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Bringing life back into art? - The Open College of the Arts

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Bringing life back into art?

A recent visit to the stunning Jaume Plensa exhibition at the unique Yorkshire Sculpture Park near OCA HQ in Barnsley got me thinking about the sculptor’s obsession with the head, the head as everyman, the head as a unique individual, the head as an archetype of heads. Plensa’s heads, sitting in the stunning landscape in the Sculpture Park are mesmerising and beautiful. They stare into the landscape and beyond, creating thoughtful spaces between them, and between them and the viewer.

Photo Martin Middleton

So, what other contemporary artists focus on the head? Marc Quinn’s head cast filled with his own blood, his Self Portrait of his own framed DNA, Antony Gormley’s life casts of his own body, these are sculpture objects that have a strong sense of life. Marc Quinn’s aim is that his art objects objects bring life back into art. It is well worth settling down to watch and listening to the two videos below of these two artists talking. Quinn articulates his artistic vision lucidly, while Gormley seems to have a complex relationship with the art world and the role of art in the world as he sees it. For while Gormley uses his body as the mainstay of his sculptural works, accepting public commissions in many locations across the UK and beyond, he maintains that public art is in fact a betrayal of what art can do, wishing us back to a pre-literary collective form of art exemplified in narrative dances, patterns painted onto bodies creating a sense of the collective body.
You may have already come across, or indeed subscribe to www.theartnewspaper.com, but even if you don’t you can view substantial numbers of videos of artists talking (as well as on the BBC website). To get the most up to date videos you do have to subscribe, but the two I provide links to below were shot in 2009/10. Click here to view the interview with Marc Quinn and here to see Antony Gormley talking.


Posted by author: Jane Parry

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