birgitte moos | Art Takes Miami 2011
BirgitteMoos.see.me

This portfolio is part of Art Takes Miami, an art open call awarding $25,000 in Prizes and Exposure, including a Feature Booth at this year's SCOPE Art Show in Miami. Miami is Calling You.

OPENING RECEPTION   'Driven to Abstraction; My Bloody Black Valentine'

February 10th, 2011 5-10PM

GLORIA DELSON CONTEMPORARY ARTS

215 W. 6th Street #115
Los Angeles, CA 90014

Link to VIDEO http://www.gloriadelsoncontemporaryarts.com/Events/events.html

Artists Statement  for 'Driven to Abstraction / THE MEMORY PALACE SERIES'  by Birgitte Moos

Since the early 80’s neo-expressionism, painting was in the latter part of the same decade declaired, dead. In Europe the movement was labelled ’The New Wild Ones’ and in the US either ’Punk Art’ or 'Bad Painting’. Later, in New York, neo-expressionism influenced graffiti art, exemplified by Jean-Michel Basquiat. 'Bad Painting,’ opposed the idea of a piece of art as an unique 'accessoire' for the bourgeois circles. Neo-expressionist painters typically commented on the isolation of man and alienation created by modern society. The paintings were often aggressive and 'ugly'. A response of protest and despair and pure simulated confusion.

Bad Painting, rejected 'good taste!' I personally do not reject ’good taste!’ I do not believe there are such fixed definitions as good taste anymore. The contemporary world consists of, sliding outside the concepts of nationality and presupposed identity politics. A decentered world without fixed signifiers and national symbolic forms.

If 'new painting’ are seen in a broader perspective than the meaning of policy, they can be interpreted with far more complexity through an angle which shows, that we live in an era where global cultural signs and codes are constantly available, especially in a universal software supermarket inside the computer. Receivers may even according to John R. Hall be so international that they cannot identify with visual stereotypes recognized by a homogeneous group. I guess the same counts for the Artists.

These are some of the challenges which painting is facing today. One way to gain insight into the paradox, is to be updated and aware of visual communication, and that artists study linguistics. In that field, cognitive linguistics is highly relevant to explain how paintings, through visual metaphors, can make the complex understandable.

My task has been to re-examine the style of neo-expressionism, and as a female artist from a younger generation, to respond to an art movement dominated by male artists.

My approach to form is painting formless forms, reminiscent of  decorations that indicate a subliminal sense of an underlying threat: The newer hyper-globalized landscape incorporating references that no longer have specific cultural reference points. I find this landscape extremely fascinating, and a new infinite ground for creating hybrid forms of visual expression.

The question is, how to integrate these opportunities into an ’altmodisch’ medium such as painting?

My perspective is spatial negotiation and traces of thought. An interdisciplinary approach to painting, where the painting should not be a piece of an art installation but an installation of art. Painting becomes a performative act more than a finished art-business object. Its content is depth in the surface  and style in its substance.

The content of the painting is temporal. Its content visualizes what time is, in itself, when it is created as a physical and abstract object, the painting. The object itself is a container containing time. The painting is incomprehensible from the inside, giving the outside audience an experience beyond time and space. The painting has transformed time into an object, where the object is subject to the spectator attendance. 

When a spectator places himself in front of a painting, the person is in time. Inside the painting many time periods are reflected. Regarding the time reflections, I took a starting point from Jaques Lacan’s theories of ’Mirror Stages’. A human is in ’violence of time’. The experience inside the container becomes self-referential. The sequences of events (the visual compositions)  that are inside in time (present, space, sound) are variant and multi referential.

I adapted some of my considerations about time from an object  ’Alt 2000’ that I developed while being a student of set design at Denmarks Designschool.

I take a lot of pleasure in making the painting seem like there is a lot of work beneath the paint, to it give it the feel and texture of a worked-on canvas. But, as the surface is the content, it becomes alive straight away. I have no need to spend months on generating one single expression as on a naturalistic painting. This can be be done swiftly through other medias.

On the contrary, the act of painting is an action where the body pulls on impressions of layered information, gathered through being an image devourer, and an avid reader fascinated by intercultural expression. The impressions need to be transferred to the canvas quickly, so I can move on with my research and paint more paintings.

I don’t search for my identity through the act of painting anymore, and rarely, if ever, paint as a need for emotional or immediate expression or relief, as seen in the postwar expressionist movement. Works coming out of  various influences are translated into precise abstractions containing shape, form, color and opinions about culture. Multiplying the newer cultural diffences and inserting old values in the 'semiotic square'.

As the paintings deals with multi-referential forms, they can be decoded in several directions. Inspirational sources can include anything from art, new technology to the humanities such as anthropology, philosophy, art history and linguistics to social and natural sciences.

Intuitively my intention is to create experiences of a coincidence principle. A principle of perfection through 'de-form' where the known and the aesthetic material is broken up. I have for example been inspired by the title of Deleuze and Guattaris’ ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia'.

The paintings are references to various movements, past and present.

I choose to work so fast that I cannot stop the content from becoming a response to my own myriad of thought contradictions and interests, as a result of being a product of an era, that is and has developed so quickly as never seen before in history.

My guess is that, the brain has so much unused capacity and empty space, that it can afford  to take in lots of new information and reprocess it.

Being classically trained, and been dragged through years of art theory and drawing through the various educational instititutions, this has helped me to place paint precisely abstract. Sort of abstract figurative. To paint without indecisiveness, because of the personal, ethical and aesthetic foundations within me.

Not as a result of toxic oil fumes, I assure you, as I do use acrylic paint, I simply love color and the process of mixing them, 

it is highly intoxicating. But I do question the defense of ancestral academic virtues and crafts. Today, it is completely different floating values, it's about. Art has become an open expression that freely chooses its materials and techniques as needed.

 

I don't see breaking up the use of styles as a postmodern stylization. I see it as standing on the edge of post-human society’s stylization. I am influenced by being a witness of unprecedented technologies introduced to extend and enhance human living conditions.
Humanity is in the intermediate stage of a new system, which question previous centuries of humanistic values and traditions. Some scientists believe that we are now on the threshold of new forms of existence and interaction. Changes that which no doubt will transform basic human living conditions. These changes will provoke very deep ideas in the humanistic sciences: The past inventories of cultural material that has taught us about the humanistic values. The Australian Artist Stellarc states, that new modes of high-tech interaction could break cultural memory and the old ways of Western thinking. This scenario would have been a relevant solution to Hamlets schism; a mankind still functioning on memory. 

I am not on a mission to neglect humanistic traditions and values .  On the contrary, the experiment is an attempt to find new painterly forms and to explore how the painting has its eligibility, and why!

I have in a constant interaction explored and worked with painting, new visual forms of communication, digital media, interdisciplinary set designs, graphics and fashion. And return passionately back to expressive painting, as the most direct medium to express a network of content and codes, that I constantly seek out and meet in my everyday life.  An everyday, where I try to avoid the tedium and ignorance. A life composed of choices and involuntary events, where the multiple forms of media is not above, but a foundation for painting.

A painting can both inspire and be inspired by intercultural communication. Simultaneously a new cultural landscape emerges: a mutually synergistic interaction communicating between the surrounding society, paintings and viewers.

Overall I assume that my paintings consists of consciousness, sociological reflections, cultural commentary and memory,  collective work across disciplines, applied interdisciplinary art forms and transformations of words and action into spatial painterly solutions. Painting contains an option to move people's awareness, support the development of global networks, transcend age, experience, social, religious and cultural backgrounds.

JANUARY 2011 EXHIBITION 

Caporale/Bleicher Gallery 

355 N La Brea Ave, LA.   

Installation-curatorial hybrid by Airom Bleicher,  with 

collaborating artists.  

Anachronious Mind Tree is a dynamic constantly evolving 

exhibit and simulation of a connectionist network (the 

computer programing used in Artificial Intelligence 

modeling). Rather than running on binary code it runs on 

artwork critique and viewer response. The network learns, 

adapts and responds to feedback and suggestions from 

critics, artists, and viewers.