BlackIvory

2 responses to “Me a Doll Book”

1. 

   Emma Pugmire

   3 Oct 2024

   Mini Book Reviews: Making Friends With Wild Dogs reads like a personal inventory by Ron Throop. He lists practical day to day budgeting: paints, food and running a home; a very good chef who left a catering career for painting supported by his Graphic Designer wife Rose. It is also an inventory of his feelings, friendships, mood swings, reactions to a barbaric political climate and his account with The Lord. It is a candid diary of his struggle to get up in the morning and paint, rejecting the career of the ego artist , re-evaluating the Stuckist Manifesto.

   Edgeworth Johnstone’s Bitcoin Of Art also revisits the Stuckist Manifesto: ‘If it is the conceptual Artist’s duty to be clever it is the Stuckist’s duty to be wrong.’ He hands out free salad spinner paintings while Damien Hirst would’ve charged thousands and burned the originals for tax purposes in the gallery system. On the maxim that ‘Free Art Frees Art’.It reads like an absurdist Dadaist Manifesto ‘The true Dadaist is against Dada’ ; funny nonsensical, contradictory but in these contradictions also true.

   LikeLiked by 1 person

   Reply
2. 

   Emma Pugmire

   4 Oct 2024

   Here are my thoughts on the Turner Prize:

   I am interested in objects used for Artworks. With the Turner Prize we can differentiate between types or a classification of objects. The difference between found objects and what we might call ‘identity ‘ objects.An example of a found object would be a seashell which goes into a painting of a mermaid,dreaming head on a beach, an erotic depiction in an old master traditional surrealist painting. Magritte’s Bedroom had a disproportionately large shaving brush and comb against a blue cloud sky backdrop, perhaps commenting on the small, overlooked daily object taking on a huge significance in the irrational, unconscious language of dreams. Likewise, The Treachery Of Images mislabels everyday pictures; a horse,a mirror etc exploring the objects depicted and the noun; an intellectual leap that lead not only to conceptual art but even influenced modern computers.

   However, it doesn’t matter whether it is a Gucci shaving set, what type of comb depicted. Pop Art was a response to the mass productions of items and images around us .Andy Warhols Campells Soup cans had an autobiographical significance; his mother fed him Campells Soup when ill as a boy .In this case there is a poor Polish immigrant identity story attached. Most of the time the advertising labels were still found images or mass produced identity images e.g Peter Blake’s Elvis Badges, football shirts. The ongoing project was to take on and examine magazines and newspapers often with feminist and gender deconstruction and dissolve the lines between high art, illustration and low culture.

   In Jasleen Kaur’s work there is a Ford Escort car with a huge lace doily on top. In Freudian terms you could say the car is her father, the doily her mother her conception and upbringing as an Indian ,working class Glaswegian. They are aspirational; her father may of been proud of his Ford Escort – David Beckham had one. They are not found items like shells washed up on a beach; they are carefully selected signifiers of class, status or cultural inheritance. You may argue that the traditional Surrealists, being mainly posh white men did not need to make such artistic statements. Yet this is still the ego artist’s work. Is there any difference between Kaur’s work and the online influencer selling Gucci perfume? Other than it is in the cultural, rarified, distanced ,’ironic’ space of the gallery. There is no universal feeling conveyed, only a bland, branded autobiography.

   LikeLiked by 1 person

   Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.