MONDAY
25/7/2016

Contemporary art is a culture that matters -to itself, as its own sub-culture, to the local cultural formations in which it is embedded, to the complex exchanges between proximate cultures, and as trendsetting force within international high culture (pp. 242).

The quote above is pulled from our reading which was set this week, Terry Smith’s 2009 piece ‘What is Contemporary Art’. I found this was an important quote to briefly draw on as it expresses that Contemporary Art is important in the way that it encapsulates and reflects certain point, change or ‘trend’ within an era. Contemporary Art acts as a device to maps out moments in time in the form of art.

Today we talked about the differences between traditional art and contemporary art. We had a strong focus on thinking about the art which we saw at Gertrude Contemporary, which was clearly more modern day, despite having elements of old technological advancements in some of the works.

We also watched the full-version of the second half of The A-Z of Contemporary Art, which was both informative and amusing.

WEDNESDAY
27/7/2016

Today was a little bit of a blur, I didn’t realise that I had this class today and thought that I had my Australian Cinema class instead. Turns out, I had this studio AND a presentation due in it about my chosen artist, David Cross. I hadn’t completely prepared for it as I was very sick all of Monday night and slept all of Tuesday and lost track entirely! But I managed to rustle up my ideas of what to tell the class about David Cross and ended up presenting anyway which was good. It all went smoothly as I am interested in his work anyway, so I knew what I was talking about. Luckily they were just a warm-up to our actual project briefs and weren’t marked, in that case, I’d have been rather anxious – as well as feeling the post-stomach-bug still lingering.

David Cross is a New Zealander who now resides in Melbourne, Australia. I remember him from when I was much younger going to art exhibition openings with my mother. I always really liked his work, a particular favourite was called ‘Tear,’ which you can view on his website which I linked above in this post.

Here’s this week’s video update: