Marina Abramovic

Yogoslavian performance artist based in New York who began her career in the early 1970s. Her work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind.

A well-known work of hers is 'The artist is present', where she sat in a room on a chair next to rooms filled with her other works, and people could queue up to sit in front of her.

Really recently she had a show called 'Generator', where it's visitors were made to put on blindfolds and headphones. It's an artwork that focuses on nothingness, at it's simplest. Her artist's statement reads as follows:

'It took me 25 years to have the courage, the concentration and the knowledge to come to this, the idea that there would be art without any objects, solely an exchange between the performer and the public'.

I found this quite interesting in the New York Time's 'arts beat' blog: 
In a brief interview, she explained that “Generator” was born out of “512 Hours,” when she became taken with the idea of removing herself and her art-star status from the work. “This is the thing: people want to see you, and then go home,” she said. “This is not about that.”

Here's a youtube video I found where she talks a little bit about being a young artist, and appreciating things as you do them. Even something as simple as drinking water:

Christian Marklay

Clocks:

Goeffrey Farmer

Farmer is a Canadian artist, based in Vancouver. He creates instillation-based artworks using heaps of different elements, like drawing, photography, video, sculpture, performance, and found materials. He combines all that with chaotic soundtracks and flashing lights - sometimes things move, sometimes they're still. I haven't been into any of his instillation works, but I'm sure it would be quite overwhelming, but magical too see his work for real. Here's a good little video of Let's Make The Water Turn Black:

Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman can do everything, it seems. Much of his most famous work deals with his neon elements and sculpted hands, but he's has worked in almost every medium. He's experiented with performance, holograms, film,  interactive environments and paintings. His work is often criticized as being unattractive, with unappealing aesthetic, but I disagree. I like his placement, despite it often looking quite busy. He tends to focus on the meaning of the piece though anyway. His neon pieces often use word play to make them entertaining and interesting. 

Richard Prince

This dude likes to 're-photograph' things.
So many times when I read about an artist it seems like a waste of time to rewrite a perfectly good description of the history of that artist, so here's a very good description found at metmuseaums.org

'In the mid-1970s, Prince was an aspiring painter who earned a living by clipping articles from magazines for staff writers at Time-Life Inc. What remained at the end of the day were the advertisements, featuring gleaming luxury goods and impossibly perfect models; both fascinated and repulsed by these ubiquitous images, the artist began rephotographing them, using a repertoire of strategies (such as blurring, cropping, and enlarging) to intensify their original artifice. In so doing, Prince undermined the seeming naturalness and inevitability of the images, revealing them as hallucinatory fictions of society's desires.'

He's arguably most famous for his piece 'Untitled (Cowboy)' from 1989. It got sold in New York and was the first 'rephotograph' to raise over $1 at an auction, in 2005. The photo was originally taken by Sam Abell and appropriated from a cigarette advertisement. Here's a very respectable explanation about the meaning and story behind the work. (also from met museums.org)

'Untitled (Cowboy) is a high point of the artist's ongoing deconstruction of an American archetype as old as the first trailblazers and as timely as then-outgoing president Ronald Reagan. Prince's picture is a copy (the photograph) of a copy (the advertisement) of a myth (the cowboy). Perpetually disappearing into the sunset, this lone ranger is also a convincing stand-in for the artist himself, endlessly chasing the meaning behind surfaces. Created in the fade-out of a decade devoted to materialism and illusion, Untitled (Cowboy) is, in the largest sense, a meditation on an entire culture's continuing attraction to spectacle over lived experience.'

And here's the image:

He does a lot of other cool stuff, and has tried out a range of different styles, but generally it seems his strongest and most common theme is picking out interesting pictures, quotes, and silly little things often found in the news that you wouldn't generally have noticed otherwise. Often he will just write one of these lines on a colored or even simply a white canvas in quotation marks, and that's his artwork:

They're often funny, but always interesting. You should definitely check out his website for more.

Miranda July

THIS LADY WRITES, DIRECTS, AND STARS IN HER FILMS. WHAT A GENIUS. Oh my goodness. I am so ashamed to say that I've never seen any of her films before, so I don't feel like I can talk about her very much. I remember reading about how brilliant she was in a magazine once, and then making a mental note to myself to look her up later, but then I never remembered again. I think I lost the mental note. So now I'm just going to post this trailer which looks like an absolutely incredible movie, and then I will watch her films. Hopefully I can find that and read it. Oh man, I have been missing out. What have I been doing with my life?!?! Maybe after I've read/seen everything I'll add to this and write about her a bit more.

Her movies are called 'You me and everyone we know' (2010) and 'The future' (2011). She also has a heap of books. And a super recent film called 'Somebody'. And she's worked with LENA DUNHAM and THERE'S SO MUCH MORE. Look at this site and your mind will break into five hundred million pieces: http://mirandajuly.com/ She seems to do something amazing practically every month. Wow.
Oh and she's also super super super adorable:

Jenny Holzer

Holzer is mostly known for her huge public artworks that include billboard advertisements, projections on buildings & other architectural structures, and illuminated electronic displays. 
She uses text in her work and is well known for her short statements called 'truisms'. These statements often address themes like consumerist impulses, describing torture, and lamenting death and disease. Her work is quite provocative, which I think is important if you want people to notice it and questions the ideas and meanings.

Barbara Krugger

For about a year I had Barbara Krugger's 'Your Body is a Battleground' stuck on my wall at home, and looking back at my collages and little zines now that I'm researching her, I think her work has influenced mine a lot more than I'd really considered before. Her work says a lot while being very simple - that seems to be a reoccurring theme in well-known contemporary art. It's a hard thing to do, but so much more effective than complementing the message and overworking things.

I think her instillation pieces are very effective too.

This is my very favorite work of hers:

Apparently the quote 'it's time for women to stop being politely angry' is by the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winner Lehymah Bbowee, who's work helped to end the Liberian civil war. The women in the image are Mergaret Sanger, the person who created what we now call 'planned parenthood'. She was an American birth control activist, sex educator, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term birth control, opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The eyes in the image belong to Lauryn Hochberg, who does all theses brilliant things: Voice work, puppeteer, improv artist, educator, actor, acting instructor.

I didn't realize how much thought was put into the characters in her images! That just makes them ever better. What an awesome artist.

Grandma Moses

Grandma Moses (September 7, 1860-December 13, 1961) is often cited as an example of an artist who successfully began their career at quite an old ago. She was a very well known and highly regarded American Folk Artist, and began painting at 78. Her work has been featured on a heap of postcards and is in some high-brow galleries. There was a documentary made about her life which I haven't seen, but apparently she had a fascinating 101 years.
Here's some of her work:

Gillian Wearing

I really like this artist. A lot. Particularly her series 'Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say'. I often feel like making art about you own feelings and opinions is good, but too limiting. I often wonder about the best way to get other opinions and thoughts ins, particularly people who don't label themselves artists who'd generally want to contribute to projects with you. This project seemed like the most straightforward, simple way to do that. And it was non-exclusive - she's just picked regular people around the streets to participate, which in my humble opinion is the perfect way to do it:

She also did a series around 2003 when she took photos of herself using prosthetics and heavy makeup, costume, and various props, dressed as different members of her family/close relations. This wasn't the only challenge. She also had to pick out specific family photos and replicate them, and whoever's photo she used had to approve the photo as being one that they accepted as a token of their likeness at a particular moment in time. There are six photos in total, here's a couple of them:

I found Dan Cameron's take on the series quite interesting: '.....Wearing also wants us to be aware that within a family, the separation between self and others is a more  subtle distinction, since in purely genetic terms we are the result of the mixing of our two parents. Yet, rather than serve as a release from the tension of ALBUM, the
similarities between Wearing and her kin make the impersonation more disturbing, as if she was, at some level, creating a simulation of herself from the components of her actual self.....'

Gillian's also done a while heap of other stuff, like a film called Drunk in 2003, which simple documents a couple of drunk guys staggering around her studio, and another film, Broad Street, documenting the typical behavior of teenagers in Britain, who go out at night and drink a heap of alcohol. I haven't seen either of these pieces, but they sound like they would be interesting.

Beginnings of film

According to Australia.gov.au, The Australian film industry produced what was probably the world's first full length feature film, in 1906. The film was by the Tait brothers and titles The Story of the Kelly Gang. Apparently it was a success in both Australian and british theaters, and also the beginning of a genre of 'bushranger stories'.

Only fragments of the film are left, so here's a little bit of it I found on youtube:

Another important figure in the beginning of film is Georges Melies.
His film 'A trip to the moon' (in french it's called Le Voyage dans la lune) is a 1902 black and white silent science fiction film. In fact, it's the screen's first ever science fiction film, loosely based on two popular novels of the time: From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne, and The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells:

Stefan Zsaitsits

Stefan Zsaitsits is an Austrian artist, and from looking at his website it seems as though he's been working since about 2007, when he did a lot of painting. Since then he seems to have gone off painting, and for the last 3/4 years he's been focusing on drawing, mainly just with graphite pencil. His surreal drawings were described on Colossol as depicting 'an individual who is literally or figuratively encumbered by animals, objects, or metaphorical thoughts'. I think that's a very nice way to put them. In terms of my own opinion, I particularly like the layering in his work - I always find it difficult to create enough tone and depth to works in graphite/grey lead, but he's tackled that problem very well by using the thin, un-concrete nature of the medium softly and carefully in just the right parts. I also like and the sketchy aesthetic (though it's still very controlled at the same time).

I think his drawing works are a lot stronger than his earlier paintings. His style appears more developed and his drawings are a lot more refined these days. In the painting works I think it was a little more obvious who his influences were, and now he's realised how much more of his own personality and ideas he can put into the work, and taken the work away from direct surrealist influences. I guess that comes with time too. But perhaps I'm just jumping to conclusions. I guess it's easy to categorise artists and assume things about their influences, but here's a work by Dali that I thought of when I saw Stefan's early paintings (I think it's called 'Venus with drawers'):

and here's some of Zsaitsit's early work:

I guess you can't really just say that if there's drawers and bright colours it's obviously Dali/surrealist influenced though, and that's not really a bad thing either anyway. There's always going to be someone out there doing something really similar to what someone's done in the past. I'm guilty of that myself. I'll probably go home and do something really similar to Zsaitsits unintentionally in the future now. Plus, maybe he was just reading a lot about alice in wonderland and climbing into furniture or something. Or maybe he just liked all that stuff and wanted to try it out? I shouldn't be putting people in drawers and filing them under categories. Plus, I'm 17. What the hell do I know? So just ignore all that. Anyway. This is such a crap post. I'm talking shit now. What I'm trying to say is Zsaitsit's has improved since he first started and now he does some very impressive uniquely stylized drawings. This is one of my favourites:

Here's his website. 

Eugenia Loli

Someone emailed me a link to Euginia Loli's work - she seems to use similar materials in her collages to me, and her work is very simplistic in the amount of components she adds to the images, though they're still effective. I particularly like the meat piece: