Redundant Perception: An Artist's Enquiry
(2017)
author(s): Christopher Hollins
published in: Research Catalogue
Living things often display redundant and unused appendages of physical characteristics that once served to give them an advantage in the struggle for life. Examples would be the flightless wings of penguins and ostriches, and the vestige of a tail in we humans; which is made of three small loosely fused bones called the coccyx. This is known as the ‘tail-bone’ because it is considered the remains of the full tail that our ape-like ancestors once possessed. It is also probable that our brains generate the remaining impulses from an older redundant power of perception that once gave our distant ancestors an ‘animal’ awareness of objects and events. This experience of mind now lies buried behind our modern day thought processes, and for any artist aware of this the implications are that the way we create art through intelligent learned ideas hides an experience of deeper natural form. A state of mind therefore exists that once allowed us to conceive of the world in a natural way, but artists have always created intelligently structured artificial images rather than the spontaneous intuitive results need to glimpse the instinctive insight. Art has always worked to suppress rather than reveal an original way of sensing sight, shape, sound, and movement, and it is this realisation that I believe was the motivation for challenging the established principles of art upheld by the founding pioneers of modernism.
Evolution
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Betty Nigianni
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
"New ideas might be conceived and developed more rapidly in disciplines that are more abstract.
The inductive methods of experimental innovators in painting makes their enterprise resemble the more empirical disciplines considered by psychologists, while the deductive approach of the conceptual innovators makes theirs resemble the more abstract disciplines."
David W. Galenson, "The Life Cycles of Modern Artists", NBER Working Paper Series, 2003.
Artists and architects have been at times captivated by visionary ideological viewpoints, which they used as inspiration and to make suggestions for applications with their artworks and designs. My use of the diagram and the image aims to convey the simple message that art strives for evolution; meaning to strengthen the mind, to research capabilities, to communicate a disinterested, though not necessarily apolitical, view of social changes, to overcome banality and offer an alternative way of looking at the world. For many artists, this motivation has traditionally often gone hand in hand with political goals and motivations.
The decline of the commercial art market in the 1980s gave rise to artists working mainly, but not solely, with ephemeral installations, including the ubiquitous video art, performance, and the broader range of conceptual art. Painting remained as an established fine art practice, with a renewed interest to conceptualism.
The portrait is of the artist, myself, at a young age, dated 1993, when I was a student at the NTUA. Betty Nigianni is my name known as (aka), which I also used as my artistic pseudonym.