OPPOSITES ATTRACT
For this brief we were each assigned a creative practitioner to investigate. I was assigned Fiona Banner, an artist who had great interests in type, language and wordplay. Despite being labelled as a fine artist, she also produced many design-esque publications and installations that highlight her lingual nature. For example, her 'Font book' was of images of Fonts (a receptacle in a church for the water used in baptism, typically a free-standing stone structure), instead of typefaces, which played with expectations and 'homonyms'. She also tries to re-contextualise objects, exaggerating them in scale like her gigantic full-stop sculptures. I produced experiments that emulated her descriptive tendencies and playful, humorous nuances. We were then paired up with someone who received a contrasting practitioner. I was paired with George, who looked into Jean Paul Goude. Jean Paul Goude was different in his use of vibrant colors, practice in fashion+photography, and his dynamic vivid compositions with shapes. We were given the unification term 'Shrine', in which we had to combine the practices of the 2 artists and produce an outcome relating to it.
A shrine (Latin: scrinium "case or chest for books or papers"; Old French: escrin "box or case"), a sacred place, which is dedicated to a specific deity, ancestor, hero, martyr, or similar figure of awe and respect, at which they are venerated or worshipped.
We decided instead to create a guide/book on how to view Jean Paul Goude work, as you would a shrine, with a sort of worshipping nature. We thought we would incorporate the obsessive nature of a shrine with continuous, repetitive text within the guide, also inspired by Fiona Banner's use of language (Like in her book 'The Nam'). And use of wordplay, with the book outside being "A Guide on How to View the Work of Jean Paul Goude", enclosing a book inside that is titled "A Guide on How to View the Guide on How to View the Work of Jean Paul Goude". The book within a book also pays tribute to the direct translation of a shrine, "case or chest for books or papers". The instructions within the book, are exaggerated and humorous, emulating the two Practitioners.
Emulating Fiona Banner by using descriptive language to describe Jean Paul Goude's images
