On Vulnerability and Doubt Exhibition Kit

Charlie Sofo is an artist who is interested in how to make art out of everyday experiences and observations. For his piece Chocks 2013–15, Sofo kept an eye out for objects that were being used as improvised wheel-stops. Over a period of two years the artist collected these when he could and the final collection includes concrete chunks, pieces of wood, and rocks. You can describe this artwork as a readymade because the artist didn’t craft the objects. Instead, he found them, recognised their potential to be part of an artwork, and placed them into a new context – the gallery.

Chocks has linkages to the Italian art historical movement arte povera. Translating to ‘poor art’ arte povera used non-traditional processes, such as assembly, collection and bricolage, and everyday materials such as wool, potatoes and neon. Similarly, Chocks uses inexpensive and unspectacular materials. It challenges the viewer to find beauty in ordinary objects that normally have no material or aesthetic value beyond holding a door open.

Sofo has used arrangement and isolation as techniques to transform found chocks into artwork. He has introduced structural arrangement to order otherwise random objects. Placed symmetrically and in pairs the chocks feel considered and special. This draws the eye and entices the viewer to consider them more closely than they otherwise might. Another technique he has used is isolation, by presenting the chocks on a pristine white custom-made plinth. This is the same as placing a statue on a plinth: using literal elevation to create metaphorical elevation.

Discussion questions

• Is this art? Why/why not?
• What has the artist done to these ordinary objects to transform them into an artwork?
• Does this artwork have aesthetic value? Why/why not?

Andrea Büttner was initially drawn to printmaking, often seen as a lowly valued artform,  in the early 1990’s,  at a time when the practice was very unfashionable. An important body of work by the artist, Beggars 2016 is a series of nine large-scale woodcut prints that demonstrates her ongoing engagement with printmaking practices and discourses on poverty and shame. Büttner’s use of humble materials and resources to create her work links her practice to the arte povera (‘poor art’) movement of the late 1960’s to early 70’s. Working in her studio, the artist creates her large-scale colourful prints by carving marks into plywood using hand and machine tools. Büttner’s prints are spare and minimal, each illustrating shrouded beggars leaning forward with their hands wide open to the viewer.

Büttner creates artworks that question systems and beliefs from a philosophical perspective. In 2013 the artist produced a book tracing the history of beggars throughout art history, from medieval to early renaissance times. Beggars highlights the contradictions of Christian traditions of charity, compassion and vows of poverty, while also having a history of wealth and corruption. Büttner also challenges the commodification of art under capitalism, using the example that people would pay more money to buy an artwork depicting a beggar instead of giving to a beggar on the street. Büttner has elevated these figures in the gallery to give them dignity. She has written that these works could also be images of artists in front of their viewers to invite them to engage, commenting on the vulnerability that artists have putting themselves on display for judgement and the shamefulness that comes with presenting your own work.

Discussion questions

• Why would printmaking be considered a lowly valued artform?
• Why are other artforms be more valued in society?
• Why would an artist feel vulnerable or doubtful?

For her series Fear of 2011 artist Cherine Fahd began by asking herself, what am I afraid of? Fahd then chose a selection of her private fears to print onto sheets of paper that she pasted-up in laneways and public spaces across Sydney. Fahd used still photography to document the paste-ups in-situ and also the process of putting them up – one image even shows the artist ‘caught in the act’. The paste-ups were ephemeral – they were destined to be covered over or to peel off in the elements – but by taking photographs Fahd has made them enduring artworks. These are the photographs that became the series Fear of.

One way to think about the Fear of photographs is as a series of conceptual self-portraits. They contrast from a traditional self-portrait, such as a painting of a subject, because they do not reveal Fahd through an image-based likeness. But they are similar because they do expose Fahd in a different, equally important way, by revealing to the viewer the subject’s inner thoughts. Our thoughts (such as what scares us) are invisible to others unless we choose to reveal them. In making her thoughts visible, Fahd is volunteering her vulnerability. This is a generous act on the part of the artist because she is allowing strangers to see her fears and perhaps acknowledge that they share some, gaining comfort from the realisation that they are not alone.

Discussion questions

• What are some similarities and differences between each photograph in the series?
• Why would Fahd want to make her fears public?
• Are the fears on display universal or common to most people? Why/why not?