Rebecca's work was pretty cool I thought. The art works I really liked were mostly from her series Up With the Fall, Down on the Diagonal. My favorites were Slip n' Slide, 2006 and Waiting, 2007. I also really like Drunk Power Poles.
Although I didn't particularily like Hobbs's work Ah-Round, I did find it quite interesting. She talked about Imperialism, and the colonizing of countries. This I am not to surprised about, as she is from Australia, a country that was heavily colonized and subject to imperialism. In the work Ah-Round The camera circles a black man watering his plants quite happily. In the hand out Hobbs gave us she says that the "360 degree camera movement represents moving full circle, and pays tribute to Marcus Garvey's BSL ambitions."
While viewing the video I thought of the colonization of Australia. The camera circumnavigates the island and Madou, the subject, who represents the indigenous people of Australia. He is happy, and is completely unaware of being viewed. It could be as if this is all about to get taken away from him. However the relationship the camera has with Madou is one of intimacy, not something a colonist would feel. I don't know if I am supposed to find these sorts of similarity's in the video, but it definitely ties in with the idea of Imperialism.
I think Hobbs has quite a lot of social knowledge. She has studied in California, now lives in New Zealand, and was brought up in Australia. Imperialism and colonization is not a foreign concept for these three country's, especially Australia.
While Studying in California Hobbs was surrounded by a lot of western themed things. So she made western themed artwork. Her other video piece is called Tumbleweeds, 2004. It features people slowly rolling/tumbling through an old western town. This piece deals more with the absurd than Imperialism, however when I think of Westerns or western movies or anything western I also think of Indians, A group of people heavily subject to a lot of colonization and imperialism.
I think Alex Monteith should win the Walters award, to be honest I was a little underwhelmed with all the contestants and there wasn't an artwork that I really liked. I base my decision on how aesthetically pleasing the works are, Monteith's motorcycles were the only work that I enjoyed looking at.
Thanks Max,
ReplyDeleteMadou is from Africa, not Australia, although I guess you could argue he has some sort of implicit relationship to the indigenous of Australia, but others might find that a racist assumption. I guess the interesting thing about the work is that it brings up all these ingrained assumptions that we have, and forces us to examine them.
It seems like here you didn't want to settle for either Imperialism or The Absurd for your subject, but looked a little at both. In either case, though, you should have looked at either Rebecca's artist statement, or Peter Shand's essay, in order to back up your ideas and statements.
TX