mike hunt

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Vanessa Beecroft

I decided to have a look at Vanessa Beecroft because of her use of the female body in performances. I find her weird and bitchy, in her performance VB51 in 2002 she told the participants that there would be three acts, each signaled by a bell, the first in which they stood still, the second they could move around and the third they could do as they pleased.
No bell rang and the thirty participants waited and waited, some having to be carried out at the end. Cruel.
Interesting how i some works she makes the models look androgenous and shaves their pubes. I don't really get it, the weird relationship between viewer and participant. All in the same room, some object some subject, all real people but they live out the roles expected of them.
Crazy crazy bitch.
The above picture is my favourite work of hers, because it looks like hair over the model's faces. The masks are translucent (i hate that word its stupid), you can sort of see through them but not, its like one of those spider nests with the ball of white sticky web you almost would expect to see spiders spilling out if you sliced a hole through the side.

Framing

One idea i had was to frame the little photographs i took. I really like the photos but just can't seem to find a suitable way of presenting them. I think trying them on a larger scale will be better in the way that it will make them more impressive??? i like the small hairy picture inside the red frame. I don't think anyone really got it in the critique or noticed it so obviously its not something to carry on with.
Below, just an idea for displaying them. This photo gives you pretty much no information and yeah. I think i'll leave these pictures and concentrate on other things :)

Kiki Smith has a cool name

Messy, uncomfortable, open, personal, desires, bodily fluids, anxiety, body as landscape, architecture, taboo. BOO!

Kiki uses low art or craft mediums generally associated with women such as beading, embroidery, paper and glass. She combines these with formal materials associated with high art, MEN"": bronze and plaster. Combining these she effaces the purity of the high art materials. Totally copied that last sentence from a book :)
Her work responds to that of Cindy Sherman and Barbara Krueger, it is very feminist and deals with abjection in art. I love the photocopy/ print she has done of her face all flayed out as if the skin has been peeled from her head. It reminds me of an animal skin used as a floor mat or something, an object that people walk over carelessly. Leather chairs are like this for me, an animal skin encompassing foamy comfort. such a waste of animal using it for a stupid chair, luxurios masculine cold leather chair. Cracking and drying out like real skin does.
COMFORT?

Meat Arms 1992
Kiki uses animal flesh to create human arms then casts them in bronze. The result is a realistic looking arm with the skin peeled off revealing muscle tissue, MEAT. She has taken a universally repulsive subject and made it precious and beautiful by casting it in bronze. But at the same time she hasn't. Being bronze it is more valuable, it isn't human, its animal made to look like human, imitation.. does this make it more/less acceptable? She couldn't have used a real human arm to craft it of course, and animals are going to die anyway so meat is in ready supply. eeew kiki you sicko.

Train 1994
Wax figure with red beads trailing out of its vajayjay. Looks awesome! Hello sparkling bloody menstruation. Definitely a female figure, looks almost as if it is dragging chains, sort of painful, struggling??