The final week of art blogging is here. So sad! Lucky for me, I really enjoyed Amanda Wajick as our guest presenter, and she gave us all a lot to think about. Sculpture is one of my favorite medias, and I like how she started by showing us a little bit of her own work, because I know that is something the class wants more of every week. I loved the variety in her work; she made sculptures anywhere from three inches to eight feet tall! The thing that I loved the most about her presentation though was the fact that she showed us one female sculptor from each decade of the 1900s until now, and I really appreciated that she clearly took the time to make such an informative slide show.
If I were to rate the female sculptors from my favorite to least favorite, I would definitely start with Yayoi Kusama. It wasn’t so much her work that I thought was so wild and memorable, it was her life as an artist. When Amanda told us that she admitted herself into an insane asylum and still worked in her studio, I couldn’t believe it, but I thought it was so awesome at the same time. No wonder her work was so crazy. She was crazy! Being true to yourself in your art is what makes a real artist. I’ve said this before in other blogs, but Yayoi is the first artist I’ve seen this whole term that really defines what that means. She knows her mind isn’t normal, so she faces that fact, and turns her bizarre thoughts into amazing works of art. Her obsession with patterns and making the body one with the art is also something that really intrigued me.
Another sculptor presented that I thought did really interesting projects was Magdelena Abakanovicz. After she asked what sculpture is, she continued by saying, “with impressive continuity it testifies man’s evolving sense of reality…” Her quote continued, but I think this is the part that meant the most with her work. I remember an image that was of a pile of different sizes and lengths of what I think were potatoes, and because she lived through World War II, I would assume these “body part” looking items were referring to the bodies of those who died in the concentration camps, and for people at that time, that was their sense of reality. I thought it was interesting that the figures she made were neither male nor female, and I liked that because it was up to the viewer to decide and make judgments about what they were seeing. I think that’s how it should be.
I didn’t love Meret Oppenheim’s work, but it was definitely thought provoking. Her piece that was the most difficult to think about for me was the one where the high-heeled shoes were bound together on a plate. When Amanda told us it was supposed to look like a woman’s legs were spread, and like a turkey, I definitely got the feeling it had a lot to do with the status of women at that time, and I thought that was brave of Meret to do. It possibly argued the fact that women were “supposed to cook” or something along those lines, and she must have had a strong personality to try and question that in that time period. Her furry teacup and saucer was also pretty weird, and like a girl said in class, I would assume she was just comparing two things that we rarely think of together, which is a really cool idea.
Richard Serra was part of our online material this week, and I have a lot of mixed feelings about his work. What I liked was his metal wall sculpture that was made of four pieces of a conical figure, because all of the walls were tilted in a way that made viewers feel balanced, off-balanced, open to the world, or extremely claustrophobic. By him playing with this idea of space and feelings people get from it, I felt calm and open when Ty had us imagine the walls tilted out, and I could see myself feeling closed in and suffocated when she has us imagine the walls leaning in towards us. The work that I didn’t like was his piece “Tilted Arc.” I can see that he was upset that people wanted his art taken down, but when he said that art wasn’t for the people, I immediately was not a fan anymore. If art isn’t for the people, who is it for? Him? Definitely not. That wasn’t his space, it was everyone’s space, and I would have been bothered by it just as much as the employees, because it did block them from seeing a really nice view. It made me feel a lot better knowing that they used the wall for scrap metal.
Louise Bourgeois was not only talked about in Amanda’s presentation, she was also part of our online media. Louise has a large range of work. In the Art 21 video, it showed her small sculptures with the child and adult hands and arms, and I liked how she said she was taking a risk by putting such small, delicate things into an open space in Chicago where someone could break them at any time. On the flip side of that, she created the large-scale sculptures of the spiders, and they were definitely my favorite of her works. I understood what Ty and Amanda meant when they said that you could look at these massive structures on the slide show and think it’s really great, but you can never fully appreciate their size until you actually go and see them in person. This is exactly what we talked about in lecture on Thursday when the whole class went to go see “Wind Fence.” Yes I have seen it before passing by to class, and yes I could see it up on the screen in lecture, but until I went down to it and actually took the time to look, listen, and take it all in, I never really knew what it was for. This simple fact about looking is exactly what the reading by James Elkins tries to put into our heads. I like how James talked about that looking is really more like hunting, because whether we recognize it or not, we are usually looking for something to stand out and grab our attention. This is also why he says when we look, we are also being hunted, because those things that stick out to us are actually luring us in. I’m not trying to say that I beat James to the idea, but I can honestly say I am one of the few people in the world who does stop sometimes to just look at something, with no goals to find anything and no intention of making a judgment about it, because most times I end up seeing even more. I don’t do this with art so much as I do with life. Just last weekend I went to the coast with my girlfriend to watch the sunset, and as it was going down into the horizon, we didn’t say a word to each other. We just watched, and looked, and enjoyed life at that moment. I think that is what I will take away from this class, and I want to thank Ty for that, whether she reads this entry or not. If her goal was to make at least one student look at art in a new light, she accomplished that.
My hometown of Grants Pass, Oregon uses sculpture in the downtown district every spring to lighten things up, and they do this by hiring local artists to paint bears however they like. The event is called Bearfest, and I think it fits well with this weeks lecture about sculpture.
