Death and Life

Gustav Kilmt's painting Death and Life is saturated with imagery. The composition is broken in to two pillars of activity on the left and on the right. Unlike many of Klimt's other works, the background is a relatively flat, eery green color with some texture added through the use of brush strokes. On the left is a figure with a skull for a head and a bony hands that hold an object that looks like a flute or a recorder. The left hand figure represents death. His body is shrouded in pattern containing the catholic cross that is highlighted by the pattern but interior shows through to the background. The colors on the shroud are dark and ominous.

on the right hand side of the painting is a leaning mass of people seemingly stacked on top of each other with more pattern being the only thing that holds the pillar. The mass of people includes a few beautiful young women posing for the viewer, a pretty young mother and her rosy cheeked baby, an old woman who prays with her head cast down and eyes averted from the on-looker, a small child who peeks out from the consuming blanket wrapped around the people, and finally a tan man and a pale woman who hold each other with heads down resting on the other.

As for the story that goes on here, I see a population who is held together by a common source. Each person handles the onset of death differently: Some embrace life, some are naive to the concept, some avert their eyes in fear or grief, and some prepare for death by appealing to salvation. Death wears a suit patterned with cemetery plot marker. He brings death in the cruelest of forms by presenting a cold, dark, damp eternity in the ground. He carries a club or an instrument, perhaps to lure the un-thinking closer to the edge. Death smiles and looks Right at the mass of people, none of which acknowledge him at all.

The success of absurdity in the design, breathes fresh life into the obviousness of imagery in Klimt's painting. While it is easy to see that people exist in the composition, There is not sense of proportion or structure, which leaves the bodies anamorphic and free floating. The pattern that Klimt wraps the bodies in switches between figure and ground which is intriguing. the randomness of pattern makes the images of the bodies stand out in contrast against obscurity. With the exception of Death's cloak it is unclear whether the people are clothed of if a blanket surrounds them. Perhaps it is just klimt's way of separating one person from the next. The dynamic colors make one want to keep looking and searching for still more imagery. The painting has the effect of an optical illusion, one waits for the puzzle to be solved and yet there is no solution, only a story wrapped in vibrancy and motion.

Ultramarine (walker post)

The Suaire de Mondo Cane (Mondo cane shroud) comes from artist Yves Klein. To the eye this painting looks simple and hurried. The blurred images congeal to form outlines of bodies engaging in activity. The brashness of "brush" stroke and high contrast of ultramarine blue on white was interesting to me, The painting seems unfinished yet brazenly complete.

Yves Klein was born in Nice, France and grew up influenced by the spirit and physical activity including Judo. Poet and lover of the essence of the earth first, Klein has a portfolio including photography, painting, music, and writings. With the help of a physist, Yves created his own brand of blue dubbed International Klein Blue, that would become a staple color in a majority of his work.

Klein is not the physical artist of Mondo Cane Shroud. The work was created by models who painted their nude bodies with IK blue paint and upon Klein's instruction would press their bodies against a canvas. He called the women models his "living brushes". Mondo Cane Shroud and other pieces like it were the finales to other of Klein's works. Klein captured the painting of the models and applying the paint to the canvases as preformance art and charged fees for viewing and was to be part of a documentary series.

Yves Klein's body imprints represent ideas he had about the importance of denying worldly influences in order to pay attention to one's own sensibilities. The Imprints emphasized ideas about reality and representation.

The blue images in Cane are headless, armless and realatively legless. They are all female and appear to be dancing. breasts and pelvic regions are the focal point on each figure. Handprints grope at the canvas. Painted women dancing in glass boxes with their bodies pressed against the walls.

Finger prints are dragged through the blue torsos. Vibration ripples through bodies as they bang on the surface.

the concept of an imprint is that it locks and captures a thing's essence when the object is no longer there.

Much of Klein's work includes painted women sprawling themselves on his canvas. Are these women living paintbrushes or Klein's sexual relics?

these imprints of naked women in empty space seem locked there.

It is kind of no wonder that Klein and his shrouds ended up in "Mondo Cane" a movie exploits many cultural practices throughout he world.

Works Cited

http://www.yveskleinarchives.org

http://www.artsconnected.org/resource/89971/suaire-de-mondo-cane-mondo-cane-shroud?style=print

http://visualarts.walkerart.org

how to "ADD ELEGANCE TO YOUR POVERTY"

Take one stark, white wall; add black spray paint text and outline of a picket fence. Artist Monica Bonvicini obviously had a message in mind when in 2002 she created the work “Add Elegance to your poverty”.

The image size is variable due to the nature of the design. The artist can transfer the work only by re-painting the image in a new viewing space. This allows for a different visual affect each time the piece moves galleries possibly suggesting the transient nature of poverty in and out of people’s lives and the different ways poverty is seen in people’s lives. Bonvicini’s piece in the Midway Contemporary Gallery stands roughly 7 feet high and 14 feet wide. The text is written in plain text and all capital letters. There are 12 long, thin and pointed rectangles below the text that I assume to be a portion of a picket fence. The overall appearance is impressive with an in-your-face message.

Monica Bonvicini is an artist who always likes to make a statement with her work, which includes everything from 3-D constructions of toilets to flat installments of text or photographs. Bonvicini comments on a variety of social inequalities and perceptual sexual discrepancies. One piece displays large photographs of construction workers engaging in homosexual, pornographic acts. The fuel for this racy installment came from a trip that she took to Italy that she ended abruptly because of the harassment she received from the construction workers there. Bonvicini takes the idea of hard-bodied construction workers as being the ideal portrayal of masculinity and then asks the question “why are construction workers so appealing?” The work is ongoing and accompanied by a series of questionnaires that she hands out to Construction workers, including questions such as “what does your wife think of your dry cracked hands?” Bonvicini is obsessed with the relationship between building and sexuality. Another of Monica Bonvicini’s favorite topics is the inequality that women architects are subject to in “boys club” of building. She created “Stairway to Hell” seemingly to mock the male architects of the past. With her staircase Bonvicni comments on her inability to move in a desirable direction on social “staircase” among her male counterparts. The staircase has the dimensions of up and down but the chain-link that surrounds the structure suggests that either way one goes hell is the future.

It seems that Monica Bonvicini always has something to say. In “Poverty” the only visual clue to what is being said, is the white picket fence below the text. Perhaps Bonvicini is saying something about the old American Dream of having a nice house with a yard and a white fence. It seems she alludes to this dream becoming a standard for living, a necessity today instead of a nicety. The appearance of someone or something has become much more important than the internal stability of these things. Bonvicini could be commenting on the poverty of the soul that many people try to fill with material things. Following her trend of commenting on the sick nature if building, Bonvicini could be commenting on the poverty of ingenuity in the field of construction and architecture.