Natalie- Project 4-Collaboration

Natalie Frisinger

Lia Halloran

Advanced Painting

Project 4: Collaboration

For this collaborative project I partnered with Lily Standberg and Maddi Lucas from our painting class. As our collaborator outside of the art field, we selected (randomly) an acting major named Taylor Owen. Finally as our ‘collaborator’ from art history, we selected to channel Yves Klein. Furthering our art historical influence (Dada art trends), and seeing that we were a group of three artists, we decided that our final product would be 3 separately made piece of work that would then come together in an exquisite corpse, thus dismantling the authorship that was put into the original expression. Although our method visually referenced the essence of the exquisite corpse, it attempted to transform the idea of creating a whole without knowing what the other parts might be, to one where all the parts are seen by the artists, and only then are they deconstructed.

            In incorporating our historical referencing of Yves Klein, we decided that our works would take the form of body impressions, done in Yves Klein patented blue. The act of creating prints of our own bodies was one that, in and of itself, completely uproots the ideas behind Klein’s famous anthropometries, using the bodies of women pressed against canvases, walls and sometimes even dragged around by the artist to create indexical marks. This highly performative act was one, which brought up the questions of the essence of painting and its depiction as an extremely physical act. Thus, Klein’s pieces questioned not only the authorship of art but also the expression of feminine form through male authorship.

            Finally, we asked our third party (person from a different discipline) to give us a specific yoga pose that we would all replicate in our prints. Ironically, she selected the corpse pose, where one lays on one’s back with their arms and legs straight. This was great as it played with Klein’s ideas of the physicality of painting by replicating his prints with an extremely static position. In addition, by creating our prints using only the backsides of our bodies, the finished product triggered dialogue about the passive role of females in Klein’s work- following his orders and sometimes getting dragged around.