Some people would admit that textiles have the ability to “capture and convey cultural, national and individual identities”. Artists such as, Elaine Reichek, created a way to link textiles to the art world. She often called the textile the painting’s canvas. This idea that she had was interesting considering the boundary betwee
n what is considered art and what is considered craft. “Throughout her work, Reichek uses the textile to help scrutinize alternative cultural perspectives”. Yinka Shonibare, a Nigerian artist, made a special cloth named Batik cloth. “Since the mid- 1990s, his work has depicted clothed copulating couples, aliens, ballerinas, and the sails of sla
ve ships all reworked in wax resist cloth”. This cloth was imported but Indonesia did not accept it and soon found its way to West Africa. “Today wax resist cloth is a symbol of national pride associated with independence of the West African nations gained in the late 1950s through the 1970s, but this, too, is a ‘new’ tradition”. Susan Stockwell was a British artist who has a unique way of depicting art. She often used coffee filters, rubber, paper currency. “Materials that allude to the physical excess of our contemporary lives appe
ar in re-creations of maps and dresses that refer to colonial-era expansion and trade.Trayne uses coffee filters to create a life-sized woman’s dress with a pronounced bustle. The filters remind us that the wealth behind the ownership of luxury clothing came directly from the trade of materials such as tea and coffee.” There was a famous piece of work called the Pattern of the World that used paper dressmaking with a pattern of sta
ined tea. “It provided us with yet another version of the scramble for Africa. To adapt the pattern to the wearer’s size, coincide with the tip of the African continent to provide yet another interpretation of the arbitrary madness that went into the creation of he contemporary African map. Stockwell seems to be telling us that skirts can be lengthened and shortened. Continents cannot, and should not”. Textiles can be used in many different ways to depict different meanings. Artists often use textiles to communicate a complicated idea. It can also be used to represent a culture. “The beauty of the textile is often deployed as a visual seduction used to package challenging narratives”.
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O80231/pattern-of-the-world-drawing-stockwell-susan/
file:///Users/Downloads/Hemmings_Shonibare%20(1).pdf
http://disabledfeminists.com/2010/11/23/creative-work-yinka-shonibare-mbe/
http://www.fiberarts.com/article_archive/history/Postcolonial.asp
ing photographed”. Gursky’s art, “largely focused on the industrial and technological possibilities of globalisation, he uses digital manipulation to bend our sense of perception to the outer edge of credibility, creating a world we recognise but also one which is partially imagined and not yet realised”. The way both Gursky and Sekula approached their art work, highlighting the different ways Globalisaion can be understood is what set them apart 
from one another. Some people would agree that the Global justice movement has tested capitalism. Allan Sekula, on the other hand, “focused on the limits of globalisation. Following the deterritorialised flow of capital, he focuses on the wave of industrialisation in the developing world which has relocated old technologies into this new context. Within the two worlds of Globalisation, Sekulachooses to focus on the one inhabited by the poor, the marginalised and the dispossessed”. Gursky’s art depicts a world in a sense that is still to come while Sekula’s work depicts a world that has already passed. “The multitude is in a process of becoming by invoking a world that is not (yet). ‘Another World is Possible'”. With art work, there is always a deeper meaning. The struggles that are conveyed in these pieces of artwork solicits the possibility of a world becoming. It conveys hope among all things.
on today. He believed “social relations are vanishing as communication becomes restricted”. In the reading Bourriaud mentioned how art has changed. He had said art was intended to prepare and announce a future world. But today, it is modeling possible universes. He makes a valid point about the Old Avant Garde versus the New, “The old avant-gardes, Bourriaud tells us, were oriented toward conflict and social struggle; relieved of this dogmatic radical antagonism and macro-focus on the global system, relational-alleviational art “is concerned with negotiations, bonds, and co-existences. The new relational avant-gardistes “are not naïve or cynical enough ‘to go about things as if’ the radical and universalist utopia were still on the agenda”. In my opinion, the way society is today has a huge impact on art in many different ways. Today, technology plays a massive part in our lives which takes away from things that use to matter. Art created an “escape” and created a voice for individuals. It was a way to bring people together and to connect on the same level. The way both art and society was, there was one goal and one “dream” of how the future would be. But now, art and society couldn’t be more divergent.
tshine him/her. It is a constant competition between artists. But I will say that art is not like a game in a sense that art has no rules. There are no boundaries for art. For example, ‘Fountain’ by Duchamp. “Fountain is an example of what Duchamp called a ‘ready made’, an ordinary manufactured object designated by the artist as a work of art. It epitomises the assault on convention and good taste for which he and the Dada movement are best known”. The purpose of Relational Aesthetics is to explore art by fabricating moments or encounters. Bourriaud saw artists as, “facilitators rather than makers. He regarded art as information exchanged between the artist and the viewers. The artist, in this sense, gives audiences access to power and the means to change the world”.
ith the works the artists produced. Appropriation was the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them. “Appropriation artists wants the viewer to recognize the images they copy, and they hope that the viewer will bring all of his/her original associations with the image to the artist’s new context, be it a painting, a sculpture, a collage, a combine or an entire installation”.
