The picture shown above is a quick sketch to illustrate my plan of making Hungarian Forints printed over with the face of George Soros taken from the infamous posters made by the Hungarian government to make Soros the boogie man of Hungary.

Continuing my work on the Soros posters made me curious about how further I could develop this project as I could clearly see more potential in this. Keeping the theme of having him present in our every-day life through political propaganda all the time and having him present in any space in Hungary I started to think about where to reuse his “iconic” image. I chose money because it is an object that is similar to advertisements and posters in that it is present in our every-day life. What’s more, we are forced to use money on a daily basis unable to escape it making it similar to the Hungarian government’s aggressive hate campaign in that context.

Having him present on Hungarian currency is especially ironic considering the fact that the government is demonizing him because of his status as an oligarch. By putting his image on Hungarian forints I put him on an imagined pedestal with other Hungarian people such as Count Istvan Széchenyi who has been presented with the title of The biggest Hungarian of all-time for his generous charities to develop and modernize Hungary in the 19’th century.

Despite all the criticism George Soros is the second biggest benefactor of Hungary till today. Next in line right after Count Széchenyi.

REFERENCES

444. (2017). Közleményt adott ki a Fidesz Soros György védelmében! – 444. [online]
Available at: https://444.hu/2016/05/26/kozlemenyt-adott- ki-a- fidesz-soros- gyorgy-
vedelmeben [Accessed 7 Dec. 2017].

Kovács, Z., Woods, J., Kovács, Z., Kovács, Z., Kovács, Z., Györgyi, B., Kovács, Z., Lajtai-
Szabó, G., Erdő-Bonyár, K., Mezei, L., News, D., Béni, A., Mezei, L., News, D., News, D.,
Erdő-Bonyár, K., Kovács, Z., Erdő-Bonyár, K. and News, D. (2017). DK: Orbán, Hungary
have lot to thank to Soros – Update – Daily News Hungary. [online] Daily News Hungary.
Available at: https://dailynewshungary.com/dk-orban- hungary-have- lot-to- thank-to- soros/
[Accessed 7 Dec. 2017].

My blog has become a platform for celebrating diversity through art and liberation from alienation through self-representation and encouraging to break out of the boxes through creativity.

My goals are clear. I believe in art’s power to shape society and I also believe in social engagement. I want to urge a shift in social-paradigms and to replace the material and consumerist value with intellectual cultural and personal value.

I want to create an art space that is free of class, race and gender inequality and that is encouraging people to start to think freely and becoming more sensitive to socio-political problems and to start to shape the world around them so that our society can be a more fair place to live in.

Through my work on this blog, I learned valuable skills from the process. It was a nice experience teaching me how to collect materials around me and where to look for information to represent my ideas. I still have a lot to learn through but I became more confident in my skills in collecting ideas and resources and reflecting on them.

#Bills #Debts #Waste #Burial #Alienation #Consume #Collect #Own #Beurocracy #Capitalism

Most of my present practice includes collecting materials that usually has no artistic value but are strongly connected to our identity and often tells a very intimate story of who we are.

In a capitalistic state apparatus what we own is often more important what we know or who we are, so the lack of materialistic possessions, lack of money and being indebted is also a very important factor that can play into our alienation burying and suffocating us.

Collecting these materials and rearranging them into art-works offers a very intimate self-representation while also liberating from alienation.

Guerilla Girls is an artist-activist group founded in 1985 in New York dedicated to fighting sexism and racism in the art world. The group was made up of anonymous women artists wearing gorilla masks and using pseudo names of deceased women artists namely Kate Hollwitz, Alma Thomas, Rosalba Carriera, Frida Kahlo, Julia de Burgos and Hanna Höch.

The group began in response to the exhibition International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture in MoMA. The exhibition claimed to display the era’s top artists from 17 countries but the roster only included 13 women and even fewer people of color and none of them were women. To add salt to the injury Kynaston McShine the show’s curator commented in interviews that “Any artist that wasn’t in the show should rethink ‘his’ career.”

It was started as a protest against the exhibition with little success but they later started to look for other methods for protesting through the use of street art, posters, prints, and actions.The girls naturally gained popularity and gradually became an embraced part of the art world.

The group has a clear feminist agenda and later expanded their focus to include racism as well becoming the self-proclaimed consciousness of the art-world by heavily criticizing its sexism and racism. They started to do projects outside of New York as well enabling them to address sexism and racism internationally too.

Through their work, the girls have witnessed many positive changes and brought attention to the sexism and racism in the art-world on an international scale and influenced a more inclusive approach from the part of curators and art-dealers.

REFERENCES

The Museum of Modern Art. (2017). An International Survey of Recent Painting and
Sculpture | MoMA. [online] Available at: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2220
[Accessed 7 Dec. 2017].

Tate. (2017). Who are Guerrilla Girls? | Tate. [online] Available at:
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/guerrilla-girls- 6858/who-are- guerrilla-girls [Accessed 7
Dec. 2017].

Sparkmovement.org. (2017). SPARK Artists: The Guerrilla Girls and activism as art | Spark
Movement. [online] Available at: http://www.sparkmovement.org/2014/09/09/spark-artists-
the-guerrilla- girls-and- activism-as- art/ [Accessed 7 Dec. 2017].

In terms of appropriation, I was mostly interested in the everyday pictures we see on a daily basis like advertisements, posters, and political advertisements and turning them into pieces of art-work.

For my work, I chose the Hungarian government’s propaganda campaign against the Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros. While it might be unheard in the UK, but the figure and especially the face of Soros became kind of iconic or anti-iconic in Hungary due to the current government’s attempt to demonize him through an excessive poster campaign and also trying to shut-down the Central European University founded by Soros in 1992 and passing legalizations to force non-governmental organisations to declare themselves “foreign-funded” making a very xenophobic atmosphere in the country.

The poster campaign includes the face of Soros printed on a poster with a text saying “Let’s not allow Soros to have the last laugh!” The posters themselves are put in metro-stations, or the walls of buildings as giant posters, and even on the floor of busses, metro-trains, and trams often more than one next to each other, just to illustrate how un-subtle this campaign is.

The Hungarian government is targeting Soros because he spent a lot of money on open society foundations and on civil organizations to help reduce the poverty in Hungary and in other post-communist countries in eastern-Europe.

Understandably many Hungarian Jews are upset and find this very anti-semitic mainly because Soros has Jewish roots and the posters are often becoming the targets of Anti-semitic vandalism and graffiti, and the posters on the floors of Budapest trams were deliberately placed so passengers would have to tread on Soros’s face which brings back many disturbing memories in holocaust survivors.

For my work, I took the face of Soros from the posters and printed it on different colored papers influenced by Andy Warhol’s prints of Marilyn Monroe to illustrate how much it pushed into people’s face and everyday life and how un-subtle this campaign is.

REFERENCES

BBC News. (2017). How a university became a battle for Europe’s identity. [online]
Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39780546 [Accessed 7 Dec. 2017].

BBC News. (2017). Hungary vilifies financier with posters. [online] Available at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe- 40554844 [Accessed 7 Dec. 2017].

Herszenhorn, D., Baume, M., Ariès, Q., Ariès, Q. and Bayer, L. (2017). Hungary’s Freudian
political fight: Orbán vs Soros. [online] POLITICO. Available at:
https://www.politico.eu/article/hungarys-freudian- political-fight- orban-vs- soros/ [Accessed 7
Dec. 2017].

Leo Steinberg in his book of essays is talking about the way the old masters have drawn attention to their work through different devices, illusions, radical color-schemes, certain details and proportions and the different ways of compositions. He also talks about the way this has changed in modernist paintings but seems to come back in post-modernist paintings. He argues that by doing that the old masters not only promoted their own work but also art in general and sucked the viewer’s attention towards art whereas with modernist paintings which is more about deconstructing art as we knew before and by postmodernism these virtues not necessarily consciously but seems to come back to practice.

Most of his theoretical work is focusing on paintings, in contrast with Richard Serra who is a practicing artist, a sculptor with big and robust works, industrial metal structures with little aesthetic appealing to people who are not proficient in arts.

In his private letter’s Serra also mentions the way the old masters have made work although he is more interested in the way their works are constructing and de-constructing the buildings they take place in.

While they are talking about two different things the two ideas are not fundamentally antithetical to each other, in fact, they have many common points. Richard Serra writes that the works of the old masters, their frescos, and namely the frescos on the walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel have deconstructed the place, metaphorically destroying it’s walls and abolishing it as a construction.

It is easy to see how Steinberg’s statement applies to Serra’s ideas. By directing the attention to their paintings and creating illusions the old masters are essentially stealing the viewer’s attention. By doing that they distorting space making it into a strange little universe where walls and ceilings do not exist only illusions.

They smartly using the surface to bring out the best from their work, turning it into an interactive painting. The buildings are only buildings from the outside they ultimately function as a painting that you can enter and be a part of at any time.

My work on this project started out as a simple synesthesia practice with my boyfriend who is a classical musician. The project’s aim was to find a common ground between painting and classical violin. Through some paintings and various videos and some experimenting with making music together evolved this project into something that’s more about making music from a fine art perspective rather than the connection between music and painting.

What started out as paintings trying to imitate the music and the sound of the violin slowly started to become something that instead wants to create music and wants to use the violin and the musician instead. For this new idea, I photocopied my boyfriend’s chords and cut them up into small pieces so I can rearrange them in different orders, making it a sort of hand-made remixing practice.

Similar to how the film-editors worked long ago.

To make my collages I chose the works of the English composer Thomas Campion who is usually considered a renaissance composer and mixed it with European Baroque composition’s most notably with Bach to prove that he was very well influenced by European, mostly Italian composer’s work and he was way ahead of his time.

My chosen art-work is from the same exhibition made for the Manifesto project the AMP for Anti-manifesto party made by Poppy Ash, Maryam Kazimi, and Lauren Culloty.

The work itself was a yellow box stuck on the wall with many small books, manifestos, and anti-manifestos in it. The box has a nice home-made, punkish aesthetics and its color contrast is reminiscent of the posters made by the Guerilla Girls. The books itself are coming in 20 different designs and an inverse color combination as well and has 10 copies each. Simplistic in design the girls were clearly approaching the whole theme through humor and with the intention of having fun.

The books including pictures taken out of context, appropriating random things and drawings from the studio and from newspapers. The work itself becomes an anti-manifesto through the rejection of the rhetorics of a classical manifesto and becomes a representation of the whole class through the appropriation of drawings and ideas from other students. It also provides a nice interactivity with the books being readable and takeable.

When asking the girls why their decision fell on a group project they said everyone brings individuality and new ideas in. By doing a group project the work becomes a celebration of diversity and individuality.

My chosen exhibition is the one our First Year Fine Art class has made for the Manifesto Project. As short as it was, however, it was also a big surprise to me.

The exhibition included different works varying in content and in media including paintings, installations, video installations, texts, prints and other objects. The exhibition was displayed only for a week but it was still very intense. It also provided a good opportunity to get to know a little bit more about the more personal aspect of each other’s work. To my surprise, I was stunned at how aware and how politically sensitive the whole class is to certain socio-political issues while there was still enough room for silliness and self-comedy to make it a more forgiving and less burning experience for the viewers.

As a practitioner, I really enjoyed being part of this exhibition, and the social conversation that followed it which helped to get to more about the work and interests of my peers not just as art students but also as entrant artists who are all very different and having important, full-fledged ideas about the world around them.

The exhibition could be viewed on the ground floor of the Westside Foyer in Winchester School of Art and it could be viewed by anyone but mostly by the students of the University of Southampton.

Renée Cox is a Jamaican born artist, activist, lecturer, and curator. Her recurring theme includes race, gender through the use of her own body in many of her works.

Cox liberating herself and other black women through self-representation and criticizes the way black women are portrayed in media through her work.

In hot-en-tot venus, Cox is portraying herself as Saartje Bartman a Khoikhoi women who was exhibited at freak shows across Europe in the 19th century known as the Hottentot Venus. She uses plastic breasts and buttocks from a costume shop to make her body similar to Saartje’s.
Cox criticizes the stereotypical portrayal and exploitation of Black woman and the lack of awareness with the use of the plastic body-parts in her work and also celebrating her own body through her own nudity ultimately liberating herself with shaping her own identity.

REFERENCES

Aperture Foundation NY. (2017). Renée Cox: A Taste of Power. [online] Available at:
https://aperture.org/blog/renee-cox- taste-power/ [Accessed 7 Dec. 2017].

Black Atlantic Resource Debate. (2017). Video of the Week: After Hot-En- Tot: Two
conversations with Artist Renée Cox. [online] Available at:
https://blackatlanticresource.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/video-of- the-week- after-hot- en-tot-
two-conversations- with-artist- renee-cox/ [Accessed 7 Dec. 2017].

Black feminist art. (2017). Renée Cox – Hot en Tot. [online] Available at:
https://artintheblackdiaspora.wordpress.com/2014/05/01/renee-cox- hot-en- tot/ [Accessed 7
Dec. 2017].