Day 9 Rod presents Artists who are considered to be dealing with 'Political' and Gender in their work

 We were shown a still life picture that posed something of a quandary - you may see it and think it inoffensive and of little consequence. 











Here is a link to the story of the  work and the artist responsible - now what should we think? Is it political? There are many questions we can now consider.


We then moved on to look at work of Barbara Kruger who started  her art career working with materials ( described as  re claiming craft for women) but in tandem she was involved with Poetry and critiscm.

Her work then became a  text based critique of consumerism and the perceived misbalance of the genders which has been successfully  critically and commercially.


Discussions in class questioned her use of copyright free images in many of the works  and their long term credibility as works of art that remained 'interesting' beyond the period they were created in (and the values they reflected at that time) - you can see some of her work here and I have noticed some of it in Public spaces like  at London's Tate Modern - the work is impactful.  


We then carried out our own use of adding text to images - perhaps it showed us that some skill and thought goes into the exercise?

This was what my Kruger-esque work looked like (Vogue magazine was the source of material)


I wonder what Barbara would think?

Cindy Sherman

After Barbara we looked at another American artist - Cindy Sherman who works around issues of Identity -Her work is centered around her being the subject (and her own muse) in Photographs


Here's Cindy's Studio recreated at London's  NPG in 2019 when I visited


Cindy has worked in this field  of Photography for over 50 years  since her degree show and is considered to be successful - her early work has a film noir Hichcock-ian  look and other experiments have not always been greeted with universal acclaim (her use of makeup to present herself  as non-white was controversial).

I found the retrospective exhibition at National portrait Gallery (London) that I visited in 2019 was useful in seeing how her work developed - and I remain something of a fan of her work, although I am curious into what has led her to work in this way (Freud could help perhaps?) and wonder if it has been ultimately a dead end creatively. 

More of Cindy's work showing colour as well as multiple 'characters (again from NPG 2019 in London)


And later..

 Later during the day we worked further on our assignment to create a short critical analysis of the work of a contemporary artist.  

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