Judy Chicago: Painter, Sculptor and Installation Artist

This article summarises some of the principles that guide Chicago's work:

http://www.theartstory.org/artist-chicago-judy.htm

"I believe in art that is connected to real human feeling, that extends itself beyond the limits of the art world to embrace all people who are striving for alternatives in an increasingly dehumanized world. I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism."

Judy Chicago would call herself a feminist artist. She sought to challenge the male dominated art world and produced images, sculptures and installations that were very personally female. Some of her work was seen as shocking with her plain use of vaginal imagery.

"Just as she elevated explicitly female subject matter, Chicago embraced artistic media whose creators were exclusively or mainly women and (perhaps not coincidentally) dismissed by the high art world as merely "craft." Art forms such as needlework, ceramic decoration, and glass art are central to Chicago's work, often included alongside traditional high art media, such as painting. Works such as The Dinner Party helped validate the importance of crafts-based art forms and break down the boundaries separating them from their "high" art counterparts."


The Dinner Party (1979)

“Thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating a female historical or mythological figure, are placed around an equatorial triangle, formed from three tables. Each of the thirty-nine women is represented on a hand-painted plate by an abstract form based on ‘central core’ vulvic imagery: an embroidery and a chalice. On the base tiles are inscribed a further 999 names. The work’s chronological sequence traces the social origins and decline of matriarchy, its replacement by patriarchy, the institutionalization of male oppression and women’s response to it. The work toured internationally and attracted among the largest crowds ever to view a museum exhibit.”
http://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2016/july/20/how-judy-chicago-made-a-feminist-masterpiece/


Earth Birth (1983)

"During the early 1980s, Judy Chicago worked on the "Birth Project," a series of images she designed for execution by a network of skilled needleworkers spread across the U.S. These needleworkers were volunteers who had either stayed in contact with Judy Chicago following their work on images to give expression to an important aspect of female experience too rarely depicted in fine art while linking these individual birth experiences to ancient, archetypal, female-centered myths of creation. The designs for several images in the series, most notably executed in a variety of needlework mediums over a several year period. The work depicted here is "Earth Birth "(1983), a sprayed acrylic on fabric painting by Judy Chicago with quilting by Jacquelyn Moore. "Earth Birth" is also available as a 1985 serigraph by the artist and as one of five serigraphs in a suite called Eve Images from the "Birth Project.""
https://www.wikiart.org/en/judy-chicago/earth-birth-1983

Frida Kahlo: Female Artist

It seems necessary in my own mind to say "oh, the artist is a woman!" The more I study art, the more I am impacted in the still massive imbalance of male to female artists, despite during my education, the massive imbalance of girls studying the arts compared to boys. There are more women recognised for their art now and I can't help but have more and more respect for those women in the early part of last century, wading against the huge power of numbers and critique. She had an unusually powerful sense of self and entitlement which must have been her defense against a world that would regularly say no, and certainly wouldn't pay the same for the same thing: good art.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frida_Kahlo

"Frida Kahlo de Rivera (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈfɾiða ˈkalo]; born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón; July 6, 1907 – July 13, 1954) was a Mexican artist who painted many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country's popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society.[1] Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist.

Kahlo's work has been celebrated internationally as emblematic of Mexican national and Indigenous traditions, and by feminists for what is seen as its uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form.[2]"



Kahlo painted many self portraits or pictures with herself depicted. The portrait is not directly face on but she is looking at the viewer. Her hair is tied back and so her face is very prominant. Her strong eyebrows, which she always included to identify herself, however naive the painting, almost feel like she is saying something about her self aware strength and identity. In the same way she rarely neglects the shadow of upper lip hair. A statement about her masculine self perhaps..The delicate lace of her dress is in stark contrast with her strong and dark features, and a necklace talks of her self respect and dignity somehow.



I love this painting and to see Kahlo with the painting. The lush, exotic greenery in the background is a brilliantly balanced colour palette to illuminate her face. The necklace, organic and still growing around her neck, butterflies as hair adornments connect her profoundly to these natural elements. The two creatures, a cat and a monkey on her left and right shoulder respectively, may be suggesting something about aspects of her self. A curious and intelligent creature, and an independent, mystical creature. The cat may be aware of the dead bird around her neck and she seems to be wearing the dynamic and drama of hunting as an integral part of her own life's drama. This image is loaded with symbolism. Kahlo makes beautiful art with strong images anmd a potent message of personal and cultural identity.

Anish Kapoor

I find the work of Anish Kapoor stunning in its simplicity of line and limited but strong or no colour palette. My favourite piece is a sculpture made from alabaster and cut into, creating ever reducing windows. The outer part of the sculpture has the raw surface of the untreated rock whilst the polished and cut forms are perfectly engineered, with straight, unatural lines making the manmade and the natural form a thing of intriguing beauty.




Blind 2013 (Alabaster)



This impossible looking sculpture looks like it is made purely from pigment, with the remaining red dust on the floor suggesting its material. The simple but beautifully curving lines that come to a point suggest an unfurling leaf, a sharks fin under immense pressure! or an exposed hook. The colour is the reddest red and curated in a blank space where it seems to burst through the floor is impactful and alluring.

https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/anish-kapoor

"Anish Kapoor is one of the most influential sculptors of his generation. Perhaps most famous for public sculptures that are both adventures in form and feats of engineering, he manoeuvres between vastly different scales, across numerous series of work. Immense PVC skins, stretched or deflated; concave or convex mirrors whose reflections attract and swallow the viewer; recesses carved in stone and pigmented so as to disappear: these voids and protrusions summon up deep-felt metaphysical polarities of presence and absence, concealment and revelation. Forms turn themselves inside out, womb-like, and materials are not painted but impregnated with colour, as if to negate the idea of an outer surface, inviting the viewer to the inner reaches of the imagination. Kapoor’s geometric forms from the early 1980s, for example, rise up from the floor and appear to be made of pure pigment, while the viscous, blood-red wax sculptures from the last ten years – kinetic and self-generating – ravage their own surfaces and explode the quiet of the gallery environment. There are resonances with mythologies of the ancient world – Indian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman – and with modern times, where 20th century events loom large."

Ai Wei Wei: Human Flow

Further to the posting for the trailer for Ai Wei Wei's film, or cine-essay: Human Flow, the film was released in December 2017 and The Guardian reviewed the film, post release:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/dec/07/human-flow-review-ai-weiwei-migration-documentary

I watched the film. It was one of the most impactful, moving and emotionally demanding pieces of cinema I have ever watched, in as much as it raises awareness of the magnitude of the issue.

As the reporter from the Guardian comments, it is beautifully shot. The camera shots are often from above and so help give a perspective to the scale of the number of people that may be on the move at any one time, and the distance from them also speaks of their alienation. There is a reduction in dialogue and the images speak profoundly of the plight and difficulties. The film, in taking account of the huge number of people across the world attempts to describe the magnitude of people being constantly affected by the many complications and consequences of being made a migrant. It also focuses on the individual stories which takes away from numbers and turns people into individuals, and so empathy and impact become immediate.

Charles Jencks: "The Architecture of the Multiverse" Lecture at Harvard GSD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LoaQAbK-mk

Charles Jencks AB ’61 BArch ’65 is a cultural theorist, landscape designer, and architecture historian. Among his many influential books are Meaning in Architecture (1969), The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977), Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation (with Nathan Silver, 1972), The Daydream Houses of Los Angeles (1978), Bizarre Architecture (1979), and The Architecture of the Jumping Universe (1997). He is also co-founder of the Maggie’s Cancer Care Centres, named for his late wife Maggie Keswick, and has written about this project in The Architecture of Hope (2015). Jencks has taught and lectured widely and served on numerous juries and selection committees; his work has been recognized with numerous awards and honorary degrees. As a landscape designer, Jencks has completed several projects in Scotland, including the Garden of Cosmic Speculation (2007) and Jupiter Artland (2010). In his lecture, he will speak about his ongoing project the Crawick Multiverse, about which he writes:

The cosmos is almost the measure of all things and provides a referent and subject, a focus otherwise hard to find in present day society. With a few architects the patterns of nature and the architecture of the universe have partly reemerged as a shared meaning and iconography. At the same time the Multiverse has emerged on the agenda among scientists. Is this now a subject of thought and ultimate meaning? I have explored it in the architecture of the multiverse, an unfinished project. Where it leads, the imagination follows.

Paolo Portoghesi: Post Modern Architect (with a nod to Hundertwasser)

In looking at post modern architecture I am drawn to the work of Paolo Portoghesi and struck by "Italian" his work looks despite working and living in an increasingly homogenised style.



Casa Baldi (1959 - 61) This is a querky and beautiful building with roof balconys and an interesting patterning to the brick work. It's most striking feature is the curved lines and curved walls which must be a builders challenge.

It has a striking resemblance in terms of its lines to a later work in 2002, designing "Il Teatro Politeama a Catanzaro



Portaghesi has specialized in teaching and researching Classical architecture, especially Baroque architecture, and in particular Borromini, but also Michelangelo. His interest in more contemporary architecture coincided largely with that of his colleague in Rome, Bruno Zevi, in championing a more organic form of modernism, evident in, for instance, the work of Victor Horta and Frank Lloyd Wright, and in Italy with neorealism and the Neo-Liberty style. This attitude has continued throughout Portoghesi's career, and is clearly visible in his own architecture. It is also evident in his concern for the studies of nature, brought to the fore in his more recent book Nature and Architecture (2000).

In terms of studying nature, I am also struck by some similarity in the work of Hundertwasser, also adherring to a tennet of creating architecture that has direct connection with the flow of lines found in nature. Hundertwasser's work is much more fantastical in form and colour, more eccentric perhaps but the relationship in the lines seems to return both artists to nature for their inspiration, blending the necessary linear structural lines for the possibility of building but haling nature where it is possible.

Blood Diamonds

The following article offers a perspective or an account of the dynamics of the diamond trade. It is now over 10 years old but it seems many of the arguments apply.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2007/03/16/the-political-economy-of-diamonds/


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I found this article interesting. It is the consequence of market research and not addressing the broader political meaning and use of diamonds and the politics related to it, but it does indicate there is a shift in women's increasing independence and selecting diamonds to purchase for themselves and their own reasons: "I love myself, rather than a man loves me." Much of the research was based on the purchasing habits of chinese and japanese women. China is very involved in the receipt of the diamond trade so the DeBeers marketting strategy is heavily underpinned by the immoral transit of diamonds.

http://www.rough-polished.com/en/analytics/108261.html

DeBeers still own the monopoly of the diamond trade and still their role is to maintain an unfair possession of a resource that does not belong to them. I do not beleive that if diamonds were a british resource being mined and processed on british soil, that it would allow their processing and profits to be appropriated by another country. Its just "plain wrong".

A way to have a fair future for diamonds is either to reduce their monetary value or to establish a fair trade program where the mining/gathering, processing and profits from diamonds stays with the people who live in the areas where they are found. If it were possible to depoliticize the diamond trade (??!!) then the economy of these brutalised countries may increase for the benefit of those that live there. A bit simplistic but the current situation is outrageously corrupt.