Definition: a feeling of profound respect for someone or something, honor or respect felt or shown, profound adoring awed respect
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
“If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.”
- Albert Schweitzer, The Philosophy of Civilization, (translated from German)
Banksy
Banksy's anonymous, subversive and witty street art, has a flair for anti-establishment movement. His works seems to prick our sensitivities and slightly confound the viewer at times. His is the reverence of rationality and honesty. Using quite irreverent techniques; juxtaposing disparate images or colors he heightens the simple clarity, celebrates the core nature of things, longing for the end of corruption and deceit.
Glastonbery
Donut
Punk Mum
Excerpt from “Street (il)legal: Q&A with Banksy”, By David Fear, "Time Out: New York"
Do you see Exit justifying the idea that street art is equal to what’s hanging in galleries?What’s more subversive: making socially conscious art that smacks people out of their stupor, or getting paid and becoming famous from it?
I wouldn’t want to be remembered as the guy who contaminated a perfectly legitimate form of protest art with money and celebrities. I do sometimes question whether I’m part of the solution or part of the problem. For example: I’m getting pressure from my distributor to take out billboards for the film. Now, I hate billboards; they’re just corporate vandalism. And yet last week I was thinking, Well…maybe a couple won’t hurt.… There’s obviously nothing wrong with selling your art—only an idiot with a trust fund would tell you otherwise. But it’s confusing to know how far you should take it. I don’t read books or listen to music made by people in their spare time, so I guess the vandalism I look at shouldn’t be any different. I want it performed by professionals at the highest level.
You must get a lot of flak for that opinion.
People ask, How do I sleep at night? Very well, actually. Because I’m an alcoholic.
Is it now harder to cultivate anonymity instead of fame?
In today’s culture: yes. I don’t know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public; they forget that invisibility is a superpower.
Street (il)legal: Q&A with Banksy, By David Fear, "Time Out: New York", Issue 759 : Apr 14–22, 2010
James Turrell
Turrell's work reveals a deep reverence for light. It's obvious he's spent tons of time getting to understand it, use it, have a relationship with it. His pieces seem as if he's painstakingly coaxed it to do what he wants. Like a bird eating out of his hand, any second light could fly off with a mind of its own. As opposed to an animal that a hunter has wrangled to the ground, left only with a still, cooling inanimate corpse, the light in Turrell's pieces seems to be alive and as curious about its viewer as the viewer is about it. Turrell seems to be obsessed with creating a relationship between his work and its viewers.
Bridget's Bardo, 2008, Begehbare installation
Wedgework: Milk Run III, 2002
Art:21 Interview, Season 1: 2001
ART:21: Why do you want to work with light?
TURRELL: Certainly when people describe near death experiences, they use a vocabulary of light. And also when we have dreams, a lucid dream that's in this color, that really is I think quite, quite astonishing. So, in thinking of light, if we can think about what it can do, and what it is, by thinking about itself, not about what we wanted it to do for other things, because again we've used light as people might be used, in the sense that we use it to light paintings. We use it to light so that we can read. We don't really pay much attention to the light itself. And so turning that and letting light and sound speak for itself is that you figure out these different relationships and rules. Now there's a lot to do with sensory synesthesia as well, in that the feeling of light in so many ways - you probably have seen or handled a lemon and suddenly felt the taste in your mouth. I mean it suddenly floods your mouth. The perception through vision actually creates the sensation in taste. The same thing can happen in sound and sound can change the perception of color.
We think of color as a thing that we're receiving. And if you go into one of the sky spaces, you can see that it's possible to change the color of the sky. Now, I obviously don't change the color of the sky, but I changed the context of vision. This is very similar to simultaneous contrast, where you see a yellow dot on a blue field, versus the yellow dot on a red field. Same yellow dot will be seen as two different colors. The same frequencies come into your eyes through a difference of context of vision, and are perceived differently. We actually create this color. Color is this response to what we are perceiving. So there isn't something out there that we perceive, we are actually creating this vision, and that we are responsible for it is something we're rather unaware of. So I actually like to do that, and I look at my art as being somewhere between the limits of perception of the creature that we are, that is - what we can actually perceive and not perceive, like the limits of hearing or seeing - and that of learned perception, or we could call prejudice perception. That's a situation where we have learned to perceive a certain way, but we're unaware of the fact that we learned it. So this can actually work against you sometimes. Working between those limits and kind of pointing them out is something I enjoy doing because it's not just the fact that you are bringing the cosmos down into the space where you live, but that your perception helps create that as well. So that you really are this co-creator of what you're seeing.
ART:21: Can works of art impart a sense of spirituality?
TURRELL: People talk about spiritual in art, and I think that's been the territory of artists all along. You know, if you go into the great cathedrals made by architects and through the light of artisans, you have created a sense of awe that often is greater than what people feel when they read, or any sort of rhetoric by the priesthood. This is something that can be very powerful in a visual sense. And so the artists have always been involved in this; this is not something new. And I think that sometimes it's easier for people to approach that portion of the spiritual through the visual than through organized religion, and perhaps that's true today. But I also want to say that the senses and gratification through the senses, while it can direct you toward the spiritual, is also something that will hold you from it fully. That's the limits of art, and so I don't think that art is terribly spiritual, but it's something that can be along that way, be a gesture toward that.
Art:21: James Turrell, Season 1:2001
Rinko Kawauchi
Rinko Kawauchi has said she's interested in things that have a short life-time: insects, flowers, clouds, children & elderly faces. This kind of quiet reverence is perfectly suited for this kind of work, and why I feel her work is so successful. She's not out colonizing with her third eye, collecting specimen for categorical analysis; she's a quiet observer, ready with her camera at all times, on the chance that different vectors of life will by chance meet in one place in one moment and she'll be there, snap the picture, and it'll all be over. Her work makes me feel lucky to have seen it, lucky that she was there to see it, and lucky that it happened in order to be seen at all. In the Schweitzer sense of the word, Rinko Kawauchi's reverence doesn't end with the life that each of those vectors belong to, but with the brief moments in which those vectors intermingle, quietly Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment.
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Interviews/quotes
"[Rinko] describes releasing the camera shutter as being as much a part of her life as drinking tea."
- Asahi Shinbun, 2010年08月02日http://mytown.asahi.com/kumamoto/news.php?k_id=44000131008020002
Rinko Kawauchi has been described as "both heartwarming and unsettling at the same time". Photographer Kishin Shinoyama said: “Anyone who thinks her photos are designed to have a healing effect or produce some degree of happiness, which is trendy now, is making a big mistake. Her pictures are fearful. They are cruel and erotic.”
Click Opera, September 1, 2005
Interview with PingMag: Mayalina
Miss Kawauchi, your photos bring me into a world of quiet contemplation, your camera captures the most intricate details of every day life, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary and revealing a lyrical rhythm to our daily lives and surroundings. Before I go into your motifs and motivation,may I start by asking you what cameras you use?
“My favourite camera is the Rolleiflex. The reason why I like the Rolleiflex so much is because every aspect of it, the soft quality of the lens, the feeling of it in my hand, the clicking of the shutter, feels just right. But I also use normal compact cameras as well because some things can only be taken with a compact camera. I love that moment when I feel something and press the shutter.”
- Interview with PingMag, August 11, 2006
Daikichi Amano
Daikichi Amano creates fantastical, theatrical sets and costumes, stunning, and yes, reverent. His mastery of the brilliant fantasy of eroticism could only be achieve if it was something he himself beleived, something that haunted him, and indeed were the fabric of his dreams. An interesting, further evidence of reverence in his work, none of the animals used in his work as wasted. They are eaten by the crew after the shoot.
Interview with Toro Magazine's Louise Bak, Noember 29, 2009
Q: I had heard of Zoot & Genant, sex performers from the Netherlands being injured when they tried to have sex with a live octopus. Have you felt any subjective challenges in your photo processes, involving sexuality and creatures?
A: Of course. This is a challenge to my personal curiosity. Cockroaches are my worst enemy. I get goosebumps just looking at one, but nothing prepared me for the sight of those black bugs squirming inside Miss Bliss’s mouth. I think that’s psychologically scarred me for the rest of my life. It truly repulsed me to the bone.
Q: Would your actresses and models need to undergo particular preparations to work with various forms?
A: Before shooting, I talk with actresses about which living things are used in movies. They just have to be mentally prepared for that.
Q: Is there any concern for hygiene? Garnering of information from veterinary sources?
A: Basically, I use ones sold for human consumption and they are germ-free. I have never had any hygiene troubles.
Q: You’ve mentioned that some creatures like the sea slug gives off a peculiar stench. Are you interested not only in the surfaces of your scenes, while also imparting a sense of what it would be like to be in erotic presence with such creatures?
A: I don't really want to let people know how it is, but people who watched my movies want to know how it feels and how it is like in details during shooting and ask me out of their curiosity. I have strong memories of all my works and it brands my mind with the smell in some cases. They have surprisingly strong vital energies, too. I think that the photography feels alive.
- Interview with Toro Magazine, Noevember 29, 2009
Amy Jenkins
Amy Jenkins' work focuses on the home domain. She truly reveres the home, and the characters that are found there. Pieces commemorate relationships that have ended and celebrate as new ones begin. Her use of scuplture as a "screen" to project her videos on further enhances this reverence, as the sculptural elements serve more as momento elements of home.
From the same water, 2009, projected video, stand
Ebb, 1995, projected video, miniature bathtub
"Miniature Awakenings", Jennifer Dalton reviews "Ebb" by Amy Jenkins for Performing Arts Journal
A miniature bathtub is lit from above, sitting on a low, tiled table in a dark room. The light and the sound of water splashing draw you towards the object, and as you approach it, you see the projected image of a woman bathing. At first, the bathtub is filled with water that is eerily tinted red. The nude figure slowly begins caressing herself. The movements of the woman, though fluid, seem apprehensive and tentative. Her hands approach her pubic area but seem too shy to explore further, as though she is afraid of what she might discover. A few minutes go by and the redness of the water condenses and apparently flows into the woman through her vagina. Thus fortified and empowered, she climbs out of the bathtub leaving the water clear, and walks out of the projection. The illusion of the image projected into the miniature tub and the accompanying sound are so convincing that when the woman stands, you expect to be greeted by not a real woman, but a real holographic apparition. You realize you've been teased with the idea of what is "real." But most of all, Amy Jenkins's video installation Ebb (1996) leaves you uncomfortably remembering how it felt to begin to discover your own body.
Trained as photographer, Jenkins began using video as a static element in her photographs in 1990 in a body of work called the Telerotic series. In many of these dark images, a television screen cast dim light on one or two naked human forms. The photographs juxtaposed a video screen image--often of an eye--with partial bodies engaged in vague acts, not explicit but unmistakably intimate. In this work she spoke to the increasing conflation of private and public and our individual and societal fantasies about being watched.
- "Miniature Awakenings", Performing Arts Journal, PAJ 56 (Volume 19, Number 2), May 1997
Takagi Masakatsu
Takagi Masakatsu gets most of his inspiration from growing up in Kyoto, Japan and the nature he finds there. His reverence for light, family, childhood, the countryside, and the innocence of youth is clearly evident in his work.
Light Pool, 2006
Pia #12, 2001
"Kyoto POP Artist Speaks Through Light & Shadow", Interview with Hanami Web, July 26, 2006
"When I first started making videos, I was always reacting to light. I was obsessed with light, and captured everything with light", the Kyoto artist said in the beginning of the interview.
Takagi Masakatsu travels around the world and records people's everyday lives, and when he returns to Japan, he molds the recordings into an aesthetical multimedia work that moves the audience in all levels.
Indeed, Takagi's works reflect light and shadow, white and dark in human beings and society. Human or animal forms often emerge in his videos, and dissolve into abstract colors and shapes. Music and video are having interactive conversation - constantly sensitive and changing. Takagi stops audience to listen and see the sublime and gentle psychedelics - created with such a fantastic artistic sense.
His video works are truly amazing, both with technique and content. Screen turns into a moving painting of watercolor and mixed technique - sublime, relaxed and so fantastically fresh and stylish.
Questioning and thinking about relationship between city and nature is one of Takagi's themes, as well as wondering the humanity and also the inevitable dark side of people. His works are dreamy but still have the cutting edge of the reality - like in fantastic video of Birdland, where bird shapes appear to wires. Perhaps the wires symbol the Tokyo's street scene (where you can see those hanging wires hanging almost everywhere). Takagi is often called as "multimedia documentarian" or "renaissance man of our times".
- "Kyoto POP Artist Speaks Through Light & Shadow", Hanami Web, July 26, 2006
A fantastic profile piece on him-
Know Hope
Getting back to street art, with a different perspective, Isreali street artist, Know Hope, pastes up scenes of characters making connections, reaching out to each other, and the viewer to build bonds that will create sympathy. The undestanding of people's need for connection, companionship, shows a reverence for humanity. He's quite young, I hope he contiues on with his world view and call for hope and peace.
The Things We Hold Dear, 2010
No Hard Feelings, 2007
Young, thoughtful and determined to share his message, Know Hope has garnered much attention over the past year with his paste ups and in situ installations as well as successful group shows in the U.K., NY, L.A. and Norway.
Know Hope's work is based on the need of momentary connections we all search for in our everyday lives... "and when we can get our heavy hearts to love lightly; this house of cards will become a home."
- Anno Domini Gallery, October 2008
"What i like about the lanterns is that it deals with the frail temporary aspect of putting up art in street.if i take the best case scenario (that nobody takes the piece after a short while and there are no extreme winds or rain) then the longest life span of these pieces will be that of the candles, which is probably just a few hours. therefore, when someone runs into it on the street they know that it was placed there not so long ago and they, by coincidence, got there in the small time frame that the piece was "active", hopefully giving them the feeling that it was placed there especially for them, and maybe guiding them,following them home and subtly lighting up their way."
- "KNOW HOPE's Beautiful Candlelit Street Art", Wooster Collective, JUNE 5, 2007
Kumi Yamashita
Use of light, shadow; seems like light and dark have become bedfellows with Kumi Yamashita, and she's gotten to know them quite well. While the simplicity of the concept is easy to grasp, Yamashita has certainly mastered it. All kinds of reverence seem to be at play here, but perhaps most of all is reverence for storytelling. As is often the case with street art, in one image of light and dark, Yamashita reveals just enough of a story to hook the viewer. An intriguing technique, masterful execution and a touching story.
City View, 2003
Clouds, 2005
"The Mysterious Shadows That Lie Behind Everyday Objects", Simone Preuss for Environmental Graffiti
Simple? Not really. Says the Japanese-born, now New York-based artist about her motivation:
“Through my work I wish to remind ourselves of how we preconceive what is around and inside us. It is easy to passively turn to prepared information. Knowledge, ideas, and values are too often accepted without questioning.”
Call it visual trickery or manipulation, but the beauty of Yamashita’s objects lies in their simplicity, symbolized by the materials she uses: paper, wood, aluminum and most importantly, light.
Though born and raised in Japan, Kumi Yamashita has spent much of her adult life abroad, starting with a high-school exchange to the US in 1984. She then graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1994 from the College of Arts in Washington and with a Master of Fine Arts in 1999 from the Glasgow School of Art in the UK. Since then, she has taken part in close to 30 group exhibitions and was featured in more than 10 solo exhibitions around the world. She’s also won numerous awards for her work.
- Enviromental Graffiti
Pretty epic video of her guest appearance on a Japanese TV show-
Chunky Move
CHunky Move combines body kinetics with digital manipulation in a remarkable stage performance. A deep understanding and admiration for digital processes and the human locamotion is on display in each of their pieces.
Mortal Engine, 2008
Glow (excerpt), 2006
"Humanity meets technology (successfully, for a change)", Merilyn Jackson, Boston Street Review, September 27, 2010
Mortal Engine provided many mesmerizing moments between the dancers and the shadowy video that swathed their bodies, either in solo or in combination with others. These shadows began by outlining the dancers’ splayed limbs on the steeply raked stage like crime scene chalk in reverse. They shimmered like coal dust on the pale moon of the stage. Panels in the stage opened from time to time to create a vertical plane against which dancers moved as if they were graphite particles magnetized on a page.
The themes included mirror images, attraction and repulsion, and images that suggested a regression to the protozoan stage of life. In one duet, the woman dancer experiences a kind of electro infusion from which she cannot escape until her male counterpart covers her with his body and takes some of the infusion into himself, diffusing its power. In the most riveting scene, one dancer’s shadow seems to crystallize and shatter into thousands of small fragments that cascade down the raked stage, draining the life out of her.
Connectivity, both organic and electric, was another motif, with dancers joined only by their forefingers, lit with a pinpoint spot that, as it diminished to darkness, suggested a disconnect.
The soundscape consisted of many noises we are accustomed to hearing in this age: the beeping of trucks driving in reverse, Velcro unripping. But it was the light, especially the neon green light that limned the dancers’ bodies near the end that gave the Mortal Engine its otherworldly atmosphere.
- "Humanity meets technology (successfully, for a change)", Boston Street Review, September 27, 2010
Jonsí
Jonsí's latest body of work, "Go" a collaboration with composer Nico Muhley brims with energy, vitality, and honesty. Jonsi writes about youth, innocence, growing up, relationships beginning and ending. Another masterful storyteller, another artist who's work drips with reverence for life.. which brings up full circle, back to Albert Schweitzer, and although he might have had the idea leap to his mind observing a group of hippos in an African river, I think he'd be proud to see how some of these artists approach life and reverence in their own way.
Animal Arithmetic, 2010
Listen to any piece you'd like from this body of work.
Pitchfork Review
Jónsi Birgisson doesn't do small. As the lead singer of Sigur Rós, he's starred in several of this century's most epic songs; with their penchant for instrumental swells, feedback, and weight-of-humanity wails, the Icelandic band has practically set a new, near unreachable height for melodramatic art rock. But after perfecting this style on 2005's Takk, Jónsi and his mates have had some trouble finding a way out from beneath the burden of big. Their last album, 2008's Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, tried to temper the bombast but occasionally got bogged down in aimless balladry. Jónsi's subsequent Riceboy Sleeps LP with Alex Somers offered largely voiceless ambiance, akin to Quentin Tarantino directing a silent chamber drama. But with his solo debut, Jónsi fights huge with huger.
Helping to realize the mini symphonies in the singer's head are two key collaborators: pianist, composer, and arranger Nico Muhly-- who has become the de facto solution for artists like Grizzly Bear and Antony and the Johnsons when in need of unique, showy flourishes-- and Finnish percussionist Samuli Kosminen, who can be seen literally banging on old suitcases in an in-studio video on Jónsi's website. The conspirators balance well; though Muhly's manicured arrangements could have come off stiff in this context, their combination with Kosminen's unbridled wallops brings the orchestration dizzily whirling forth. But what truly elevates Go is Jónsi's voice, which still has the ability to stun a decade after Agætis Byrjun introduced most listeners to his alien bleats.
- Pitchfork
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