Marina Abramovic //

750,000 spectators crowded the Museum of Modern Art last year to watch Marina Abramović sit in a chair. In her MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) exhibit, from which the movie draws its name, Abramović spent nearly eight hours a day for three months last spring sitting motionless in the wide open room at the entrance to her exhibit. Anyone in attendance -- or at least those willing to wait in an increasingly jammed line -- could stare back at the performer for as long as they saw fit.

Interesting, yet strange things about Marina:

- Marina played Russian Roulette with her mother's pistol when she was 14 years old.

- When she was younger, she tried to break her nose to force her parents to pay for plastic surgery.

- Before she learned about performance art, she pursued painting as a child and used to paint "big socialistic trucks crashed together" and "little innocent socialistic toy trucks."

- In 1997, she performed a piece called Balkan Baroque, where she scrubbed 1,500 cow bones for six hours a day.

- For one of her pieces, she carved the five-point Communist star on her stomach with a razor blade.

            --> In the early '70s Marina Abramovic performed Lips of Thomas, a piece where she carved the five-point Communist star on her stomach with a razor blade, whipped herself, and then layed on a bed of ice (shaped like a cross) on a heater for 30 minutes. Her grandmother once found her passed out while doing the performance, and she had burned off her hair.

My Own Opinions:

I first started to learn about Marina Abramovic in High School, I was really fascinated with her, and towards her work. I first learned about her carving a Communist star on her stomach, I found this really outrageous, but in a way really interesting and completely unique. I like the idea of performance art, I think that it is a really interesting art form and movement in itself.  I believe that all of her other artwork as well, is fascinating. I think that it is really strange to do these kinds of things to your body to be noticed and for people to see it, and also inflict pain on the artist like Marina has done in past experiments. However, I think that this is truly interesting and I like knowing about all the other bits of work that she has done in the past.

Gottfried Helnwein //

Gottfried is a well known artist for photography, painting and also that of installation art, he is associated with many styles of movements which range between: Hyperrealism, Installation Art and also Performance Art. He has worked as a painter, draftsman, photographer, muralist, sculptor, installation and performance artist, using a wide variety of techniques and media. His early work consists mainly of hyper-realistic water-colours, depicting wounded and mistreated children, as well as performances – often with children – in public spaces. 

Quote on Gottfried's Website: "Not all of Gottfried's work is on a canvas. A lot of it is the way he's approached life. And it doesn't take someone knowing him to know that. You take one look at the paintings and you say "this guy has been around." You can't sit in a closet - and create this. This level of work is earned. As an artist my strongest reaction to Helnwein's work is that it challenges me to be better at what I do. There are very few people that achieve utter excellence in what they do. And I think that Gottfried Helnwein is certainly one of those people."
Sean Penn
Source
Actor, Director

My Own Opinions:

I am really fascinated with Gottfried's work. I think that it is truly remarkable and also beautiful, I love the way how each individual painting of the children is very different, and looks real. I am touched by these paintings. I think that they give off a certain vibe that is showing true, raw emotion, and I find that fascinating in itself. 

James Hayward //

Hayward’s paintings are divided into two bodies of work: flat paintings from 1975-1984, and thick paintings from 1984 to the present. He works in series, some of which are ongoing, and include The Annunciations, The Stations of the Cross, the Red Maps, Fire Paintings, Smoke Paintings, Sacred and Profane and Nothing’s Perfect series.

The movements he is associated with are: Abstract paintings, monochrome paintings, process art and that of minimalism. 

My Own Opinions:

I actually really like this work, I find it to remind me of thick acrylic paint on canvas. I like the texture that this art gives off, I think that if you were to touch this in an art gallery or even that of a museum, I think that it would have a rather nice feel towards it.

Frederick Hammersley //

Frederick Hammersley (1919-2009) spent most of his career in the Los Angeles area working as a painter and teacher. He is closely associated with the hard-edge abstraction painting style of the Abstract Classicists of southern California.

Hammersley's reputaton as a painter began in 1948 when one of his small paintings was accepted into an annual exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Then in 1958, several of his works were included in a traveling exhibition called Four Abstract Classicists,organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Hammersley, and his fellow painters Lorser Feitelson, Karl Benjamin, and John McLaughlin, were dubbed the "hard-edged painters," which consisted of flat, coloured geometric shapes that had a sharper contrast to the more popular Abstract Expressionism. The label stuck and in the mid 1970s, Hammersley submitted several works of art for a show calledL.A. Hard Edge - the 50s and 70s in Los Angeles.

My Opinions:

I really quite like Frederick's work. I like the simple and clean elegance of his paintings, I also like that to me this is quite minimalist. I like how gridded this form of work is, I like the sets of squares are in the corners of the work.

Lucien Clergue //

French photographer Lucien Clergue died in Nîmes on November 15, aged 80, after a long illness. Born in Arles in 1934, Clergue was more than an image-maker, best-known for his sultry nudes and striking pictures of dead bulls. He belonged to the handful of people who tore down the barriers separating fine art and photography in France. A real champion of the medium, he founded Les Rencontres d’Arles in 1970, setting a blueprint for photography festivals worldwide. In 2006, he was elected at France’s Académie des Beaux-Arts, the first photographer ever to receive the accolade.

My own opinions:

I really found Lucien's work to be really surprising, when I first saw one image I couldn't really tell what the image was of, until on closer inspection I saw that it was of a naked woman. Until I noticed this I was really intrigued because at first to me, it didn't look like that of a woman's naked body. I believe that the image was perfectly conceived that, it didn't look like the female form. It was tastefully created. At first I just noticed the lines and thought that this was a really beautiful and interesting photograph. 

Frank Lloyd Wright //

Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect, interior 

designer, writer, and he was also an educator. He has designed more than 1,000 structures, 532 of which were completed. Wright believed in designing structures that were in harmony with humanity and its environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture. This philosophy was best exemplified by Fallingwater (1935), which has been called “the best all-time work of American architecture”.

In 1915, the Japanese Emperor commissioned Wright to design the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. He spent the next seven years on the project, a beautiful and revolutionary building that Wright claimed was “earthquake proof.” Only one year after its completion, the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 devastated the city and tested the architect’s claim. Wright’s Imperial Hotel was the city’s only large structure to survive the earthquake intact.

My own Opinion:

I think these architectural designs are really interesting, I like the way how modern these two buildings look. I also think that they look visually appealing. The photograph below I believe is to be a really interesting perception of modern architecture. I think that the way this house looks is to be beautiful yet, subtle. I like the way how the roof comes to a straight point and how it hangs over the rest of the house (right side roof). I also like how straight and clean this particular house looks, I think that the style suits the area surrounding the house itself. 

Modernism //

Modernism refers to the broad movement in Western art, architecture and also that of design which self-consciously rejected the past as a model for the art of the present, and then placed an emphasis on the formal qualities within art and the processes and 

materials.

Modern art has also been driven by various social and political agendas. These were often utopian, and modernism was in general association with ideal visions of human life and society and a belief in progression.

Modernism, described by the V&A:

Museum: in design and architecture emerged in the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution – a period when the artistic avant-garde dreamed of a new world free of conflict, greed and social inequality. It was not a style but a loose collection of ideas. Many different styles can be characterised as Modernist, but they shared certain underlying principles: a rejection of history and applied ornament; a preference for abstraction; and a belief that design and technology could transform society.

Style:

under-furnished, austere spaces

use of tubular steel, plastic, laminated plywood, fibreglass

abstract motifs

bold primary colours

The names:

Frank Lloyd Wright - architect

Mies van der Rohe - designer and director of the Bauhaus art school

Le Corbusier - Swiss architect and designer