Artist & Object : My bit...

So 2 weeks on this project and its finished. my manual is complete, yesterday i had it printed and put it together using the cardboard and the felt to create the book cover.

although i liked my finished idea, if Im honest i was really nervous taking it into the crit in college,because i had no idea how it was going to be received by both other students and tutors.

other people in my class, and the other tutor groups who i spoke to seemed to like what id made, they liked the felt cover and the manual in general and also understood what it was about, which put me at ease lots before my crit as that was the main idea behind the project.

so heres the finished thing...

Artist & object.. the object bit..

For the object to accompany my artist i received a knife. Initially everything that i thought of on the spot there was pastiche. There was the ideas floating around my head of felt having healing properties according to Joseph Beuys, and a knife being something that can injure/ damage. So of corse i thought of encasing the knife in felt in some way, whether mimicking Beuys directly and just wrapping the knife almost like a gift, to creating a older/ case of the knife. although of course these initial thoughts are pretty well awful, the idea of healing crossed with the harming of the knife was an idea that kept coming back to me.

Using Beuys’ concepts that society needs healing - and healing starts with the individual - when given the object of a knife I wanted to produce a piece that transferred his ideas onto the object in a contemporary setting. Today’s infatuation with knife crime offered me the opportunity to use Beuys’ theory that every object can be transformed into a tool to release creative power. For the outcome of this project I want to create a set of instructions/manual mapping the journey the individual needs to take in order to transform their fear of knives into this creative power - thus following Beuys’ theory - Heal themselves, therefore, heal society.

i like america....

I found this video on youtube showing clips of both interviews with Joseph Beuys himself and also clips of some of his works, including his action performance " i like america and america likes me" in which Beuys spends a week in a room with a coyote.

this video talks somewhat about Beuys notions of sickness within society and of how he believed that the only cure for this sickness was through art.  

WATCH : i like america

Artist & Object : The artist bit..

German performance artist, instillation artist, printmaker and sculpture, Josef Beuys, worked mainly throughout the 1960s performing his "actions" and producing his "multiples" for public exhibition. 

His thoughts and feelings were what i found  most interesting about his work. Beuys was  very interested in bring art into everyday life. 

For Beuys, the beauty of an objects materialism could be appreciated only when the object is isolated from its setting and looked at objectively as he believed that every object could in some way would spark the individual to realise the objects, thus their own creative potential.   

Another opinion that id like to draw on is Beuys' belief that Western society is "sick"  and that in order to free society liberation of each individuals creative power must occur, and the way to do that, Beuys thought, was through art.              

 

"To make people free is the aim of art, therefore art, for me, is the science of freedom"