Posts Tagged ‘Christian Boltanski’

Unit 3 is upon us

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

Hmm. Well, I’ve fannied around for ages with writing this post and haven’t really written anything. I started writing something but it’s on my laptop and I can’t remember writing anything in it that I cared about at all. That’s probably not a good sign.

I want to write a short post, then, saying where i think I’m at. No doubt somewhat hilariously, I had a dream that changed my mind about my direction a little bit. In the dream Jonathan Kearney was telling me my prototype was boring as it was too much like a school text book or something. It was prescriptive. I woke up and immediately thought ‘I must look at Anselm Kiefer, Ansel Adams and Christian Boltanski again’. So there we go. This undoubtedly makes me sound like a muppet but it seems I achieve that pretty regularly anyway. The important thing is that those three artists mark a continuation of earlier thoughts and making something with a simple and direct, quite emotional presence. The thought didn’t just come from a dream, though it seems to have been part of the way my brain processed it. This is really a thought for the work in a gallery space. I may need a different approach for the online version.

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February 19th 2008

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

The other people’s pictures issue

I have spent quite a lot if time of late looking at artists who interest me for different reasons. Most of the work that follows has a large ‘Gee Whizz that’s big’ factor. I’m struggling to find much work that deals with the wordier end of what I’m dealing with, or that inspires me to think on it. I’ll be commenting on this soon as I think it might need a bit of its own breathing space.

Anselm Kiefer

I want the part of this project that’s about the very genesis of language to have a sense of primal origins about it. I think in many of Anselm Kiefer’s paintings there’s an incredibly strong sense of ‘usness’ – this is our history. I love the fact that his work so often feels like part of the fabric of the dawn of a time long before ours. The scale of his pictures lends itself to feeling immersed in the pictures as well. The pictures from his series about the Jewish exodus from Israel show this well. Of course, in these paintings the narrative/mythological background add to the immersive effect; and then there’s the obvious thing of his being a German artist working through a few issues, on a national scale. Just imagine them 20 foot wide and you’re some of the way there.

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