Mierle Laderman Ukeles is a feminist artist who creates conceptual work relating the domestic labour and civic work. Ukeles believed that there shouldn’t be a separation between her life as a mother, wife and labourer and her life as an artist and proposed that all maintenance work she did is art in her ‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an exhibition “Care”’. In this manifesto Ukeles’ stated ‘I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order)’. In her maintenance works Ukeles cleaned gallery spaces and museum objects before attaching a plaque which read ‘Maintenance Art Original’. She also did a work called ‘Touch Sanitation’ in which over almost a year she shook hands with over 8,500 sanitation workers and said ‘Thank you for keeping New York City alive’.
I am interested in how her work can be seen to subvert ideas of physical and emotional labour. By remaining passive in her actions Ukeles can be seen to highlight the passivity of domestic labour. Furthermore, in her non-confrontational actions she is using emotional labour by presenting these mechanisms public Ukeles further subverts ideas of female emotion. In my own work, I am interested in the relationship between degradation and building. By being a female naked body I am subject to a voyeuristic gaze and potentially degraded, I want to explore how the action of durationally physically building a structure can interact with spectatorship and be a feminist action. From Ukeles work I can see how in presenting physical labour within artistic work it can work to counter the absence of the female by highlight the passivity of emotional labour and by presenting the physicality of the female body.
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Andy Goldsworthy is a sculptor and photography who works with natural materials to create site specific work. I am interested in his manipulation of natural materials to make clear and completely transformed sculpture.
Goldsworthy states: "Movement, change, light, growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. Nature is in a state of change and that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather. Each work grows, stays, decays. Process and decay are implicit. Transience in my work reflects what I find in nature" [http://www.morning-earth.org/ARTISTNATURALISTS/AN_Goldsworthy.html] What I take from his work is his sensitivity to the materials, that the materials are still part of a natural cycle even when being used artistically. I think the changing materiality of natural materials is what makes this work so interesting. When the materials are placed in such a controlled form it highlights the ephemerality of the objects. I find it interesting how documentation becomes really important in this work as a way of creating permanence to something which will easily degrade. I like how Goldsworthy's work is site specific because the controlled forms really contrast with the uncontrollable natural environments around them. This contrast further enhances the ephemerality of the materials as the sculptures will be absorbed into these environments. In my own work I'm interested in exploring how removing natural materials from a natural environment might change how the materials are seen, whether this gives the materials more permanence or makes them seem 'dirty' and degrading. Noun
1.the act of degrading. 2.the state of being degraded. 3.Physical Geography. the wearing down of the land by the erosive action of water, wind, or ice. 4.Chemistry. the breakdown of an organic compound. [http://www.dictionary.com/browse/degradation] I am interested in how degradation can be applied to people, performance and material. Degradation is a changing state and an action, this talks to ideas around the ephemeral, permanence and insignificance. I am working with the concept on degradation in terms of material; objects which are changeable, such as wax, fire, ice; found objects which are seen as dead or insignificant, such as bricks and fallen branches; and the body as degrading, hair and nails as dead cells but seen as beautiful or important in some way. I'm interested in how performance itself is degrading. Temporally performance is ephemeral- dying and becoming memory in the moment it is being created. Thinking about degradation as a starting point has created several questions I want to work with: -What is degradation in humans? and especially women? -How are people insignificant? -If performance creates memory is it in some way permanent? -What does it mean to create something 'permanent' in performance art? -Is anything really permanent? As a form of research I've been asking other about what they think of when they hear 'degradation'. These are some of the results: -Pride. in a negative sense- like the military. Also about rights, that others can strip away the idea that a person can have any pride. -Falling. Walls crumbling and falling- like my front porch. -Falling apart. The breakdown of my parent's marriage. |
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