The Reflection Of Social Contexts In Contemporary Art

I will be looking at the relation and concerns between social contexts and contemporary art. There have been so many pieces of contemporary artwork that can be related to social contexts. These pieces often referred to and understood as social art. These pieces can send powerful messages via the social platform, they can be interpreted in many different ways but essentially sending out powerful messages. Using a wide range of materials and technics to explore ideas that relate to the government or public affairs of the country such as visual arts, text, painting, photography, abstract and even performance.

You can name it pollical art but can be related or even be in other forms such as protest art, activist art, politically motivated art, socially engaged art but yet they all have the same message and form. The range is so vast that you can easily argue that all art has some form of political and social context behind it.

I will also be talking about what contemporary art is, its history and contemporary artworks, specifically its social contents. I will be looking at two contemporary artists who work with social context, Maria Abramovic and Tania Burgaura. I’ll be looking out of their social contemporary artworks. I will also try and compare the two artists and their differences they have.

Contemporary Art

Contemporary art is the art of today, it started in 20th century. Contemporary art provides an opportunity to reflect on contemporary society and the issues relevant to ourselves, and the world around us, in general contemporary is modern art, recent, relevant, diverse, dynamic, ideology and so forth.

Contemporary art first was found by Roger Fry an English painter in London, 1910. One of the most famous pieces of contemporary art is Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, He famously took a urinal and presented it just as he would any painting or sculpture.

Duchamp explanation about this piece was that he turned the urinal 90 degrees and he gave it a new title; you are looking at it from different perspective physically but with the title you will be looking at it from different perspective intellectually and maybe emotionally.

Fountain was in first exhibition of the society of independent artist in New York in 1917. He signed it R. Mutt and installed it in a rotated position but before the show started, it was decided that they wouldn’t show this object, so they rejected from the show and it hidden behind the certain. In one perspective you can say that Fountain can have meaning as anything can be art, and the other it could be the humblest manufactured object. Duchamp himself preferred to see his readymade as proof that art is in fact no different from anything else in the world.

By blurring the boundary between art and life, Duchamp set the stage for much of what was to come, including Warhol’s erasure of distinction between high and low art, the rise of Conceptual art, and the infusion of materials and forms that were previously foreign to art. If Duchamp’s influence extends to the widespread use of readymade objects and industrial material in art, it also can be seen in the contrary impulse to create object that look like readymade. Duchamp’s legacy includes not only Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box 1964, but iconic works such as Jasper John’s painted bronze.

Tania Bruguera

Tania Bruguera was born in Havana in 1968, She has a strong artwork as a performance, activism and social engagement. She always wants to show power and control, even from the beginning of her artistic career you could see that. she has always been an advocate for freedom of expressions and that makes her strange and not acceptable in the Cuban government. An example of this tension is her artwork Tatilin’s Whisper NO 6 2009, The work provides a platform for free speech, inviting people to speak uncensored and out of their mind, the work involves people in public for one minute on a subject of their choice, so it was a freeze peach and the right of freeze peach. During the exhibition in December 2014 in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolution Bruguera was arrested by the Cuban government forces. She was released after 3 days but she had to stay in the country until the decision regarding legal action was determined by the government. After her release she became the target of a state-sponsored campaign to discredit her as an artist.

The other example of her social work is Tatlin’s Whispers NO 5 2008 at Tate Modern in London, for this piece There were two police officers with their official uniform on their horses, who were using everything that they’re learning in police academy through their experience to controlling the audience of the exhibition. During the exhibition Police officers were coming towards the audience and giving them directions, what to do and where to move, like they were doing their everyday jobs. Her main objective was to gain the audiences reactions and live experience without them realising it is actually her artwork being displayed, this was very important to her. She wanted people not to know they were looking at art because she felt the audience would start judging, comparing and associating her art straight away. She was aiming for the same reactions as you would in an everyday life/experience. In the project “Tatlin’s Whispers NO 5 2008” were the police was controlling the crowd on their horses she wanted to capture their first hand reactions in this live event without knowing its art.

Tania’s Bruguera’s work is more confrontational, she creates performance installation and videos that use bodies as instruments to explore social, political, and religious restraints. Bruguera was using her own body as the object on her early work, she used blood and animal body parts for her art piece for example, her work The Burden of Guilt 1997, she was 29 years old when she performed it, for this performance she stood naked and hanged a butchered lamb on her neck and she spent about 45 minutes to mixing some water with Cuban soil and eating it, representing of tears. She wanted to vow indigenous people of Cuban to eat dirt and nothing else instead of being captives of the Spanish conquistadors and she explains of doing this performance and eating dirt was a “weapon of resistance”.

One strong artwork of Tania’s the project she had in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall last year, October 2018. The exhibition was 3 part, Crying Room, heat sensitive floor, and the speaker, this installation was about migration and communities. Tania wanted the people to think nothing has changed when they entered the turbine hall and the building had no innervation at all, she wanted people to understand that things only change and happen in society when you are intervening with them. She explained in one of her interview that one of the most important part of this exhibition was working with Tate’s neighbours which was a group of people such as activism, artists, young people and elders to come up with a program of institutional changes that will last beyond the commission itself, to create a manifesto you see when you sign up to the Tate’s wifi and rename one of the Tate’s buildings after local hero Natalie Bell.

For her Heat Sensitive floor piece, she carefully chose a portrait of Yousef, a young migrant from Syria, when he fled, he’s hometown Homs he had nothing to his name and now is studying medicine to further help people and give back to the community. She covered the portrait by heat sensitive paint, so the only way people could see him is gather together and with their body heat uncover the portrait and the picture of Yousef would appear. Other pieces of this exhibition were the crying room, which was designed to make people cry, when you enter the room it would physically make your eyes water without knowing why.

She states in one of her articles “I like the fact that even though the reaction is purely physical it somehow prompts empathy between people”. She designed this room with plain white walls and floors and the organic chemical compound was constantly pumping into the air which naturally makes tears, visitors would describe it as bathing in Olbas oil or a tub of Vicks chest rub.

And the other piece which was a big speaker that she collaborated with another artist, the sounds were humming and low base and overwhelming, she wanted to people feel uncomfortable and unsettled when they enter the turbine hall.

Most of the works of Bruguera are social, she always wants to people to interact and participate with her art pieces, she wants people to find out about her work instead of her explaining everything, like the last project I explained she wanted to people work together and then find out what the piece actually was about. She enjoyed the audience’s observations, interactions and firsthand reactions to her art.

Mariana Abramovic

Marina was born in Belgrade, Serbia 1946, she’s a performance artist, filmmaker, and writer. Her works explore Feminist art, body art, and endurance art. She called herself “the grandmother of performance art”, she’s been working for more than four decades. Abramovic used her body as the main subject of her art, she uses her body in ways that accentuate self-control, physical endurance, and risk.

One of her most famous works is Rhythm 0 in 1974, she pushed her body to the limited, she said that she didn’t want to die she was interested to see how far you can push the energy of the human body and how far you can go and to see that our energy is just limitless, it’s not about the body it’s about the mind, so extreme that you could not imagine, she put 72 objects on a table with the instruction and said that you can use the objects on her body in any way they want and she will take all the responsibility for 6 hours. On the table was rose, perfume, piece of bread, grapes, and wines and there was another objects like scissors, razorblade, nails, metal bar and a pistol with a single bullet that people could potentially kill her, She put herself at risk just to see what the public would and could do in these circumstances. At the beginning of the exhibition she stood in front of the take with all the objects in front of her. At first nothing series or dramatic happened, people just looked at her, played with her hair, kissed her, giving her the rose all the while she did not speak or make any gestures of any kind. Then gradually the public started to become more curious and started to become more creative leading to savage and wilder acts. This terrifying piece intensified in the last two hours where people cut her neck, drank from her blood, ripped her clothes with the scissors, molested her, physically moved her around, they used the pistol on her but did not fire and eventually the exhibition security removed the pistol. After approximately six hours at 2am the performance eventually came to an end, Marina started to finally move around and be herself instead of being puppet to the public this caused the audience to panic and started to run away.

One her popular work of hers is the performance The Artist is presents 2010 which was at museum of modern art (MoMA), she shared a minute of silence with each stranger who sat in front of her, for 3 months she sat there, every day for 8 hours without eating or drinking or moving, she wanted people to experience something different, this was a one to one piece rather than in a group, she was watching the people come and sat in front of her and they had to wait for hours to get to a seat, about 1400 people sat in front of her silently for only one or two minutes. Maria had sat with 1,565 people for a total of 736 hours and 30 minutes.

The performance’s structured stillness of corporeal and visual engagement provided an aesthetic framework for bringing the mutual attention of the two sitters into a relation, or in Abramovic’s term, being presents. Abramovic intended the piece to engage energetically with the sitter in the space and the time that moment in stark into the future. While devoid of contiguous touch, the situation provided a one-on-one audience with the artist that had the effect of holding participants in what I call a distal embrace. This was palpable for many sitters who reported extraordinarily strong responses of enthrallment and sensations of absorbing intensity. Some participants wept openly, an effect that surprised the artist.

Conclusion

If I want to answer that question that how contemporary art relate to social context, I can say art is a communication which is a connection between audience and artist, that itself is a social context, that artist wants to tell you something about what they are feeling and thinking, and people are the receiver to see what story artist have. When people involve in an art piece or an exhibition it makes that contemporary art social context. In affect all the artist seen before us, they all have a message that they want to portray to us the public. Whether this message is political, economic, social or even physical and emotional. In essence these messages have been created using a verity of different methods which the artist of made their own. We can see that all the pieces have a link and heavily relate to social contents. We can see the artist have gone to great lengths to display their pieces, some have incurred injuries, abuse, prison sentences, this just shows how important it was for them to make the public understand their messages and at the same time see the art for what it is. So, in conclusion contemporary art has a great effect on social contents and it reflects it works on this era.