Dissertation Research

A history of printmaking:
http://www.cartage.org.lb/en/themes/arts/graphicartists/generalities/historyofprintmaking.htm

Katsushika Hokusai
http://www.katsushikahokusai.org/

Japanese woodblock printing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodblock_printing_in_Japan

ESSAY PHOTOS

ESSAY RE SUBMIT (photos shown separately)

Social Surveillance: The return of Panoptisicm

The use of surveillance has been steadily increasing in modern society.  A written report from the BBC this time last year states that “No-one knows precisely how many cameras there are in the UK, but the estimates go as high as 4.5 million”. Every moment of everyday life is watched, from walking out of your house onto a main street where the CCTV cameras can watch you as you take money from an ATM machine that askes you for your PIN number to verify that you are still actually you, “making Britons among the world's most watched people.”

Cctv in London

As citizens we allow this surveillance, we see it so often that we have almost come to ignore it. D.Lyon states in ‘Surveillance and Society’ (2002), “Now the means of surveillance flow freely through domestic spaces”, and we allow it to do this because we believe that it will help us keep people in order. We believe it will help authorities to pick the bad needle from the haystack.

Methods of surveillance are constantly increasing and becoming more advanced. Jumps in the creation of watching people may be growing quickly, but there are a few examples from our past, which can be linked to this theme of social control. Jeremy Benthams design of the Panopticon in 1971 is a perfect example of how that state can reform bodies that are not acting as the state would wish.

The main design behind the Panopticon is that all authority is ‘centralized’. It is a spherical building made with cells on the outer walls that face into an open middle with a central tower. All cells are individual, meaning no cross contamination or conversation. This central tower is backlight with guards, scrutinising in their separate viewing tower. The building has a peculiar affect on those who are incarcerated. The central tower is in darkness often with venetian blinds, allowing no peering eyes to see in, but the cells are all in perfect light, allowing the guards to watch constantly. This is where the idea of surveillance comes in, the people in the cell are aware that they are being watched, and so they behave. Making the central tower impossible to see into means that there doesn’t actually need to be a guard present, as the patient/prisoner will assume their presence. The prisoners incarcerated themselves, from the fear that someone could theoretically be watching them. The inmate would willingly submit to power. ‘Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.’ (Foucault, 1975)

Presidio Modelo Isla De la Juventud, Cuba

This is the design model which French Philosopher Michael Foucault based his theories of Panopticism. Panopticism to Foucault was the act of a person regulating him or herself, because of the notion that they are being watched by a higher power. “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection". [Foucault 1995]. Foucault saw the Panopticon as a way of remodelling people and society, in the image of modernity. Changing our society to be controlled in the masses through surveillance. 

Foucault says this is a shift in disciplinary techniques from the physical control to the subtle mental control. He aims to show how these forms of knowledge and rationalising institutions like the prison, the asylum, the hospital, the school, now affect human beings in such a way that they alter our consciousness and that they internalise our responsibility. ‘Power relations have an immediate hold upon it [the body]; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’ (Foucault 1975). Foucault writing this in 1975 was relating this form of power only to institutions, unfortunately for modern day societies the need for power and control has moved outside the institutions and onto the streets, and into most parts of everyday life.

Disciplinary society’s produces what Foucault calls ‘docile bodies’. – Someone who is controllable, trainable, the docile bodies are better because they are more willing to be obedient. The docile body is supposed to be more productive, and fitter than normal, they can self-monitor themselves. Modern disciplinary societies and Panoptisicm create docile bodies, which the state can control, and use for work as they want. For example the recent cult of the gym; in the last 30 years the surge to be healthy, eat your 5 a day, and exercise regularly has been trained into us. The government is filling our society with reminders to be healthy, for example by putting calorie amounts on the side of packaging, and showing us what percentage of our ‘daily allowance’ we have eaten into.

They want us to believe that it is in their best interest to help us be healthy, when really they want a healthy society. As Foucault says in  ‘The subject and power’, ‘Human beings are made subjects’, they are made controllable. A society that can be moulded and made productive, in our case, one that creates a lot of work and doesn’t bring in a huge NHS bill.

John Fiske (b.1941) is a media scholar who teaches in Popular Culture and Media Studies. He says the ‘individual is produced by nature; the subject by culture’ expressing similar opinions to Foucault as the body can be moulded and shaped by society, even if the mind doesn’t notice.

These techniques can be seen very often in everyday life, for instance something as routine as driving. When driving down the M1, the road that notoriously always has road works, you can’t help but wonder if those average speed cameras are ever actually on. But you don’t dare test them, just in case.

In other writings Foucault discusses the relationship between power, knowledge and the body. He states that ‘Where there is power there is resistance.’, and the two can only coincide, power cannot simply work on it’s own. The exercise of power relies on there being the capacity for power to be resisted. A good example of this in action is in the book [George Orwell] and it’s film adaptation [Michael Radford] ‘1984’, where a character rebels against the control of the government because he realises how everyone is being controlled. Far before his time Orwell managed to capture how communication technology can and will shape the society. He created the ‘telescreen’ and the image of ‘Big brother’, which is now used often in reality television shows where people are always being watched. Big Brother is what Orwell describes in his other work as a ‘brain in a bottle’, a way of controlling people without the controller actually having to be present. Much like the absence of the guards in Bentham’s Panopticon.

The idea of power and control is one that many artists love to play with. B.Nauman created an installation called the ‘corridor piece’ in which he has created a corridor only wide enough to fit the average persons shoulders through it, with a close circuit television placed at the far end of the corridor. As the viewer walks towards the screen to find out what or who they are watching they realise that it is themselves being watched, and the closer they get to the screen the further away they move from the camera recording them. Viewers then reasct to this strange and clostraphobic feeling, and turn and walk the other way, knowing they are being watced, as Foucault says ‘Power relations have an immediate hold upon it [the body]’. This is an incredibly claustrophobic idea but it I think it proves a valid point in making people feel this claustrophobic. If they feel claustrophobic in a closed and safe environment where they are accepting being filmed, they should feel even worse to realise that that is how our society is built.

Another artist who works with the idea of control and monitoring human reactions is Vito Acconci with his ‘Seedbed’ piece. Personally I am not a fan of this installation but it defiantly had an affect on a lot of people. The piece is made in a room where a low wooden ramp has been made to merge into the floor. The ramp covers the width of the room so that it looks as if the floor is at a slant. However, underneath this ramp Acconci would lay, waiting for people to walk over him and then he would masturbate and talk to them. Saying aloud across loudspeakers to the gallery his fantasies about the visitors. They were able to hear him but not see him, most people probably didn’t realise what was actually happening right underneath their feet. I mention this piece because I think the idea of someone actively watching and affecting another person’s reactions and movements without them realising they are present, ‘Human beings are made subjects’ ties in with how society is controlled by a power that we never see.

In conclusion it is clear to see that surveillance is a huge part of everyday life, and increasingly so over the last fifty years. George Orwell wrote in 1948 about how life would change in the future, and although the details may not be correct, our society has defiantly become the surveyed society that he imaged. The only problem is that there aren’t enough people that notice it. Since looking into the Theories of Foucault around Panoptisicm and the relationship between people and power I have realised how often his theory applies to everyday life. Whether it’s the shape of our lecture theatres that insure that we listen and behave, or the speed cameras controlling how we drive, or the cctv through out shops that stop us from acting out of place. We are being watched so much now, that it would be near impossible to do anything about it. 

Bibliography

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12224075

http://benatlas.com/2010/11/the-prison-if-island-of-juventud-are-you-gonna-go-my-way/

http://www.michel-foucault.com/concepts/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish

http://theinvisibleagent.wordpress.com/2008/12/20/first-edition-book-covers/

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5464625623984168940

http://loveforlife.com.au/content/10/01/29/videomoviebook-1984-george-orwell-john-hurt-richard-burton-1-hour-50-minutes-29-sec

http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/Articles3(1)/return.pdf

http://www.dur.ac.uk/geography/research/groups_and_clusters/?mode=pdetail&id=934&sid=934&pdetail=39455

http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/ctc/docs/bybybb.htm

Foucault, Michel (1998) The History of Sexuality Vol.1: The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin. p. 140

Foucault, Michael (1194) essential works of Foucault 1954 – 1984: volume 3 London: Penguin

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punishment. Vintage Books, New York: 1995.

Contemporary Art

                                                                                        

Contemporary Art                                                                                                                         

What is contemporary art?

What is its history and context of production?

·       Modernisms (Dada and Duchamp vs. Modernist painting)

·       Conceptual Art

·       Postmodernism

·       YBAs- Art in the 1990s

·       Art Now- Themes and Issues in Contemporary Art

Conceptualism:

 ‘Art, when vital, is about setting the teeth on edge, of reminding us that we are alive for a span, and that the ugly and wholly unavoidable fact of death is never very far away. Art is about the beautiful. It is also about the nasty, the unpalatable.’ Michael Glover- Art Critic (Independent)

‘A point which I want very much to establish is that the choice of these “readymades” was never dictated by esthetic delectation. This choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste….in fact a complete anesthesia.’ Marcel Duchamp, “Apropos of Readymades”, 1961

‘A new kind of flatness, one that breathes and pulsates, is the product of the darkened, value muffling warmth of colour in the paintings of Newman, Rothko and Still. Broken by relatively few incidents of drawing or design, their surfaces exhale colour with an enveloping effect that is enhanced by size itself.’ Clement Greenberg, ‘American Type Painting’, 1955

‘All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual in nature because art only exists conceptually’ Joseph Kosuth, ‘Art after Philosophy’, 1969

‘In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work…..The idea becomes a machine that makes art.’ Sol LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, 1968

‘Works of art are analytic propositions. That is, if viewed within their context-as-art, they provide no information what-so-ever about any matter of fact. A work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artist’s intention, that is, he is saying that that particular work of art is art, which means, is a definition of art.’ Joseph Kosuth: Art as Idea as Idea

‘…One will have to wait fifty or one hundred years to meet one’s real audience, but it is this audience alone that interests me.’ Marcel Duchamp, 1955

  

The Young British Artists

‘The point was to generate hype from the combination of ‘cutting –edge’ art and the traditional frame that would hold it……High art lite, then had- successfully and spectacularly – broken with the autonomous concerns of the art world and had intervened in ‘real life.’- Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s, 1999

The Turner Prize: ‘Matching the cool and alternate image of Channel 4, the emphasis was placed on youth, and the first new shortlist dramatically reflected that change: in 1989, the average age of the nominees had been fifty; in 1991, it was thirty.’ Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite, 1999

Art Now: Themes and Issues

‘A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.’ Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 1998

‘We now have: ‘a worldwide system for the production, distribution and consumption of art on a spectacular scale….the art it shows, sells and talks about is non-medium specific ‘conceptual’ postmodernism…..the work of art is, in short, entirely dependent on the institution of the museum for its continued existence.’ Paul Wood, ‘Inside the whale: an introduction to postmodernist art’ in Gill Perry and Paul Wood, ed. Themes in Contemporary Art, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004). 

General Bibliography:

Kent, Sarah. Shark Infested Waters: The Saatchi Collection of British Art in the 90s, (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2003)

Stallabrass, Julian. High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s, (London: Verso, 1999)

Stallabrass, Julian. A Very Short Introduction to Contemporary Art, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

Perry, G. and Wood, P. (eds.), Themes in Contemporary Art, (Yale: Yale University Press, 2004)

Wood, Paul. Conceptual Art, (London: Tate Publishing, 2002)

Feminism

Feminisms LCA Level 5 Lecture Programme        Tutor: Dr Madeleine Newman

What is feminism?

O.E.D: ‘The advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.’

‘The issue of rights for women first became prominent during the French and American revolutions in the late 18th century. In Britain it was not until the emergence of the suffragette movement in the late 19th century that there was significant political change. A ‘second wave’ of feminism arose in the 1960s, with an emphasis on unity and sisterhood; seminal figures included Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer.’

Tate Glossary: Feminist Art

‘May be defined as art by women artists made consciously in the light of developments in feminist art theory since about 1970.’

Key Questions: What is gender?; What is a feminist critique of art history (discipline) and museum (institution)?; Why ‘feminisms’?

Case study 1970s: Feminisms and their methodologies

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974-1979   Mary Kelly, Post Partum Document, 1973-79

‘The most signal omission of feminist art history to date is our failure to analyse why modern art history ignores the existence of women artists. Why it has become silent about them, why it has consistently dismissed as insignificant those it did acknowledge. To confront these questions enables us to identify the unacknowledged ideology which informs the practice of this discipline and the values which decide its classification and interpretation in all of art.’

Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, 1981 p.49

‘What is feminist art? There is no such entity; no homogenous movement defined by a characteristic style, favoured media or typical subject- matter. There are instead feminist art practices which cannot be comprehended by the standard procedures and protocols of modernist art history and criticism which depend upon isolating aesthetic considerations such as style or media.’

Griselda Pollock, ‘Feminism and Modernism’ in Parker, R. and Pollock, G. Framing Feminism: Art and the Woman’s Movement, 1970-85, (London: Pandora Press, 1987)

‘I’d like to make a distinction between “feminist practice” and “the feminist problematic” in art (problematic in the sense that a concept cannot be isolated from the general theoretical or ideological framework in which it is used). One aspect of the problematic is that it points out the absence of a notion of practice in the way the question is currently phrased and most familiarly posed- ‘What is feminist art?’’

Mary Kelly, ‘Art and Sexual Politics’, 1977 in Kelly, M. Imaging Desire, (London: MIT Press, 1996)

‘In the work by artists we name women, we should not read for signs of a known femininity- womanhood, women like us…..- but for signs of femininity’s structurally conditioned and dissonant struggle with the already existing, historically specific definitions and changing dispositions of the terms Man and Woman within sexual difference….. We can read for inscriptions of the feminine – which do not come from a fixed origin, this female painter, that women artist, but from those working in the predicament of femininity in phallocentric culture in their diverse formations and varying systems of representation.’

Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories, (London: Routledge, 1999.)

  

Bibliography:

• Lippard, L. From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women's Art, (New York: Dutton, 1976.)
• Parker, R. and Pollock, G, Framing Feminism: Art and the Woman’s Movement, 1970-85, (London: Pandora Press, 1987.)
• Pollock, G. Differencing the Canon : Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories, (London: Routledge, 1999.)
• Pollock, G. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, (London: Routledge, 1988.)
• Chicago, J. Through the Flower my Struggle as a Woman Artist, (New York: Doubleday and Company, INC, 1973.)
• Chicago, J. The Dinner Party, (New York: Penguin Books, 1996.)
• Kelly, M. Post Partum Document, (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983.)
• Iverson, M., Crimp, D., Bhabha, H. Mary Kelly, (London: Phaidon Press, 1997)