Lauren Vandenburgh was the guest speaker for this week, and I would have to say I loved almost every single picture she showed the whole lecture. I've been surrounded by art my whole life because my dad is an art teacher, and I do a fair share of artwork myself, but everything shown in class was unique and amazing, whether it was a large-scale painting or a simple doodle on notebook paper. The images that interested and sparked creativity in me the most were the pieces that were meant to be 3D pencil drawings done with wire or chords, because no matter where you go around the art, you never see the exact same picture. I also loved the image where the shadow cast by a pile of trash was actually a scene of a boy and girl sitting back-to-back. This is one of the most clever ways of incorporating garbage into artwork that I have ever seen.
While reading Art Theory for Beginners, there was one thing that really stood out to me. On page 138, Susan Sontag "stressed the idea that art has always been to do with ritual and the irrational or magical, and that to search for meaning (as many critics do) is to miss the point." To me, this is the main point of the article, and I completely agree with her statement. Art is sometimes strange, and often can't be described, but I feel like that is kind of the point. Art is our way of going into another world that we couldn't normally experience, and there doesn't always need to be a reason for why artists do what they do.
On page 143, Pop Art is discussed, and because it is one of my favorite medias, I did less speed reading and thought about it a little more. Arthur C. Danto called Pop Art the end of art, which I can agree to disagree with. I don't agree because to me, it is definitely art, amazing art at that, but I also see what he means, because up to that point, the definition of art was fairly straight forward, and Pop Art was a new, weird, out-of-this-world kind of media, and it fit into a completely new category. That's why I love it. Many people don't like Andy Warhol's images like the Campbell's Soup Can because it is just a simple everyday object. But that's why it's so awesome! Anything can count as art in this world, and I love that!
For the Margaret Kilgallen video, I liked how it showed that art doesn't mean that it's a picture, it can be something 3D that you can walk through and look at from different angles, like the massive steel sculpture in the gallery that the group of children walked around in. It can be big enough that it takes construction workers to assemble it! I loved the comment by the photographer using the chemicals and the old camera outside when she says, "in your prayer, say please don't screw it up, but screw it up just a little bit to make it interesting!" I liked this so much because mistakes in art are often what make the piece special, or a little bit more exciting. My elementary school art teacher called these mistakes "Happy Accidents." Another one of my favorite forms of art is graffiti, and unlike many people, I don't see the "garbage and ugliness" on the walls on buildings and freeways. I drive through cities in awe instead, because many of these graffiti artists are some of the most talented people in the world, and 95% of the time they have no professional training. To me, that is what defines raw, pure talent. Just being born with the ability to take ideas and put them out there is inspiring to me, whether it is illegal to paint on public property or not. I also really like the train paintings because it takes the spreading of ideas to a new level, because the images and words travel all over the place. Pretty clever if you ask me.
What I have taken away from the material in lecture and the material online is that all of the information connects together to tell us that art doesn't really have a set definition, set rules, or obvious characteristics. You can make art whatever you want. I remember Tyrras' statement about how artists can look at a plain apple and be amazed by its beauty even though its just an apple. Art is everywhere, and it can be everything, but you just have to think of it that way. Another connection between the lecture and the online material that comes to mind was the fact that both showed how it is possible to use language as a form of art. The writings on the walls that Tyrras did were amazing to me because that was one of the first times I had seen writing used as art, and I would never copy that idea, but it inspired me to maybe do something like that on my own.
Here is the link to one of my favorite kinds of art. I can’t watch this clip without being amazed. It incorporates drawing, which was a main subject for this week.
January 12, 2011
Braden Beck
Art 101
Braden - You are writing well about the material presented this week and I appreciate you including your personal experiences and reactions. One area you could spend more time with is the connections you find between the readings/multimedia and the lecturer's material.
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