The other day we went to the gallery in Huddersfield to look at the work and think about how you might reconstruct pieces in a contemporary fashion. Although I didn't find any pieces that particularly interested me from this point of view, I did start to realise different ways in which you could modernise an art work. I focused on two pieces during this visit.
The first is a Lowry painting called '
Huddersfield'. This was easy to look at with a contemporary spin as Huddersfield these days looks very different. Instead of the many factories that you can see in this painting there is now mainly shops, there is also more evidence of technology etc. The idea of just doing a picture of Huddersfield today didn't seem like a very interesting idea though so I thought about other ways to make it contemporary. I know Lowry's work often focused on industrial spaces and the workers who inhabited them, this made me think that a modernisation of his work would focus on office life with people in front of computers and on their daily commute stuck in traffic.
The second piece that I took interest in was Edward Mathew Ward's painting '
Hogarth's Studio in 1736'. The painting was done in 1863. I found that there was a lot to say about this painting and since there was a lot too say I thought of many different ways that one could appropriate it too a contemporary setting. My first thoughts, before I knew what the painting was about, was how these days an artists studio wouldn't look like that, it is more likely to be small and cluttered. I also thought that it would be unlikely for som many people to take such interest in art that's in a studio.You could also modernise each aspect of the painting such as replacing the crutches with a wheel chair and the globe and book with a mac. Once I learned more about the painting I found out that it is about a painting of Thomas Coram a well known benefactor of foundlings at the time. A modern version could feature someone who gives a lot of money to charity such as Bill Gates. Graham from my course says this scenario gives a creepy Jimmy Saville-esque feel.His reasoning was today someone like Coram who is often close to a lot of kids could be held in suspicion. This got me thinking about how today nothing is ever innocent, there is always some sort of underlying darkness to pretty much everything. This is a view which should probably be reflected if I were to put a contemporary spin on this piece.
I'm having trouble choosing what I want to recreate. I've looked around at various pieces of art from varying time periods but none have seemed to interest me, at least from the perspective of recreating it. The closest I've got is looking at Leon Golub's work. His work is mostly about subjects such as terrorism war and other acts of human horror. I find his work interesting and thanks to the social commentary prevalent throughout his work it could be modernised on a number of levels. The most obvious way to go about this would be looking at conditions in the middle east and terrorism control in the USA, especially Guantanamo bay. My main problem with this however is it wouldn't be a drastic change from Golub's original work. There are other ways that I could go about modernising his work, one idea I have is of making what is going on less obvious almost giving the piece a hidden, yet obvious, meaning. This is something seen quite a lot especially in protest arts. I'm also not interested in going overtly political so maybe pieces like this aren't what I'm looking for.
