Studio 5: Image-Object, Object-Image

Studio brief

Image-Object, Object-Image explores and celebrates the peculiarly intense subjectivity and skewed focus of the artist’s eye as a transformative agency. Galloping through a study of diverse practices that range in their affect from the stridently political to the wilfully dumb, students and tutors attempt to identify as a research group just what it is that artists can offer in the way of a unique revelatory experience to their audiences amidst the increasingly shrill competitive babble of contemporary cultural life. The emphasis throughout is on nurturing and encouraging an atmosphere of spontaneity and risk-taking whilst building a firm critical framework through which to assess its outcomes.

Beginning with an exploration of the increasingly blurred formal boundaries between drawing, painting and sculptural practices, the faulty mechanics by which objects are accorded cultural and historical value will fall under scrutiny. How malleable is meaning, when assimilated by curatorial, museological and archival imperatives? Simultaneously, the alluring gaudy trash of ‘low’ culture continues to exert a strong pull for any number of practitioners working at the edges of taste and respectability, treading the thin line between complicity and critique. We consider the charged potential of manipulating these tropes with reference to a broad spread of media, including film, performance and photography.

Students will be supported in the development and review of tailored personal research plans and specific practical targets throughout the studio via individual tutorials, and will additionally participate in a series of focused seminars, discussions, collaborative presentations and gallery visits to establish a lively and responsive space for active group study.

Themes and concepts taught:

  • Painting as Sculpture as Drawing: representation and illusion
  • Appropriation: the uses of genre and stereotype
  • Performance for camera/writing for performance
  • Narrative: archive, performative documentation and fiction
  • Identity: constructs and depictions

Artists to look at:

Mike Kelley, Candice Breitz, Tamy Ben Tor, Steve Claydon, Keith Tyson, Bedwyr Williams, Christian Jankowski, Ann Magnuson, Angela De La Cruz, Andy Kaufman, Francis Alÿs, Jamie Shovlin, Jeremy Deller.

Brief reading and screening list:

  • Buskirk, Martha (2005), The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art, New York: MIT Press
  • Hickey, Dave (1997), Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, Los Angeles: Art Issues Press
  • Jones, Amelia (2012) and Adrian Heathfield (eds.), Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, Bristol: Intellect
  • Schimmel, Paul (2005) and Kristine Stiles (eds), Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object – 1949-1979, London: Thames and Hudson
  • This Is Not a Dream (2011). Video directed by Gavin Butt and Ben Walters. UK: Burn

Level 5 and Level 6 Studios are based in Central House 2nd Floor on Mondays and Thursdays. Please speak to your course leader for further timetable information.

Image Credit: Erwin Wurm, 'One Minute Sculpture'

Details

Course Fine Art BA (Hons)
Tutor Mel Brimfield
Andrea Medjesi-Jones
Where Central House 2nd Floor Studios
When Mondays and Thursday

MONIKA BANCYR DE ANGELI
FARIDA BHULA
JOANNA BOXALL
KATIE BROWN
EDMUND CAVILL
JACOPO DAL BELLO
MARTA DOLAK
MAXWELL HEALE
JAMES KELLY
ZORNITSA KESHISHAYAN
TAHIR KHAN
JING LU
AMBER MARSH
CHRISTINE MEYER
KATIE MOIR
CATHERINE NOBLE
PARIS PEDDIE
CHOI POON
LEWIS QUINN
JAMES SMITHSON
DIDAR UDDIN AHMED
WILLIAM VICKERS
INDRE VILCINSKAITE
ADAM WALLACE
CHRISTIANNA WEBSTER
TRACEY SMITH