Below is an inspired set of photo collage, circa 2000.  Mies van der Rohe via Petra Vadehra von Treskow with a little help from a fellow called Karl, a fictional character who traversed the globe, aloft in the sky in search of the light that was Mies. I love this fairytale. Only this past week I spotted a Zephyr floating high above San Francisco and it reminded me of von Treskow’s homage, prompting me to post it.

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Mark Schaer, Prada Riot, 2009

Mark Schaer, J Meyer H2, 2009

Mark Schaer, Untitled, 2009

My final year at college (1989) I finally settled into making photomontage , and in those days without the use of a computer programme. I would cut up pictures from magazines, take photos of scenes and people and arrange the pieces, then take a final photo which I would then process in black and white. Sometimes I would paint part of the photo with special photo paints. I was into dada and surrealism – ( can’t you tell?!)  Most often the idea was spontaneous – I had no final image in my head before I started. But the process of the choice and  juxtoposition of the images were the most important  part. Those pieces arranged to make a whole.

I also made videos at college, and studied contemporary dance. Some of the videos were stop motion animations and others were real life action videos, only cut up and re-arranged again like a collage, a photomontage. In dance classes I had to choreograph my dances . I had to design and  choose the moves I made and put them into some kind of order…. for both video and dance , the process of choice and juxtoposition are most important, as well as timing.

In 1994 I was asked by a headteacher of a school if I could make a mosaic on the school wall with the kids. So from photomontage, collage and video art, it seemed a logical progression. Again practising the process of choice and juxtoposition.   Pieces that make a whole.

Going Home - (1989)

(If you look at the menu on your right and click my photomontage you can see some more of my work from 1989)

Eikoh Hosoe via (OvO)

Kestimones, The Paperbags, Photo Collage

Kestimones, Pyrex, Photo Collage

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Mathilde rend hommage à Schumpeter dans cette évocation du “monopole temporaire”, réalisée à partir de photos et de pâte à modeler (ah ! la pâte à modeler !)… Merci Mathilde !

It’s the online journalism blog!

We had a lecture last week from Daniel Meadows, who first made his name touring an old routemaster bus round Britain and taking pictures of whoever he saw. The pictures are touching, interesting, funny, sad – all human life is there, and I love them, in their daft, twee glory.

What he started doing 25 years later was much the same. In 2000 he started receiving public money to help people make films like this. That’s right (watch it!) – Capture Wales is totally, totally daft, even if it does make you titter.

The project ran right up until last year, and you can see why it’s stopped now – the videos you can browse through on the site mostly look like the lower end of Youtube.

But in its early days it was more than just a bit novel. It introduced to the world the idea of picture storytelling on the internet, an easy, cheap, powerful way of getting your point across without having to deal with the huge file sizes and inaccessibility of video.

From Daniel Meadows' Photobus project

Personally, I don’t think the twee Capture Wales videos warranted public funding in their own right. I mean, the people who did them spent five days under tuition making them. Five days!

But I do concede what they tried to achieve. While I come from a young generation and the South East, where my mates were already making more sophisticated things than this (and publishing them online) by the time our Welsh Babe had her inspiration-flash, Capture Wales brought out older Valleys people who’d seldom touched a computer before (in 2000, anyway), and told them it could actually be fun. It’s the lesson they were going to learn anyway, by the time Youtube came along, but how could the Capture Wales team have known this back then?

And better Wales than anywhere else. Where else could the filmmakers have got voiceovers more chirpy, innocent and patriotic?

In other ways, too, the ends have justified the means. Forget about chirpy Proper Welsh Babes for a minute, and look at a video that was briefly mentioned in the lecture; Rape of a Nation. It’s the most informative and powerful 10 minutes about the Congo I’ve ever seen. Brilliant production values, sensitive presentation – it’ll have you spellbound.

Watch this space for my version before 3 December. No doubt it’ll be as inspiring.

Toujours Arnaud : Bling-Bling !

Arnaud nous fait rêver :

A friend knows the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails.  ~Donna Roberts

A true friend is a treasure

Available as a fine art print, notecards, or gallery wrap at bbrunophotography

Claire nous offre un retour vers la nature, en rapport avec l’équilibre ressources-emplois du PIB. A vous de deviner !

This fisticuffish visage belongs to Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971), an Austrian artist and writer, and a key figure in Berlin’s Club Dada. (This 1919 portrait is by Hannah Höch, who was his lover from 1915-22.)

He invented photomontage—at the same time, supposedly, as his co-conspirator dadaistes George Grosz, John Heartfield and Johannes Baader. In the spring of 1918, when Hausmann and Höch holidayed on the Baltic Sea, the guest room in which they were staying had a generic portrait of soldiers onto which the patron had glued photographic portrait heads of his son five times; in 1958, he recalled,

It was like a thunderbolt: one could—I saw it instantaneously—make pictures, assembled entirely from cut-up photographs. Back in Berlin that September, I began to realize this new vision, and I made use of photographs from the press and the cinema. (Leah Dickerman and Brigid Doherty (eds), Dada . . . [Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2006] 90)

“ABCD” (c.1920; see Dietmar Elger and Uta Grosenic, Dadaism [Taschen, 2004] 40).

He developed typographical experiments into collages into what he called “phonemes,” or more exactly, the practice of opto-phonetics, that is, “the science of visible speech sounds,” probably the model for Kurt Schwitters’ “Ursonate” (1922-32).

“kp’erioum” (1919)

Such constructions embodied the Dadasophy he created for Berlin Dada that embraced “destruction as an act of creation,” a schizo-aleatory process (Dada . . .); at the same time, when read aloud, they disconnected phonetics from semantics and became “exercises in strange forms of vocalisation and sound production” (Cornelius Brock, “Sound Work and Visionary Prosthetics: Artistic Experiments in Raoul Hausmann,” Papers of Surrealism 4 [Winter 2005]: 16).

But, more than that, they were prosthetic—”an outperformance of the human body” that was “a mechanical intensification of our natural faculties”:

Typography is an intermediate domain between art and technology, between seeing and understanding, and is one of the most obvious means for the permanent psycho-physiological auto-instruction of human beings. (“Biodynamische Naturanschauung,” in Eva Zürchern (ed.), Scharfrichter der Bürgerlichen Seele: Raoul Hausmann in Berlin 1900-1933 [Ostfildern, 1998] 171)

(Note that aside from his collages, his most well-known work was assemblages like “Mechanical Head.”)

]]> http://artses.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/consommation/ Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:25:32 +0000 BoboTheBoss http://artses.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/consommation/

Première création, du Sieur Arnaud ! Merci l’artiste, d’avoir ouvert le bal ! On attend vos commentaires…

Peter Combe, The 3 Graces, collage, 4 x 8″, 1992

Hannah Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany

Höch was unique in her role as one of Dada’s only leading female figures. She also was an early pioneer of photomontage, of which this piece is a great example. In it, she cuts of found newsprint, advertisments, maps, and photos, to create a piece which addresses many aspects of her modern world. Particularly, she touches upon the role of women in society, and brings up questions of where women might be heading. In a way, she predicts the women’s movement by asserting herself as an artist, a thinker, and an agent of social transformation.

This piece has a lot going on: lots of descriptions of women and society; references to men’s domination and the mechanisms of society, as well as self-references to Dada and its “anti-” perspective. One thing that I read on a site was that the lower right-hand corner is a map of countries in Europe which, by 1920, had extended the right to vote to women. I thought that was very interesting.

´150 feet 2009´, Photography+Collage, 68,9×51,5 cm, 2009. A limited edition of 100 by Petra Vadehra von Treskow.

milo02 by erre_>