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].