibers:

naturals: plant: cotton, ramie, hemp( interesting in the UK as self sufficient), raffia, sisal, jute

animal: silk, alpaca, cashmere, mohair, angora, place silk

celluloses regenerated ( wood pulp): viscose, rayon, cupro, lycell(tencell), bamboo, acetate, tricaetate

synthetic petroleum based: nylon, Lycra, acrylic, polyester

new fiber: starch ( ingeo) genetically modified corn - nothing really has the perfect answer

We have this ideas that cotton is GOOD and polyester is BAD but it is much more complicated than that, if we look at the whole cycles of either cotton production or polyester production.

This fact actually changes a lot of things for designer as there is much more freedom in fabric use and we can find more idea for a more eco-friendly textile industry.

natural dyes, yes or no?

• good for small and craft industry but more complex for bigger industries, the quality of the dye is not always as hoped for.
• if using synthetic dye, choose your colour well, as they all have different level of impact on the environment.
• solution: close water loop, constantly re using the same water.

The problem might be somewhere else...

• production and finishing
• offcuts, where do they go?
• etc.. find your own issue and work on it

good website and books:

• www.climatex.com textile and environment issues
• cradle to cradle industry and environnment

http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm

• http://fashioninganethicalindustry.org/home/ ethical fashion, courses and etc...
• http://www.pan-uk.org/ cotton production issues

AO TEXTILES LTD.

Karen Purgin diverse work

Emma D'arcey marbelling

Penny Walsh natural dyes

Spike money

Aveda sustainable project; great outfit and production, interesting that Aveda cares about environment

!!! Important to have someone looking at the financial part of your business!!!

Chris Ofili exhibition at the Tate Britain

Afrodizzia

The titles and descriptions of Chris Ofili work was a first seen for me, his exhibition was bright and catchy, unique. It was more than beautiful colours and innovative use of materials, I quickly realized that Chris Ofili was playing with identity, female identity, Afro-Caribbean and Caucasian identity, the difference and the stereotypes.

Space Hit

1995

Acrylic oil, polyester resin,

map pins and elephant dung on linen - I love it!

Some aspect of Cris Ofili's work:

• Collage of faces, black people
• Faces made of elephant dung
• Collage of women faces with sexual expressions
• Faces with added afro hair style
• Nudity
• Picture of women asses and vaginas
• adoration, men-women The adoration of captain shit and the legend of the black stars
• White woman,blond hair blue eyes, showing her breast Foxy Roxy
• Famous black faces Afrodizzia
• Pornographic images Prince amongst thieves
• Red black and green Afro love and unity
• Black woman with a banana in her mouth
• Stephen Laurence tribute

3 Questions:

1. When does expressing identity represent racism?
2. Is Chris Ofili stereotyping his own culture?
3. Do these work represent a black man identity in the 20th century

I come from Switzerland and the integration of other cultures has never been as smooth as in England. In Switzerland it is not cool to be Swiss, the new generation is not at all patriotic and if we dare to be, we will be called racist. why? The same happens in France, when a Moroccan say go Morocco he is cool when a Frenchman says go France he is racist. I think that expressing your identity is never a racist thing, it only depends on the self esteem of the people that listen to you.

I think that Chris Ofili is not only stereotyping his own culture but the other cultures, it is obvious that in many of his paintings he uses Afro-Caribbean stereotypes, such as physical features, but his painting Foxy Roxy where it is a white woman pictured with blond hair and blue eyes, which his also a Caucasian stereotype.

I think his work is definitely representing 20th century art, and it is fresh and appealing. It does represent a black man identity as his work is based on it. Then could this work represent a black woman identity? I think that except some pieces, it could. so I would say that this work represent a black person identity in the 20th century.

I really liked this exhibition and the conversation it provoked. in terms of the aesthetics of his pieces I found them beautiful i loved the dots technique and the shine of many pieces, in the last room the paintings were a feast for the eyes, the colours were amazing.

Identity in Art- Women Only!!!

Lecture by Wendy Meakins

"One was not born a woman, one becomes a woman." Simone DeBeauvoir

On that day we talked about art and women, following the theme of identity.

Identity in art is very present, and a lot of artist use their identity or their story in their work( is it sometimes a bit therapeutic?).

Can we say that the environment you are brought up in , determines your identity?

I think that it does, recently in the news it was the horrid story of those two boys who tortured two other boys , apparently, there had a toxic home life and watched many horror and pornographic movies and their parents were violent, would have they done what they have done if they had live a different life style? I think so. I do not believe in the murderer, psychopath gene.

Now in terms of female and male identity, is it an environmental thing or a genetic thing that girls like to play with dolls and wear jewellery and little boys like cars and Bob the builder?

I think that society has given us a model and that if a girl doesn't wear pretty pink dresses she will be called a tomboy, and boys playing with dolls might be criticised...

Maybe there is a little percentage of genetics but most of the identity is created by the society and environment we live in.

the following artists are women who used or played with identity in their art.

ORLAN 1947 France

She used her own body and self-performed plastic surgery on her face and body and recorded it.

Self-hybridization

Even though her way of playing with identity is strange and probably pretty dangerous it make me think that she pushes the boundaries of plastic surgery, does what she do is really different than what Michael Jackson or Silvester Stallone do? does she look worst?

MADONNA 1958 USA

Madonna during all her career played with sexuality, female and male issues very controversially.

her SEX book is a way she used.

what space does she really inhabits?

she seems to be more of an object that anything else.

CLAUDE CAHUN 1894-1954 France

Born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob she intentionally choose a sexually ambigous name.

Claude Cahun in a series of photographs plays very much with male and female identity, teh viewer can really be confused if it is a man or a women.

her work was really political and personal.

The other artist that is very controversial and plays with her identity is TRACEY EMIN, she is touching women issues in a very interesting and powerful way e.g. the bed and Everyone I have ever slept with 1963- 1995.

it is very interesting to notice that women seem to always have self referential work, is it because we need to prove something? or are we more able and more sensitive to play a with ourself and our histories?

Some other artists and writers that are interesting to look at:

SUSAN SONNTAG 1933- 2004 USA

BARBARA KRUGER 1944 USA

VIRGINIA WOLF 188201941 England

LISA LYONS 1953 USA ( body-builder)

Empire

Lecture by Wendy Meakins, my personal notes..

This day we mainly talked about Africa indigenous technology, Black bodies in relation to empire

The starting point is the western creation, point of view that Africa is a single entity; even though it is made of 53 countries and that they are 2,000 languages spoken.

The first colonial contact with Africa was made by the Portuguese but bartering, they wanted gold so they brought other products...

The English and the French colonised in a more violent way and suck out everything they could from the countries.

We had interesting exchanges between us, about the races and the ideas we had about them.

We talked about the colonisation heritage in art and about artist who work closely to their origins and also those who push the social boundaries, to open our minds.

Josephine Baker, the author of Negrophilia played with stereotype in her association with Paul Collin who did sketches for the French magazine "Negre" he sketched Josephine baker accentuating her physical features and using prejudice that people have.

The Harlem Renaissance was also a big artistic revolution for black artist and the Jazz was its big star, being a avant-garde way of dealing with Music, very ingenious.

Here are some other artist that participated to this "breaking the European art" movement:

Nancy Cunard, who was the heiress of the Cunard Line shipping businesses, in 1928 she married Henry Crowder and Afro-American Jazz musician, she wanted to be part of the African culture and fought against racism.

Aaron Douglas, a painter who is closely linked to the Harlem Renaissance by his painting, a very explicit work is The Crisis

James Van der Zee, a photographer in Harlem he photographer Jean Michel Basquiat

Kieth Piper, an artist from the West-Indies, whose picture of the world hold by black hands express his reality,

I particularly like it because it is very explicit about our own personal representation of the world and the colonialist and "superior" attitude a lot of Westerner adopt.

Sonia Boyce, a British Afro-Caribbean artist with her work "we are English"

Yinka Shonibare 1962, African textiles

What I will remember from this lecture and the previous one is that art is closely linked with identity, and that the artist that are using their identity in their work always end up with a very touching sometime shocking outcome which provoke a reflexion to the viewer.

"He was a genius. What a tragic waste"

I don't know which words to use to explain how I felt, I said it was like when Michael Jackson died but in worse, it gave me goosebumps. I wasn't expecting Alexander McQueen to die that early, he was only 40... I felt sad thinking of how sad he could have been to want to put a final stop to his life.

I loved the risk he took in every collection he created, a genius that is who he was.

I believe that in order to compensate the genius, life or God, in its fairness or unfairness, has given the doted a weakness... It is tough but we have to keep going..

I will not forget that day, A final, tragic, twist in the tale of a fashion giant.

...

Postmodernism, as I researched and understood it...

I have been reading POSTMODERNIST CULTURE, An introduction to theories of the contemporary by Steven Connor to help understand more this movement and especially how it influenced art.
I want to quote parts of the text I have read and then "debrief" it...

" we might say that the characteristics of postmodernism is this peculiarly complex relationship which it has to modernism which in its very name it has once invoked, admired, suspected or rejected."
For me this means that postmodernism and modernism are in many ways closely linked.

ARCHITECTURE:
MODERNISM: Bauhaus Walter Gropius, Henri Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe.

" From now on, architecture was to belong to and express the new. It was to use new materials and embrace the techniques of construction which industrial development had made available, The newness of the modern movement would lie principally in forms of reduction, simplification and concentration."
NEW and SIMPLIFICATION

"Its beauty was now longer to be incidental or supplementary to its function, for its beauty would now be its function."
Introduction of beauty not only as a "plus" but has the aspects of modernism constructions.

"At the same time, architecture was to be the visible expression of a new unity of art, science and industry."

Architecture was the first and most obvious example of the modernist movement.

" Jencks focuses first of all on what he calls the uni valence

of modern architecture. (...) the simple, essential forms (...)usually, this is achieved by the device of repetition, (...) in their approximation of geometrical perfection (...)which does not refer to anything outside itself by quotation or allusion.

Uni valence: the quality of being univalent:

Genetics. (of a chromosome) single; unpaired; not possessing or joining its homologous chromosome in synapsis.)http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Univalent?o=100074

To me this means that modernism is about simplicity to a extend that it doesn't even link to the "world context".

"The first and most obvious of these is through a return to the sense of the meaningful or referential function of architecture."

Not much connection with the current context but more about a message through architecture.

ART:

MODERNISM: Kandinsky,Klee, Mondrian, Clive Bell (critic), Kant (philosopher)

"What holds modernism together in art is a programme or ideology, rather than a particular, identifiable form of practice; correspondingly, what underline debate about postmodernism is a shift in this programme. This is to say that even more than in architecture,artistic modernism is defined at some point between practice and theory, between artistic objects and their definitions. The postmodernism debate makes this interrelationship even more complex."

Modernism art is about its significance, postmodernism is a following of it adding more to its definition.

Greenberg believes, that because Kant was the first philosopher thoroughly to scrutinize the nature and limitations of reason itself , he is the first real modernist.

"For Greenberg, the undeniable dominance of painting in modernism is due to the achievement of this absolute self-possession and self government, and it's painting's absolute dependence upon its own medium."

SELF SELF and SELF : self criticism, scrutinize, self possession, self-government...

I believe the modernism movement was not about matching in the context anymore but about individuals and the own development of each techniques independently and maybe even about each countries evolving independently...

"Greenberg's attempt, then, is to affirm the uni valence of painting, as Le Corbusier wanted to affirm the essential identity of architecture."

"It might be said that Cavell has run into a certain crucial switch point in the division of modernism from postmodernism in the visual arts, a point at which modernism's intensity of self-definition flips over into a radical uncertainty about art's very means and identity."

Where it changed from modernism to postmodernism, that is when the self when too far too a point that there weren't any more identity in art.

The theory of postmodernism can be separated in two by two Critical groups; the conservative-pluralist "Charles Jencks has identified himself as the central figure of conservative-pluralist theories of artistic postmodernism." and the critical-pluralist which is represented by writers from the journal October.

"Where Jencks imagines a simple break between the restriction of modernist 'absorption' and the openness of post modernist 'theatrically', the October group seek to understand the complex relationships between the terms of the binary opposition."

difference between the two post modernist analysis group.

"One of the signs of this openness to that which lies beyond the self-absorbed work, is the unabashed return to representation, symbolism, connotation, and all the other forms of referentiality."

One of the characteristic of post modernism is this come back to the arts referring to a context.

"..forms of artistic post modernism have all been money spinners, and whose central purpose, in recent years, seems to have been to reconstitute art in the way that Jencks so openly acknowledges, as 'the image of the bourgeoisie triumphant and enjoying itself'"

Post modernism is again the comeback of what art was before the modernism movement.

The structure of oppositions which frames the post modernist analysis of the two groups * therefore has much in common, in setting multi valence against uni valence, impurity against purity, and inter-textuality against singleness of the work."

* conservative-pluralist( Jencks) and critical-pluralist (October) .

This part of the text explain clearly what is the difference between modernism and post modernism.

"This complex passage argues that the non representational sign of the modernist painting always represents something, if only the desire to embody non representation."

Interesting point about modernism and in life generally, even if you are against all kind of "group" then you will be grouped as a non-group.

PHOTOGRAPHY:

" As the quintessentially art, modern art, photography has been one of the most threatening adversaries to the integrity of paintings in the twentieth century.Indeed, one may say that it was partly in reaction to the widespread dissemination of photographic technology that modern painting was forced to turn from representation into the abstract interrogation of its own form of conditions."

The role and evolution of photography in these movements(modernism and post modernism), as I understand it art- photography too the self absorption the modernists had.

I am happy I could read this chapter and understand some of it, it was a challenge for me!

What I will remember from it is that Modernism and Post modernism are closely linked and could not exist independently, I will remember the self of modernism and the back to referential values of the post modernism, I have learnt about architecture and influential names linked to modernist art and post modernist art.