Modification and Appropriation
The Big Bang Theory has exisiting thoughts that theres a possibility that there was something before. Theory’s say ‘Everything comes from something’.
What is the ‘Big Bang Theory’? ‘The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model for the universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large scale evolution. The model accounts for the fact that the universe expanded from a very high density and high temperature state, and offers a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of phenomena, including the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background, large scale structure and Hubble’s Law. If the known laws of physics are extrapolated beyond where they have been verified, there is a singularity. Some estimates place this moment at approximately 13.8 billion years ago, which is thus considered the age of the universe. After the initial expansion, the universe cooled sufficiently to allow the formation of subatomic particles, and later simple atoms. Giant clouds of these primordial elements later coalesced through gravity to form stars and galaxies’.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang)
‘(From the cause(s) of your projects to the universe, we want to know the origins)’
Marcel Duchamp – (Fountain, 1917).
Fountain is one of Duchamp’s most famous works and is widely seen as an icon of twentieth-century art. The original, which is lost, consisted of a standard urinal, usually presented on its back for exhibition purposes rather than upright, and was signed and dated ‘R. Mutt 1917’. Tate’s work is a 1964 replica and is made from glazed earthenware painted to resemble the original porcelain. The signature is reproduced in black paint. Fountain has been seen as a quintessential example, along with Duchamp’s Bottle Rack 1914, of what he called a ‘readymade’, an ordinary manufactured object designated by the artist as a work of art (and, in Duchamp’s case, interpreted in some way).
Duchamp later recalled that the idea for Fountain arose from a discussion with the collector Walter Arensberg (1878–1954) and the artist Joseph Stella (1877–1946) in New York. He purchased a urinal from a sanitary ware supplier and submitted it – or arranged for it to be submitted – as an artwork by ‘R. Mutt’ to the newly established Society of Independent Artists that Duchamp himself had helped found and promote on the lines of the Parisian Salon des Indépendants (Duchamp had moved from Paris to New York in 1915). The society’s board of directors, who were bound by the Society’s constitution to accept all members’ submissions, took exception to Fountain, believing that a piece of sanitary ware – and one associated with bodily waste – could not be considered a work of art and furthermore was indecent (presumably, although this was not said, if displayed to women). Following a discussion and a vote, the directors present during the installation of the show at the Grand Central Palace (about ten of them according to a report in the New York Herald) narrowly decided on behalf of the board to exclude the submission from the Society’s inaugural exhibition that opened to the public on 10 April 1917. Arensberg and Duchamp resigned in protest against the board taking it upon itself to veto and effectively censor an artist’s work.
Marcel Duchamp photograph of the urinal. Personally it’s extremely fascination but at the same time strange and confusing why he would produce a photograph in this specific view point. Duchamp photograph was linking to his broader interest in seeing things quite literally in a new perspective. The intimate nature of the auction of the urinal, and its highly gendered character, also resonated strongly with the complex psycho-phsical themes of the masterpieces he was working on at the time, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even 1915–23 (also known as The Large Glass; see Tate T02011), although relatively few at the time knew of the unfinished work and, therefore, were able to make this association.
It’s quite extraordinary how, once the urinal is removed from its customary setting, laid on it’s back like a turtle and given a signature, its meaning immediately multiply. For some reason, it hasn’t been much remarked on that the object must have been an unfamiliar and exotic sight for half the audience. Although Duchamp defends it against indecency by saying that is a common sight in plumbers to show windows, it would only be really familiar to his male audience. Public lavatories were. indeed a very recent development in the modern world, and there was little provision for women at all.
Helen Chadwick – (Piss Flowers, 1992).
Chadwick work ‘Piss Flowers’. Shows total disregard for boundaries, she used anything from flowers and rotting vegetable matter to meat, chocolate, fur, wood and bronze, and from photocopies to colour photographs and video in work that spanned the divide between fine art and craft, two and three dimensions and between permanent objects and temporary installations.
‘The pleasure of a taboo act exalted through the object, their flower pistils cast from the cavities melted in the snow by hot urine, strong and warm from the woman, diffuse and cooler from the man, are an inversion of human genitalia. The central female form is penile, the male labia’.
Chadwick and her partner David Notaries urinated in the snow. Her single flow created a deep indent around which he drew a pattern of fluent undulations. When case in bronze, the forms are inverted so that she produced a single phallic column surrounded by the fury of labial petals made by her partner. Lacquered white to refer back to the conditions of their making, the bronzes resemble rigid bouquets of frozen flowers. Three of them are on snow accompanied by a verse written by Chadwick.
‘Meat Series’ .. Chadwick was far more than a precursor of flamboyant things to come. During her short career, she not only produced playful, extreme and beautiful works but ceaselessly explored the potential of new media to give expression to her radical ideas. In the photographic series Meat Abstracts, 1989. ‘Meat’, innards such as liver, kidney, tongue, tripe and the yolks of partially formed eggs are arranged on animal skins and folds of silk or velvet – materials normally used to hide, protect and decorate the human form. Instead of focusing on the body’s external surface, the beautiful carapace which has long been a favoured subject in art and which obsesses so many of us, she reveals the hideously vulnerable guts housed within, which we prefer to forget or ignore and which she described as “the hidden profane”. She uses them as reminders of our “flesh-hood”, the fact that we reside in bodies that are living organisms as well as desirable and desiring objects.
The series ‘Meat’ personaly is tremendously bizarre and outlandish piece of art work. I find it disgusting and not appealing to look at but also fascinating and intriguing to know what the photograph meaning behind it is. The meat glistens with bodily fluids that suggest freshness and vitality, and among the organs nestle light bulbs symbolising energy and consciousness.
Piero Manzoni (Shit, 1961)
Manzoni’s critical and metaphorical reification of the artist’s body, its processes and products, pointed the way towards an understanding of the persona of the artist and the product of the artist’s body as a consumable object. The Merda d’artista, the artist’s shit, dried naturally and canned ‘with no added preservatives’, was the perfect metaphor for the bodied and disembodied nature of artistic labour: the work of art as fully incorporated raw material, and its violent expulsion as commodity. Manzoni understood the creative act as part of the cycle of consumption: as a constant reprocessing, packaging, marketing, consuming, reprocessing, packaging, ad infinitum. (Piero Manzoni, 1998, p.45)
Artist’s Shit was made at a time when Manzoni was producing a variety of works involving the fetishisation and commodification of his own body substances. These included marking eggs with his thumbprints before eating them, and selling balloons filled with his own breath. These works, the cans of Artist’s Shit have become the most notorious, in part because of a lingering uncertainty about whether they do indeed contain Manzoni’s faeces. At times when Manzoni’s reputation has seen the market value of these works increase, such uncertainties have imbued them with an additional level of irony.
Marc Quinn – (Self Portrait, 2000)
Quinn is a British sculptor and visual artist. He is a member of the loose group known as the Young British Artists. He is better known for Alison Lapper Pregnant, a sculpture of Alison Lapper which has been installed on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square, Self, a sculpture of his head made with his own frozen blood, and garden. Quinn has used not only conventional sculpture material, but also blood, ice and faeces; his work sometime refers to scientific developments. Quinn’s oeuvre displays a preoccupation with the mutability of the body and the dualisms that define human life spiritual and physical, surface and depth, cerebral and sexual.
Quinn’s sculpture, paintings and drawings often deal with the distanced relationship we have with our bodies highlighting how the conflict between the ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ has a group on the contemporary psyche. In 1999, Quinn began a series of marble sculptures of amputees as a way of re-reading the aspirations of Greek and Roman statuary and their depictions of an idealised whole.
Quinn’s self portrait sculptures, are excedingly shocking and revolting to view as the audience, at first before researching and reading up on the artist, the work does look interesting and appealing to view as a piece of art. But after knowing what Quinn’s approach was to making these self portrait sculptures, as stomach turning and disgusting. And makes me wonder why he would want to produce a piece of art in this way.
Quinn’s head, immersed in frozen silicone, is created from ten pints of his own blood. In this way, the materiality of the sculpture has both a symbolic and real function. The work was made at a time when Quinn was an alcoholic and a notion of dependency – of things needing to be plugged in or connected to something to survive – is apparent since the work needs electricity to retain its frozen appearance. A further iteration made every five years, this series of sculptures presents a cumulative index of passing time and an ongoing self-portrait of the artist’s ageing and changing self.