[text ID: it’s no fun watching people wound themselves so that they can hole up, nurse themselves back to health and then repeat the cycle. they don’t know what else to do. end ID]
On Friday, July 13, the Whitney will host Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic, a symposium that takes its name from an oral history project by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. The symposium welcomes conversations with artists, activists, and oral historians on memories of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and ‘90s. Learn more on whitney.org.
[(From Left to Right: John Fekner, Jenny Holzer, David Wojnarowicz, Keith Haring and Michael Smith). “Urban Pulses” Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh, PA 1983 Photo credit: David Lubarsky 1983 Courtesy John Fekner Research Archive]
I looked at some different artists who just use typography and text to get some ideas and inspiration. The things I like most are very small, detailed and intimate because I think they portray a way of documenting thoughts and feelings, but because the brief is to make each page a3 size, this would not really be appropriate.
Within my research I found Jenny Holzer’s pieces, where she writes onto skin in ink, recounting sex crimes.
The creepy, honest, personal accounts work really effectively written onto the skin because it’s so intimate and delicate, and being that close up to skin creates the feeling of being very vulnerable. I then used this idea as using skin as a surface and wrote onto my skin.
Using skin as a surface was also really relevant for my quotes because I’m talking about society’s expectations of the way women ‘should’ look - as hairless, but my body hair goes against this and shows the reality of what women look like when they don’t follow these standards created by them for society.
I also looked at Tracy Emin’s textiles banner pieces.
These were really relevant to me, and she was playing with this same contradiction I had been experimenting with before, of using something traditionally feminine, but contrasting it with what the words were actually saying. The Tate’s summary of ‘hate and power can be a terrible thing’ says ‘They transform the concept of the traditionally nurturing, feminine craft of quilt-making into an arena for angry self-expression and revelation.’The words are very open and expressive, which is what I liked about the previous small, intimate works I looked at, but having these private thoughts displayed in a very large and accessible manner is very bold and interesting to see.
We also did a workshop where we were given a random article, and blank white booklet, and asked to make something in three colours, and all image or all text. My article was about rainfall causing toxic algae in a river that was polluting tap water. I chose to use all image because using all text was making me feel a bit stuck creatively. I used very abstract imagery, focusing mostly on colour and texture, and I found this exercise really helpful because it made me think about colour, techniques and use of space in a more creative way, so helped me feel more inspired about making my final book.
