Depictions of Paranoia in Art Exhibitions

Depictions of Paranoia in Art ExhibitionsAn essay relating a text from Art in speculation (ed. Harrison and Wood) to a current exhibition or work of fine production located in United KingdomIn this essay I testament look at a selection of trick from the exhibition authorise Paranoia situated at the Freud Museum. The exhibition is intended as an investigation of suspicion, fear, distress and delusion in the post 9/11 world and investigates the abuses of semipolitical power and the media in generating a public consensus of good and evil in the world. In crabby, I will look at the work of Franko B., a London base cheatisan who uses paintings and performance to ch eachenge perceptions of our bodies and of how the political relates to the impostureistic and the individual. In this exhibition thither be exhibits of a couple of his inglorious acrylic paintings. These paintings ar heavily wrought, naively painted and concerned with sagacity and texture rather than with no nions of prettiness. Because they eschew certain relationships between what comprises art, and are twin with Franko Bs place as a performance artist, whose blood-letting performances in 2003 at Tate Modern, they challenge the aestheticism and the inability for the artist to be a politically relevant individual. A number of telly installations also attempt to straight politicise art in vegetable oil rather than subtle ways. Jackie Sallooms Planet of the Arabs and some early(a) works is a 20 minute video that dapples together stills from films, magazines, newsprints, television and advertising media, and functions to expose how myths and prejudices are developed and disseminated across decree. Because I am interested in the political effects of art, and whether art stomach be established effectively as a critiquing prick to place against society, I will be looking in ill-tempered at how this exhibition relates to Joseph Buoys theories on the democratization of art, and up on whether performance based work on Art by artists such as Franko B. can effectively seat the individual, do him or her an artist him or herself.The 1960s signalled a execution away from the perception of the artist as a unique purveyor of queer genius towards a much inclusive, incorporative process that questioned the underlying mechanisms and mythologies of artistry. Andy Warhol in particular sought to fabricate the notion of the artist as a Promethean character a sort-of demented idiot-savant, whose suffering brought light upon the world, by quizzical the very foundations of the artist. Warhols techniques were designed to automate and remove any particular response from the art. Similar to the collage techniques of the futurists, the pop art movement could be seen as both an attempt to contemporize art and furthermore to wear away or, at the very least, to change the perception of the artist and how he or she relates to the world around him. Politically this has importan t connotations. Because of Warhols techniques towards the pile scattering of art and of factory produced Warhol pieces of art, the artist is no longer seen as fair game and eccentric, and the truth offered by the artist is no longer situated in a higher place society, but alongside it. Politically, this means that the sweeping and grandiose ideologies signified by futurism, cubism, surrealism and other modernist movements no longer mother the same currency. Therefore, politics swallow changed and art has become a fusion of high and low forms of frolic and politics.The video installation and performance-based art that looks to remanufacture the artifice of the artistic self is innately political in Joseph Beuys terminology because it seeks to confront and democratize the artistic world, making artists of everybody that interacts with it. To impose forms on the world around us is the head start of a process that continues into the political flying field. Discussion used to c entre on the participation of the public and it became apparent that actionism as a sort of joystick play was not enough the participant must also have something to contribute from the resources of his accept thought (905). Therefore, in accordance with Buoys, the political field of art is in its struggle to empower and to transform others into artists. Buoys theory posits that, firearm there are people excluded from art, there can be no majority rule. Thus, rather than art being a peripheral critique of society and politics, it forms a principle component of art itself. He continues by locution that A total work of art is only possible in the context of the whole of society. Everyone will be a necessary co-creator of a social architecture, and, so long as anyone cannot participate, the ideal form of democracy has not been reached (905). At the exhibition, techniques are adopted which serve to democratize art. devil books are present in the museum in which people draw things associate to their dreams. Also, in a more abstract way, much of the art leaves gaps and ambiguities into which the artist can place his or her engagements. The use of video footage and stills from mass market publications in Sallooms Planet of the Arabs suggests that the artist is attempting to democratize the art in question. The intentionally crude collage nature of the work which juxtaposes images sharply, quickly and artlessly also serves to denounce the role of the artist as endowment funded, serving kinda to perceive the artist as a facilitator to bring about other artists. The use of footage that we are all familiar with war torn countries, bombings, newspaper images and other forms of mass media serves to invoke a sense of feeling in the viewer, and the satirized nature of the piece helps the viewer confront ones own prejudices, which in turn empowers the viewer and helps to denounce the controlling mechanisms of mass-media.Truth and the detail role of artist are furt her interrogated by the artist Tim Blake and his piece The Big Secret. This simply features an interview with the prominent conspiracy theorist David Icke. Although astray denounced in scientific communities for his crackpot theories, here David Icke is allowed to speak in an lineal way about his theory that extraterrestrial insects control and govern the planet. here(predicate) Tim Blake attempts to provoke the viewer into a reaction by filming Icke in an unelaborated way. In the accompanying pamphlet, he uses a quotation from Freud The psycho-analyst, in the light of his knowledge of the psychoneuroses, approaches the subject with a suspicion that even thought-structures so extraordinary as these and so remote from our common modes of thinking are nevertheless derived from the about general and comprehensible impulses of the human mind (1). Thus, here there is an attempt do to democratize humanity and to assume that all emerges from a general principle. Coupled with the absen ce of any particularly artist-like pretensions in the film, the question of artist is interrogated and jeopardised, allowing for democracy, in Buoys sense, to occur In a full-strength democracy there are no other differences than capability democracy can only develop freely when all restrictive mechanisms are gone. One of the greatest of these restrictive mechanisms is the present-day school, because it does not develop people but channels them (905-6).In Franko Bs retrospective of his art, he posited that the best reaction to his work would be for somebody to mention themselves in relation to it. His work has always attempted to denigrate his own invest as technical artist in favour of more openly politicised attempts to democratize his viewers. His work in multiple medias over the years, from performance art involving blood letting to mass-produced flags that he would stain with his own blood, to more traditional painting, suggests that he is attempting to transform the image of the artist and how it is conceived by the masses. As most people feel politically isolated from art, it is of especial magnificence that the artist relates to people outside of the artistic world. Franko Bs crude and nave painting, his simple iconography, and his lacerating, self-sacrificing performance pieces attempts to achieve this by making his work both accessible and vague simultaneously. His massive black portraits take a hop Rothko in their minimalism, but are concerned with iconic and image based themes that Franko B. takes from his own life. Because these pieces dont use any colour other than black, they appear more concerned about depth and line. Also, because they are made from blown up photographs, they also deny singular artistic talent in favour of a more inciting, democratic painterly technique.Buoys argues that The generation educate people to think in terms of abstract concepts most people think they have to comprehend art in clever terms in many people the o rgans of sensory and emotional experience have atrophied (905). Buoys attacks what he sees as the prevailing scientific concepts, which constrain and hamper the development of artistic imagination. According to Buoys, the concept of art must be widened to incorporate all things. The use of multimedia and dissimilar sources fragment the traditional role of artist as a singular paradigm of a truth that cannot be interacted with. Also, the conception of mass-produced art, which can be disseminated through video also serves a similar aspire to allow for a larger audience to be incorporated into art, not as passive but as active components. The crudity of the art on offer at the museum, which directly and unambiguously interrogates the role mass media has to play in the formation of mechanisms of racial hate, terrorism and power, echoes the sentiments of Joseph Buoys.Works Cited brochure for Paranoia at the Freud Museum, 2007Beuys, Joseph (1921-1986) Not Just a Few Are Called, exclu sively Everyone, Art in Theory, pp 903-6Harrison, Charles Wood, Paul (2003), Art in Theory 1900-2000 An Anthology of ever-changing Ideas, Oxford Blackwell Publishers