Essay About Dan Cameron And Contemporary Visual Artists

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CHADORS AND GRAFFITI, EU FLAGS AND ICONIC
BODIES: FOUR CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ARTISTS
By Maria Petrides
ÐWork grounded in protest – against fascism, moral hypocrisy, the
Vietnam War, and so on – is the closest thing we have to an art that
zeroes in on a crisis of public conscience and attempts to provoke
viewers to think about their own relationship to a social upheaval
close at hand.1
Contemporary art stretches beyond the boundaries of an
individual medium and of a single national border. With
this encouragement of diversity, fluidity and mobility, art
becomes a form of social empowerment by the very
surrender of singularity. Reviewing the work of four
artists – the Turkish-Cypriot fashion designer and
installation/video artist Hussein Chalayan; the British
graffiti artist known as Banksy; the New York installation
artist Spencer Tunick; and the New York-based multi-
media artist Anna Lascari – this piece of commentary
aims to show how, in the late twentieth and early twenty-
first century, certain art expresses its resistance through
various media: whether it be social or political resistance,
or resistance to any type of Ðconformity which may
restrict the potential found in mobility and hybridity.
Hussein Chalayans oeuvre crosses the boundaries of
fashion into sculpture, furniture objects into architecture.
If one of the literary concerns of the nineteenth century2
was the Ðform and Ðcontent divide in literature,
complicating the process of Ðcontent as it develops into
Ðform, and locating how Ðform becomes an expression
of emerging Ðcontents and ideas, we may find that our
century is not necessarily free of this separation.
In 1891, Oscar Wilde writes in ÐThe Soul of Man
Under Socialism,
Form and substance cannot be separated in a work of
art; they are always one [Ð]. Style recognizes the beauty
of the material it employs, be that material one of
words or of bronze, of colour or of ivory, and uses that
beauty as a factor in producing the aesthetic effect [Ð…].
Dan Cameron, Inconsolable in Doris Salcedo, p.9 (Dan
Cameron is senior curator of the New Museum of
Contemporary Art, and contributor to the magazine Art
Forum).
Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and Gustave Flaubert are examples
of several writers of aestheticism who began to emphasize the
importance of style and aesthetics in literature, complicating
notions about finding Ðmeaning merely in the subject of a text.
For more on this see Paters Appreciations, Wildes The Soul of
Man Under Socialism and Flauberts work ÐOn Realism in Oeuvres
ComplДЁtes, Correspondance, p.90-95.
The subject is conditioned by the temperament of the
artist, and comes directly out of it.3
The materials of the creator, whether it be paint, objects,
words or ideas, are, innately, forms that the artist chooses
because of the potential s/he attributes to them. In this
way, content and form are indissoluble. On the
inseparability of form and idea, Gustave Flaubert writes,
It is impossible to extract from a physical body the
qualities which really constitute it colour, extension, and
the like Ð- without reducing it to a hollow abstraction, in
a word, without destroying it; just so it is impossible to
detach the form from the idea, for the idea only exists
by virtue of the form.4
If Flaubert makes a distinction between the two, it is to
esteem form over content since, for Flaubert, content,
the idea, needs to be exhibited in a given form.
Nonetheless, these terms return to remind us that,
perhaps, we arent always ready to think that they are one
and the same in different ways. The