ITAP Design Canons - week six

This lecture was about 'Artists with Issues' and how they use strong images and concepts to get messages across in there work. The three artists that were mentioned were Jenny Holzer, Adrian Piper and Jean Michel Basquiat. 


I found the work of Adrian Piper quite inspirational. I especially liked her style of work shown in the smoking images below. These images stood out to me as the image is very hard edge and cold and instantly portrays smoking in a bad manner. The quotes she has used on some of the images in her series of 6 are very serious and get you thinking deeper into the meaning behind the artwork.

I also researched into Jean Michel Basquiat and found his life story very moving. I looked at his work to see how he may have portrayed some of his personal issues through art.

His work is very childlike and messy. There is a lot of random mark making strange objects scatter about the page. Some of his work contains sketches of figures that are drawn in unusual shapes and sizes, they're is nothing realistic about his work. You can tell it has been created from his mind, not from real life observation. As a heroin addict Basquiats mind must have been all over the place. Some people say that when you taking drugs your mind is sent back into a childlike state. This made me think that maybe this is what happened to Basquiat and he portrayed it through his art.

When i saw this image of a skull it instantly made me think of a self portrait. Basquiat had a very messed up childhood and obviously turned to drugs because of this. In his early years he was extremely bright and was noticed from a young age. I think this may have put a lot of pressure on him causing him to act strangely like when he ran away at 15. I think he may have been trying to get away from the attention, especially as he went into street art which is sort of illegal and usually kept on a lowdown showing he must have been a quite secretive person. 

Having seen Jenny Holzer's work, I looked at the people she worked with and was influenced by and came across the work of Barbara Kruger. Barbara is a conceptual artist with a very individual style. Her work usually consists of black and white photographs with red or white typography, and often the use of pronouns such as we, your, etc. I was moved by some of the quotes that she uses in her work, i think more so than then imagery. The two images shown below i found particularly eye catching. 

The bottom image i instantly found i could relate to. It got me thinking about how we live in this 21st century world where everyone is on social networking sites, creating profiles for themselves how they think they are or want to be but are not necessarily so. I think that this could become a problem in the future and artwork like this is a good way of promoting the issue. Though this was not the issue the image was designed for, it goes to show that use of strong image and typography could cover many different issues.

Barbara Kruger