Ideas for assignment...

I want to explore my own personal traces, and where better to explore that than my flat! I spend a lot of time at my flat I eat and sleep there among other things. 

I am wanting to document my own traces around my flat because I feel that it is interesting working on something that is personal and is interesting for the viewer. I always find it interesting going to open homes where people allow you into their personal place where they have lived, slept and ate in it has a strange but exciting feeling like looking at photographs of history (maybe its because I am a curious person). 

I was thinking initially starting to look at ways of showing my traces such as dishes and a messy bed, however my traces aren't that obvious because I am a tidy person. I make my bed, have my room orderly and never leave dishes out.. so getting the feel of my traces would seem fake to me as the artist if I were to take pictures of stacked dishes etc. However what is so bad about creating scenes such as Jeff Walls destroyed room...

I could create my own scenes to seem like someone had been there.. I can picture scrunched sheets and pilled dishes, which are all white in my house; it could have a cool pattern feel to it and an organised mess... I could have zoomed tight framed images. 

I am also interested in Schneemann’s performance art and I feel like that way of working and making art is familiar to me and I have done similar things before and found it fascinating, it is like letting go and releasing your subconscious to be free.. 

I had an idea of turning my room into a performance piece and making my room a mess just re arranging things, piling things on top of each other creating a mess, which is sort of like Jeff Wall did in ‘The Destroyed Room’ where it was actually carefully constructed to reference Eugène Delacroix’s 1827 painting, Death of Sardanapalus. Maybe if I had something to reference like that it might give me some clarity?

The end could be a series of different ways I have organised mess.. To make it more cohesive I could use a tripod and have in the same position each time. Also I could attempt to use studio lights for a similar feel in each picture if I wanted the series to have a studio and organised feel? Could be a nice juxtaposition with the mess to formally, cohesive formatted pictures.

I chose the following images from the book 'Art and Photography'

I feel like this series shows how I could do a series of something being altered and documenting it, without having to have the same position of each picture to be interesting.. its actually more interesting having different angles.
It gives another take on traces, more of a literal take..

I chose this image because i thought it could be inspiration for chaotic mess and shows another way of taking images.. such as it has been taken up close and has a tight frame, which sort of make the mess of the food feel overwhelming... even more close up could turn into something completely different and abstract. 

Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin

My Bed

1998

http://blogs.elpais.com/.a/6a00d8341bfb1653ef01a73dce9fa5970d-pi

Emin is a storyteller and displays that in her artwork, as she engages the viewer with her honest exploration of universal emotions. Her artwork has been described as ‘confessional’, which you can tell, by her statements and by her work, which shows and tells explicit details of her life, brutal honesty. She has an ability to merge her life and work together, which establishes intimacy with the viewer.

‘My Bed’ is Emins actual bed, with ‘all its embarrassing glory.’ It displays empty alcohol bottles, cigarette butts, stained sheets, worn underwear and ‘the bloody aftermath of a nervous breakdown.’

‘By presenting art, Emin shares her most personal space, revealing she is as insecure and imperfect as the rest of the world.’

http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/artpages/tracey_emin_my_bed.htm

Tracey Emin has been one of my favourite artists for a long time and when thinking of the idea of traces of traces her 'My Bed' artwork definitely registers in my mind as her 'traces.'
It is such a personal piece of art and again has that mystery feeling to it, because it doesn't have her inside the bed or any obvious things like that. There has been many events in the installation before it came to be an artwork at Tate. It feels like it has been really lived in through the rubbish and untidiness of it. It has traces of late nights, rough days and normal days and nights which sparked ideas of how i live and how i leave traces around my own enviroment.. such as after a big night i might not make my bed in the morning or leave my dishes out leaving ideas of laziness, or traces of routine such as making my bed every weekday...etc

Abstract images of traces...

Image from 'Art and Photography' book

From the youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WyHG_26lgE Cadieux says that she 'likes treating the body as a landscape' which is displayed in the images above comparing the bruised part of the body which has aspects like the beautiful sky. 

I was attracted her images because it shows the abstract possibilities that you can do for the subject of traces of traces. She used macroscopic lenses so she can get very close to the subject and allows her to have large-scale images which have landscape abstract feels to them.

I am wanting to do something abstract but it doesn't necessarily need to be large-scale or made with a zoomed lens.. however these made me think about the possibilities of traces and how vast the subject is (which is a good thing).. traces could be something internal or external such as heartbreak, or injury or changing feelings such as excited, sad, happy, surprised. I find that music is influential on my moods and when a song changes it can change my mood leaving the other mood something of the past. 

‘In her enormous colour photographs, Genevieve Cadieux of Montreal provides the most challenging and provocative works in the show. "Le Corps du Ciel" (the skys body) juxtaposes two photographs, one of bruised skin and one of a sky with gathering storm clouds. By bringing together an ugly blemish and a manifestation of natural beauty, Cadieux invites a reordering of thoughts on the beauty of nature and the nature of beauty.’

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1993-11-10/features/1993314170_1_radice-nea-funds-du-ciel


Carolee Schneemann

Carolee Schneemann, multidisciplinary artist. Transformed the definition of art, especially discourse on the body, sexuality, and gender. The history of her work is characterized by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the social body.

Up To And Including Her Limits was the direct result of Pollock's physicalized painting process....
I am suspended in a tree surgeon's harness on a three-quarter-inch manila rope, a rope which I can raise or lower manually to sustain an entranced period of drawing– my extended arm holds crayons which stroke the surrounding walls, accumulating a web of colored marks. My entire body becomes the agency of visual traces, vestige of the body's energy in motion."

http://www.caroleeschneemann.com/uptoandincluding.html

Schneemann is known for her groundbreaking multimedia works, ranging from painting and film to politically charged performance and installation. Her work explores visual traditions, the body of the individual as it relates to social bodies, and preconceived notions of sexuality and gender. In Up to and Including Her Limits, a rope and harness hang above a huge canvas. Video monitors show a recording of the artist suspended naked above the canvas using her body to paint on it. With these remnants of a performance–video recordings, harness, and markings on a canvas–Schneemann addressed the male-dominated history of Abstract Expressionism and action painting.

http://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/carolee-schneemann-up-to-and-including-her-limits-1973-76

Schneemann’s iamge of her performance work reminded me quite a lot of Tracey Emin who is an English post-modern artist and has strong views on sexuality and gender. I am not interested in the top of the body and gender as such but the process that she has used to do the performance work, sort of letting your body do its own thing sort of accessing your subconscious… and not thinking of exactly what you are doing just moving. I find that words can appear rather cliché but it is interesting to write down your thoughts whatever your thinking at a certain time.

As I have said before I like the idea of before and after shots leaving mystery such as a series could show which could have been interesting in this case if it wasn’t more of a cinematic type of art piece.  

Jeff Wall
The Destroyed Room 1978

http://highlike.org/jeff-wall-2/

I think the idea inspires me more than the image itself, with photography I look for a more interesting image such as this one than a 'pretty' image.

The Destroyed Room(1978) is a ‘cinematographic’ photograph, carefully constructed in the studio.

A reference to Eugène Delacroix’s 1827 painting, Death of Sardanapalus, Wall’s work uses its large scale, strong light and oblique composition to locate itself in an uneasy place between historical painting and advertising.

Delacroix’s work, itself inspired by Byron’s play, shows the death of the Assyrian king Sardanapalus, who ordered the killing of his servants, the destruction of his palace and his own death after hearing of the defeat of his armies in battle.

The Destroyed Room uses Delacroix’s brutal spectacle as the platform for his own critique of the systems of meaning that control how we understand both commercial and artistic images.

http://www.mca.com.au/news/2013/05/27/jeff-wall-photographs-works-behind-works/

Even though this is sort of a constructed disaster it shows the power of illusion and what photography can do. It as a realistic feel to it even though it has been constructed in his studio.

In realtion the the subject of traces of traces, i feel that this image in influential as it shows the possibilities of the subject of leaving a trace.. I could make my own scene and manipulate it and shoot it, or it doesn't have to be a scene it could be my own created moment.. 

Thoughts on topic... 

I am interested in looking into the topic of traces of traces from the book Art and Photography. What sparked my interest initially was the thought of capturing an image of something that is temporary or could be only a moment that the mark, trace or evidence is present and then it disappears and could change into something else.

Before and after images have always interested me whether it being someone having a makeover, loosing weight, having a house renovated, cities before and after bombings etc.. this is because I find it fascinating that there will never be that moment of having having the city the way it was before it was bombed or having the historical house the same before it was renovated, however photography can capture and document that moment before it all changes by time or by humanity.