The face is a central organ to personal identity. With it we can communicate human expression, feelings and characters with as little as the blink of an eye. On a deeper level, the face can be an art form that speaks to a universal understanding of the mind. Olivier De Sagazan uses the face to challenge conventions. He exposes human rawness and looks at cultural taboos. Sagazan’s artwork cannot be pinned down by language but by raw emotion. His unsettling performances represent visions of primitivism, agony, occult and other ancient cultural art forms that cover or deform the face in ways that can be both beautiful and confronting. Leading us to question, “What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?
A conventional face represents an idealised self-portrait. In ‘Transfiguration’, Olivier de Sagazan builds an existential performance based on layers of clay that he paints onto his face and body to transform, disfigure and take apart his own figure from the physical world that constraints his emotions and passions. Jolting viewers out of ordinary patterns of thinking. Sagazan’s face test his viewers perceptions of the totemic face, the grotesque face, the face in performance, the violent face—all the while creating a dialogue between past, present, and what’s yet to come.
His concern with the diversity of facial expression and with the expressiveness of body language is a conscious means of breaking taboos against what is ugly, absurd or instinctual. Sagazan’s performance explores extreme emotional states provoking more questions than answers. The contemporary “primitivism” movement in design and art examines objects that will become ritualized, layered with another spirit or energy - embedding them with a soul. Primitivism is, ins...
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...r pure philosophy. It is anecdote - it is a memento of someone. In that sense perhaps every Transfiguration performance here is a form of self-portrait, but Sagazan complicates this dynamic by also transforming himself into the subject. He impersonates the primitive in his work, and therefore becomes Bacon’s subject as well as his own. He is the subject, object, and history of portrait painting all in one.
We carry our past with us, the primitive and irrational mind with its inner desires and emotions, and it is only with an enormous psychic effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. And when masks shatter down like in Sagazan’s transfiguration, there is our shadow to remind us that we are the monsters. In the very end this is like the process of covering and uncovering, a way to adopt a role, to perform a raw character, to paint our self-portrait.
People usually expect to see paintings and sculptures in Art Galleries. Imagine the surprise one finds when they are presented with a man stitching his face into a bizarre caricature, or connected to a machine which controls the artist’s body. These shocking pieces of performance art come under the broad umbrella that is Postmodernism. Emphasis on meaning and shock value has replaced traditional skills and aesthetic values evident in the earlier Modernist movements.
This book was also one of my first encounters with an important truth of art: that your work is powerful not because you convey a new emotion to the audience, but because you tap into an emotion the audience already feels but can't express.
First, the size of the painting drew me in before all. It measures at 339.1 by 199.5 cm, surrounded by a large golden frame. The size alone is enough to bring in any person passing by. Once getting close, the really wonder happened. The story told by the painting
A passing moment (like the one involving Verushka) is fickle on the surface, but under the right circumstances, is potentially timeless. Matthew Goulish uncovers this transition in his essay “Criticism.” He explains, “we understand something by approaching it,” and that “we approach it using our ears, our noses, our intellects, our imaginations. We approach it with silence. We approach it with Childhood” (328). In order to truly see something, or rather, to truly know something, Goulish asserts that we have to look at it in the same wide-eyed manner we would in our youth. Though we, as humans, have a tendency to analyze based on preconceived ideas, only through an acknowledgment of the unknown and an acceptance of the absurd can we truly “[liberate the] critical mind to follow whatever might cross its path” (329). In doing so, Goulish recognized the distinction between the literal and the surreal, and similarly understood the effects of embracing one over the other when viewing a subject. Verushka’s state of being was documented with a brief, exhaustively exploitative photo session, and acts as a direct representation of the concept of actually “viewing.” Everything, from her free-flowing hair to her effortless poses, personifies Goulish’s acknowledgement of the the pursuit of liberation. Though she’s the focal point of the image, this “liberation” isn’t her own; it’s the
In my examination of the works, I came across a particular sculpture that portrayed both beauty and craftsmanship. A 15th century sculpture (1490), made in Venice, Italy by Tullio Lombardo, shows a life-size figure of Adam. Titled Adam, the work is the most prominent in the gallery mostly because of its 6-foot standing. It immediately caught my attention and gave me a very realistic impression. One beige color and made of marble, Adam is depicted simply, yet the statue has intense emotions. His meaningful glance is seen in the upward and tilted head position. Adam has almost lifeless looking eyes and seems to be staring into the distance. With these sagging eyes, parted lips, and lacking posture I feel Adam’s guilt is displayed in this figure.
...lved Mysteries of the Arnolfini Double Portrait." FluxBoston.org. N.p., 21 Jul 2007. Web. 8 Dec 2013.
Tarkovsky’s refusal to attach these faces to a situation, to a decision, or to an exchange of looks with another character makes these anonymous and minor figures especially elusive. Yet their impact is undeniably strong. It is as if the viewer’s mind, unable to read the characters’ eyes, turns away from the distractions of the world towards deeper and unspeakable regions, thus reacting in a way comparable to the beholder of a holy face in an icon. (143)
Some of Goffman’s other works include ‘The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’, ‘Asylums’, and ‘Stigma’ which are a series of books about social behaviour. They are often referred to as modern classics. The essay on face-work can be considered as an expansion of Goffman’s previous works on interaction and included in this series.
The human form transcends throughout time persistently present in art. Dating all the way back to Paleolithic human beings our renderings of idealized forms have served many purposes. Though the Neolithic and Paleolithic purpose of these renderings is widely speculative the range of reason for these depictions ranges from idolization and worship to assertion of aristocratic and economic status even to simply serving as statements of self-expression. Amongst ruins and artifacts, sculptures of ancient cultures demonstrate the ways in which humans perceptions of what is aesthetically desirable have progressed. Two idealized sculptures the Woman from Willendorf and the Khafre statue with approximately 21,500 years separating their individual gestations this demonstrate the stylistic progression of idealized imagery through time.
...e multiplicity of meaning embedded in these works suggests the importance of the body as a liminal site, a site of inscription and meaning making, in both historical-contemporary and more recent feminist work. It is, of course, unlikely that Antin or Kraus draws directly upon any singular theory explicated in this essay. Both artists are, however, undeniably interested in the formations, constructions, and shifts of subjectivity. Both Carving: A Traditional Sculpture and Aliens and Anorexia address the body’s uncontained boundaries, exploding the dual Cartesian model of interior/exterior self. As feminist artists, both Antin and Kraus are also surely aware of the complexity of discourses around food, self, and the body. Through the artists may not be speaking “to” or “through” any particular theoretical model, they are contributing to these discourses all the same.
Performance artist Patty Chang creates pieces that deal with scopophilia or voyeurism, best described as “the love of looking”, a topic that goes hand in hand with the issues of gender roles in society that Chang also represents in her work. Chang particularly addresses issues of gender roles through her confrontation of female representation in art, film and popular culture as a whole. In Chang’s video clip entitled, “Shaved (At a Loss)”, she sits herself on a chair in front of her audience, hikes up her dress to expose her vagina and then proceeds to, very roughly, shave off her pubic hair. The entire duration of “Shaved (At a Loss), Chang is blindfolded. In this piece Chang presents consumer culture’s fetishization of the ”flawless” female figure, which is outlined by the unattainable body ideals that are portrayed not only in most mainstream pornography, but also in almost all media connected to our society’s popular culture sphere.
Since its emergence over 30,000 years ago, one of visual art’s main purposes has been to act as an instrument of personal expression and catharsis. Through the mastery of paint, pencil, clay, and other mediums, artists can articulate and make sense of their current situation or past experiences, by portraying their complex, abstract emotions in a concrete form. The act of creation gives the artist a feeling of authority or control over these situations and emotions. Seen in the work of Michelangelo, Frida Kahlo, Jean Michel-Basquiat, and others, artists’ cathartic use of visual art is universal, giving it symbolic value in literature. In Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,
Introduction Upon my first encounter with Kandinsky's painting, my eyes and indeed my mind were overcome with a sense of puzzlement, as it seemed impossible to decipher what lay beneath his passionate use of colour and distorted forms. Kandinsky hoped by freeing colour from its representational restrictions, it, like music could conjure up a series of emotions in the soul of viewer, reinforced by corresponding forms. Throughout this essay, I will follow Kandinsky's quest for a pure, abstract art and attempt to determine whether his passionate belief in this spiritual art and his theories on its effects on the soul, can truly be felt and appreciated by the average viewer, who at first glance would most likely view Kandinsky's paintings as simply abstract. Kandinsky was indeed a visionary, an artist who through his theoretical ideas of creating a new pictorial language sought to revolutionize the art of the twentieth-century. Regarded as the founder of abstract painting, he broke free from arts traditional limitations and invented the first painting for paintings sake, whereby the dissolution of the object and subsequent promotion of colour and form became means of expression in their own right.
In order to familiarise myself with the above topic, I have invested much time reading vast selection of the portraiture art themes with aim to get acquainted with the knowledge and the language used in this particular subject. It was very challenging and entertaining to read comprehensive range of various critiques and analysis of the world best paintings stretching from ancient classic to contemporary western image. Developing understanding of the diverse art expressions and social and political influences tha...
During my first look at Antonio Canova’s Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, the detail in the woman being saved by a kiss from Cupid astonished me. I was especially impressed by the feathers on the wings and the smoothness of the skin. I find it absolutely amazing that in a time of limited, or any, modern technology, someone could create such delicate features and texture on a hard surface. This piece must have taken years to carve. I feel that this beautiful sculpture portrays love, compassion, and ironically, humanity. I do not know who the woman is, or why she needs a kiss from Cupid, but she seems to welcome it desperately.