Being Human. Contextual Practice Tate Modern Gallery Visit. 6/11/19

For each artist listed select one piece of work on display and answer the following questions.

QUESTION：

what aspect(s) of being human does the artist explore in their work?
What materials, processes and media do they use to explore their ideas?
How successfully do you think their approach is? why?
How is the work installed/ arranged in the gallery?

Mitch Epstein 1952

Biloxi, Mississippi 2005 2005

Keyword:

Two kinds of chaos
flesh and stare separate

Answer Question

Being human is so powerless an experience that we all secretly have the desire to join in the force: to live a life as chaotic as the disaster that’s about to come(to interact by participating), or staring at the ruins of the wreckage, feeling the presence of power (to interact by the gaze). Force always belongs to the structural organization, just as the chaos which hurricane represents is pure, a form of differentiation of the universe. But the chaos after the hurricane belongs to a human, which is organic, like a seed that stretches out its roots during us gazing.
Photography naturally holds a sense of stare, and photos exist as the physical body of the sense of gaze, being separated from the flesh. In fact, the flesh is always feeble and inevitably exposed to a chaotic force field, while stare embraces the harmony of force every moment through wounds and ruins.
The warm orange hue creates such an emotional tone for the photo. The ruins are not a monument to the disaster, but a channel of communication between viewers and the world, which crave a gentle and forgiving stare. And those strong American elements also bring aesthetic pleasure at the level of cultural intertext.
The image is 1143*1473 mm, and this huge volume affects viewing to be closer to "fixed gaze" rather than "watching ".

Kara Walker

Answer Question:

God is the embodiment of human admiration. on the one hand, it represents hope and justification for the sense of fear of the unknown. On the other hand, god is a high-concentration of human traits. Venus on the top of the fountain faces away from the low-class people. Her blood (human origin) and the milk she sows (acts of willful behaviour) have become the sea in which all living struggle. There is no interaction between any character in the work. They are just either arrogant, or struggle, or desperate, occupying a corner of themselves in the different spots of the miserable sea of life, the sea of tears.
This 13-Meter-High Sculpture makes the viewpoint of the audience on the ground exactly the same as the characters who struggle in the sea, thus the sense of class directly hits the audience. And when they move to the position where they can even look down to Venus, the audience has to ask themselves what their point of view stands for.
The success of the work lies in water: the sea of life, the milk and blood of God, and tears origin from the very same source. And It is also worth to mention that the setting of spraying Venus's blood by cutting her neck artery wild open has a strong modern art character of querying.
The work sits in a room that can be viewed at different heights, the lights illuminating from its top to bottom. The foundation of the fountain offers a place to sit, in fact, the audience who sits on it makes a very interesting comparison with the sculptures who are trying to get rid of the shark chasing behind them.

Joseph Beuys 1921-1986

Lightning with Stag in its Glare 1958-85

The moment I saw this work, associate with the Christ Crucified.

IMG_5879的副本.JPG

Keyword:

The sense of distance

Precision

Highly-symbolizing

The instinct fear

Answer Question:

The goat that’s flinching in the distance, the ideal world contains civilization and plants that are being lifted upon the ground, the bright silver stag in the wilderness with countless saprophagous animals that surround it. There is also a huge black lightning hanging, without touching the earth yet heavily pressure on everything underneath. Viewers, as humans, are not watching the work, because there is no space for interactions like watching, coexisting, emphasizing to happen inside this work. Its highly symbolic expression strip every other attribute of the viewers, leaving them to exist only as life itself. It rouses the sense of destruction and perdition around the corner, and we live as if treading on thin ice.
In such a highly symbolic work that the artist can reveal his precision of abstracting, the strong sensitivity and skill in managing the materials. It’s extremely crucial to select the visual attributes of the material itself to match, even complement the features of images(such as heavy, ancient cast bronze, to symbolize the world with plants, ceramic and magnetic fields).
What struck me most is the artist’s precision. In addition to the precision of the materials as above, It is also shown in the control of the distance from the elements in three-dimensional space. The flinching goat, the ideal world that’s standing off the ground, the lightning that’s almost touching the ground... The artist successfully makes the distance a crucial part of his expression.
This work occupied the whole room. Apparently, there can be no interference here. It's concretization world of a constant nerve, the sixth sense of inevitable collapse, which requires an entire space to maintain this undercurrent. This world used to be in one’s head, like a dream that’s not able to recall, existing as an invisible filter above life. Now, this nightmare is just on the other side of the door.

Ella Gallagher 1965

Afo Puff 1996

Keyword:

Lip print

Answer Question:

Racial culture and the resulting stereotypes-prejudice, and the retroaction to culture.
lip print is given identity by the act of kissing, which is endowed with the quality of uniqueness and intimacy. To observe the trace of every kiss is to deconstruct an overall stereotype: you should acknowledge a person with your gaze and lips.
Very simple and direct theme: kiss and prejudice. Lip print itself brings a unique stroke and complex emotion to the work: every kiss is not the same.
Lining it up with the same-styles is like cutting an object from a different direction, getting various section.

Mixed Material

Key concept:

Media is the information

Answer Question:

In recent decades, people are living in a way that has never been precedented in human history before. People start to regard things like globalization, equal rights, freedom of information, etc. as granted. This magnificent revolution is based very much on the information flow that’s mass, incessant, high-speed and beyond the control of any single organization. It has shaped our behaviour and values, sparked vast deep philosophical and artistic debates. In a manner of speaking, the pursuit of information and information rights mould us into who we are today.
As the few pioneers had predicted what mobile communications devices and the network would mean to human, artists have expanded questions about communication boundaries through experimenting the idea of external space communication equipment for individual, which also raises a series of questions concerns human culture, metaphysics, politics, etc: who am I communicating with? In what position do I stand to communicate with outer space creatures? Is communication going to be re-shaped?....
The efforts made to expand the boundaries of communication are certainly going to bring the most enormous impact on the definition of human and life. It’s like to reverse the story building babel: people from different places, who speak different languages, come together to invent this new universal language and build a giant tower entering outer space.
As we were seeing this row of external space communication equipment lined up on the ceiling, this "Sci-fi" scene in real life breaks through our assumption about communication. Those antennas themselves as media are already sending out unprecedented messages and questions. And the very place they hang, above us towards the sky, is where we gaze and explore.

Ed Ruscha

Answer Question:

When inexpensive lights blur the difference between day and night, people start to sink into this long sleep insomnia. Being human is like being a copy of a copy of a copy of the copy, and texture is replaced by concepts, a few lines on the paper. People give up talking about what’s referring to the eternality. And the green light that Gatsby stared through the sea fog, now appears on every cellphone and reflex on those expressionless face every night: Instagram, eBay, Pornhub...
The artist had perfectly chosen what’s consistent with the inducing nature of the slogan as the background: the tall and dangerous snow mountains in (temptation), the dusk sunlight (calm). And this quality of seduction and quiet is stripped away by consumerism from the substance of the snow mountain and the sunlit, being mass-produced like hormones and injecting into people.
Advertisements, slogans and movie sets... When the image environment surrounding us is separated and examined separately, the alien environment amplifies the strangeness and absurdity, and the familiarity brings extra impact. At this time, consumerism shows its eternity: Pay, April. Time - life morphs into long consumptions and repayments.
I'm not sure, I didn't find this work on Tate, I search the information online.

Part 2

Part 2

Contextual Practice

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