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Art in an emergency is the subtitle of Olivia Laing's new book 'Funny Weather'. And aren't we in one now? The book was discussed in the book section of our weekend newspaper, where the published fragment, a quote from David Wojnarowicz in the context of AIDS, ‘if silence equals death, then art equals language equals life,’ caught my eye. I see my painting as communication, a visual language. I always struggle with words if I have to write a statement and let that be what’s important for artists these days, being able to talk/write about their practice, as if critics and curators have all forgotten Hopper ('if I could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint'). In my statement here I wrote 'I rage against injustices with my brushes. I believe that activist art can foster dialogue, that it can make us aware, that it can empower us as individuals. I suppose that I aim to provide a visual social critique, to render a record of what is going on, believing that art can expose what it means exactly to be a fleshed human being in the world today.' Laing is adamant about the political, activist role art can play in people’s lives. How? Because `paintings can conjure feeling,’ artworks that take you deeply into the reality of another person’s life are offering itself to the viewer’s emphatic capabilities. Laing thus believes in art as a creative, active and generous cultural force through which thinking happens and through which social justice can happen. Ethics arise from that, justice arises from that. Hence art is essential in civilisation. She talks about ‘reparative reading’ (of a work of art, literature or visual art), where at the core of the reparative lies the desire, the motivation, the drive to make something that ‘gives’ to somebody else that you don’t know and that you’re not going to meet. Here she refers to artist David Wojnarowicz again, who said ‘I want to make something that speaks to someone who feels like I do. I want to makes something that communicates after I’m gone.’ In a world that doesn’t nourish or sustain you, art can function as a collage of nourishment. That’s why art is essential in a culture for everyone to have access to, and it's a stringent point now that culture is suffering badly during the covid crisis everywhere. The book isn’t available in my country (yet), but I’ll be getting a copy as soon as it does. I feel Laing is giving me the words to speak about my art, which I consider to be socially engaged for exactly the reasons she mentions. Maybe I am less optimistic as to the impact art can have for change, but I certainly agree that it has the potential, the (latent) force to touch people, to open the viewer’s world to other people’s experiences, their suffering, their issues, to other ways of thinking, to other ways of being in the world with each other. I'm starting a blog! As a documentation of my studio work and of materials that are at the basis of my practice. I'm jumping right in, following John Cage's 'start anywhere'. Since January 2020 I've been working, painting and sculpting on a feminist body of work 'The Anatomy Lesson,' the progress of which I've been documenting on social media. But I wanted a more extensive record, of the inspiration, the sources, the research. I can't go back in time, but I'll start here and now, today, at the point where I'm at with the project. The complete project up until now can be viewed here in a viewing room I made especially for it. In this blog though I want to write more about my thoughts behind it, where I get the inspiration from, the images, how it fits into a story of feminist artists working on the core images, the body. I hope you'll enjoy it.
Returning to my kaleidoscopic monochromatic paintings, 2 mirrored panels of the diptych for 'The Anatomy Lesson,' body of work, addressing the way women's bodies were/are approached in art and science. I want to mirror the first panel, and I'm hesitant to start without much plotting of the figure. Sometimes my artistic enthousiasm gets in the way when working on something that needs careful prepping. So I decided to use a more effective way, than the cutout I used earlier, to position the 'figures' in the mirrored painting more precisely: tracing paper! As it turns out I'm not the only (woman) artist using a kaleidoscopic effect to create a body-related work, swipe left to see Carolee Schneemann's work, Parallel Axis. The work attempts to find new ways of viewing the (female) body by placing it within a landscape as an integral part of the visual field. Schneeman's performance-based work was primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the individual in relation to social bodies. Again, big steps to follow into~ Does it have to be this?
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