Today we went on a class trip to London to see TENT LONDON at the Truman brewery in Brick Lane and EXPOSED: Voyeurism, surveillance and the camera at the Tate Modern.
Tent
These are models made by Kingston University students. They took a film and made a scale model of a building from the film. These were very detailed and most impressive!
These are the things I liked from the stands:
The two on the right are by
Dixit: Coco's Brilliant Red, Yes and No.
Miller and Goodman's product is called Shape Maker. It is basically painted wooden blocks that can be put together to make pictures. On their website is this animation made from the blocks:
Hello animated simple coloured shapes!
Although this is a stop motion animation that isn't supposed to look smooth and naturalistic, it still shows that you can make characters out of simple(ish) shapes. It also shows overlapping of movements.
The music goes well with the movements and make it innocent and fun.
Dixit's 'Yes' and "No' were detailed 3D sculptures of the words yes and no on layers of plastic. From the side you can't really tell what they are
But face on you can read them!
I really like the contrasting colours, the font and the way that yes sticks out but no goes in.
On their website they show them separately but I think they only really work together like they were at the show or like this:
Official photos of
Yes and
No
At the Tate Modern I had a quick look at States of Flux - Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism and change and modernity:
Unique forms of Continuity in Space by Umberto Boccioni, Jazzmen by Villeglé and Camouflage by Andy Warhol. Russian posters in the background.
Then we went to see Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera
This was interesting but i didn't take any photos because it wasn't allowed. The exhibition covered The unseen photographer, Celebrity and the public gaze, Voyeurism and desire, Witnessing violence and Surveillance.
I particularly liked the old photographs in the unseen photographer section that were taken in the street with new small cameras so the subjects didn't know they were being taken, or camera's with a false lens on the front and the real lens on the side.
I also liked Philip-Lorca diCorcia's Heads:
(6 of the 18 photographs)
These were taken in new york in 2000 using automatic flashes and hidden long lens cameras. The flash was activated by people walking past, which provided a well lit portrait of an unsuspecting person on the street, with the dark background singling them out.
I was surprised to read that when one of the subjects look the photographer to court over a photograph, the judge ruled in favour of diCorsia, saying that the first amendment gave him the right to freedom of expression over the subject's right to their own image.
Cartier-Bresson took photos from above his subjects. The timing and composition in this picture is perfect
Henri Cartier-Bresson 1932
The voyeurism and violence sections raised lots of questions about the moral issues surrounding taking photographs, as well as viewing them, especially the pictures taken through brothel windows and of suicidal people on top of buildings.
The exhibition showed how some covert photography is important; there were photographs taken in Germany and Poland showing evidence of the concentration camps.
The surveillance section was less interesting apart from some strange artists who:
- Paid a private detective to follow them
- Selected a stranger to follow every day and took photos of them until they went somewhere private.
- Hid a camera in their handbag and took it into a fashion boutique's communal changing room.
- Stood or laid around in a square by a fountain in the view of a webcam for a month.
