木
14 August 2017 @ 11:18 pm
Time  

Felix Gonzalez-Torres made Untitled (Perfect Lovers) at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis in America. He had lost his boyfriend of eight years (Ross Laycock) to AIDS-related illness the same year he made this work. While Untitled (Perfect Lovers) grew out of his own experience of love, partnership, and loss, it is universal. Simple in its construction, it consists of two clocks hung side-by-side and touching on a pale blue wall. Gradually, the clocks go out of sync. This subtle, elegant presentation may be read as a metaphor for the progress of the life of a couple and the consequences of time, which can introduce disharmony, illness, and the decay of perfection into that life. “We…have to trust the viewer and trust the power of the object,” Gonzalez-Torres once said about his choice of imagery. “And the power is in simple things….It keeps thought from being opaque.”
 
 
木
14 August 2017 @ 11:30 pm
Karš un miers  

Martha Rosler made House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home in protest against the Vietnam War—at a moment when American involvement in Vietnam had nearly peaked. To make these photomontages, she seamlessly combined images of the war with advertisements and illustrations of fashionable American home interiors, many published in the magazine, House Beautiful. By bringing together images of war and domesticity so that they appear to share the same space, she references the “living room war,” a phrase coined to characterize the Vietnam War as the first major military conflict to be extensively broadcast into people’s homes on television. “The series is called House Beautiful…because it really is centered on the idea of domesticity, safety, space, and aesthetic rightness,” she has explained. “But also Bringing the War Home because I am literally bringing images of the war into spaces having to do with our domestic life.” Rosler considered these images to be agitprop, originally disseminating them as photocopied flyers at anti-war demonstrations.