Amanda Wojick’s presentation was pretty incredible. She really brought sculpture forwards for me, which must be a feat; taking something that should really be experienced in three dimensions, in space, and communicating it through a flat projection slide. I personally really enjoyed the works of Yayoi Kusama and Petah Coyne. But what I got out of this presentation was mostly a vague description of what a sculpture really is compared to a painting or a drawing. A sculpture is defined by its opposite, by not being flat. So, technically, you cannot fully experience a sculpture by looking at a flat representation, or even just looking at it from one point across the room. In my opinion, sculpture has been kind of perverted by the art community, or perhaps it has been that way all along. A sculpture is supposed to be a three-dimensional object in space and to fully understand and appreciate the work you need to interact with it. And yet, you are not allowed to touch it or even get within a foot of the piece. Seeing a sculpture in real life, and interacting with it from different perspectives, is so much more. You build the vision of the sculpture in your head. If you fully understand a three-dimensional object, you know how it smells, feels, how heavy it is. You know what it looks like from the back and from the side and from a distance. You become really familiar with it. Something similar to this is the experience of becoming familiar with your own face or the faces of your friends. You know what they look like from every angle and your understanding of them is considerably different from the single photo you see of someone in a newspaper. For example, imagine looking at a photo of the ocean or the Sears Tower (Willis Tower, whatever). You cannot fully comprehend the incredible magnitude of these objects unless you see them yourself. Imagine looking out from space at the planet! You cannot get that extraordinary enormity from a two-dimensional photograph. I think that an important part of ‘seeing’ is experiencing, being there and really seeing something and understanding it.
“The Observer looks at the Object” is, as discussed, a kind of ridiculous statement. A person is never just looking at something, you see it, label it, judge it, like it, hate it, are attracted to it, are repulsed, all mostly subconsciously. James Elkins writes an incredible stream of consciousness, illustrating the process so many of us take for granted: seeing. An interesting thing he mentioned was the violence of looking, the deeply personal and harmful way people ‘see’. What this reminded me of was the way people categorize. Everyone does it. They see something and have to put it into a category. For example, you see a balloon and you classify it into different containers: round, light, red, childish, latex, etc. Or you could see a person and put them into different categories: fat, thin, feminine, masculine, white, black, asian, intelligent, stupid, young, old, attractive. I think this is what violent seeing is. Viewing someone and taking that information you have gathered and making judgements about that person. Of course, this is the only way a person can actually comprehend the world, by putting labels on things. This is a bird, this is a machine, this is food, etc.
What I noticed right away in Richard Serra’s work was the massive, heavy, masculine aura of those intense planes of steel. Works like Charlie Brown and Torqued Eclipses really are very very imposing and they present themselves like that in the space they are in. You can walk in and around Charlie Brown and be intimidated in almost the same way you feel going into a large government building or a cathedral. I like how he relates his work multiple times to being in the presence of a ship. When I was in England, I went to Portsmouth and saw the HMS Victory and if you have never seen a ship up close, it is an incredible experience: completely overwhelming and powerful. Sculpture has the ability to take you up as it transforms a space. Louise Bourgeois, on the other hand, is incredibly light, dreamy, ‘sensitive’, ‘discrete’ and feminine. Her work is so light it brings you to a dream-like place that acts like a balloon, taking you up to a higher place. Even the pieces If Richard Serra’s work is dark and intimidating, Louise Bourgeois is light and dreamy. The ability to manipulate a space so magically is a byproduct only of sculpture.
So, to sum things up, I want to give an example of an incredibly talented artist manipulating a space, and thus, manipulating a person. Frank Lloyd Wright, as you might have known, is an architect with a gift for manipulating space, similar to the way Richard Serra manipulates space with his work. A couple of summers ago, I visited Taliesin (East) in Spring Green, WI. Taliesin was Frank Lloyd Wright’s summer home and studio and is a beautiful work of art, to say the least. On our tour, I found it amazing the amount of thought Wright put into manipulating walls, ceilings, windows and the negative space between them to make the rooms come alive. This window was put in this particular place because it gave you a very particular view of the valley. There is a certain amount of stairs here and this wall is here because of this, and etc. What I thought was especially interesting was a space just in front of the theater/performance hall. Just in front of the entrance doors, the ceiling was slowed low, near your head, and gently sloped up, outward towards a foyer. The tour guide mentioned that Frank Lloyd Wright did this on purpose to manipulate a person to move towards the foyer and not to stay in the dark cramped area. People feel uncomfortable in smaller, darker places, so Frank Lloyd Wright used that to move people around the space he created. I do not have any photos of that space, but here are some photos from Taliesin to get an idea.
I got a variety of different ideas from the presentation by Anya Kavarkis on Tuesday. She brought up many concepts, but what I found two things especially interesting. On one hand, she mentioned that a major part of an artwork and what it means is the production of the piece, or how it was made. You can see this especially in the work of Robert Gober. He hand sculpts pieces that are traditionally produced in a factory by machines. This juxtaposition brings the artist back into the equation and highlights the making of the product instead of the product itself.
Another interesting idea is the production of something 'precious'. As artists, they should be creating something unique and precious. So with the works of Allan McCollum for example, it is interesting to see that although each work of "Over 100,000 Individual Works" is technically unique and one of a kind, you still see the overwhelming similarities and assembly-line style production of the work as a whole. How can something that is produced in such large quantities 'precious' or 'unique'?
John Feodorov also had interesting things to say. I enjoyed his somewhat sarcastic and yet sincere approach to his upbringing and the juxtaposition of religions he experienced. He brought up an especially interesting argument in the simplification and the production of sacred objects. When you look at a religious or sacred object, how it is made is irrelevant because it supposed to be all about what it represents and what the object means. But Feordorov, like Robert Gober, puts the artist back into the equation by putting objects, generally plastic, easily produced children's toys, into religious connotations. Viewing Feordorov's art, you are reminded of the artist behind most everything and also of the interesting connotations of religious objects and their apparent mass production. It reminds me of Cai Guo-Qiang's 'Reflections', where the broken religious statues were all piled together. It is hard to consider a statue an icon of religion when you know it has been mass produced in a factory with millions of others.
Generally, when I make these outside connections, I attempt to pick something obscure, but this time, I'm going to forget that and introduce you to Andy Warhol, who relishes the mass produced preciousness. Andy Warhol's art is screen printed, which can be easily duplicated, and shows produced or easily recognized idols such as a Campbell's soup can or Marilyn Monroe.
Earlier in this class, we have focused on mediums and uses for art, but this week one notices a shift. An interesting topic that I thought was relevant to this week’s many resources was the role of the artist. An artist, or creator, plays an obviously important part in the manufacturing the work, but just as important is for whom the artist is creating for: the viewer. The idea of true art plays around this holy trinity of the artist, the viewer and the work of art itself. Firstly, the relationship between the artist and the viewer is defined by the communication. The communication, the heart of all relationships is the work of art itself. But what Roland Barthes believes is that once the artist creates something they “die”. The artist does not matter anymore because the art stands for itself now.
What I thought was the most interesting about Kiki Smith was the dark vagueness of her artwork. She creates dark, mysterious pieces that hint at morbid connotations, but leaves the rest up to interpretation. She, as an artist, creates the art and pushes it in a direction allowing the viewer to take it the rest of the way. Kiki Smith artfully designs holes that can be filled.
Another thing I found interesting was the way I went about learning about her. I have never seen any of Kiki Smith’s work before and I began by going through the interactive website. Viewing her works, very carefully categorized and explained, I imagined her work to have very dark, very dismal meaning. Her subjects, things like graphic and messy body parts, evoked an uncomfortable feeling. Then, I watched the Art:21 video and got to see the artist herself and her process and what she felt about her artwork, my view of her work changed dramatically. I had imagined her as this grizzled old woman who hated everyone and only wanted to draw dead animals, or something, and yet she is this outgoing woman who makes her art not to shock or horrify people. Kiki Smith begins with an idea and lets other people establish their own meaning.
But does that mean she is dead? If I did not know about Kiki Smith and only let the artwork speak for itself, would I interpret it differently than how I would if I knew where she was coming from or what she was trying to say?
Our speaker this week also mentioned an interesting topic of the piece standing by itself. She mentioned the rolled up snow balls transported from I think it was Scotland and how they happened to be placed in front of the BP headquarters in London. It was assumed that the snowballs were placed to form a political comment about the melting icecaps and global crisis. It turned out, however, that this was not the artist intention at all. He just wanted to observe this natural process and enjoy its aesthetics. So does the artist matter in this scenario? He did not intend for the snowball to have political meaning, but most viewers took it that way due to the context provided. The meaning of the piece changes drastically with or without the artist’s intentions. Does Roland Barthe’s thesis apply here?
In William Kentridge’s work, the content is very social and political, generally stemming from his home country South Africa dealing with the apartheid and other social events. As an American viewer, one needs to be aware, in order to appreciate the political depth of his work, of William Kentridge’s background. You cannot really understand the connotations if you, like most of us and myself included, are not very aware of the political and social reactions to events like the apartheid. So does Roland Barthe’s thesis apply here either? Without the artist and the artist’s history, the viewer would not get the full story and could not fully appreciate the artwork.
So, in the end, Roland Barthe brings up an interesting topic: once the artwork is created, does the artist die? Does the artist even matter anymore? I think it does, but to a certain extent. The artist must create the work and present it in a context. This context is just as important as the artwork itself, I believe, as it helps direct the viewer to understanding the piece as part of a larger picture.
An example of art needing context, needing the artist to help explain, is the work of Marina Abramović. Last May in 2010, I visited the MOMA and saw her work, especially The Artist is Present, in which she sat at a table and museum-goers could sit down across from her and stare at her. It was all very intense and confusing for me, because I had never really been exposed to performance art before and this was definitely performance art at its peak. But what really struck me was her Balkan Erotic Epic, which, without context is very confusing. It features Balkan tradition ceremonies of women running around a field, lifting up their dresses and men humping the ground. I was very very confused until I read those convenient little placards. Apparently, these are ceremonies involving rain and the crop. If it rains too much and the crops were flooding, the women would lift their skirts to the rain, asking it to stop. If the crops were not growing or the food was not plentiful, the men would lay on the ground naked and essentially hump the ground. As you can see, context is very important in this case, as is the artist's Balkan history.
An example of art needing context, needing the artist to help explain, is the work of Marina Abramović. Last May in 2010, I visited the MOMA and saw her work, especially The Artist is Present, in which she sat at a table and museum-goers could sit down across from her and stare at her. It was all very intense and confusing for me, because I had never really been exposed to performance art before and this was definitely performance art at its peak. But what really struck me was her Balkan Erotic Epic, which, without context is very confusing. It features Balkan tradition ceremonies of women running around a field, lifting up their dresses and men humping the ground. I was very very confused until I read those convenient little placards. Apparently, these are ceremonies involving rain and the crop. If it rains too much and the crops were flooding, the women would lift their skirts to the rain, asking it to stop. If the crops were not growing or the food was not plentiful, the men would lay on the ground naked and essentially hump the ground. As you can see, context is very important in this case, as is the artist's Balkan history.
John Park brought up some incredibly poignant issues that are completely relevant to all of our lives right now. Digital technology: is it good? Bad? How can we use it without becoming mindless sheep? I would like to touch on few of the problems with technology that Mr. Park mentioned on Tuesday.
First off, Mr. Park mentioned the problem of the screen. How can a glowing, flat, 2-D object communicate to a real person? Even though graphics are getting better and better every year and programs are being more and more powerful in order to create the most life-like images, it is still not a tangible thing: you cannot hold it in your hand or interact with it. The answer to this problem is not that much of a stretch, actually. Programmers and artists are coming together to make art interactive and to move off the screen and into space. John Park mentioned an initiative that I was actually familiar with: The Fun Theory. This company is fighting the boundaries of digital art, bringing it into the real world and interacting with real people. With projects like the World’s Deepest Bin and the Speed Camera Lottery and the famous Piano Staircase, they are reaching out to people and letting them be a part of the technology and being a part of the art. David Byrne (one of my favorite people in the whole world) also accomplished this with his Playing the Building. That organ allowed the audience to be more than just an audience, they were a part of the art. They became the artists. Digital art has the ability to bring art out from behind the scenes and out from behind the curtain to the masses. When the masses can be a part of the art, they are interacting with it and creating as well. Creating is not just an exclusive action for artists, anyone can be a creator*.
Or do we want to completely disengage? Complete interaction does not always have to be physical interaction. What Janet Cardiff has accomplished is complete immersion. She brings the viewer, who is often more than just a viewer, completely out of reality and into an amazing world that is beautiful and frightening at the same time. I personally love her installations and her walks just because it transports me away from whatever is going on and into this mystical and emotionally charged world. I would love to take one of her walks, but unfortunately, she does not have one for the U of O campus. Maybe I should make one.
This brings me to another problem that Mr. Park mentioned: the zombie apocalypse. Moving into the digital age, there is a looming threat of becoming totally plugged in, completely tuned out. People are afraid of becoming completely dehumanized with the rise of powerful digital technology. So how do we keep digital technology from becoming completely controlling? Some artists have began to put the human back into the equation. “I Want You To Want Me” works by putting the people back into the art. This project is all about the people and how they work and feel. Another project by Jonathon Harris and Sep Kamvar is We Feel Fine which is a real time collection of lines from blogs written by people all over the world, but always beginning with the words “I feel…”. The result is an intimate and exceptional feeling of being a part of everyone in the whole world. And, optimistically, the most used word has always been “better”. Paul Pfieffer also puts the human into the situation by taking the people out. His art has the interesting double punch of having the art be able to speak for itself, but also having the art show off the craftsmanship. Sometimes, with digital art, it is so easy to lose the artist and to imagine everything as the work of a faceless machine, but with Pfieffer’s work, you can see the workmanship, the ‘brushstrokes’ as it were.
So while the digital age seems synonymous with apocalypse, this might not be the case. The world is filled with incredible talented, rule-breaking and creative people who will use tools to not just make but create. I say here that I had two visual examples but not only did our professor take one, but both of them. I was going to use the Virtual Haircut and was sadly beaten to it. I was also going to use We Feel Fine, but I think using the same artists is kind of cheating. So I am not really sure what to do right now. For now, I will rely on We Feel Fine, seeing as this is due in 20 minutes, but if I think of anything else, I will definitely update.
* This actually ties into another heavy debate going on right now. Is anyone with a camera an artist? Is a girl who takes black and white macro pictures of lawn chairs really creating? What is art? High Art? Low Art? This is a debate for another time.
Week 5: Craig Hickman vs. Alfredo Jarr vs. Errol Morris
1 comments Posted by christine madsen at 11:37 PMIf Craig Hickman’s overwhelming presentation showed us anything, it was how hugely diverse the world of photography is. I feel that because the use of a camera is so relatively straight forward, things like technique or skill (sometimes, of course) may take a backseat to things like experimentation and interpretation. You can communicate so much and so many different things through photography because of its ambiguity and potential. Alfredo Jarr could only communicate that vast amount of emotion through a photograph. Otherwise, the medium would distract from the idea. Alfredo Jarr works with such emotionally heavy material that it could only be communicated through the medium of photography. If it were a sculpture or a painting, the abstract emotions would be much more difficult to communicate and the medium itself would distract the viewer. To most people, photography is not seen so much as art, but evidence. So when a photograph is used in a work of art, or as a work of art, whatever the artist is trying to communicate is much easier to absorb because of the familiarity and the believability of a photograph.
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| Frances and her fairy friends |
And yet believability is not so straightforward. People can look at a photograph in two ways. On one hand, you can look at a photograph as the ultimate truth: as evidence. You take a photo of something to prove that it exists or that it happened, you do not draw a quick sketch or paint a picture of it. On the other hand, photography is just as easily manipulated as any other medium. Ever since the beginning, people have been using photography to fool the eye, such as the infamous Cottingley Fairies taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, cousins aged 10 and 16 respectively. And of course now, there is the huge being of Photoshop influencing photography today. What is there to believe?
With Errol Morris’s interviews I got an idea of what is really the largest problem people have with photography currently: believability. Photography is supposed to be the ultimate truth. People expect photography to be entirely real and 100% accurate; to be used as solid evidence of a particular event or person or location. But that is not necessarily what photography is. So when images like the photo of the four bombs surfaces and then are debunked, people are not really sure what to believe anymore. The super clear crisp photos that are featured in newspapers and magazines (especially not magazines) are hardly ever the real deal and people are starting to get a feel for that. And the more believable a photograph is, the more emotional it can be. For example, if I see a photograph of a model in a magazine, I can bemoan my less than stellar complexion, but the photograph is relatively unimpressionable. I will forget about it in a matter of minutes. But if a photograph is the true thing, the ultimate in evidence and it portrays something emotionally three-dimensional, I will remember it for a while.
The photograph is a very powerful thing. It can take something very vague and hard to grasp like sorrow or beauty and can document it so easily. It can communicate heavy, dark things like in the work of Alfredo Jarr, but it can also convey playfulness and spontaneity found in the work of Craig Hickman. It can even find that invisible medium between negativity and optimism found in the works of JR. This optimism is especially important. If one attempts to combat the world’s problems by sharing them in only a negative and depressing light, people will give up. Being an aware person and to successfully share that awareness through art is difficult enough, but to share it and still be optimistic for the future is another thing altogether.
Something I found on a favorite blog of mine, seemed pretty relevant to the discussion of the close line of believability in photography. The works of Philipp Schaerer are, in fact, not un-touched photographs, but digital compilations of photographed textures cute and pasted together to form architectural structures. In the artist’s own words “„Bildbauten“ deals with the effect and the claim to credibility of images of architecture that appear to be photographs. It further questions the medium “photograph” as a documentary piece of evidence depicting reality. Frontal views of fictional architectures serve as an example. By means of their exaggerated and orchestrated way of representation, they model themselves on the object-like appearance and the formal language of contemporary architecture in a rather ironic way. All images try to reproduce a reality. They are not a photograph; instead, they were newly designed and constructed from scratch by means of image synthesis and digital image editing.”
The making-of is quite intriguing too.
Week 4: Sarah Rabinowitz vs Cai Guo-Qiang vs Anne Hamilton
1 comments Posted by christine madsen at 10:52 AMFibers is definitely a remarkable subject for me, art wise. It has been a part of my life since I was born. My mother sews and crochets and, in the past five or so years, has taken up spinning, dying, felting and quilt making. My great aunt also spins, felts, sews, dyes and knits. As for myself, I have picked up some rudimentary knitting, felting, sewing and spinning skills myself. So I would like to think that I appreciate and understand the work and construction that goes on behind a piece made by a fiber artist. On the other hand, I never really considered it ‘art’ until my mother began to be more involved in a community of fiber artists. Accompanying her to fiber shows and conventions, I began to start to see fiber being manipulated in ways that could hardly be considered just a craft. It is difficult to say that some pieces like the free-standing, sexually charged fiber sculptures of Claire Zeisler could be considered crafts, but what about the scarf that I knitted four years ago? That lumpy bit of knotted fiber, I would not consider art… But what about scribbles of crayon I made when I was four? Art or craft?
It was discussed in class earlier today about the context of a piece of art. As a peer mentioned, she could be going through the kitsch-y part of a Goodwill store and everything will look like crap, but if we were to take something from that pile and put it in a gallery next to other pieces, and it just might be considered art. Fiber arts definitely enter into this through the debate on whether or not it should be considered an ‘art’ or a ‘craft’. While it is not the only element, context is definitely something that separates ‘high art’ from ‘low art’. Cai Guo-Qiang mentions this when he talks about his “Reflection” installation. The ceramic statues, that would have been considered deities if not for their ‘imperfections’, are considered garbage. If one of those statues were simply taken from the pile of broken ceramic and placed on a pedestal or onto someone’s shrine, it would be worshiped instead of thrown away. While the idea of context makes sense to me, it is actually kind of frustrating because the piece itself does not change between Goodwill and the gallery. So why should it matter where the piece is located? I do not feel like I can fully answer that right now. So I am going to move in a different direction.
Fiber has a large sense of community. Historically, things like quilts would be made by a large group of people. Works such as Wind-Up Houston and Wind-Up Chicago, organized by Anne Wilson, are produced and created by a group of people, including our guest presenter Sarah Rabinowitz, and borders on the performance art, but it is the fiber that ties everyone together. Also consider Cai Guo-Qiang’s gunpowder drawings. These drawings take many people to put together and execute, really emphasizing the community coming together to create something. People working together can easily convey a message. The Knitta Please group for example, brings people together through the power of the internet to beautify their urban landscapes. And fiber lends itself to communication very well, I think, because it is so easily relatable. Everyone has intimate experience with fibers, whether it be through the clothes on your back or the sheets you sleep on or the rugs you walk on or the curtains you pull back every morning. Everyone knows quilts and scarves and tapestries and carpets. So when artists use fiber art to convey messages, it generally makes it much easier to communicate that message. For example, in Anne Hamilton’s “Myein” installation, raised Braille dots spelling out lines from a poem catch bright red dye falling in thin sheets making something that was invisible, visible. The use of things like dye and the illusion of a curtain successfully and beautifully, in my opinion, communicate something that is difficult to put into words. Because she used elements that were familiar to the viewer, it allowed that something to be absorbed that much more easily. In a more tangible way, artists such as Cat Mazza are bringing people together to create socially and politically charged pieces out of yarn. The “Nike Blanket Petition” not only brought together that sense of community that I mentioned earlier, it also brought about communication about sweatshops and worker abuse but by using a medium that is so comforting and familiar.Personally, I feel that it would be a mistake to consider something with so much communicable power and beauty to be anything less that art. Pieces like the incredible Out of the Forest are crafted so beautifully and with so much attention to detail and emotions are perfect examples of this. But where is the line drawn? Is there a line? While it is definitely something I cannot answer right now, I hope to be able to have a slightly greater idea further along in this class.
I leave with some examples of fiber arts being taken beyond their constraints as a craft and into something a little bigger.
Here is a music video for the song Like it Or Not by Architecture in Helsinki. It’s a stop-motion of happy and fun adventures of some coconuts in love. It is just something a little beyond the stereotypical embroideries of cats and such.
Here is a music video for the song Like it Or Not by Architecture in Helsinki. It’s a stop-motion of happy and fun adventures of some coconuts in love. It is just something a little beyond the stereotypical embroideries of cats and such.
I also would like to show the work of Amandine Alessandra. She uses photography and fiber to communicate something a little more abstract. She uses something so tangible and yet discusses something very unclear. The juxtaposition is what makes it even better.
Week 3 : Michael A Salter vs. Understanding Comics vs. Chris Coleman
0 comments Posted by christine madsen at 9:24 PMThis week we got a little more specific in looking at a particular element at the art of contemporary art: the icon. The icon is everywhere: in advertising, in graffiti, in labels, in logos, in comics, in cartoons, etc. Why does the icon matter? What artistic weight does the icon pull? What is an icon anyway?
Essentially, an icon is the message of an artist, stripped to the bare technical and simplified minimum. The icon’s goal is to say as much as it can in very little. Michael Salter’s art demonstrates this in its simplicity and yet very poignant statements. His characters provide social commentary however deceptively minimal their design is. In Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, we see another perspective on this. He states that “by stripping down an image to its essential ‘meaning’, an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t” (McCloud 30). This statement accurately explains the power of the icon. An artist such as Mr. Salter can take away elements and details of a piece of art that would otherwise only distract from the true meaning and really project an idea or agenda or whatever they wanted. In a realistic work, the audience gets caught up in the technical design and details and is distracted from the true meaning. You see this use of iconography in cartoons, comics, art and, especially, logos. Logos are particularly adept at using this technique of agenda sharing. Simple design choices can convey the purpose of the company and perhaps a little of what their company means and stands for. Mr. Salter mentioned a few seasoned experts in the field such as Paul Rand (who designed the logos for IBM, ABC, and UPS) and Saul Bass (who designed the logos of United Airlines, Dixie and the Girl Scouts of America as well as many famous movie posters and intros). Here are a few that I think really stand out from other logos in this way.
Another element of logos that I believe is becoming more and more relevant in contemporary art today is using familiar icons in unfamiliar settings. Both Messrs. Michael Salter and Chris Coleman use this cacophony in their work. In Mr. Coleman’s The Magnitude of the Continental Divides and Informational Divides he uses icons that are familiar to us: people and graphics from safety manuals and boy scout books. However, he turns these icons on their heads. These icons are supposed to give us hope and calm us in the possibility of an emergency, but in these animations and sculpture, they are presented in an intense and slightly horrifying way. Salter, on the other hand, illustrates characters and objects in a style also familiar to us: people and items we find painted on windows and printed on packaging. These icons generally are intended to sooth the viewer in purchasing something, but in Mr. Salter’s work, they are seducing the audience into a crass and adolescent world. I really appreciate this social commentary and I think it is exceptionally relevant now, in a time of constant bombardment of icons and characters and images always trying to sway us one way or another. To bastardize these characters is to reveal the true nature and the invasive purpose of this relentless barrage.
Something that I feel really exemplifies this idea of extreme simplification in design, yet complete retention of meaning is the idea of the simplified movie poster. This idea, inspired heavily by the work of Saul Bass, an artist Mr. Salter mentioned in his presentation, has been passed around a few contemporary artists and is not only limited to movie posters. The goal is to simplify the design of the poster to contain the fewest elements and yet the movie should be easily recognized. While I have seen many examples of this particle idea, I feel the artist Olly Moss best portrays it.
Laura Vandenburgh’s lecture was intriguing. Most art classes I have had in the past have put all the emphasis on much older art. My last art class was an art history class ending with Roman sculpture and beginning with cave paintings. So to begin to have an insight into modern and contemporary art (I understand now that there is a distinction) is not only new and interesting, but much more relevant and applicable.
I actually garnered a few things from her speech. The one that stood out the most to me at first was how the essential element of drawing was line. Drawing is line. And not necessarily the physical remnants of a pencil or pen left over on the piece of paper or stretch of canvas. It is the act of putting a mark on a surface. That is why the sculpture of the line suspended off the canvas (name? artist? I did not catch it) and Impenetrable by Mona Hatoum can, and should, be considered 'drawings'. They still incorporate and rely on line, they just take the extra step and transport the lines off the page and into physical space. That physical space is the canvas for these line sculptures.However, when I came back to write this and I began thinking more about some of the deeper and more philosophical things that Professor Vandenburgh may have indirectly mentioned, another thing that resounded for me was the fact that drawing is where art begins. So many incredible things began as sketches. I take back what I said about drawing being where art begins- it can be where anything begins: machines, buildings, paintings, sculptures, essays, speeches, inventions, anything. Incredible things like the Sistine Chapel Ceiling began with a pencil and Michelangelo’s hand.
But finally, and I think most importantly, I believe Professor Vandenburgh was attempting to communicate the importance of the artist. As the Modern Art Theory illustrated, art theorists can hardly agree on anything. But, if they must agree on something, it has to be that art would not be anything without the artist. Nothing can be created without someone behind it. And this was something that also stood out in Margaret Kilgallen. Her bold and graphic style generally lends itself to more of a digital media, in which drawing straight and perfect lines would be much easier to create. However, Margaret Kilgallen does not want her art to be “easy”.
I like things that are handmade and I like to see people's hand in the world, anywhere in the world; it doesn't matter to me where it is. And in my own work, I do everything by hand. I don't project or use anything mechanical, because even though I do spend a lot of time trying to perfect my line work and my hand, my hand will always be imperfect because it's human. And I think it's the part that's off that's interesting, that even if I'm doing really big letters and I spend a lot of time going over the line and over the line and trying to make it straight, I'll never be able to make it straight. From a distance it might look straight, but when you get close up, you can always see the line waver. And I think that's where the beauty is. – Margaret Kilgallen (ART:21)
Essentially, you can see Margaret Kilgallen in her work. In the rise of digital art and photography in the past fifty years, the artist is starting to disappear behind the artwork. With photography, you cannot necessarily see the evidence of a human hand making the piece. The same is generally the case with digital art. Human flaws are being avoided by relying on computer programs for perfection, but there is a sacrifice of humanity.* Kilgallen strives to move away from this and really put herself and her humanity and flaws into her work, not solely in her depictions of strong heroic females but in her method: a very precise and clean style generally reserved for digital mediums.
Another interesting thing I particularly enjoyed about Margaret Kilgallen is the flatness of her drawings. Her style was having everything "flatly painted". You see a lot of that flatness is contemporary graphic design today, especially in modern logos. This, I believe, is just another aspect of line. Instead of a line being a thin ‘line’ as it is generally defined (as in a pen drawing a single line on a paper), it is the edge of a shape (as in the border between a shape and the background).
The Modern Art Theory was actually rather eye opening for me, no matter how difficult it was to read during the football game this week. My friends kept yelling and rolling around on the floor. I like to consider myself well versed in art history, technique and theory, and I was familiar with a lot of the terms being described in this pdf. However, I have never really made all those connections. For example, I am a psychology major and am quite familiar with Sigmund Freud, but I have never really made the correlation between the unconscious and the creation of art. Of course now that I think about it, viewing art through Freud’s perspective, you have to see how the unconscious and subconscious would influence perspective and, thus, creation. And it was interesting, if not necessarily believable, his perspective on genius being “[Leonardo DaVinci] converted his sexuality into an urge for knowledge” (Art Theory for Beginners 108). Either way, this chapter emphasizes not only the importance of the artist, as in the opinions of Sigmund Freud, but also the importance of the work of art itself. Art theorists attempt to find what a piece of art and the artist behind it is attempting to communicate and also the response of the viewers and culture in which the art is being displayed.
Margaret Kilgallen, for example, is trying to communicate a number of things with her art. A recurring subject in her paintings is her strong and heroic female. What is she trying to communicate with that particular theme? I actually do not have an answer to that question. Another thing Margaret Kilgallen does is paint her characters on the sides of trains. Is this graffiti then? If a well-known and established artist paints on a train is that low art or high art? The work of Banksy, for instance, might be labeled ‘graffiti’, but if he has had museum shows (which I had the fantastic chance to visit in Bristol in 2009) and if the mark of his work makes any building worth thousands and thousands of dollars more, does he still count as a graffiti artist? These are more rhetorical questions I do not have the answers to, but hopefully I might have better insight later this quarter. |
| Jerr by Talking-Jive |
I would just like to mention that I have the perfect idea of a piece of art to put in this post to connect everything together, but I cannot remember who the artist was. It was at the Contemporary Museum of Art in Chicago and the artist held a pencil to the wall and moved his whole body slowly across the wall, his hand responding to the way his body moved and breathed and the way his heart beat and thus creating a thin and wavering line directly on the wall. It reminded me of those heart beat readers they have in hospitals. It was interesting how he basically translated his body into art. But I do not remember who it was, unfortunately, so I cannot give you an image. I suspect it to be Sol Lewitt, however.
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