Tag: art

“Created by the American artist Matthew Barney, Cremaster 5 1997 is a colour film with sound and accompanying sculptural elements. The film, based around a five-act lyric opera, is a tragic love story featuring elaborate costumes, ornate set design and frequent imagery of biological reproduction. Its main characters include a queen played by the actress Ursula Andress and three roles – a diva, a giant and a magician – performed by Barney. The work was originally shot on digital betacam and subsequently transferred to 35mm film (the format on which it can be shown in a seated theatre) and high definition video (for viewing within a gallery). In its gallery installation, the work is shown as a video on a loop on two fifty-inch screens tilted slightly downwards and mounted back-to-back on a bracket suspended from the ceiling in the centre of the exhibition space.”

–Tate

Gina Pane, Le corps pressenti: L’amour, 1975, Color photographs, ink on paper, plaster, razor blade, 33.00 cm x 22.00]

The Franco-Italian artist Gina Pane is one of the most important representatives of the French Art Corporel. She achieved notoriety through her spectacular, choreographed down to the smallest detail actions of the 1970s, in which she relentlessly used her body as a material. Each action was performed only once and archived through photographs, sketches and relics. The panels exhibited here as well as the floor object with a footprint belong to the action “Les corps pressenti”, “The divined bodies”, listed in 1975 in the Galerie Krinzinger in Innsbruck. The power and violence of these inscriptions symbolize the artist through self-wounding, which take up the Christian iconography of the martyrs. In addition to rose thorns as symbols of suffering,“The wound is a sign of the extreme fragility of the body, a sign of suffering, a sign that always shows the external situation of aggression, the violence we are exposed to. The wound is the memory of the body, it stores its fragility, its pain and thus its real existence. "With her actions, Pane wants to shake us out of our indifference. She turns directly to us when she says, "When I open my body so that you can see your blood in it, I do so out of love for you: for the love of others. (…) That’s why your presence in my actions is important to me. ”