Liverpool Biennial - Leung Mee-Ping

'Out of Place', 2012

Leung Mee-Ping's videon installation was also part of the Biennial and was located in the Copperas building Liverpool. The installation consisted of six videos, which were projected onto screens that were hanging from the ceiling, that you had to walk between in order to view what was on all sides. The videos were set in six different places: Hong Kong, Beijing, Tokyo, Smokey Mountain Manila, Bangkok and Varanasi. They depicted busy city life and traffic. As a viewer, you walk through the projections as though you are walking through a city. The camera viewpoint is very much from the eyes of the viewer, as though it is a simulation. The work is interesting because we feel as though we are there, and these are our own memories and experiences. Some of the videos are walking down a busy street, where people push past you and you feel as though you are in the way. The uncomfortable feeling of constantly being in the way and out of place, causes you to keep moving around the space, watching all of the videos. The sounds of traffic, car horns, people talking all add to the stressful scene. I think this was a really successful piece in creating what the artist intended; to make the viewer feel out of place and lost in a different culture. The screens are slightly high up, so that the crowds are too tall, making you feel small and even more lost and insecure in this new world. If I was being critical, I do think the screens could do with being slightly lower, just so that the viewer can implicate themselves in the scene even more so. I found this piece interesting for the same reasons that I found Edward Kienholz's 'Sawdy' interesting - the viewer feels as though they are in the scene, which is a really useful technique for my own themes to do with shared experience and collective memory.

Edward Kienholz, 'Sawdy', 1971

In the Tate Liverpool this week I saw this piece by Edward Kienholz. The scale replica of a car door is mounted on the wall, and is made from materials including metal, glass, plastic and rubber, amongst other things. On walking up to the piece, the window is already wound down, and you look beyond it to work out what is depicted. The scene is set in America, and shows a group of white men castrating a black man, surrounded by four parked cars. The viewer is immediately implicated in the scene as you feel as though you are sitting in one of the pickup trucks, looking out of the window and watching this attack occur. The window of the car is mirrored, showing your own reflection and forcing you further to place yourself in the scene. The image is a dark side of American contemporary life. In my own practice I am interested in British contemporary life and the shared experiences of my generation, but from a much more lighthearted point of view. I like the viewer to see themselves in my work as though they could be looking at their own memories, and I think Kienholz has done this so successfully by creating a scale replica of a car, which we are all familiar with being in and looking out the window. It places you directly in the scene. Most recently I created a piece that was based on an experience of a music festival/outside gig. I wanted to create the feeling of being in the crowd, so I tried to make other crowd members life-size, as though the viewer would be standing behind them, having a slightly blocked view of the stage. I think I could have done this a lot more successfully by depicting the people in the crowd that would be standing directly in front of the viewer more clearly, and experimenting with altering the perspective so that they were more or less focused, depending on which worked best. I do like this technique of making work of memories as though it is from a person's eyes though, as it implicates the viewer in the scene. It is useful for my theme of collective memory, as it suggests that my work could be the memories of any viewer.

Liverpool Biennial - Yukinori Yanagi

Pacific, 1996

When I originally saw this work I wasn't so much interested in the flags or worried too much what the piece was about - but I was immediately intrigued by the materials used in the piece. The flags were presented in perspex boxes, and inside are flags which look to have eroded somehow. I initially thought that this was polystyrene, that had been rubbed away in parts, as the texture looked very similar. On reading up on the piece I discovered that it was in fact sand inside the perspex boxes, and  ants had been released inside them, to create these tunnels between the grid-like flags as a comment on migration. It's the idea of erosion and the fading of the bright flags that I am drawn to. I think because they are images that we all recognise so much, it makes the fading away of them even more symbolic. I am interested in this idea of fading away in my own work, in relation to memory. Yanagi's piece has made me think more about my own work. Although I have since found out that it is made from sand, I am interested in my initial misconception of it being made from polystyrene. I would like to try using polystyrene in my own work to create some of the fragmented images; cutting it away or using certain liquids to dissolve parts of it and make it disintegrate.

Liverpool Biennial - Jakob Kolding

This week I visited Liverpool to have a look at the Liverpool Biennial. I was quite interested in the work of Jakob Kolding, which I found in the Bluecoat's exhibition space. Inspired by modernist architecture and city life; Kolding works with collage and collective imagery, such as pop-cultural sources like music and football. Kolding is interested in the idea of 'local identity', and creates posters and maquettes based around this theme.

As I walked into his exhibition the first thing I noticed was the lack of colour, all of Kolding's selected work was black-and-white. A lot of the work is also quite minimalist in nature - sometimes with only a few small images on a page. Generally his work has the feel of old newspapers; a lot of the images are pixelated as though they are small images found from secondary sources which have been enlarged, reducing the picture quality. The connotations with architecture are strong - his work is very structured, using bold designs and layouts, and he also creates cardboard maquettes which immediately remind me of an architect's model. It's the more minimalist prints that I find the most interesting. I think they're simple and effective, and relate to themes that I am looking at in my own practice. The large amount of white space in the images makes me think of the absence of memory, and the use of pop-culture/secondary imagery, makes me think of collective memory and the idea of shared experience. In my own work I generally work with layered rectangles which mirror the dimensions of standard photographs, as I am interested in the relationship between photography and memory, but Kolding carefully cuts around details that he wants to display. I would like to try this technique of cutting around the details of images I am collaging, so that I am clearly selecting parts of an image, creating isolated parts of a memory. 

Roland Barthes - Camera Lucida

Recently I have read 'Camera Lucida' by Roland Barthes, which is a far more personal approach to an analysis of photography than Susan Sontag's. His problems with photography stem from his search for the 'perfect' picture of his dead mother. The first part of the book Barthes takes a more objective viewpoint of photography, and identifies two planes of an image. He calls the one the 'studium' of an image, which is the subject and meaning of the photograph. The other, he names the 'punctum', which refers to the aspect or detail of an image that hold our gaze.  Barthes writes about the punctum as often piercing through the studium of a photograph. It's the second half of the book where it becomes more moving, when he writes more about his grief for his mother's death and begins searching for a perfect picture of her. Barthes wants to find a picture of his mother that encompasses everything he remembers about her visually, as well as summing up her personality, which proves to be an almost impossible task. He eventually discovers a photograph that depicts the 'air' about his mother, when she was aged only five. There is an immediate sense of jubilation as Barthes finds this picture and has an onrush of emotions triggered by her photograph and the memory of her. Barthes never shows the photograph, making it clear that it is a personal journey: 'It exists only for me. For you it would be nothing but an indifferent picture.' This is the thing about personal photographs; - other people's are rarely interesting because we have no personal attachment to it, there is no 'studium' as Barthes would put it. This is why I am far more interested in the idea of collective memory rather than individual memory. My search for photographs tends to be the opposite to that of Barthes', I am interested in images that are not personal, that anyone may have already seen in real life. My hope would be that viewers might believe they have already have experienced the memory, even if they remember it just through looking at the photographs and starting to believe that the images are familiar and in fact their own memory. Barthes' view on photography is that 'it actually blocks memory, [it] quickly becomes a counter-memory one day, some friends were talking about their childhood memories; they had any number; but I, who had just been looking at my old photographs, had none left.' I find this idea of memory being replaced by memory really interesting, we start to forget what we actually remember and what we have just been shown through images. Barthes' view on photography in relation to memory is not very different from Susan Sontag's, who writes that photographs are 'not so much an instrument of memory, as an invention of it or a replacement.' [Susan Sontag, On Photography, pg. 165].

In my work I am interested in depicting the visualisation of a memory. I try to do this through fragmentation - some part of the image are photographs (some clear, and others less so), to refer to the idea of photographs filling in the blanks of our memory, or even replacing it. In other parts of the image I like to use other methods such as drawing and painting, to portray the other parts of a memory, possibly the less well remembered; what there are no photographs of to serve as a reminder or memory replacement.