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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