Some photographs from tulca exhibitions

modernism

Modernism(begins 1850)
The term Modernism applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in the arts that emerged from the middle of the 19th century, as artists rebelled against traditional Historicism, and later through 20th century as the necessity of an individual rejecting previous tradition, and by creating individual, original techniques.
Rather than a lockstep organization, it is better to see Modernism as taking a series of responses to the situation, and the attempt to wrestle universal principles from the collision between the two. The Modernism was not merely defined by its avant garde but also by a reforming trend within previous artistic norms.
The second half of the 19th century has been called the Positivist age. In the visual arts this modernistic or positivistic spirit is most obvious in the widespread rejection of Romantic subjectivism and imagination in favor of the faith in the positive consequences of the close observation and the accurate and apparently objective description of the ordinary, observable world. The term Realism was the label used around 1850 by the artists and critics who pioneered the development.
In the modern opposition to this current historicism were a series of ideas, among which some were even direct extensions of the Romanticism itself- the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood for example. But Impressionism- painting school originating in France, had particular impact on Modernism. It was initially focused on work done, not in studios, but in the "plain air". They argued that human beings do not see objects, but instead, they saw light itself. The school became increasingly influential and the work of Eduard Manet attracted tremendous attention.
In the turn of century crucial ideas were: the importance of the machine as being part of beauty, the importance of subjective experience, the necessity for system to replace the concept of "objective reality". These concepts were often in competition with each other, and were subject of direct conflict.
In the first 15 years of the 20th century, the landmarks of Modernism include artists such as Gustav Klimt, Matisse, Mondrian, the abstract paintings of Wassily Kandinsky, culminating with the founding of the Blue Rider group in Munich, the Surrealism, the rise of Cubism with the work of Picasso and Georges Braque. Modernism's cutting edges, to this point had been the exploration of subjective experience and the clarification and simplification of structure.
The rise of cinema and "moving pictures" in the first decade of the 20th century gave the modern movement an artform which was uniquely its own. The use of photography, which had rendered much of the representational function of visual art obsolete, also strongly affected Modernism.
In period 1910-1930's there were two trends of Modernism, to some extent, at cross purposes - Subjectivity and Criticism. Many early modernists were seeking increasing sophistication, and hence for greater difficulty in understanding a work, and others a greater transparency, and hence easier understanding.
On the eve of World War I the break out of the Russian Revolution introduced the increasing number of works which either radically simplified or rejected previous practice. Underlying strand of that thinking can be called the shift from idealistic to critical. This tendency mirrors that art is to communicate clearly.
Subjectivity, on the other hand, led to an increasing exploration of primitivism, with Paul Gauguin's paintings. Arts from Africa became increasingly prominent in the public consciousness, because of their geometrical nature, their perceived reaching for original or basic drives, and their phantasmagoric quality, such as is seen by ceremonial masks.
Thus in the immediate post-war years, the tendency to form "movements" and develop systems became increasingly entrenched in the modern movement. Examples include Dadaism, the "International style" of Bauhaus and Socialist Realism. By 1930, Modernism had entered popular culture with "The Jazz Age" and the increasing urbanization of populations. Such ideas rapidly became labeled "modern" or "hyper-modern.
The pressures of communication, transportation and more rapid scientific development began placing a premium on search for simplification of diction in the work of various art forms. One example was the movement towards clarity, and the embracing of new technology, found in Futurism.
After World War II, Modernism began to merge with consumer culture, especially during the 1960s. In Britain, a youth sub-culture even called itself "modernists". Modernist design also began to enter the mainstream of popular culture. The merging of consumer and modernist culture led to a radical transformation of the meaning of "modernism" itself. Firstly, it implied that a movement based on the rejection of tradition had become a tradition of its own. Secondly, it demonstrated that the distinction between elite modernist and mass consumerist culture had lost its precision. Many have interpreted this transformation as the beginning of the phase that became known as Postmodernism.

Andrew Toovey - Red Bird - featuring Indi Kaur

Chosen artist for L2l project

• The Guardian, Friday 16 February 2001 02.27 GMT

The painter Ken Kiff, who has died aged 65, never quite starred on the media's British art stage, but his work has many admirers. To them he was a true painter, ever fresh yet firmly rooted in the best traditions. His work has been shown often, from 1970 onwards in thematic and group shows, and, beginning in 1979, also in solo exhibitions, in London, New York and elsewhere.

In 1992-93, he was the National Gallery's associate artist. As a teacher, there was no mistaking the way he cared for art, and his deep under standing of it. Occasionally, he gave public lectures - thoughtful, unhurried personal comments on his own art and the art of those he especially valued.

Many of us thought of him as an art guru, a very wise man opening up important issues. The abstract painter John McLean introduced us in 1969. At the time, I was writing mostly about abstract art, puzzled by English resistance to it, and eager to draw attention to a remarkable upsurge of outstanding work, especially among English artists. Ken's was wholly and insistently figurative. It was also full of colour, sonorous, sometimes delicate, sometimes tough, but never crude. It was always, in that sense, musical, and indeed he had wide knowledge of classical music of all periods.

His subject-matter struck one as openly poetical - a woman, water, a tree and rocks, a little heap of clothing; a lizard, sand, a small rock, a large geometrical sun-moon of the painter's inventing - with more than a hint of myths and legends. He spoke of poetry out of a deep personal attachment to, among others, Yeats, Frost, Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson. His pictures took some of their resonance from these attachments, and can be utterly enchanting. They can also be deeply disturbing.

When Ken spoke about art, it was about about the aspects people call formalist, those that condition our reading of images. Colour mattered to him especially. The exhibition which ended his time at the National Gallery, a museum dominated by relatively low-toned work, sang with colour. Many of the exhibits were personal reworkings of the gallery's pictures of the 13th and 14th centuries, before elaborate tonal modelling and sfumato [the gradual transition between colours] made colour secondary and ornamental, not an essential structural as well as expressive element.

Also important were the character and disposition of forms, the spaces between them, their firm or broken outlines, the dynamics of rising or sinking forms. These were aspects he was eager to talk about, in his own art or others', from Chinese landscapists to the old masters and moderns, notably Picasso, Matisse, Klee, Miró and Pollock. He had a special passion for Chagall, finding in him a venturing, partly playful spirit akin to his own, but Klee was the essential precursor, not only for the delicacy and economy of his working methods but also for Klee's guiding principle, the genetic process by which images arise out of the marks made and the materials being used.

Not that Ken's work ever looks like Klee's, or Chagall's, or anyone else's. Often his images are benign and cheerful, but at times they were grim, even ghastly. Generally his work was dream-like, neither a description of reality nor accounts of dreams and daydreams, but drawing on both as raw materials. He had no doubt that art should be beautiful, but that did not mean pretty or polite. Art lovers have sometimes been offended by the cruel or coarse actions he included, up-front and without apology. More often his compositions, large and small, from commanding triptychs down to enticing little prints and monoprints, involve a little man (himself?), radiantly beautiful women, elements of landscape (trees, hills, caves, rivers, a boat) or of towns (streets, houses, a pillar-box), but also fairy-tale ogres, truncated bodies and floating heads. Everything has the presence of intense imaginings, and lives on the surface of his pictures as being of now, this minute. The life of colour and form concerned him above all else once a painting was started, and many a work changed both as to cast and script. His pictures end up looking spontaneous, off-hand even. He was always reluctant to say a work was finished, needing to reconsider this or that aspect of it. He was also reluctant to talk about its specific meaning, and not keen to have us speculate about it.

His origins were simple: he was born in Essex, and his father had worked in a woodyard being killed in the first months of the war. One of his two step-fathers appears in an emblematic portrait - a sad, silent image. He did not speak of his mother; a brother died in 1998 after a grave illness. Ken studied at Hornsey School of Art, pottery first, then stained glass under an inspiring teacher, and thence moved on into painting. He married a fellow artist, Jane, later to become a psycho-therapist, when they were still quite young; their children, Anna and Sam, were tremendously important to him.

Many of Ken's pictures suggest journeys or adventures, with himself as protagonist. In 1970, he embarked on a series of small pictures on paper as a parallel activity to his painting on canvas and on boards. He called this project The Sequence. Its nearly 200 numbered pictures relate to himself more openly, in many instances picturing him in various actual and imagined situations, sometimes in an almost illustrational manner, often allegorically. Its essential subject is the harmonies and discords, marvels as well as dismays, occasioned by the interaction of outer reality and the realities of thought and memory. Quentin Blake has included a Kiff in his Tell Me A Picture show at the National Gallery (open until June 17); a selection of Kiff's prints will be at Charleston, near Lewes, from May 13 to June 24.

• Ken Kiff, painter and printmaker, born May 29 1935; died February 15 2001

 

A Few Myths and Facts About Methadone

The following may include some of the most common things you may hear about methadone:

1. Methadone is an illegal drug (myth).

• Methadone is a legal, prescription drug. However, like any narcotic, it can be abused in an illegal manner.

2. Methadone is not approved for pain treatment (myth).

• Methadone is approved to treat moderate to severe pain; however, the highest strengths (such as the oral dispersible tablets) are only approved for addiction treatment.

3. Methadone can help people lead productive lives (fact).

• Studies have shown that long-term methadone treatment results in less criminal activity, improved family relationships, and an increased ability to hold employment.

4. Any doctor can treat addiction with methadone (myth).

• Methadone can only be used to treat addiction in special clinics. Although any healthcare provider who is licensed to prescribe narcotics can prescribe methadone for pain (and any pharmacy that handles narcotics can dispense this medication), only a methadone clinic can provide it for addiction treatment.

5. Methadone maintenance treatment is healthier than being addicted to heroin (fact).

• There are significant benefits of taking methadone in place of heroin or other injectable drugs, such as:

• A lower risk of overdose
• A lower risk of HIV or other such diseases
• Less risk of death.

In addition, because methadone provides more stability (less severe highs and lows) and because withdrawal occurs more slowly, people taking this drug are better able to function in their day-to-day lives.

6. If you follow all the rules, you can get up to a month's worth of "take-home" methadone doses (fact).

• If you meet certain requirements to prove your commitment to staying clean, such as passing random drug tests, you may be allowed increasing take-home doses, up to a full month's worth after two years of successful treatment.

7. Methadone is a good drug to abuse, especially because it is a "safe" prescription medication (myth).

• Methadone provides less of a high, compared with most other opioids. Most people who abuse methadone are simply trying to avoid withdrawal from their drug of choice (such as heroin) when they cannot obtain or afford that drug. In order to get a significant high, people often combine methadone with alcohol or other drugs, which can be lethal.

In addition, methadone is not safe for use except under the supervision of a skilled healthcare provider. Dosing is confusing and difficult; even experienced healthcare providers have given inappropriate (and sometimes lethal) amounts of methadone.

8. Methadone is simply a way for addicts to get their drugs paid for by taxpayers (myth).

• Studies have shown that maintenance treatment with methadone is a cost-effective way to treat opioid addiction. Society will pay the costs for drug addiction and abuse either way; it might as well be in such a way that helps addicts lead healthy and productive lives while saving taxpayers money.

LINK -E-Med TV

 

I found this piece of information very helpful and it answered alot of my questions relating to the topic of our debate "russel brand trying to promote drug users to go free from all drugs rather than becoming dependant on another (methadone) "

Mind map on an artist Aguste Rodin. This mindmap included only primay research and related pictures.

Mind map realating to topic "why i want to study Art and Design?" included are reasons why i personally want to study Art and Design and also advantages in studying such a subject.