Craft and Methods of Production with Anya Kivarkis

            This week in lecture, the guest speaker was Anya Kivarkis, who talked about craft and methods of its production. Much of the lecture was about the art of jewelry making, and showed this media as being a type of craft as well as being a type of art. Not everything she presented had to do with jewelry, though. Roy McMakin created one piece she showed us, and it was titled, “Lequita Feye.” This slide showed a 3D recreation of Roy’s memory of his grandmother’s bedroom. It was made completely in shades of gray, and the proximity between different items in the room was often distorted. This represented the distortions that we have in our own memories, and I really liked this piece, because it made me realize the fact that many memories that I have of certain places are most likely different from what they looked like in reality.

            Another image that she showed us that I really loved was “House” created by Rachel Whiteread. This piece was absolutely amazing to me, but I can see why it may have upset some neighbors. Rachel filled an old, abandoned house with concrete, and took the outside walls, roof, and windows off. Filling the negative space of the house left a structure that almost acted as a ghost of the old house that once stood there. I loved this so much because my dad is an art teacher, and he always taught me to pay attention to the shapes that are made with the negative space, and this was a creative way of acknowledging that space.

            The online media this week is centered around John Feodorov, and the thing that I liked most about him is that he really lets his personality shine through his art. Sometimes artists get caught up in making their work too serious, and I can tell that he isn’t that way at all. In his video “Office Shaman” with Paul Stuart, it seems to be stupid and meaningless, but it just shows that these guys are really playful with ideas and they have a lot of personality. I don’t think the class really understood it in lecture, but the feeling I get from watching it is that you don’t have to understand it. It’s just dumb and fun.

            I really liked John’s work with the “Totem Teddies” because he gave power and meaning to simple teddy bears. I also liked the point that he gave when he said that these meaningful masked bears could be sold, which also gives an example of “commodifying spirituality.” We talked about this exact thing in lecture on Tuesday. For some Native Americans, the symbols of these bears stand for something spiritual, and it has great importance to them, but someone else could purchase a bear and want them to play with or for decoration. Different objects and ideas have different meanings and importance for different people. This reminds me of the idea of “preciousness” that we talked about in class. An item’s preciousness is going to be based on the person’s background, beliefs, likes, and wants, among many other things. I probably wouldn’t think that a Totem Teddy was a precious item, but a Native American might. It all depends on what we give importance to in our own lives.

            Another connection I see between John Feodorov’s work and the presentation on Tuesday is subtle, but I can still see it. Anya talked a lot about different crafts, and that is the media that I think John represents. His work goes beyond paint on a canvas, just like she showed us on her slides. Jewelry is a craft that I know well because my grandma makes and sells hand-made jewelry, so I have always thought of it as art as well. John’s work is also art because it evokes different feelings and emotions in people, and I think that is the purpose of art. It makes us think, and most times, we really appreciate the artist’s work and his or her talents.

            Ty also asked us to think about the ideas of ownership and power this week, and when I thought of everything we learned, Ted Noten came into my head. Ted asked if anyone wanted a broach made from his or her car, and I can’t remember exactly what kind of car it was, but the man who accepted his offer had a very expensive car. I really liked that the man let Ted do this, because it showed that even though he obviously bought the car to somehow symbolize his power and prized ownership over such an exquisite object, he still let Ted take a chunk out of it. I think that one simple thing really brought the owner of the car back down to our level, and made him more “average Joe.” He removed himself from the material things in his life, and let someone create some art. And, once again, it goes to show that absolutely anything can be art.

            My favorite example that Anya gave during her presentation was when she showed the “Do Hit Series.” Not only did I want to smash that box myself and make a chair or something, but I also thought that it was a great way to engage the audience with the work, just like Ted Noten did. It is so rare that the audience has that much input into the art, and that was the coolest thing ever! The viewer finally gets the chance to make of it what they want, picture, or feel at that moment.

We've all used clay to make art before, and clay is sometimes used in jewelry making, so I chose a clip of Polymer Clay Creations from ku-ki-shop.com.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ7QzAVWZwQ&feature=related

Art and Environment with Carla Bengston

            The most memorable thing about Carla Bengston’s guest lecture during week seven was the huge amount of amazing quotes that she provided for us, whether they were typed on the power point, or fresh out of her own mouth. It wasn’t the most exciting presentation of the term, but I could tell that this woman new her media like the back of her hand. One of the main questions she presented us with at the beginning of class was if we thought of humans as being part of nature, not part of nature at all, or if we thought they could be in both categories. I agree with people when they think that humans are not part of nature, because we are the main cause of all the stress being put on our fragile planet, but personally, I think we are definitely part of nature, because we are creatures living and working with our environment just like everything else. A main quote that I remember being shown to us also dealt with the ideas of humans versus nature. “If culture is always with us in nature, is nature always with us when we’re in culture?” To me, it is obvious that nature is always with us when we’re in culture, because I think that everything in our lives is based off of nature. Everything we own, everything we eat, everything we do, all involves nature in some way, shape, or form.           

            I always complain about how the guest speakers never show enough of their own work, and this week is no different, but I understand she was short on time. Something that I thought was amazing was how she incorporated nature into her art by letting ants step in paint and spread it around over the material. I never would have thought of this concept, and to see it in action on her personal video was incredible. I also liked how she decided to leave the materials with the ants, because they were using it now, and she didn’t want to take away what she had given them. Her videos and images all around were very interesting. The video that gave an insight on the journey of a cockroach was unbelievable, and it almost gave me a real ‘Bug’s Life’ point of view. There are so many movies out there that try to put you into the eyes of the insects, but the detail in this clip went above and beyond that.

            The thing I liked about Kiki Smith is that she referred to her family as being similar to the Addams family, and before she even said that, I totally thought of scary movies when I got my first glance at her dark eyes, scraggly hair, and crooked teeth. She is one of those artists that really fits into the mold of what she is trying to portray, and I like that, because an important quality in a good artist is staying true to his or herself. The imagery of the dead animals freaked me out and intrigued me all at the same time. I didn’t have an issue with the death part of the work at all, but I was bothered to think about what goes through this woman’s mind. This work with the animals was her link to nature, like we spoke about in lecture. I was fascinated with Kiki’s work because she truly engages with her art, like when she used the cast of her own face and body parts for the person huddled up and dead on the ground. She had the same extreme passion and love for her work that I could see in Carla Bengston.

I started by reading “Barthes for Beginners” because after listening in lecture, I was afraid to read the real one, but I didn’t understand what it meant at all. So, I prepared myself, and moved on to reading the real thing. Even though it was only four pages, it was loaded with brilliant concepts, and I didn’t fully grasp those concepts until our discussion on Thursday. In short, Roland is trying to say that a million people can look at one piece of art, or read one piece of literature, and each will have a completely different idea and personal understanding of what that material is about. Ty asked, “does it really matter what the artist intends?” My answer to that is yes, of course it matters, but the opinions that the viewer makes about it and the meaning that they take out of it is equally important. This talk in lecture also works perfectly for the online materials for William Kentridge, because the purpose for his own work was important, but the students had to make their own opinions and meaning about his work. I am generally interested by everything we see in this class, whether it is my style or not, but I have to say that I have never hated any art more than William’s. I can’t even tell you exactly what it was, and I felt like I was the only one in the whole auditorium feeling that way, but I honestly almost had to leave because I hated his videos so much. I couldn’t stand the darkness, I couldn’t stand his illustrations and cartoons, and I was disturbed by the dark feelings it gave me to watch those images. I’m not really sure what he intends the meaning to be for his work, but all I saw were gloomy and depressing themes that didn’t interest me at all.

On a brighter note, since I liked Carla’s ant paintings so much, the art I chose this week was a video of elephants painting on a canvas. In a way, it’s nature involved in art. Most people have seen these videos before, but it’s still amazing to me how smart animals can be.

Elephants Painting 

Digital Arts with John Park

            For week six, our guest speaker was John Park, a Digital Arts specialist whose slide presentation really caught my attention. My favorite part of his presentation was when he showed us the video of the Mortal Engine Dance group, where the lights and animation followed the dancer’s every move. I have never seen anything like this before, and it was one of the craziest and most creative ways of expressing dance that I have ever seen. I thought of what that dance would look like without the animation, and yes it would interesting, but it wouldn’t have taken such a toll on my emotion. My eyes were glued to the screen with all of the colors and flashes, and no normal dance performance keeps me that connected with the movement. It took dance to a million new levels.

            Another thing I really enjoyed about John’s presentation was the way he presented the four main questions and problems with Digital Arts. Ty said in lecture on Thursday that the most important question was “where is the art”, but to me, this isn’t the most important. I loved the reference to zombies, and so the question that I asked the most in my head was “where is the humanity?” It takes me to the short video John showed where the cars were being constructed on the assembly line without absolutely zero help from a human hand. Yes, digital arts are created with a person’s own ideas, and I agree that the audience or viewers can watch and interact with the material. But when dealing with works created on a computer, a human hand didn’t make any of it, and I think we are losing ourselves to all of the technology we are provided with today. I have a huge amount of respect for digital artists today because it takes an extremely creative mind to do what they do, but I wish that for a short time I knew what it was like to live in a world without advanced technology, so I could really see art before this period in time.

            On the flip side, I think technology is a beautiful thing, especially after seeing the clip of the paralyzed man in the hospital that could continue drawing his graffiti just by moving his eyes towards a screen. I have never seen anything so amazing before, and to be honest, I didn’t even know we had technology to such an extent. After seeing it, I’m not that surprised though. Digital Art has been taken to whole new levels in the past few years, and I am excited to see where it goes from here.

When I watched David Byrn’s video “Playing the Building”, I couldn’t fully understand how his structure involving the piano is in the Digital Arts category, other than the fact that it uses sound, but it was an amazing creation. I really liked when the woman spoke and said that she can’t imagine how the little kids must feel when they play the piano and they “make the room come alive”, because that is what this piece of artwork is there to do. I know that if I played it as a small child, I would have been put into a completely different world. There is this huge space filled with noise, and they get excited because they know that they are the ones making those noises. This is also the point of Digital Arts in my mind. In lecture, Ty said she asks herself everyday if her media is actually art, and in my opinion, there is no question about that. For me, art is something that gets your imagination moving, and makes you question what you see, and Digital Arts does just that.

            In the Art:21 video dealing with Paul Pfeiffer, he talks about his inspirations from the 1970s version of The Amityville Horror, which is exactly what we talked about in lecture as well. He really found a connection with the staircase in the movie on a deeper level because that was the contact point between the human and non-human beings. For me, I personally had a connection with this because I have seen the older and newer versions of the film, read the book, and did a presentation in high school based on the true story. I new exactly what he was seeing with this piece and I really enjoyed it. One thing I did not agree with that Paul said was during his observations of the basketball game. He said, “if you’re served literally 500 channels on TV, like, why go out?” I really do love Digital Arts, but I have trouble with people who substitute television with reality. If I were given the choice between watching an extremely action-packed episode of Jersey Shore, or going outside and experiencing life away from a screen, I would go outside. Don’t get me wrong, everyone loves Jersey Shore, but it makes me sick how much we are obsessed with TV and other technology these days. This connects me to the talk Ty had with the class in lecture on Thursday. Those cell phones in our pockets are just so addicting, and we can’t resist checking them every two minutes, but I really don’t get why? To me, this is just sad.

To get a feeling of what Janet Cardiff’s work was about, I took Ty’s advice and watched “Virtual Haircut”. I’m not sure if I watched the right “Virtual Haircut” video because it wasn’t inappropriate like Ty said it would be, but either way, it was crazy how realistic it sounded to me. I don’t know how many people have this same reaction, and I might be totally crazy, but when the man was using the electric shaver around my head, I actually felt a tingling sensation along my scalp. I do have great headphones that might create strong enough sound waves to create some movement, but I was still baffled and amazed by the video all at the same time. It also helped me understand her work more after hearing a girl in class compare the experience people have in Janet’s work to her own experience taking the audio-tour at Alcatraz Island. I have done the same exact tour twice, and just by closing your eyes, you feel like you are there, watching every move in history. I believe this out-of-body experience is what Janet was aiming for with her viewers.

Sorry my video for the week isn't in English, but it's still very similar to what we saw this week. It is shadow-sensitive interactive music. It makes me think a lot of the Reactable that John showed us on Tuesday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRVItBGGdFI&feature=related

 

Photography with Craig Hickman

For week 5, our guest presenter was Craig Hickman, a professional photographer. I don’t know if it was the fact that Ty was gone, or that everyone truly had somewhere else to be, but I was extremely distracted and lost in this whole lecture because half of the class got up and left throughout the presentation. Craig was obviously a great guy who knew so much about this subject matter, but his presentation was fairly quiet and sped through dozens of pictures without much of an explanation. In a way I can understand why students were getting a little bored, but I was completely distracted by everyone leaving. Having said that, I will try my best to discuss what I heard and understood of his lecture.

When one student asked why Craig chose photography in the first place, his answer really stood out to me. He replied, “The reason I enjoy it is because photography is believable, and has real world connection.” This connection was also used in the online material, especially with Errol Morris’ article that dealt with the photos released showing four missiles being launched in Iran. We look at an image, and if it’s not entirely skewed, we believe it to be real, just liked America did when the false images were released to the public. Another link between the lecture and the online material comes from the conversation between Errol Morris and Hany Farid. I wish I could copy and paste their whole conversation because I think it’s so great, but instead I’m just going to use this little bit:

Errol Morris:“It occurred to me, just with respect to the missile photograph, that if the people who Photoshopped this photograph wanted to call additional attention to it, they could do no better than what they did.”

Hany Farid: “That’s exactly right. Look at how much attention is being brought to it. At the end of the day, even though they doctored the photograph, it shows that these guys still fired three missiles, and they sure brought a lot of attention to it.”

This conversation is so important because it is the main reason people love photographs so much. I wish that Craig would have shown more of his own work, but in the photos he did show, most of them had some sort of text added to them. The text looked like it was part of the photograph taken, when in fact he edited most of them in. If he hadn’t told us, I never would have known he had added the text after the picture was taken, and I think this is the case for a lot of media today. And, going back to the main point of Thursday’s lecture, because it’s a photograph, we generally believe it represents truth. I’m not going to try and say that I don’t believe everything I see in the media today, because I do consider a lot of it to be real. This reminds me of the debate today about whether or not people who grew up with the editing technology all around them are more influenced by photos in the media, or are more numb to it. My opinion is that for an individual like myself born in the early ‘90s, I am very aware that many images that I see today do not represent the whole truth, but it doesn’t mean that I look at them or believe in them any less. Imagery in our every day lives is means a whole lot more to us than we pay attention to.

The thing that I liked about Alfredo Jaar’s work was that there was meaning behind every image. They aren’t just a collection of random photos. They all deal with real world issues and causes, and I think that is the most important thing that I took from his work. When I went to his personal website, I clicked on recent projects and jumped around through all of the images. I loved that his photos had background information given on the side, so I actually knew what was going on, and what it meant to him. I found the story behind The Skoghall Konsthall to be extremely interesting, especially because it is to be built entirely with paper products from the local paper mill. After reading through his bibliography, I was astounded at the amount of work his has done internationally. He isn’t only taking pictures; he’s trying to make a difference in the world, and that to me is an amazing artist.

My favorite photographs shown in Lecture this week were by Caleb Charland, and they were all part of the bored couple series. For looking like very serious photographs, they were incredibly humorous, and they gave me that “real world connection” that Craig said he gets when looking at photos. I think of awkward couples out to dinner, or downtown, and I can’t help but laugh at these images. My visual response for the week connects with this humor, and the photographs from this website never disappoint. My image for the week is a photograph taken from www.AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com. I honestly think this photo is true art, because the editing is done so interestingly, but it wasn't taken by a famous photographer.