Ron Hunt

Ron Hunt taught art history at Stourbridge College. I was one of his many students on the art and design foundation course in 1990-91. As well as been a lecturer, he is an artist in his own right and he has been a critic for a number of journals: Art Forum, Modern Painters and Studio International. I am sure that he has contributed to other magazines. He has also been responsible for the organisation of a number of exhibitions.

Art and Food by Ron Hunt: http://ronnaprojects.co.uk/Food_/Home.html

Above is a picture of a Socialist Space Worker.

Digital Culture: 6

Tony Richards has given us plenty of reading to do for this week: "Playing and Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar" by Bob Rehak, "Presence-Play: The Hauntology of the Computer Game" by Dean Lockwood and Tony Richards, and "Signature Event Context" .


"Playing and Being" gives us an analysis of video games via a Lacanian perspective (Laura Mulvey, Lacan), applying a more traditional approach to the analysis of media. Dean and Tony's "Presence-play" reads games from a Derridean (pictured: Jacque Derrida) 'deconstrctive' perspective and "Signature, Event, Context" explores deconstruction and performativity e.g Queer Theory.

Aaron Siskind

In my own work I try to seek out odd juxtapositions of objects and strange meetings of things and the images of things. I try to seek out artists and writers that attempt to explore similar issues. I really discovered Aaron Siskind after reading David Anfam’s Abstract Expressionism (1994).


Aaron Siskind (1903-1991) was a member of the New York Photo League in the 1930s. His early work was in the social documentary tradition producing projects such as Dead End: The Bowery, and The Harlem Document. In the 1940s he started to connect with members of the New York School, whose dominant aesthetic was abstraction, transforming his work and shaping his interests. His black and white images of this period were of found objects, graffiti, peeling posters and an urban landscape familiar and a source of inspiration to Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauschenberg.

Martha's Vineyard (seaweed) 2 1943

Abstract expressionists like Gottlieb and Pollock explored calligraphy in an attempt to discover new visual languages. Siskind’s Martha’s Vineyard (Seaweed) looks gestural: a tracing in the sand, a biomorphic form, a letter (A for Aaron?) a figure or a sexual symbol.

Gloucester 16A, 1944

Biomorphism as an art form draws its inspiration from nature and biological forms. We see its visual representation in Art Nouveau and its more curvilinear forms (one thinks of the Paris metro or the dominant architecture of Barcelona, specifically the work of Gaudi ) and of course Surrealism (Arp, Masson, Miro, Tanguy and Dali). The biomorphism of surrealism fed into what became abstract expressionism. The above photograph recalls the totemic art of Masson, Miro, Newman and Rothko. The above image is one that returns our gaze. Do we not see a single blank eye, a hard profile; abstract yet physiochemical like forms or “ovoids” that Motherwell presents to us in his Pancho Villa Dead or Alive 1943, the Elegy for the Spanish Republic series or At Five in the Afternoon 1949.

New York I, 1947

Chicago (Auto-Graveyard) 3, 1948

The surfaces that Siskind presents are rough, fragmentary, divided in much the same way as a de Kooning, a Motherwell, a cubist space or even a Pollock. We see the gestures of the graffiti artists, stains, drips, rust, decay, lettering and urban sign-age.

Chicago 1947-48

Siskind focused more and more on the minute. The charred surfaces that caught his eye reveal “paint smeared- walls whose facades, dense with graphic traces apparently make darkness visible”(Anfam, 1994 p. 153).

Chicago 224, 1953

This last picture again celebrates urban decay, the fragmentary with addition of the glass pain that adds a new layer and perhaps depth to this picture. The torn elements of poster remains recall not only Schwitters and the neo-dada, but the nouveau realism (Hains and Rotello) and the Situationist detournement (Debord and Jorn) that emerged in sixties Europe. This is the language of pop and low culture. What about the writing? Well, it does recall de Kooning’s dust jacket design for Harold Rosenberg’s Tradition of the New (1959) (see Hillier, Beavis The Style of the Century, 2ND Edition, 1999 p. 151).

Simon Morley’s book Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art (2003) although does not explore Siskind’s work. However across a number of chapter we see various post-WWII gestures (forgive the pun) that involve calligraphy or writing that move towards abstraction and action painting.

Bibliography:
Abrams, D (1994) Abstract Expressionism London: Thames and Hudson Hillier, B (1999) The Style of the Century, 2nd Edition, London: Herbert Press Morley, S (2003) Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art, London: Thames and Hudson.

Current Developments: 8

As promised, here are some photographs......

The above imagery are stills from the opening scenes of David Lean's Great Expectations (1946). The imagery is not cinematic, as in not official stills or photographed from a projection on a screen. They are televisual or at least a DVD recording, not video. The nature of the image is important.

Firstly, why did I choose this film and these scenes. The imagery presents us with an atmosphere of menace. The sight of a tree, seen through the eyes of the young Pip metamophoses into a threatening force. Such stylisation is very subtle.

There is something interesting and Romantic about the representation of nature as a malevolent force. I must add an entry about the grandeur of nature and deal with some of these difficult issues.

However the above image is photographed from nature. I did whole sequence of photographs of trees changing the aperture and shutter speed in search of the right effects for my project. I am particularly interested in the way nature or objects are mediated: 'direct images' of nature are overlap screen based imagery.

The above sequences of images are stills from Robert Wise’s The Haunting. The classic horror film uses subtlety to imply menace. The metamorphosis of a wallpaper pattern into a monstrous figure is produced by a slight manipulation of the camera and lighting.
These representations are surrealist and recall the grattage works of figures emerging from wallpaper or wood grain.

The influence of Ernst and my own memories of night terrors as a child led me examine Ernst’s “Irritated gaze” and the relationship between illness and the visual.

The above image interests me because of its ethereal nature. I am fascinated by gestures and blurred figures. This resembles Gerhard Richter’s photo-realist paintings.

Diebenkorn and Cezanne

"Cezanne is famous for saying that any idiot can make a deep space, that it is already deep, and that the task of the artist is to carve out that space- an oxymoron that exactly describes Cezanne's general practice" (Gilbert-Rolfe, 1995 p. 91)

Current Viewing

Apart from CSI, NCIS, Law and Order, Numbers, Criminal Minds, The Mentalist and TheEleventh Hour, I have been watching a lot of examples of avant garde film.

I was recently given a set of DVDs, one of which was a Dadaist film selection which included a number of Hans Richter abstract and semi representational film: Rythmus 21(1921-24), Filmstudie (1926) and Ghosts Before Breakfast (1927). The later two seem very surreal in nature. His one time collaborator Viking Eggeling also features on the DVD. His work Symphonia Diagonale (1921-24) is a purely abstract composition.

I also have a DVD of the work of Len Lye from 1935 to 1960/80. This is a really nice addition to my collection of animated films.

I need to prepare myself to watch Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929). This is the film which served as a guide for Lev Manovich in his book The Language of New Media (2001).

Current Developments: 7

There have been some headway made in the development of my digital projections. The software After-Effects seems to hold the key to there formation.


I must make sure that I visit this site: www.videocopilot.net

How this software will transform my ideas is hard to imagine at the moment. There are plenty of questions concerning the the nature of my work: will it be interactive and if so, how will it operate. I still have a lot of dots to connect.

More imagery will be posted asap. It will include some photography!!!