Marc Quinn

Bonsoir,


I'm going to do a post on my favourite artist of all time... he was only born in '64 and is male... so all in all it's very strange that he is and always has been my favourite artist seeing as I love 1940ish art the most and female modern artists the most. Odd.

Anyway it's Marc Quinn.

Why do I love his work?

Well first of all it is the fact that most of his big pieces are sculptures. And I'm more than obsessed with sculptures, especially of the human body(ish - if they're obscurely human it's even better).

But it's not just that because I actually prefer bodily figures like Georg Herold's 2010 sculptures a lot better:

Or these that I'm stood next to in the Tate and now cannot find anything about them anywhere...

grrrr.

So the next reason is because Quinn mixes science with art and this is something that I'm realllllllllllllllllly interested in. Everyone nowadays is into mixing art with music or music with poetry/writing
or all 3 in some cases
or even music with science sometimes
but noone really crosses science with art. But here we have his blood head called 'self' that is a frozen mold of his head made by his blood:

Now, if I had to study only 1 piece of art for the rest of my life that would be it. Why... well it is kept in a incubator to keep at a certain temperature so it doesn't melt. This is supposed to show how fragile human life is and that the 'plug can be pulled' at any moment. But there are TOO MANY ways to interpret it which is always fun. And it is just so aesthetically pleasing to me! To know that all that stuff that has made that has come out of the person that made it... it's just madness. It is part of the reason why I like Pete Doherty's art even though I dislike him - because he uses his own blood. Call me crazy, but it adds a new dimension to the whole 'death of the author' Roland Barthes theory. The author or artist is definitely not dead - very much present in these works of art.

Another one of his science + art creations is the portrait he made of nobel prize winner John Sulston. Quinn managed to use DNA for this seeing as Sulston won the prize for sequencing the Human Genome. Quinn said "The portrait was made by our standard methods for DNA cloning. My DNA was broken randomly into segments, and treated so that they could be replicated in bacteria. The bacteria containing the DNA segments were spread out on agar jelly in the plate you see in the portrait." - CRAZILY CREATIVE?!


Anyway, another reason why I love him is because he makes you think about your body and your relation to your body and subsequently, whether you are your body or you have a mind which will fly out of you when you die. It's very hard to be faced with the debate of whether when you die you cease to live in all ways - but that's what Quinn does.

Then there's the way that he doesn't shy away from topics that could seem 'low-brow'. I know most of the byas and the artists of today usually do art on everyday crap too but he specifically goes out of his way to do art on subcultures such as transexuals and celebrities such as kate moss (who is an idol of mine so... that helps):

And then there are the baby sculptures. Now I'm completely preoccupied with not babies but maternal relationships - especially when the child is young. I think he should put one of his baby sculptures with a mother sculpture.. this would satisfy all my needs and I could look at it for days. A kind of Louise Bourgeois V Marc Quinn mashup. Maybe just move the giant baby sculpture to Maman sculpture and I'd be happy.

PLUS

Yes please.


Well I could type all day about Quinn because as you can tell I'm pretty amazed by him and his work.


Ciao Amigos,


- Pantha x

Sarah Lucas

Yo,

I've always been mildly interested in Sarah Lucas. I've known about her and her work since I was around 13 and read about her Beyond the Pleasure Principle  in the Freud Museum but she's always been in the background - a backdrop to Tracey Emin I suppose. 

Then I went to the National Portrait gallery last summer and saw her self-portraits. I realised she wasn't just a vulgar-themed artist and her stuff wasn't as obvious as I first thought. Not that I don't like obvious... obvious is good, simple is good, but I'm a big believer in pretentious crap too - especially when I've been drinking (so always).

Anyway, the portraits were abit odd to find in the national portrait gallery to be honest - they weren't the usual stuff you find in there.

They stretched the period of 1990-1998 which fascinated me because I should have been born earlier so I could have had my teen years in the 90s. And they went from 'normal' portraits labelled 'summer' to very deep photography such as 'human toilet revisited'. Here are a few:

They're very raw and not as 'I'm joking around here' as I thought all her stuff was (never judge an artist on one exhibition).

Although at one end of the room I did see this: 

Which is more like what I was expecting to find.

Then I went away and did some research on her and she's amazingly creative and clever. Some of her stuff I like more than some of Emin's stuff which is a massive thing to say because I'm in love with Emin's work.

She did a collection for the Tate which had 3 black and white photographs of some mannequins she had made for a previous installation. The photos were called 'Black and White Bunnies' which showed stuffed tights that made forms of girls with limbs that where rather shapeless. They are so odd that they make you recoil (as a woman) with a kind of self-loathing as you realise how sexualised and submissive femininity has become. They have that same bawdy comical nature as I first judged Lucas to produce but more than that they scream WOMEN ARE WEAK. They almost make me sick with self-loathing. Cheery! Here is an example:

I'll end with my favourite ever Lucas piece, it sums up why I now love her as an artist - it's comic but it says something both obvious and non-obvious. It's just ambiguous enough. For a long time everything has been very abstract and fragmented in art and Lucas can fit into that category too but I find it a nice break to be able to also look at her work in an obvious way.

Ciao for now,

- Pantha x

Tracey Emin

Hello,

Well I refuse to write about Damien Hirst at the moment because there is too much hype around his new tate exhibition. I'll blog about it in a week or so.

Instead I'm thinking about Tracey Emin's 'dove planes', one of which was unveiled recently.

The planes are being made for the olympics and she's been mentoring the artist Pascal Anson to create these arty aircrafts.

It's quite clever because of the whole 'peace' thing associated with doves - a kindof stick of a finger up to hijackers.

I'm not sure whether I like Emin being associated with these kinds of projects though. I always think of her as a personal poet - yes political but in a more personal way. And this isn't political anyway, it's decoration and seems to be wasting money.

It's not that she's selling out (it is), but this along with her voting tory nonstop nowadays just makes me feel disappointed. God, I sound so elitist and snobby. Afterall isn't this 'bringing art to the people' - it's right there slapped on a plane in the sky. They can't ignore it. I do usually like this - like the Marc Quinn sculpture placed slap bang in the middle of Trafalgar Sq.

But I just don't want Emin to be part of it. I'm not sure why, maybe I feel like she should be using all the time she has to be making more personal art for me to consume. Because I'm very 'blood-thirsty' for her work. Even thinking about her new artwork makes my heart race faster.

Pantha - x

Hello

Hello,

I'm a 20 year old (nearly 21) & I've nearly finished a degree in Literature.

What did I find from doing this? Well, that literature is just a way of grabbing images and condensing them into tiny little symbols that we all then have to read in order to imagine the big images behind them.

All this seems very shifty to me now. I've always been passionate about visual art and have a lot rather useless knowledge of art from 1940ish onwards.

So that's what I'm going to blog about now...

Pantha - x