greglookerse.com
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Greg Lookerse, Artist, American
greglookerse.com
Friday, May 6, 2016
FOOD LOVE
A Community Engaged Project
April 3, 2015
Markland House Lawn
Flagler College Campus
St. Augustine, Florida
Students enrolled in my Installation and Site Specific class hand fed strangers in an intimate setting while telling personal stories. Each student prepared a meal that was nostalgic to them. Guests were seated in a tent with a fabric divider down the middle. Guests and students could not see each other. Guests were asked not to speak, simply listen and taste. Once the guest was seated, the student gently offered a taste of food by holding out a spoon/fork underneath the fabric divider. As the student fed the guest, a story was told about the memories associated with the food they had chosen to prepare. The interior of the tents were lit with white holiday lights and each student placed personal items and photos in the tent. Each guest spent approximately 10 - 15 minutes in the tent. At the end of each session, guest and student touched hands.
FOOD LOVE encompassed all the senses.
Sound. Voices whispering stories and the soft strumming of guitar.
Scent. The aroma of food being cooked and served.
Taste. Small bites of food for the palette.
Touch. The pulling back of fabric to enter the tent and a goodbye touch to the hand.
Sight. The event officially began when the sun set. The white tents glowed in the darkness under the large oak trees.
Reservations were made weeks ahead of time. The event was free and open to the public.
The students and myself designed, constructed and installed the tents. I would like to thank Russell Maycumber II, Russell Maycumber III, Luciana Gassett, Flagler College Maintenance staff, Laura Stevenson-Dumas and Holly Hill.
Hannah Wilke, American, b. 1940, d. 1993
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| Untitled, 60 ceramic objects, 1975 |
Wilke used the various mediums of photography, performance, sculpture, and video to examine and challenge prevailing notions of femininity, feminism, and sexuality. She was one of the first artists to use vaginal imagery in her work with the purpose of directly engaging with feminist issues. During the late 1950s through the early 1970s, Wilke worked on creating a type of female iconography based on the body, constructing abstract, organic forms that closely resembled female genitalia. She displayed these forms on the floor or wall in a highly organized and repetitious manner that recalled Minimalism. During the 1970s, she began to use her own body for performance pieces that she called her "performalist self-portraits." These performances, immortalized on video or in photographs, confront erotic stereotypes by calling attention to and making ironic the conventional gestures, poses, and attributes of the female body. In one well-known piece, the S.O S. Starification Object Series(1974–79), Wilke posed half-naked for a series of black-and-white photo stills, adopting the accoutrements and attitudes of female celebrities, but with her torso literally "scarred" with chewing gum shaped into tiny vulvas. The chewing gum interrupts the viewer's desiring gaze, calling attention to the objectification of woman's bodies. guggenheim.org
Thursday, May 5, 2016
Fred Wilson, American, b. 1954
| MINING THE MUSEUM Text excerpts from an essay by Elisabeth Ginsberg Source is beautifultrouble.org “What they put on view says a lot about a museum, but what they don’t put on view says even more,”[2] Wilson said in an interview about his installations. He communicated this point by contrasting what is with what should be. By drawing attention to the overlooked black figures, his installment asked whose truth was on display at the Maryland Historical Society.  |
The installation juxtaposed ornate silver pitchers, flacons, and teacups with a pair of iron slave shackles. Traditionally, the display of arts and craft is kept separate from the display of traumatic artifacts such as slave shackles. By displaying these artifacts side by side, Wilson created an atmosphere of unease and made apparent the link between the two kinds of metal works: The production of the one was made possible by the subjugation enforced by the other. When the audience made this connection, Wilson succeeded in creating awareness of the biases that often underlie historical exhibitions and, further, the way these biases shape the meaning we attach to what we are viewing.
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Modes of Transport
Wilson communicated his critique through a strategic juxtaposition of the museum’s artifacts. The audience was left to draw the conclusions. Wilson exhibited an old baby carriage in which a Ku Klux Klan hood substituted the usual bedding. The baby carriage was placed next to a photograph of black nannies with white babies — their future employers. Again, Wilson did not make any explicit statements, but simply provided the audience with a strong visual statement about the persistence of racial hierarchies. The suggestion that children readily absorb their parents’ prejudices was clear.
Why it worked
There have been other attempts to use satirical techniques to critique museum institutions from within. Often these have caused controversies due to misinterpretations and the difficulties inherent in the ambition to destabilize one’s own foundation. “Mining the Museum” worked because it was suggestive rather than didactic, provocative rather than moralizing.
Love and Loss in the Milky Way, 2005
1 table with 47 milk glass elements, 1 plaster bust, 1 plaster head, 1 standing woman and a ceramic cookie jar,
77 3/4 x 92 x 43 7/8 inches.
Photo by Kerry Ryan McFate. Courtesy The Pace Gallery, New York.
Untitled. 2005.
1 table with 47 milk glass elements, 1 plaster bust, 1 plaster head, 1 standing woman and a ceramic cookie jar,
77 3/4 x 92 x 43 7/8 inches.
Photo by Kerry Ryan McFate. Courtesy The Pace Gallery, New York.
"...Love and Loss in the Milky Way is a subtle and moving assemblage that reflects on the fragility of human relations. Here, seventy-five pieces of milk glass—one of which belonged to Wilson’s late mother—are displayed on a tabletop. Among these vessels are four sculptural elements: a standing Greek figure, the bust of a black woman with an elongated neck, a mammy-type figurative cookie jar, and a broken plaster bust of a white male, modeled on a classical Roman prototype. The work suggests an encounter between various cultures and alludes to the relationship between fine art and material culture. Yet the figures here are not just true to type. The way in which they face one another, with the white male figure lying broken among them, suggests a more philosophical response than one expects from Wilson. No longer does the artist attempt to embody one of these representations. Instead, he approaches his subject from a distance; viewers may sense that the real story lies among these pieces, in the gaps between races, ideas about race, and the way those are fixed in objects."
March 14, 2012 artpractical.com |
| Fred Wilson |
Cornelia Parker, b. 1956, United Kingdom
1988 -89
Thirty Pieces of Silver comprises over a thousand flattened silver objects, including plates, spoons, candlesticks, trophies, cigarette cases, teapots and trombones. All the objects were ceremoniously crushed by a steamroller at Cornelia Parker’s request. She then arranged the transformed silver artefacts into thirty disc-shaped groups, which are suspended about a foot from the floor by hundreds of fine wires. Each ‘disc’ is approximately ninety centimetres in diameter and they are always hung in orderly rows, although their overall configuration is adapted each time to the space in which the work is displayed. The title refers to the biblical story of how the apostle Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus in return for thirty pieces of silver.
tate.org.uk
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| Cornelia Parker |
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