Lorna Crabbe, artist and co-director of Creative Coast, an arts company based in Hastings which manages the month-long Coastal Currents Arts Festival in Hastings & Rother talks contemporary art:
‘Contemporary visual art has its base in conceptual art, i.e. it has a meaning and a purpose other than simply being beautiful, or interesting to look at.
As with all good literature, music and theatre, whatever medium is used, or wherever it is placed, most contemporary art will question, interrogate and respond to the surrounding world, and as such, no subject matter is beyond bounds. Art in all its forms plays an integral part in examining and celebrating how we live and who we are, so restricting the study of visual art to dedicated art lessons means losing out on many creative exchanges and possibilities.
Contemporary art can be defined either as that made since WWII or simply as art that has been produced in recent years. Increasingly it is likely to be viewed out of the White Cube gallery space. The ever-growing range of festivals and events; current flux of site-specific works in empty shops; plus online galleries and resources, mean that contemporary art is more lively, interactive and visible than ever before.
Contemporary art may still feature traditional practice such as painting, drawing and sculpting, but performance art, film, sound, installation art, book works, projections, land art, photography and interactive digital art are just as likely to be shown.
Whereas conventional art practices often used expensive and difficult materials such as oil paint, bronze and stone; part of contemporary art’s appeal is that it can be fashioned from almost anything imaginable. For example, Rachel Whiteread’s works, Untitled (Nine Tables) 1998 and Untitled (Twenty-Four Switches) 1998, which can be viewed in Tate’s Online collection.
Works by Whiteread, as with other contemporary artists, encourage participation and interaction with the visitor; they are to be ‘experienced’ rather than just ‘seen’, which makes them far more appealing to younger audiences.
See teaching resources for Rachel Whiteread in Tate Online.
The boundaries between fine art, craft and design are also increasingly being blurred, with craft techniques and materials regularly crossing over into fine art practice. For example: Grayson Perry’s ceramic pots, including vase, My Heroes, 1994 and tapestries; Anne Wilson’s lace, crochet & knitted drawings, and Kiki Smith’s delicate body parts cast in glass.
These changes mean that the act of making art becomes very open and accessible, and offers virtually unlimited possibilities for exploration and creativity in the classroom.
See Grayson Perry in Tate's Online Collection.
The following artists produce work that addresses a number of themes, some explicitly, others more subtly, that can be studied across the curriculum.
Chris Ofili, Turner Prize winner in 1998, works in the ‘traditional’ medium of painting, but his choice of materials and style of presentation challenge our perceptions of what a painting really is. See his works in Tate Online's Collection.
His large-scale flamboyant and brightly daubed canvases are typically adorned with glitter and resin, featuring intricate patterns and portraits cut from magazines, often of Afro-Carribean funk and hip hop musicians. Rather than being conventionally hung, they rest against the gallery wall, balanced on mounds of decorated elephant dung.
See works of Ofili's from his past Exhibition at Tate, The Upper Room.
The work is not just a visual spectacular, it makes many cultural references that can be explored at greater depth. Ofili’s imagery reflects his African heritage, and an influence of cave paintings, blaxploitation films, comic book heroes, gangster rap, and musical icons. This taps into geography, cultural studies, media studies, music, history and literature.
Some of Ofili’s work makes a direct reference to political and current affairs, for example: No Woman No Cry, 1998, which features a weeping woman whose tears encapsulate tiny images of the murdered schoolboy, Stephen Lawrence.
Studying these paintings can provide a springboard for discussion on a number of sensitive and difficult issues around race, youth culture and the media, using images and ideas that young people are familiar and comfortable with.
An artist with a very different approach is Cornelia Parker, who in creating large-scale and powerful installations, uses ordinary everyday and domestic objects to extraordinary effect.
In Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991, Parker blew up a shed and its contents, then suspended the damaged and blackened remains around a bare light bulb. The debris shifts slightly, casting ghostly silhouettes on the walls, ceiling and floor.
Parker’s actions are violent, dramatic and destructive, yet the resulting work is fragile, calm and eerily beautiful. The title of this work makes a direct reference to the Big Bang, while the delicate, suspended fragments form an almost cosmological model. The act of creating an explosion then collating and assembling the remains can be seen along the lines of an experiment in the physics lab.
Like many artists before her, including Marcel Duchamp and his readymades, Parker forces us to consider everyday objects afresh: their practical, nostalgic and monetary value, and what it means when they are damaged, altered or removed, and placed in another context. In this work she questions globalization, consumerism, mass media and conflict.
(See Marcel Duchamp teaching resources in Tate Online)
Parker's Perpetual Canon (2004) features sixty instruments that form a full brass band, which have been flattened and hung from the gallery ceiling.
Rendering these bold and valuable objects redundant and silent is a comment upon the changes and decline in British working communities, where brass bands were traditionally to be found, and could be studied within the social sciences and English literature.
See children’s response to Parker’s work, Thirty Pieces of Silver on Tate Kids.
See teaching resources for Cornelia Parker in Tate Online.
Christian Boltanksi excavates the past, exploring truth and fiction, identity, memory and loss. His sculptures are compiled from ephemeral and archival materials, often featuring group photographs where each individual portrait is enlarged to many times its original size, becoming distorted and ghostly. His work contains particular religious, historical and cultural references, including the Holocaust.
Alternatively, Barbara Kruger and Bruce Nauman both use text in their artworks: Kruger producing large-scale billboards on feminist themes, and Nauman creating sculptures from words and phrases made of neon lights; and Andy Goldsworthy’s site-specific sculptures and land art relates directly to the natural sciences, and can be linked to Environmental Studies, Geography and Maths.'
