OK class, today we will be working on our submissions to the school Art Prize and, if we have time, we will have a quick story entitled 'The Emperor's New Clothes.'
Now who is going to show and tell their ideas first? Karla Black! Will you stop messing around with that rubbish and pay attention! Oh sorry Karla, I didn't realise pet that is your art work. What is it dear? Is it finished? Oh it's an abstract assemblage using everyday materials juxtoposed to create interest and form is it? Well I am sure the headmaster will be pleased with it. Oh you have a note from a friend you would like to display with it have you? OK let's put that with it and maybe that will explain everything:
Karla Black’s work draws from a multiplicity of artistic traditions from expressionist painting, land art, performance, to formalism. Her large-scale sculptures incorporate modest everyday substances, along with very traditional art-making materials to create abstract formations. Black chooses her media for their tactile aesthetic appeal: the familiarity of the texture of cellophane or the scent of cosmetics bridges the experience of tangible matter with the intimacy of memory or the subconscious. Black’s process is intensely physical and this energy is conveyed through her work’s ‘impromptu’ staging; this suggestion of performance psychologically involves the viewer with the making process, provoking instinctive responses to her precarious assemblages.
Well Karla, it's lovely dear I am glad you have put to good use all the art techniques we have been discussing over the past few years. Now who else would like to show us their efforts? OK Martin what have you been up to? You have been cutting out bits and sticking them together again and hanging them from the ceiling. Is it a cot mobile Martin? Oh sorry, I should have realised it is a landscape is it? And you also have a note from an adult explaining what you have done have you? OK let's hear it:
Martin Boyce: Deserves to be the runner-up. Boyce frequently makes elegant sculptural forms which are based on modernist design - spiky, abstracted things that often look a bit like a cross between an abstracted tree and a piece of free-floating calligraphy
Well I am sure we all recognised the 'abstract tree' and can instantly recognise the 'free-flowing calligraphy.' Well done Martin it looks beautiful in a starange sort of way. I really want to move on because I have a feeling our story today, 'The Emperor's New Clothes' may resonate with a few of us. So who else would like to show us their work? Yes Hilary I do have an overhead projector and yes you can borrow it if you are careful. Well I'm not sure whether they are using theirs next door, do you really need two? OK let's see what you have.
I think you must have your photos mixed up dear. Never mind perhaps you could bring in the proper work when you find it. Oh I see, they are meant to be all mixed up boring urban statements. I have some photos like that on my phone when I got a little tipsy at the teacher's staff meeting the other day, do you want to include them in your little montage? Ah you too have a note from a very important art person which means that it must be good, lets hear it:
In three of the works assembled here the artist's collaborators are seen carrying out various tasks in what appears to be the same newly finished building: two men move through each other's legs; a woman repeatedly builds a house of cards; a man lies languorously on the floor tearing magazines, which gradually fill the space around him. The varied pace of their movements and activities establishes a rhythm between the works, while the echoing space creates a distinctive yet unifying soundtrack.
Well Hilary, I guess you have really stretched your imagination and have
produced something so monumentally profound that no one will dare to question it. You will get a ticking off from the IT technician though for turning the monitor on it's side.
OK time for just one more before our story and it must be you George, what have you been up to dear? Painting! How daring of you! Oh and these are pictures of..erm let's see...a garage, a row of garages with grafitti, another garage, some brick walls and another garage.
Great George you have really got the feel of the garage, I am sure the headmaster will want these hanging on the wall. What paint have you used George? It appears to be peeling off in places. Modelling paint and the reason for this is? You just happened to have some lying around. OK and you have a little note too from someone who knows what they are talking about. Good let's hear it then George:
It is there not just in the seemingly mundane subject matter, but in the almost realist style, a style that, in lesser hands, could teeter into kitsch or even folk art. It is there, too, in the sheen of the paint on the wooden surface: the now famous Humbrol sheen. In his choice of paint – Humbrol enamel of the kind used by generations of children to coat Airfix model planes, the miniature Spitfires and Hurricanes they had laboured over for hours – Shaw made his own almost imperceptible nod towards conceptualism, towards the supremacy of the idea and the process behind the art.
Well you know what George? I actually think you might be on to something here. I mean this applying paint using a brush technique and 'almost realism' thing might just catch on one day.
Well class, I am sure you will all join me in congratulating these four with their very fine efforts and wish them luck with the competition. They are all very deserving of the £25,000 prize aren't they? Now are you sitting comfortably? Then I will begin our story. Once there was a very gullible and vain king who didn't want to appear stupid by saying he couldn't see something that wasn't there. Ring any bells?
