VISA 0120 Foundations Media: Computation + Art

Martha Rosler Photo Op From the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, new series, 2004 Courtesy the artist and Galerie Christian Nagel, Berlin/Cologne

Many of you (Lissa and Daniela in particular) would benefit from looking at Martha Rosler’s work. The following is an excerpt from the text associated with Media Burn, an exhibition at the Tate Modern in 2006-7.

Rosler is one of the most influential artists of her generation and her work frequently compels the viewer to rethink the boundaries between the public and the private, the social and political. During the Vietnam War, she produced Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967-72), a series of photomontages assembled from the pages of Life magazine, where news stories featuring images of the dead and wounded shared column inches with glossy adverts for consumer products.

The work shown here, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, new series (2004), is a reworking of that project. A critique of the current war in Iraq, it draws an immediate comparison with Vietnam. Re-connecting the reality of a distant war with the living rooms of America, she underlines the relationship between the spoils of war and a consumerist society.

As time cycles continue, small mutations occur and things transform.  I sought to tie together the composition with cyclical images of ovals and curving lines and also with the repetition of images, which represent cycles in a different manner.  I chose the focus images of eggs, trees and bicycles due to both their physical shapes and also the ideas of growth and transformation that they represent.

My piece reveals my approach to time. This approach embraces the concept of taking my time and living at my own pace. I prefer to do things “on my own time,” while simultaneously enjoying and appreciating these fleeting moments. My piece reveals beautiful women, who are engaged in action and emotion, and a blissful child, who depict the notion of taking the time to “smell the roses.” This cliché of “smelling the roses” becomes a motif throughout the piece to symbolize the beautiful details of the world, which I believe are important to be observed. In addition, flowers take time to bloom, and this idea reflects this approach to time.

We try to capture and moments and fragments of our time through memory, and  mummify them in a sense (Pictures are one of the most popular way of doing this, which is why i chose to integrate its elemets into the piece.) The reality of the time as we experience it, however, i believe is always different from the ‘framed’ memory because we tend to distort the reality in the process of selecting which moments to keep. The clean-cut ‘frame’ in the piece represents such ‘photo moments’ that we think to have been perfect and happy, while the central part of the piece thatis much more chaotic, creepy, and seem to be exploding reflects the actual reality that is merely a collection of fragments of sensory experience and emotions occuring simultaneously.

 
My piece was created with the flow of the wave in mind. I attempted to capture the fluidity of the motion of the ocean but juxtapose it with the harsh edges of sound waves and angles. I think that waves really embody not only the continuity of time but also the physical application of it. I endeavoured to make my piece a meeting of the natural and the mechanical.

This piece is a reflection on the various accumulations that occur over time on a grand scale.  I attempted to illustrate an ancient space hidden from the surface which could house and embody these accumulations.  There is also an element of the performance of accumulation, as I tried to pile and layer various marks and media to build up and coagulate into a whole from the bottom up.

Through several images of nature – of mother and her children, of new fruit and old withering fruit from the same branch, and of a duck and ducklings- I tried to convey the continuity of time. After something disappears or dies in the world, there is always something else that comes to replace and continue its life. Like a river, time continues to flow, and continues on in a neverending loop (Hence the pictures of loop and river in composition). The key image of my composition is in the top left corner, a sign of a registrar’s office for reporting birth and death. This image and its ironic juxtaposition of birth and death captures the essence of what I am trying to convey through my composition, which is the endless continuity of time. The ribbon-like strips drawn across the piece reinforce my concept once again.

Decay, Let's Play!

Cities decay and are abandoned over time. The secret is to find the secret location or “sweet spot” where one can run wild. Hence, the composition is dense and labyrinth-like, punctuated with certain spaces of relief to show where youths have found their ideal location

A piece that focuses on the disillusion of memories with the passing of time. Once something physical, something that could be felt through all the senses, memories eventually become compressed, blurred, misplaced. What is leftover may be vague but perhaps even more valued.