Finding Artists info

Again, trawling sites for info on varying views and extremes in opinions on news sites. I’ve also started trying to find research material on several artists which I think are working within the same realms of my work. Thomas Hirschhorn is a big influence on me, It’s funny, when I first saw his work, I thought it was “ a load of rubbish” (which it is!), but I failed to see the relevancy of his work. It is in direct comparison to the direction I am moving in, a questioning of media / culture / politics and religious communication. Since seeing him talk about his work on the Tate shorts (podcasts) I have begun to appreciate his work far more. I have also looked at his history (on wikipedia) and found that he was once a graphic designer, with the group “Grapus”, which: “which sought to combine excellence of design with a social conscience”…
His use of “rubbish” to make installations to question the turbulent, confusing presentation of opinion, fact, truth, fiction within today’s media outlets has strong overtones of the very media he is critiquing is itself “rubbish”. To me, it is a simple, obvious (and very needed) point to create discourse with such throwaway materials. The simplicity of the material vocabulary certainly clashes and fights with the often overly complex and multifarious elements within his installations. The sheer scale of the work often engulfs the viewer in a tsunami of references – it is this immersion of the senses, bombarding them with a myriad of cultural, political and social codes, bastardised and gruesomely rubbished, that create the very idea of all the “information” to exist in guttural forms - trash tabloids, overly opinionated websites, gratuitously bias television stations etc. It is sheer coincidence that my current work (cardboard trumpets, plastered in newspapers) is like Hirschhorn’s work, the experimental construction of cardboard sculptures – to test how they “might” work as steel sculptures has resulted in a new avenue of exploration for me. The use of low grade materials and less care of “production” and more care of the ideas within the work have risen to the surface. Like Hirschhorn says in the podcast: “energy yes, quality no”. I could not agree more in these last few weeks of the MFA…I need to be energetic, I need to create work, in order to react to it, and learn from it. I can not sit on my arse and expect a “brilliant idea” to pop in there – I must create to critique, and critique to create. If I slow down, my momentum and direction will suffer – work work work, as Bruce Nauman would say.

Steve also recommended the other day that I look at "the road to war" - Rainer Ganahls. Now this is also another excellent artist, who is looking at media representation of news and especially the Iraq war. He has been learning languages and repeating statements like “I am not a terrorist” (in Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Spanish etc). His site is a massive repository for his past works, with simple pages of photographs of tv news shows, historical works (lecture theatre series) etc. I have to spend more time checking it out, to get a full handle on it, but I do believe that this work will help me inform my practice, a great deal.

It’s scorchio today, so we take the boat down the Dee, and leave Poppy at Gabi’s mum’s place. Gabi’s dad comes with us today too, he’s testing out his inflatable kayak, which turns out to be quite good! Needless to say, the first “boating of the summer” is just what I needed, some clarity and calm, before my writing storm. Procrastination, but with style.