Beautifully Banal

Artist Christian Robert-Tissot. image from his online portfolio.

The Light Fantastic

I was looking up artists who use electricity and light in their works when I came across Pierre Huyghe. He's a french artist who explores some pretty complex ideas through a range of mediums, from video and digital graphics to photography and installation. A 2006 exhibition called Celebration Park was entirely white, with moving doors and words spelled out in fluorescent white light. He was playing with the ideas of a door being a threshold, by constantly changing their position within the space the "inside" and "outside" ceased to exist. (all images from PBS)

The Journey That Wasn't is a film by Huyghe based on going to Antarctica to search for a mythical albino penguin. It's about mental, physical and philosophical journeys. Did he really go to Antarctica with a group of artists and get stuck in the ice? or it is staged? It doesn't matter because the point is questioning, learning and creating.




Finally, this is one of my favourite stills from his films because it is serene and completely odd at the same time. Huyghe found a town under construction near New York, to be called Streamside. Everyone there came from somewhere else and there was no history to the town yet. So he organised "Streamside Day", complete with parades and speeches, creating a hyper-reality based on fact but a complete work of fiction.



It's pretty difficult to try and summarise his work into one post- so if you're interested in these ideas have a look at the Art 21 site, they have a decent bio and slideshows of his work with more in-depth explanations.

Event Horizon in New York

Antony Gormley's sculptures are striking explorations of how the human body can be represented and manipulated. For the past 25 years he has been investigating and transforming the human form- constructing it out of balls, cubes, rods, sticks, smooth, rough and broken metal, making then sit, move, jump or curl up in the foetal position. Sometimes they're humorous and ironic and other times they're poignant or despairing. The "Feeling Material" series is one of the most abstract and beautiful, with fluid lines creating motion and warmth in an otherwise cold, lifeless steel sculpture. (image from artnet.com)

Feeling Material XL

One of his current works is an installation of 31 life-size fibreglass and cast iron statues around Manhattan. Life-size is a literal description as they were cast from a mould of Gormely's own body. Four of them are positioned on pathways and sidewalks in order to interrupt the day to day traffic of the city. The rest are installed on the rooftops of architecturally renowned buildings in the Flatiron district. It is essentially a recreation of an earlier installation in and around London's South Bank in 2007. During that exhibition the police were overwhelmed by the calls from passersby who thought the statues were real people attempting suicide. It is yet to be seen whether the New Yorkers, not famous for their compassion, react in the same way. (images from the Event Horizon Blog)

There is a huge archive of Gormley's work on his website, so it's definitely worth checking out.