Research: Sculpture with Latex
Jorge Otero-Pailos
Having seen this piece on a visit to the V&A several years ago, I really connect with the vastness of scale that this project comprises.
‘Trajan’s Column is a composite object: part modern replica, part ancient artifact and part industrial chimney. This work brings the chimney to light for the first time as an integral part of the object and its value.’ – Jorge Otero-Pailos
Trajan’s Column was built in Rome in the year AD 150. In the 1860s, artisans made a copy of the column in plaster sections, which were shipped here to be assembled in the newly built museum. These plaster sections were fixed to a hollow brick chimney, not unlike the chimneys of the industrial revolution of the same period.
V&A Art Installation : The Ethics of Dust; part of the All This Belongs to You series of installations; by Jorge Otero-Pailos; Cast Courts, V&A Museum; 24th March 2015.
New York-based artist, architect and academic Jorge Otero-Pailos views this chimney as an unacknowledged V&A object, hidden in plain sight. Otero-Pailos has used conservation latex to ‘clean’ the hollow brick inside surface, removing dust and dirt accumulated over decades.
The resulting material is exhibited here adjacent to its source, turning the plaster column inside-out, displaying the passage of time, and revealing this otherwise invisible object.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/designandpubliclife/projects/jorge-otero-pailos/
Renate Bertlmann
Renate Bertlmann might be one of the most controversial artists in feminist art history. In 1978 her artworks scandalised audiences in Germany to the extent that they were banned from a major exhibition of the movement, The Museum of Money, when it toured to France and Holland. The provocative artworks featured documents from her performance as a masked, pregnant bride in a wheelchair, bearing condoms and an erect penis fashioned from plastic.
Bertlmann was angered by the rejection, but she wasn’t discouraged: “I had always a special interest in hierarchical structures in all areas of life, in ‘above and below’, and particularly also in the field of sexuality,” Bertlmann explains when asked what drives her to keep making such radical art. “I was – and I am still – extremely sensitive to the sexual and physical abuse of women, and violence against women, and their mental and intellectual suppression all over the world.”
Mark Quinn
Quinn has said that “art is an engagement with the material world and its continuous transformative energy as well as the immaterial world of emotions and ideas…”. These early works explore the transformative potential of material and the notion that, for meaning, material is as important as form. The sculptures all use the artist’s own body as a model: both as a particular individual and a generic human form. In You Take my Breath Away (1992) and No Visible Means of Escape (1996) latex or rubber casts of the artist’s body are suspended limply from the ceiling – a relic or shroud-like object echoing the physical presence that once inhabited it.
http://marcquinn.com/artworks/artists-body
Michelle Wright, Fine Artist 