Politics & the Performance Artist

Stuart Brisley

Stuart Brisley (b. 1933) is often called the “godfather of British performance art.” He began his career as a painter and a sculptor in the 1950s, and today still pro­duces drawings, paintings, sculptures, and site-specific installations. But when he turned to performance in the late 1960s and early 1970s, his work broke fresh ground for performance art, taking it to a new and exciting level, galva­nizing his career and reaching critical acclaim. Influenced by Marxist counter-culture politics from the 1960s, he embraced performance as an autonomous foundation for a new rapport between artist and audience. While consistently producing new work, these older works continue to be exhibited and performed by younger artists, who are paying homage to Brisley’s revolutionary ideas...

Sculpture’s Narrative Altered by Photography

Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today

The year 1839 marked a progressive shift in the very definition of what an image was or could be conceived to be. Almost simultaneously two very different men, one working in France and the other active in England, invented two photographic processes that have forever altered our idea of how an object, a scene, or a person can be visually represented. Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot, through their experiments with chemicals and light, respectively created the daguerreotype and the negative/positive process. Neither could have imagined the influence that their inventions would have on future generations of artists...

Digital Art & the Platforms for Participation

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Artists have experimented with digitisation since its inception. Early pioneers such as Eadweard Muybridge broke new ground with his zoopraxiscope (1879) and by using multiple cameras, he captured images of motion. This movement progressed heavily into the 20th century with artists experimenting with light, motion and kinetics...

A New Identity: Decoding Portraiture

Sean Raggett

In a world saturated by the seduction of the image, the transient nature of photography is ubiquitous. Compelled by its ephemera, and drawn to its multifaceted meaning, photography has never been so relevant. A metaphor for the world we inhabit, the camera becomes more than just technical; transcending mechanics, it ultimately delivers "the moment" time and time again.

Each year, the National Portrait Gallery in London hosts the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize. With over 6,300 images submitted in 2009, photography is reaching the masses...

Voyeurism, Surveillance & the Camera

TATE Modern

The prolific use of mobile phones, cameras, CCTV, and the internet has ensured that we are never alone or unwatched, and that each of us is cast as unwitting voyeurs ourselves. New technology has enabled us to become amateur artists and removed the cloak of innocence that used to shroud candid, amateur shots. Dramatic as it may sound, we increasingly live in a Big Brother society where every move is watched and charted, in, for the most part, the interest of "safety". We are members of a post-9/11 society that is increasingly content to allow a higher degree of surveillance and intrusion into our private lives as this intrusion supposedly offers more protection...

Inverting Preconceptions of Ideas & Craft

Jerwood Contemporary Makers

Last year Aesthetica interviewed Wayne Hemingway, who shared his hopes for an increased creativity and entrepreneurialism through the coming recession. As the country settles from the upheaval of our new political dawn, it's timely to assess the successes of this new embrace of Do-It-Yourself, and the established Jerwood Foundation is celebrating the maligned areas of craft and making in a spirit that embraces the creative possibilities of fluctuating mediums with Jerwood Contemporary Makers. Deliberately ambiguous, the term "makers" embraces the plethora of creative possibilities that abound with artistic handiwork and the opportunities presented by the recession that we discussed with Hemingway...

Reality, Fiction & Illusion

Jonathan Wateridge

Jonathan Wateridge paints on a large scale, producing grandiose scenes that are part painting, part theatre set, and dominate the galleries that show them. Previous images of plane crashes or posed groups have managed to insinuate themselves into the artistic ether, showing up in exhibitions, on websites and being talked about suddenly, as if they have sprung from nowhere to high regard. Another Place, his latest sequence of seven paintings, opened on the 3 June at All Visual Artists in London. Given the level of acclaim so far garnered, there is a lot of excitement about this show, which will likely mark his debut as a new star in British painting...