Ashley-Jay Hunter's Art Blog!

Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer is one of the most significant artists to work in the public realm since the 1980s. Starting on the streets of New York with simple fly-posters, she has gone on to disseminate her truisms, slogans, memorials, and poems through a variety of media. They are enunciated by an unstable register of personae, be it adman, stand-up comedian, torturer, victim, or evangelist. The sites for her work range from T-shirts and golf balls to dazzling electronic signboards at baseball stadiums. Her work uses language to investigate the nature of ideologies as conscious and unconscious formations about identity and experience. Her complex and poetic texts can be shocking, humorous, and intriguing in content. At the same time, she draws on Minimalism's use of industrial materials and deploys scale, movement, and light to create art of great formal power and beauty.

This book discusses with the artist her use of language and its relationship to visual form and has allowed me an insight into her creative mind providing me with enthusiasm to adapt her style withing my future practices. The book takes an in-depth look at Holzer's Lustmord series, a series of work in which I can really connect with as an artist, as this series I feel connects strongly with my current work theme that portrays feminism. Lustmord was created as a response to the methodical rape and murder of women that occurred because of the irrational act of ethical cleansing during the Bosnian War. Lustmord was created to draw people’s attention to these brutal acts. The works were created between 1993 and 1994 and featured a total of three poems that recounted the sex crimes that took place during that time from the perspective of the victim, the perpetrator of the sex crimes and the observer. Lustmord was a powerful and thought-provoking project not only because it featured texts, images, and objects that forced audiences and observers to look at their own bodies more closely but also because it featured brutal acts that happened in real life. Textually, Lustmord described the actual rape and murder of Bosnian women in three voices: the females experiencing the torture, the male performing the crimes and the gender-neutral witness to the entire terrible event. The first-person accounts given in the poems were explicit and painful. In so doing, Holzer managed to implicate the audience through their personal interpretations of the work, which then forced them to closely examine how women are treated and how society responds to rape culture and victim shaming. Her work strongly depicts that of the struggles women faced at the given time in comparison to this I feel I can take inspiration from the works she has created for myself to also tackle the current struggles women are still facing in this modern world.

Overall, this book has a nice collection of her work that is both varied and inspiring. The book contained information about Jenny Holzer's work, her inspiration, and some of her personal history of the context of her art at the time.  She creates large series of art pieces and sometimes books/showcases only print or display very small excerpts, but this book includes a significant percentage of each series so that you really get a sense of what each one entails and how Holzer works as an artist. The interview and essays opened her work, even though the images in the book fall a little flat since her work is more in the public space and experiential, I was given and insight into her creative mind.

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WACK! Art and the feminist revolution.

WACK! documents and illustrates the impact of the feminist revolution on art made between 1965 and 1980, featuring pioneering and influential works by artists who came of age during that period; Chantal Akerman, Lynda Benglis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Valie Export, Mary Heilmann, Sanja Ivekovic, Ana Mendieta, Annette Messager, and others; as well as important works made in those years by artists whose careers were already well established, including Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Lucy Lippard, Alice Neel, and Yoko Ono. The art surveyed in WACK! includes work by more than 120 artists, in all media; from painting and sculpture to photography, film, installation, and video; arranged not by chronology but by theme: Abstraction, "Auto photography," Body as Medium, Family Stories, Gender Performance, Knowledge as Power, Making Art History, and others. WACK! which accompanies the first international museum exhibition to showcase feminist art from this revolutionary era, contains more than 400 colour images. Highlights include the figurative paintings of Joan Semmel; the performance and film collaborations of Sally Potter and Rose English; the untitled film stills of Cindy Sherman; and the large-scale, craft-based sculptures of Magdalena Abakanowicz. Written entries on each artist offer key biographical and descriptive information and accompanying essays by leading critics, art historians, and scholars offer new perspectives on feminist art practice. The topics; including the relationship between American and European feminism, feminism, and New York abstraction, and mapping a global feminism; provide a broad social context for the artworks themselves. WACK! is both a definitive visual record and a long-awaited history of one of the most important artistic movements of the twentieth century.

This book is a must for contemporary artists. It is especially helpful and interesting to me as I consider and develop my ideas, due to my current interest surrounding feminism and female empowerment this book has unlocked new inspiring artist that I can gather ideas, motives, and techniques from to continue making similar works. One main reason why I love this book is due to its historical content. I loved learning about the women’s movement and the social revolution that incorporated a wide range of women artist with their own different styles, techniques, intentions, motives, and backgrounds. The insight has opened my mind to many possibilities in which I can conjure as an aspiring artist. I am a big fan of history and all that has occurred in past events to get us to where we are now in the current modern world. Any chance I get to incorporate history with art I am willing to jump at the opportunity due to the fact both subject matters are close to my heart, and I am extremely passionate about them. This book has essential helped this passion to grow and merge with my passion to counteract feminism and empower women.

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Tracey Emin.

Tracey Emin has undergone an extraordinary metamorphosis from a young, unknown artist into the 'bad girl' of the Young British Art (YBA) movement, challenging the complacency of the art establishment in both her work and her life. Today she is arguably the doyenne of the British art scene and attracts more acclaim than controversy. Her work is known by a wide audience, yet rarely receives the critical attention it deserves. In Tracey Emin: Art Into Life, writers from a range of art historical, artistic, and curatorial perspectives examine how Emin's art, life and celebrity status have become inextricably intertwined. This innovative collection explores Emin's intersectional identity, including her Turkish-Cypriot heritage, ageing and sexuality, reflects on her early years as an artist, and debates issues of autobiography, self-presentation, and performativity alongside the multi-media exchanges of her work and the tensions between art and craft. With its discussions of the central themes of Emin's art, attention to key works such as My Bed, and accessible theorization of her creative practice, Tracey Emin: Art into Life will interest a broad readership.

Emin’s practice involves a mix of media, including diaries, letters, personal objects, family photos, paintings, videos, prints, neon, sculptures, applique, and written book works. For all the many forms her work has taken, it is an essentially testimonial art, characterized by the persistent process of talking and writing about past personal experiences.

With Tracey Emin, the bodily and personally affective aspects of human life are never excluded from her art. Her celebrity status stems from trading predominantly on the ‘lows’ in her life for her art, one involving graphic and blunt detailing of often painful personal experiences: sexual abuse, rape, underage sex, attempted suicide, abortion, alcoholism, and depression. Turning such life experiences into art could be seen to provide the privileged classes of the art world with an abject exoticism. In many sense her practice fits with wider vogue for degradation and ‘hard core’ realism with contemporary visual art, exemplified by the attention bestowed upon certain documentary photographic practices, a genre that was given hyperbolic visual forms and twist in the work of Richard Billingham through raw pictures of his own working-class family’s poverty, and by Boris Mikhavilov with his shocking and relentless documentation of the ‘new’ homeless in the Ukraine.

Tracey Emin: Art Into Life treats readers to a collection of critical essays that probes the reaches of her layered performances of identities. With both her enduring provocations and artistic preoccupations analysed here, this volume offers critical insights into Emin’s continuing significance to art today. To me this book is an important contributing fact to understanding that of the creative mind that is Tracey Emin if you are a fan of her work of any work that contributes to female empowerment, I would highly suggest giving this a read. The book within itself has showed me how powerful words along side imagery are and how big of an impact they can have in shaping the current worlds views.

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Richard Prince

For 30 years now, the American artist Richard Prince has been considered one of the most forward-thinking and innovative artists in the world. In 1977, his deceptively simple act of re-photographing advertising images from The New York Times Magazine and presenting them as his own ushered in an entirely new, critical approach to making art--one that questioned notions of originality and the privileged status of the unique aesthetic object. Prince's technique involves appropriation, and he pilfers freely from the vast image bank of popular culture to create works that simultaneously embrace and critique a quintessentially American sensibility, with images stemming from the Marlboro Man, muscle cars, biker chicks, off-colour jokes, gag cartoons and pulp fiction novels, among many other sources. Organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, this major traveling retrospective brings together Prince's photographs, paintings, sculptures and works on paper in the most comprehensive examination of his work to date. While previous examinations of Prince's work have emphasized its catalytic role in Postmodernist criticism, this volume also focuses on the work's iconography and how it registers prevalent themes in our social landscape, including a fascination with rebellion, an obsession with fame and a preoccupation with the tawdry and the illicit.
Highlighting key examples from the all the major series of Prince's oeuvre, this fully illustrated volume also debuts works created specifically for the exhibition. It features a critical overview by the Guggenheim Museum's Nancy Spector and an essay by Artforum Editor-at-Large Jack Bankowsky, which discusses Prince's environmental installations, including the Spiritual America Gallery, his First House and Second House, and his Library in Upstate New York. In addition, cultural commentator Glenn O'Brien contributes a series of interviews with popular culture initiators like Annie Proulx, Phyllis Diller, John Waters, Michael Ovitz, Kim Gordon and Robert Mankoff, among many others, providing a composite portrait of Prince's themes alongside an insider's view of the formation of mass-cultural taste

The book is an excellent catalogue and survey of one of the most influential artists of the late 20th century up until today. What's great about this book is that most of those interviewed about the art of Richard Prince are not people from the Art World Establishment. Comedians (Phyllis Diller!), a rare book dealer, the editors of a tabloid and of a biker magazine, a songwriter, cartoon editors, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, the VP of design for Ford Motor Co. and Sonny Barger, notorious member of the Hell's Angels. This diverse list of fans reflects the wide range of territory Prince has explored over the past 30 years.

I have taken an interest in Richard Prince’s art career and style this book has allowed me to understand him and his work better particularly why and how he has created his piece in a certain manner. My current work holds similar feature to that of Prince’s work for example my work hold a similar style and layout as I to have chosen to create most of my current piece in and insta inspired setting just like that of some of Prince’s work.

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Woman Artist

In 1971, in an essay that has now become one of the touchstones of feminist art history, Linda Nochlin raised the question heard round the world: “Why have there been no great women artists?” Since the 1970s, because of this kind of consciousness-raising, the feminist discourse around art has expanded, addressing forms of activism, the idea of a feminist aesthetic, the female body, sexuality, and representation more largely. The reframing of female contributions to the history of art is still ongoing, and this new addition to the Art Essentials series draws attention to some of its key dimensions.

Focusing on fifty diverse women artists, from Lavinia Fontana and Artemisia Gentileschi through Judy Chicago, Ana Mendieta and the Guerrilla Girls to Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman and Louise Bourgeois, this book equips the reader with a general understanding of the history of art by women, as well as an appreciation of its most outstanding figures. Traditionally women have been among art's favoured objects of representation, while their contributions as art producers have been subordinated to those of men. This book documents women artists in context to offer readers an accessible but rich understanding of key female artists from the Baroque to the present day. This book is an excellent survey of key international artists. These essential female figures should be part of our art history, and this book is part of that important re-examination

This book is a brief introduction of 57 female painters, sculptors, photographers, and performance artists starting from the 1500s and ending with Guerrilla Girls. A great starting point for anyone interested in the women’s movement and their endless journey to make it within the art world. It is a fascinating read, with a quick summary of some women artists. I would've loved more pictures of their art in the book, but I appreciate the "other key works" subhead which allows me and encourages me as the reader to do my own additional research into the individual artist presented. To me it’s funny how our society puts an emphasis on relationships and marriages when it comes to women but not when men are the object and this book simply emphasis that and places women as its main focal point. Overall, it is a well put-together book with some really interesting information about some female artists I'd never even heard of be for but would love to learn more about and explore in my future practice.