Week 3

Project 

Whilst taking photos during the previous week I realised that is not that easy to take just one photo daily. Especially when you find inspiration. When I already have a camera in my hand it’s natural to take more than one photo. And I don’t see a point in ignoring an inspiration when it comes to you. That’s why I did more than one photo daily but I still kept the topic of nature for that week. After discussing this in my tutorial with Miranda, I’m happy about my decision. With that decision, changes are coming to my project. 

The project has a new meaning, instead of being focused on only the photographs, it’s focused on the process of curation/decision-making. I feel it’s a very natural process in every artist’s life, we make a lot of artwork (scratches, drawings, rough ideas, photos) that don’t make it to the outside world. There are always decisions about what’s “worthy” for an exhibition etc. But this whole process usually happens behind closed doors and it’s so natural to the artist, that usually we don’t even realise that it’s happening. That’s why I think it’s a good idea to focus the project on the curating/editing process. 

Each week I will still have different topics to photograph, the previous week it was nature, and this week I’m focusing on architecture/buildings. I will go around the town to take photos, however many I want, then develop them and then try to find a photo of the week. I will also think about why I chose it. Make a process of selecting an artwork.

This week I had time to develop the first film roll for this project. The good news is that some of the photos turn out okay, which means that the camera is working but the bad news is that most of the roll turned out overexposed, which means that I’m probably doing something wrong. I guess that because this camera is quite old it doesn’t have a light meter in it so I was trying to take photos with measurements that I thought might be correct some of them weren’t. What I have to do while shooting the next roll is to maybe download an app on my phone that has a light meter. Some of the photos were a failure but I guess it’s a part of natural selection that happened without my control. I will go to the darkroom and see what I can get out of this film roll. 

Here are the developed photos from the first week of shooting. I’m really enjoying working in a darkroom but it’s quite time-consuming. Next time I think I will just scan the film and then develop the chosen photo. I’m happy about how the photos turned out, they have nature in them but at the same time some street elements that combine with nature. It’s a very exciting beginning for my project. The only thing that I’m disappointed by is the amount of material that I lost from this roll but that’s part of the process. 

Lecture part 2

An interesting lecture, very kitchen and life orientated. A lot of the artists in this lecture show a work that is very simple, practical and technically not art but with the right context, it becomes it. They made art from everyday chores and objects. The beauty in a lot of them was the simplicity.

Research 

Christian Boltanski- Storage Memory 

Christian Boltanski (6 September 1944- 14 July 2021) was a French sculptor, photographer, painter and filmmaker. His artwork is often related to holocaust mortality and morning. It has strong narratives that are often constructed from found materials such as family photographs, magazine-cutting postcards, toys and discarded clothes. 

His exhibition storage memory was a whole event connecting his different works. There were installations, videos, sounds and shadow theatres. The artwork there were for example 10-ton pile of clothes, 100 pictures showing infants and elderly people or an echo of 1000 heartbeats. The event was meant to question the unpredictable encounters and experiences of individuals in daily and historical contexts. 

According to tho the artist while individual memories might prove to be fragile they are still filled with truthful yet unique values. That’s why in a lot of his artworks he was choosing daily items as the main creative elements to construct and achieve humanity. 

Martha Rosler- Semiotics of the Kitchen

Martha Rosler was born in 1943 and works in video, photography, text, installation, and performance. Her work focuses on the public sphere, exploring issues from everyday life and the media to architecture and the built environment, especially as they affect women.

Semiotics of the Kitchen (1974/75) is a pioneering work of feminist video in which, parodying early television cooking shows, Rosler demonstrates some hand tools of the kitchen in alphabetical order. Wielding knives, a nutcracker, and a rolling pin, she warms to her task, her gestures sharply punctuating the rage and frustration of oppressive women’s roles. As her gestures begin to veer in an unexpected and possibly alarming direction, the character eventually dispenses with the tools and uses her body as a kind of semaphore system. Rosler has suggested that this darkly humorous work is meant to challenge social expectations of women in regard to food production and, more broadly, the role of language in determining these expectations. The issue the work calls up is whether the woman can be said to “speak herself.”

 Rosler has said of this work, “I was concerned with something like the notion of ‘language speaking the subject,’ and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity.”

“Even though it was obscure looking (on purpose) and inelegant (on purpose) and unedited (on purpose), it began to look like a naïf moment of production that was the best that could be done at the time. In other words, it was seen as a pioneering work because of its low quality of production”.

This piece was very interesting, I researched this artist before I’m very interested in her work but I feel like this piece has made a difference and is one of her most famous works. Especially since it was so strange. But the message about women being put in this narrative of being perfect housewives I think is still correct. Especially from where I’m originally from. There is this role expected from us, expectation to cook, clean to be a perfect mother and wife.