SAM CURTIS. 03/03/15.

When I first heard that Sam Curtis was a Fishmonger and an artist, I didn’t really feel interested as Fishmongers aren’t all that interesting, however after the lecture I feel inspired (He has inspired a new Random Series character – MONGER MASTER!). Sam started off with talking about being employed as a “Artist Residency”, he sent a written letter to both the Prime Minister at the time Tony Blair and the Queen, both responded but both declined him. So he just became independent and became his own artist, however he did need a job to pay the bills and this is when the interesting stuff came in – He became a Fish Monger at Harrods. Him and his fellow employee’s would display the fish and would of course sell them, however Sam did it a bit differently – he displayed the fish but in a narrative set with patterns and what not,. which I thought was really clever. I questioned him at the end of the lecture and asked if he thought about using hooks, nets and various other fishing related equipment in his displays and he said he feels its better with just the stock with maybe the odd Lemon or Parsley, which I agree with it doesn’t need any more detail however it would help the narrative perspective of the display in my opinion. The way he was talking about it got me really excited and made it sound like the most exciting job ever is a Fish Monger, he mentions how new stock came in everyday, the fishermen would occasionally catch something new and exciting and they would make different displays each and every time – the displays would change whenever the ice melted or the fish got sold, completely changing the piece all together it was really fascinating. He’s a part of “CIRF” (Centre for Innovative and Radical Fishmongery) which basically an organisation that works to intersect fishmongery with art and I personally believe this concept works and would love to witness it live one day, I can remember as a child I would always stare at the fish monger counter and would admire the patterns, never thinking it would result into an actual way of practising art. Sam made me feel more confident about my own created style of Sponge Art, people do art with sponges with paints however my work is with sponges and toothpicks, a unique concept that I hope takes off and ends up just as popular as Fishmongery art. He told us that he even got other artists involved and let them display the fish in their own way and he learned many techniques and saw many styles he would of never of thought of, two examples being Prawns holding hands in a “Ring around the roses” sort of style and 4 Basses kissing – this made me think again of my sponge art and how I personally learned new techniques through the children. He showed us the website of CIRF and the “BIRMINGHAM BULLRING FISHMONGERS CHAMPIONSHIPS 2014”, which is a competition for 2 main categories: Best display and best knife skills, I will leave a link at the bottom where you can view this awesome art style at the bottom.

Centre for Innovative and Radical Fishmongery website: http://www.cirf.org.uk/
I also love how disgusted that lady looks in the photo!

SAVINDER BUAL. 19/2/15.

I loved this lecture as the lecturer was bouncy and happy, really interesting too! She started off with showing us a Black and White video with waves and nice music, she then stated that she wanted the “star of the film to be movement”, the moving image. She then continued to show us more pieces that she had done, she had done this one piece of bushes in the foreground moving really fast, water behind the bushes moving a bit slower and the hills in the background moving even more slower to give the impression of driving, which worked really well! Another piece that caught my eye was when she cut shapes out of a Cameras bellow, as she pulled the bellow shapes and images started appearing and it was outstanding, such a unique concept!

LISE AUGOGENA. 19/2/15.

I found this lecture interesting however it wasn’t her work I really liked, it was an artist she talked about called Tomas Saraceno who owns a Spider Farm along with many spider experts. They did experiments by putting various different spiders in the same farm and see how they would react – the spiders build a community, joined webs together however they would mind their own business by staying in a certain territory – like an apartment. She began to show more of Tomas’s work and they were amazing, everything was based on webs and the line-work of them, I love the concept of spider web artwork and having a community of bugs, seeing creatures live in certain areas in certain conditions is very interesting. She stated that Tomas wanted to put the spiders in a “weightless environment” and see how they cope and it got me really intrigued, I would love to see that. Tomas has inspired me to create a web-like art piece in the future and I very much look forward to doing so. She discussed other artists such as Olafur Elliasson, Chris Harrison and Lev Manovich but they didn’t really interest me apart from Olafur, they were all about data art which sadly isn’t my cup of tea but Olafur’s piece really caught my attention. Olafurs piece was in the Tate Modern Museum and all it was was a huge giant orange glowing ball in the air, what I loved about this piece was the visitors reaction to it – everyone started sun bathing despite it not being a sun, it was also apparently really cold in that room too which made it slightly ironic, but more interesting. There were even couples who leaned on the ledge, near enough the same hight as this ball – made it look really romantic, like a never ending sun set it was beautiful. I really wish I was at the museum at the time this was displayed, I love the use of coloured lights in dark rooms, especially if they give off a relaxing vibe. Lise started talking about her piece, I preferred the other artists but I liked hers more than Chris and Levs data art – Lise’s piece was called “The Foghorn Requiem” which was basically them and the locals saying good bye to a foghorn which was getting shut down. She wanted to play sounds from an orchestra and have ships in the sea blasting their horns followed by the foghorn – I cant word it the way she does as it makes more sense when she talks about it however I see what she wanted to do and she did it brilliantly. She wanted 100 ships in the ocean however she only managed to get 60, which is a pretty big amount for one project – some of the 60 vessels were from the north east took part in the project, there was 3000 people on the ships and 1000 people on land, observing this event. The turn out shows that this was a successful project, I will leave a link to this project at the bottom of this post.

The Foghorn Requiem: http://foghornrequiem.org/

ANDREW CONYAY. 17/2/15.

I found Andrews lecture really interesting, its about a topic I don’t really enjoy listening/talking about – Politics. He talked about the “Occupy” movement, a movement of people who are against Capitalism. I really wanted to see actual created pieces about Occupy and/or Capitalism but sadly, he didn’t have any. My friend pointed out that his artwork is discussing the movement of Occupy and you don’t need actual pieces for it to be art, which I feel is very true and also made me view the whole lecture in a different way. He told us many stories of Occupy and one story stood out to me, its apparently on film and somewhere online but I can’t seem to find it. Its about a student who was at a meeting with people who are obviously supporting Capitalism, the student poured water all over the main talkers water, crumpled up the papers then threw it at the main talker. The main talker said “Why did you do that? What do you want?” and the student responded with “What gives you the right to ask that question? What gives you the right to demand an answer? The fact that you’re asking me is showing you have the power and I refuse to give you power by not answering your question” – I found this very interesting because after thinking about it more, it really does put you in position of power when you ask a question because you’re expecting an answer from someone, its optional that they answer of course but its extremely rare to find someone who will refuse to answer to not give you the satisfaction. Occupy is about people coming together – Unity, as he put it, they also have a slogan of “We are the 99%”, he claims the 1% is doing enormous harm to the community and the world, they’re responsible for many things such as explosive population growth, ocean dead zones, losses of biodiversity, pollution, deforestation, climate change, melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels. Andrew states that “Artists are the most free people in the world” and “shouldn’t sell their work for free”, however a lady in the audience gave a great question on this topic (Andrew even gave her a round of applause) she said that when an artist is getting started and makes work for free, as they get better they want to start selling their work but they cant, because there will always be an artist out there doing work for free thus not receiving the money – Andrew of course claims that is the fault of capitalism. The Occupy movement went to festivals where people donated and even offered to help them out, Andrew himself went to festivals to spread the word of Occupy and he even recruited many and received loads of donations, showing that this is a pretty serious and big movement. He gave us a few artists to look at, artists that inspire Occupy and are against Capitalism, some of these artists are Mike Nitrevic Latvia, Walead Beshty, Steve McQueen and even one of my past lecturers who I’ve wrote about – Oreet Ashry. He brought the lecture to an end by showing a very interesting video – the video was of a woman who through her life learned to play many many instruments, she was playing the worlds oldest found bone as a flute and unknown to her, in the same room there was a vulture which is a bird which holds the worlds oldest DNA, as she played it and showed the reaction of the vulture it was very strange, because if I watched that not knowing about the facts about the bone and vulture I wouldn’t be as interested as I was then. Overall a very interesting lecture, taught me a lot about politics and what capitalism is.

Link to the video of the vulture and oldest bone ( Allora&Calzadilla): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FquMYI6O_Bs

IAN KIAER. 12/2/15.

I really enjoyed Keith’s lecture, he created a very bubbly and cheery atmosphere – something we all needed in the morning lecture. He started by showing some of his own pieces, which I really admired – one of my favourite piece of his was the puddle, he basically gained permission by the council and dented the pavement in Bradford, so when it rains it would create a little puddle, however after doing this the reaction he got from the locals was hilarious and he too shared a giggle, people were outraged saying how it was wrong to do it and that “We don’t want to be in a city of puddles!” all this uproar because of a single puddle, it was genius. My overall favourite piece was his Olympic structures which towered out of the water, they were all different colours and they were a thing of beauty. He loves the fact that they will age and change colour over time as well which I wouldn’t want, I’d want them to remain bright coloured throughout the ages and not change ever, keep them looking fresh but each to their own. I would love to see structures like that jotted around the city, like going up from the ground then turn and connect to the building like an ‘L’ shape, something that you could just swing off of and just have fun with, would look very pretty and would be a very fun structure. He shown us many more pieces he did but then he started talking about other artists and this is when he got really giddy and excited, he started talking about the stories behind a certain piece and how he gained humour from them, he told us the story of a sarcophagus which had holes in it, any artist could of put them there however, they were put there when someone made it into a bathtub so the water could drain out – someone used this sacred tomb as a bathtub, its so funny its genius. Another story he enjoyed telling us was he had this bench in the museum, someone sat on it and accidentally fouled himself – behind the bench was a very sexualised male sculpture which made this story even more hilarious. I really enjoyed Keith’s lecture and hope to see more of him in the future.

GRACE SCHWLNOT. 10/2/15.

The lady who owns the Site Gallery started things off by really hyping this woman up, saying that they’re honoured to have Graces work in their gallery and much like everyone else, I got excited to see what she was about. Grace started off the lecture with a very interesting quote “As long as you make good work, someone will pick it up”, I really liked that quote as it just makes you want to work really hard on whatever you’re working on knowing that someday someone will see it and want it. Graces lecture to me wasn’t that interesting, in fact the way she worded things had me very confused however the pictures and videos she shown were pretty good and I really liked them. She started off with her feature length film (Which is featured in the Site Gallery: 10th January – 28th February 2015) which I found really interesting, the actors/dancers she chosen were really good and worked with the piece really well however, even when they started speaking I didn’t know what was going on. The 8 dancers were dressed in pure white clothing and they had random things attached to them (Whether they were random or not, I was confused as to why but I feel as though there is a reason behind them) a girl had a tree trunk attached to her side (Which was printed on cardboard), a man had loads of lace draping off of his right side and another man had what seems to be snowflake-like wings on his back. After a bit of slow dancing, they zoomed out to reveal the stage in what seems to be a park of some kind, then they started talking and could really only make out 2 voices out of the 8, I cant remember what was said but I can remember still remaining confused if not more. Grace then stated that she doesn’t like ballet and neither do her dancers, this I found interesting as ballet is a really meaningful, beautiful and expressive way of dancing – if anything I think the dancing would of been more appreciated if it were in a ballet fashion but maybe they didn’t want to give too much a way through their dancing. She then shown us what goes on when she’s writing the scripts, moves and costumes – you can tell she puts a lot of effort in her work with her scripts and drawings which goes to show that the quote “As long as you make good work, someone will pick it up” is actually true and its the reason why she is famous. I loved her drawings of the dancers in the dance positions as just “pieces”, the colour she used is beautiful and the poses certainly complimented the colouring and overall design, if she made a huge piece on just those sketches, I feel that would be a fantastic piece. She then shown us what appeared to be an empty room however she zoomed in and there was writing all over the walls, couldn’t really make out what was written although she did explain that she wrote questions, every question she could think about – an example was “How do Germans deal with German history?”, I liked this room of questions and I loved how the writing was hard to see – would of loved to of seen some of her dancer drawings on the wall though. She did some vases that really didn’t interest me, she did talk about them for a good while but I couldn’t understand her that well due to the way she worded them. Finally, she shown us a piece where a girl is hanging horizontally about 20cm off of the ground in a red dress asleep, in the corner was someone dressed as a magician who will dance four times every 40 minutes – she explained that this was like the whole “Magician sawing the beautiful assistant in half” concept which I found very interesting. After a few hours and the actors left, all that was left was the wires dangling down and the red dress on the floor where she was laying, I found this picture to be a great follow up to that piece and felt it was needed to finish it perfectly. To conclude, I still don’t really understand what she’s trying to say in her work – I heard her mention “freedom of narrative” a lot but apart from that I got nothing, I appreciated the beauty of her pieces and feel privileged to of seen her and her work.

ROSE BUTLER. 5/2/15.

Rose Butler was a very interesting lecture, she shown us three videos each with their own different and unique style, I didn’t like the first one, found the second one okay and really liked the last one. The first one was a silent film about squares and transitions, basically the shapes would meld into each other and keep transitioning to different scenes followed by more squares, it was rinsed and repeated and I didn’t like how repetitive it was, however there were scenes where a square would act like it was afraid like it was alive, then it would transition and leave me confused. The second video was a one hour video of random video shots with an orchestra in the background – I could watch 5-10 minutes of it but not an hour and finally, a very strange short movie. The movie was about a man and a woman, the man seemed somewhat sexually frustrated and the film was very “dream-like”, there was a point where he wanted to touch her so she ran into the corner of the room and started pulling 2 Piano’s with dead donkey’s on the back of them and attached to them was 2 men clutching a rope, he started pulling these towards her – the pianos came out of nowhere and I theorise that this shows how frustrated he is, showing what he’d do to touch her. All of these films were black and white with different kinds of music in the background, I will add the links to the bottom of this post. This was a very short and sweet lecture as the majority of the time was showing these three videos, there was a few giggles from the randomness of sopme of the footage and Rose Butler talked about each film really well.

Rhythumus 21 (The video with the squares): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b972EQOOEoY
Vertov: Man with a Movie Camera (The one hour video of random shots): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZkvjWIEcoU
Luis Bunuel: Un Chien andalou (Weird dream-like movie): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIKYF07Y4kA

RICHARD LAYZELL. 03/02/15

I really liked Richard Layzell, he started off by performing a few seconds of Tai Chi which shows he’s a very relaxed kind of guy, he then proceeded to thank us for turning up and for “being who you are” which I felt was a beautiful start to a lecture, safe to say he had earned my attention. He proceeded to say that he’ll start by reading something off of a computer screen – something I really dislike as the lecturer becomes monotone almost instantly, however I gave him the benefit of the doubt and listened to him. There was some parts of his dialog that went completely over my head, he said words that I didn’t understand, he used phrases I’ve never heard of before (Nor did he explain what they ment) and he talked in a monotone voice, he slowly started to lose my interest, then he showed us a Black and White video which brought me back in. The video was of wooden flooring and from the angel, you could see people walking over the floor and leaving the camera, then it cuts to a close up of a particular plank in the wooden flooring where someone (I think it was Richard himself) staring at it close up, he started feeling it with the palm of his hand, then he smelled it, proceeded to taste it and then placed his ear on it – there was no music or noise which made the video quite unnerving. It then showed you him lifting the floor board up in a certain angel so its sticking out, it would then pan out a clip of a shoe would show slamming down on the floor, it would then show you more boards stuck up, it would then show the clip of the foot slamming down and cut back to more boards sticking up. This repeated a fair bit until the majority of the floor boards were sticking up looking a bit like a maze. The next clip showed a guys bare foot just moving the planks which now looked like bricks, it would just be this foot dragging planks around on his heel, it was very intriguing but didn’t really interest me. He then started talking about one of his projects, this one really caught my attention – it was called “Becoming Other”, basically Richard Layzell would act like a character he created with a whole new personality and dress sense.
He showed a video of him acting like his character “Baily Savage” whom was really into politics, wanting to help Thatcher – in the video, he left a limo and entered the party looking very smart and would just shout nonsense (In my opinion, didn’t understand what he was talking about), then it would proceed to him in a car shouting why he should be elected and how he’s “really good at making money, oh yes aha!”. He then showed us another character he became called Max Hombre who was just in pictures, he was walking around carrying a golden builders helmet (Richard even forgot why he carried it around, which we all found funny) talking to the public, then he started talking about Tanya Koswycz. Tanya was another one of Richards Persona’s and actually made artwork for her as she was an artist which I found was really interesting, almost like this character he created has actually created something. He started having big discussions with her and put postcards up in his exhibition showing the conversations they had, it was like he was actually talking to a real life woman and it was scarily good. At the end of his lecture, I was invested enough to ask a question at the end, it may of been an awkward question but the feedback I got from the question was really good – in fact he’s never been asked it before which I was pretty shocked to hear. I asked considering Baily Savage had a video of him doing what he does and he had pictures of Max Hombre doing what he does, has he ever considered giving Tanya a visual piece like a video or pictures? Of like, Richard dressed as Tanya doing artwork or something. He responded really well followed by chuckles saying that he see’s certain women in the street and sometimes thinks to himself “Oh my, that’s what Tanya would look like!”, he once saw a woman in a pink dress and he felt like she was Tanya, he asked his persona and she apparently acted badly saying “Why would I wear a pink dress!?”, he obviously hasn’t given Tanya a public appearance, only he knows what she looked like. I love how he talks to his persona’s, almost like imaginary friends its beautiful.
He followed up with a story where he named a mannequin “Olaf” and everyone fell in love with him after he was given a name, its so interesting how just giving a name to something gives it a personality almost instantly – people apparently tried to “steal “Olaf and they filmed the kidnapping, would they have bothered to steal it if it never had a name? Or once he was given an identity? Its a very interesting concept and I found the lecture really interesting. He also started talking about a film he made, he realized that one of his ancestors was called “Phoebe” and she fell over in a certain location whilst pregnant. Just for fun, he asked his friend to repeat the fall in the certain location as he filmed around the public, people offered the help her up and they did a few takes, they looked over the footage and realized that in one of the falls, a pregnant lady walks down the path, where she fell – I don’t know why but I was incredibly moved by this.
I really enjoyed his lecture and hope to hear more about his personas in the near future. Here are a few images of Richard Layzell’s work and himself.

Oreet Ashry. 2/12/14

Oreet Ashery didn’t interest me as much as the other lecturers like David Clegg and Thomas Yeomans, I found her work intriguing and I found myself asking a lot of questions but I wasn’t really engaged in the lecture. I didn’t write many notes about Oreet because there wasn’t much for me to take notes of, however I did appreciate some of her fashion work – she made these ponchos out of these pieces of fabric and latex, almost like patchwork (One of my favourite kind of styles) all these ponchos came with weird hats and latex gloves, really looked odd and questionable but I appreciated them. Oreet’s work was at times very sexual however she only showed a few examples of these, some of her sexual work was under the name “Oreet Ashery’s Party of Freedom”, which again wasn’t my kind of thing however the majority of the audience loved her nudity work and I don’t blame them, there was some good pieces. My favourite piece by Ashery however has to be these structures which to me look like ships/boats. I really love these structures because of how bright and in-your-face they are, they’re made of plastic bags and other kinds of fabrics, much like her other work. I feel this style of work works way better as structures than clothing but that’s just my opinion.

Here is a link to Oreet Ashery’s “Party of Freedom”: WARNING, CONTAINS NUDITY. http://www.artangel.org.uk//projects/2013/party_for_freedom/about_the_project/about_the_project

Andrew Burton. 27/11/14

Andrew Burton was a very interesting lecturer as was his work. Andrew had an obsession with bricks and walls and his work revolved around those 2 topics, mainly together – brick walls. He loves ceramics and he built little bricks and made walls out of them in clever ways, he started using different materials such as glass, actual bricks and poo from cows which I thought was very clever. He moved to India for a bit and helped ladies build houses with cow poo and the structures they made were beyond amazing, despite what they were made of it was very inspirational. My favourite piece by him was his glass walls, which I sadly couldn’t find a image of – they looks like crystals because of the dimensions of the bricks, it was so beautiful – the fact that he uses beautifully crafted glass bricks and cow poo as two separate materials, shows how different his ranges of materials are. When building his walls, he sometimes paints a few individual bricks a different colour and puts them near each other and it works so well. One piece that really caught my attention was this structure he built out of small bricks, it was strange because it looks really sturdy however, the bottom of the structure is thick and it gets fatter as it goes up – my tutor Julie said something really interesting linked to this, she said that if you broke a vase, the first thing you’ll want to do is locate the bottom of the vase in hope that its still in tact so you can glue the pieces from the bottom up, not from the top down, this is because the bottom of the vase is wider and should be the most sturdiest, this is what gets me about this piece that Andrew built: