Failures + Clichés

The term Avant-garde arose sometime in the 18th century and is a bi-product of modernism and post-modernism. In the late 18th century the artists of the Dada movement and the situationalists associated themselves with the Avant-garde movement. Essentially the Avant-garde resists the products of consumerism such as kitsch and the cliché and embraces artists marginalized by mainstream commercial values (This definition is elaborated in Clement Greenberg's 1939 essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch"). During a particular cultural movement the Avant-garde leads society in a certain direction, opening up new discourses and ideas; while the cliche and kitsch respond to the movement with disregard to aesthetics and cultural relevance.

The challenge that artist's face today is how to escape the cliché and turn their work into something that is new, innovative, and changes the way we see or think, occasionally known as a trope (defined as a conventional idea or phrase). The following contemporary art pieces are good examples of tropes where the artists have managed to escape clichés.

Fuck it up and start again, 2001 Sofie Hultén
http://www.videoartworld.com/beta/video_34.html

The Weather Project, Olafur Eliasson
Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London, UK, 2003
http://www.olafureliasson.net/works/the_weather_project.html

From the Ground Up

The purpose of "FROM THE GROUND UP" is to create a show that visually illustrates how street culture influences intersect with contemporary, and capital A, academic art. This show will attempt to call into question the boundaries of high and low art, in a forum that is institutional in nature to illustrate how deep the influences of these subaltern groups run in a wide variety of emerging artist works. From graffiti, street, pop, guerrilla, lowbrow, scenster, wheat paste, D.I.Y, anarcho punk, hiphop, etc. This exhibition is an honest attempt to bring the kind of ferver and intensity into the Concourse Gallery that artists bring to the streets and back alleys. This show will be a multidisciplinary show which will utilize the Concourse Gallery as a forum for all works that investigate street culture and its intersection with fine art.


ARTIST'S STATEMENT:
Lust and Wrath
from the series 5 Sins of Advertising

As in graffiti, birth and death and the aesthetic of decay are central themes that occur in the diptych. The two panels are taken from a larger body of work entitled The 5 Sins of Advertising, the two being Lust and Wrath. I utilized an alias that I have been working with for a few years now by the name Panther Explosive, which I use for both my fine art and music practices. For me Panther Explosive has become a brand; an obsession of mine that has brought me to the point where I have the overwhelming urge to display it in both a gallery setting and public space. As certain elements of graffiti are a reflected in forms of corporate advertising, the piece functions as a direct way of self-promotion and raises the question of the artist as a corporate identity and the place of graffiti in the fine art realm.

From the Ground Up is currently showing at the Concourse Gallery at Emily Carr on Granville Island. Come support your local artists and check out some killer graffiti-inspired art while your at it.

- P