Craft and Methods of Production

Our guest presenter for this week was Anya Kivarkis.  Her presentation was very fast-paced so it was hard to engage in each slide, but I was exposed to some very outlandish, unique and interesting artistic ideas. 

One of the things that stood out to me was Richard Nelipovich's Emergent Tableware.  His method of production is called "Mass individualization".  His idea is to make multiple copies of a piece, but make each one completely different from the others. 

Notice how each fork has, not only its own unique handle, but even the tines are different on each one.  Nelipovich uses a computer program to configure multiple variations of a design, and makes it reality.  I looked at his website http://www.designercraftsman.com/portfolio_digital_craft.html because I was interested in this Mass Individuation, and discovered that he uses the same (or similar) computer program to design many different products including jewelry, chairs, bowls, vases, and more. 

 Looking around at other things in his portfolio, I discovered that he also invented a large number of products that are being sold by big name companies such as Sears.  When I learned that, it made me like his design-ware a little bit less.  That's a curious thing to me.  Does the fact that he sells his art through major department stores actually devalue them in some way?  I'm not sure where that bias came from.  I'm also not sure where I thought all those products came from -- little elves maybe... surely I didn't think that the CEO's of those companies came up with all those designs themselves!  It's just one more thing to think about now.

I think that's part of the point of Kivarkis' presentation.  She showed us a number of artists who take previously mass-produced products, and use them as a base for an artistic creation.  For example, Gijs Bakker takes old cheap costume jewelry, which is made of glass and fashioned after jewelry that is made of real gems, makes a smaller copy of it out of real valuable gems and attaches it to the original "copy".  A valuable copy of a less valuable copy of a valuable piece of jewelry -- it's ironic!

Can you see the smaller version attached to the center of the larger one?

The artists presented by Kivarkis create objects that require the viewer to think.  They're almost making a mockery of the things they are emulating, and questioning the function of each object.  John Feodorov, the artist from our reading for this week, also brings the same challenge to his viewers. 

Feodorov is Native American and was raised as a Jehovah's Witness.  Living in such dichotomy created in him a person who questions everything around him.  "Brought up both in the suburbs of Los Angeles and on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico, Feodorov early experienced the cultural differences between his dual heritages. He also observed the stereotypes present in American culture at large, where Native Americans were idealized as the living embodiment of spirituality by New Age consumerists."  (Oops! --  I'm one of those New-Agers who thinks of Native Americans in that light!)  He reiterates a few times in the reading that he's not trying to be funny, he's just trying to present both perspectives simultaneously.  Last week we learned that interpretation is up to the viewer, and I don't know what this says about me as a viewer, but I was giggling and cracking up over almost every piece of his artwork that I saw.  The irony is so, I don't know, I guess hilarious.  Just take his Animal Spirit Channeling Device for the Contemporary Shaman for example:

He took this mas produced children's toy that we are probably all familiar with in one form or another, and added feathers and the word "spirit" under the name of each animal.  That's how the modern consumer can discover his or her animal spirit guide.  No inconvenient rite of passage necessary, just pull the string.  (If you don't like the first one the feathered arrow lands on, just pull the string again!  It's easy and fun!) 


I appreciate his use of Barbie doll arms in many of his installations.  I am hoping that he acquires all the dolls second-hand, as well as the teddy bears he uses for his "Totem Teddies," rather than supporting the industry which he is mocking by purchasing them all new.  Here is a picture from his production "Art in the Twenty-First Century".

Feodorov says, "the branches are made of doll arms and are holding little plastic miniature toy animals, again sort of reflecting the Disney mentality of nature that I think has evolved just this century."  Good point, and thanks for making people think about what they are seeing, not only in your art, but in the things in their everyday lives.  There's a lot we take for granted, but there is way more than one perspective on everything.

The artist is important, but the viewer is equally as important

This week in Art 101 we read a very intellectual article written by Roland Barthes called "Death of the Author".  The author in question is a metaphor for an artist in this case.  I might use the words interchangeably since they are both representing the same concept.

He's killing the author by reading that book!

In Barthes's article, he was conveying to the reader that every individual has his or her own perspective and will have a unique interpretation upon observation or reading of any given piece of art or literature.  

He brings in the analogy of the "death of the author" as a way of saying that even though every author has a specific idea in mind when writing a story or book, the moment he/she stops writing, his/her own interpretation stops (dies) and it is now under the will of the reader to interpret in his/her own way.  No matter what, an individual will always bring meaning to what he/she sees.  Sometimes, even as the author/artist, if you let go of your idea the piece becomes its own thing.  Ty demonstrated the truth of this idea by showing the class a picture of a man with a dog sitting on his lap and asked us to tell her what we saw.  Every single person saw something different, perhaps similar, but not the same.

 

What do you see?

We also watched "Anything is Possible," a very entertaining film about William Kentridge who is an artist and decided to take his drawing abilities to a new level by creating an opera called "The Nose".  He proclaimed that, "My job is to make drawings, not to make sense."  According to what we've learned in class this week, he is exactly correct.  It is the job of each individual viewer to make the sense.  The concept is that the artist is important, but the viewer is equally as important. Without the viewer, what is the point of making art as an expression?

Kentridge's drawings are fully incorporated into the opera.

For Kiki Smith, "art is just a way to think... It can also have meaning to somebody else who can fill it up with their own meaning."  She also says "I'm very attached to needing proof of something, a proof that there has been a change."  Smith compares art to Catholicism.  She says that "both believe in the physical manifestation of the spiritual world, that it's through the physical world that you have spiritual life.  She learns through observation.  "I won't believe things that people tell me until I can see it myself somehow."  She can relate to Bob Dylan's line, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."  I guess as observers of art, that's true for each of us.  We don't need anyone to tell us what something means, because we all have our own interpretations.

Smith makes sculptures of women of every size -- life size to  sculptures small enough to hold in one's hands.  She is particularly taken by the Bodhisattva of  Compassion, Kuan Yin.  She says, "Kuan Yins tell me to pay attention... I saw one the other day and it said pierce me with your eyes.  I like that because you're not sure whether it's telling you to look at it, or you're telling it to look at you."  That perspective so perfectly sums up the relationship between the artist, the piece and the viewer.

 

Kiki Smith's (untitled) Head of Kuan Yin.

Our guest presenter this week was Carla Bengston.  Carla is not only an artist, but also involved in environmental studies.  She asks a lot of questions about humans and their role in nature, particularly as artists.  She told us about something that I have never heard before, but I find hilarious!  She said that at one time, people used to carry around little frames, called cloud lenses, and look through them at the nature all around in order to have a different kind of appreciation of nature's beauty.  I guess that's poetically profound, but I find it ironic that in order to have a better appreciation of nature, one could think it's necessary to use a man-made object that's separate from nature.  One could ask "if culture is always with us when we are in nature, is nature always with us when we are in culture?"    (The answer, of course, is up to your own personal interpretation). 

In 1919, Mondrian asked, "why should we (artists) continue to follow nature when many other fields have left nature behind?"  He then proceeded to transform his paintings from truly resembling nature to progressively more simplified, basic -- almost binary --imagery until it no longer looked like a tree, for example, at all, but only represented the frontal planes.  This concept is self-deceptive because the human eye can interpret a canvas bisected into two different colors as a painting of a horizion.  Even if the intention of the artist is to steer the viewer away from nature, it is still up to the viewer to decide what the painting means to him or her. 

Does it look like a tree?

Bengston also showed us ways in which artists make art inside of nature.  A massive undertaking by Robert Smithson is the Spiral Jetty at Rozel Point in the Great Salt Lake.  He brought "mud, salt crystals, rocks, water" together to literally make a spiral-shaped jetty that one can walk on into the lake.  For him, walking out onto the lake in a counter-clockwise direction "takes one back in time", by walking against the direction of the clock, then once a person is out there in the center of the spiral, surrounded by salt water and red algae bloom, that's where the interpretation and introspection can take place.  One has to then spiral back out in a clockwise direction back to the present where one can see bulldozers and other modern day experiences.  Smithson's intention is to bring "real experiences in real spaces in the world".

Another example of art in nature is something we have seen before in this class, Walter DeMaria's lines.  He walks back and forth in grass to create a visible line, a drawing.  DeMaria also created other forms of art in nature such as the "Lightning Field" in which he set up metal poles in a field in Marta, NM where lightning strikes often.  The poles don't actually attract the lightning, but they seem to appear and disappear depending on the light created by the lightning.

DeMaria has also brought nature inside to create art.  In "New York Earth Room", he literally brought earth into a building in New York where people can come and experience the earth, which gets watered daily, as a nice antidote to living in the city.

New York is also the home of "Wheatfield -- A Confrontation" where artist Agnes Denes planted a field of wheat in the rubble of the World Trade Center.  It's beautiful, meaningful, and functional in a place where each of those things is equally important.

There were so many inspiring, thought provoking artists presented by Bengston that it would be impossible to include them all here, but one cannot talk about artists working with nature without mentioning Andy Goldsworthy.  He has a magnificent aesthetic appreciation of nature!  The piece that we focused on in class was his Snowballs in Summer series.  He made 13 huge snowballs in the winter and had them frozen until summer solstice when he placed them in various locations around London.  One of the snowballs was placed in front of BP Headquarters, which led members of Greenpeace to announce on the news that he placed one there in protest as a bring association with the melting of the polar ice caps.  This is one case in which individual interpretation was a problem, because that was not the intention of Goldsworthy, and to announce that with such authority was manipulative.  After that, Goldsworthy decided to no longer contribute any of his proceeds to benefit Greenpeace, as he had done in the past.  As Bengston said, "Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and vice versa"

Snowballs on summer solstice.

Week 6 -- Zombies with Talking Heads

Our guest presenter this week, John Park brought up 4 concerns/problems with digital technology.  The problems he sees in this modern realm are:  1) The Screen 2) Commerce 3) Zombies and 4) Finding the Art.

In the case of the first problem, The Screen, he says that the images we are looking at are intangible and have no texture or depth.  Additionally, I would say that the screen also creates a necessity for being sedentary which creates health issues, and would be my first concern, but let's discuss Park's points for now.  One solution he discovered to the issue of the screen is an invention called "Reactable".  It's a cross between a musical instrument and an interactive horizontal computer monitor.  It's really cool.

The Reactable allows people to interact with the screen and move coded blocks around that each represent and emulate a different musical instrument.  It's a "real-time multi-tracking audio tool".  It's so functional that Bjork, among other musicians, has gone on tour using one of these machines.  It also addresses my  own personal issue which is the sedentary nature of computer use, by making it something that can be done standing up and moving one's arms and upper body rather than just one's fingers.

As a solution to problem number 2, Commerce, Park suggests using the technology itself as a way of exposing the gross imbalance of money distribution in our society.  He showed us a website, which I failed to write down, that shows the names of every person sitting on the Boards of any given major corporation, and also connects the names to every other Board each individual also sits on.  It really brings to light how connected the big money makers are.  It shows that certain companies have power in other companies' decision making.  That's kind of scary, but at least it is now exposed in a tangible way.

River vs. the Reavers (living Zombies)!

Problem 3, Zombies is just a funny, attention-grabbing way of saying that being in front of a computer all the time can really disconnect people from one another.  It can be really dehumanizing.  Even when what you're doing on the computer is connecting to other people, perhaps on Facebook, you're still isolating yourself from the people who are right next to you.  Park suggests that it's possible that using digital technology to connect to other people through dating services, craigslist, and other community-building websites, we can still maintain some sort of humanity while being plugged in to the system.

Finally, problem 4, the most relative issue to this Art Blog, is Finding the Art.  How can we find the art in all the gadgetry associated with digital technology.  Well, one awe-inspiring invention, which was created using gadgets that can be found in any department store, is the "Eye-Writer".  Wow!  This was created, I believe as a solution to the fact that a street artist afflicted with Lou Gehrig's disease lost the ability to move any part of his body except his eyes.  It is a way that he can use technology to continue to create art using the only part of his body that he can.  (As a side note, Park mentioned that Sony, for example, would never make this because, even though it's astoundingly brilliant and philanthropic, it would only be useful for a very small percentage of people, and therefore, not a money-maker -- which also connects us to problem #2).  Another way of employing digital technology for finding the art presented by Park was Harmonic Laboratories, a project he is working on in collaboration with a modern dance instructor which incorporates live dancing with a digital light image that responds to the movements of the dancer's body.  I am pleased that there are multiple artforms emerging that incorporate digital media with body movement because before this week, I only thought of computer graphics as digital art, and now the possibilities seem so vast and inspiring. 

Playing the Building:  the back of the organ. 

I also found Playing the Building to be very inspiring.  It's the brain-child of David Byrne of the Talking Heads.  Byrne uses an old organ as the control panel for a musical instrument that digitally connects various parts of an abandoned building allowing one to literally play the building.  It is an expansive interactive instrument that digitally connects the community with a fun activity without forcing them into a small screen; it's conceivably the opposite!

As for Paul Pfeiffer, I found his art to be refreshing and new.  As a fan of neither sports nor horror films, I truly appreciate his ability to turn both into almost laughable abstractions.  I don't think I could sit in front of a computer screen for as long as Pfeiffer chooses to do to create these installations, but I am glad that he does, because his creations are really thought-provoking and question the current paradigm in which sports are a central focus for an enormous percentage of the populace.  It's releiving to know that he finds the process meditative.  That way it is bringing him pleasure throughout the entire process as well as with the finished product.  I think that's really important. 

Both John Park and Ty Warren iterated that digital media is only a tool and that we should use it to create but to not allow ourselves to be used by the tools.  I found that both Byrne and Pfeiffer found very positive and effective ways of making that happen.  Use the tools, don't be used by them.  (Especially if you don't want to become a zombie). 

Week 5: Humanity and photoshop

The videos we watched in class about the photographer JR made a very deep impression on me. I thought that the way he could bring Jews and Palestinians together in a way that has never happened before was amazing. By placing images of people from one side of the wall onto the houses and walls of people from the other side he is showing them that each one is real. They have to look at each other's silly caricatures every day and see that they, too are people.

What really affected me the most about the trailer for JR's film, "Women Are Heroes" was the story of the crying woman recounting the tale of being raped by soldiers while her children had to watch and endure brutality at the same time. Horrible! I can not understand why humanity is not inherent in every human!  I sat and cried for a little while after seeing that. I realized just how much I, and pretty much everyone I have ever met, takes the freedom and luxury we have in our society for granted. I also realized that with the amount of freedom I have, I also have a lot of power. But I don't do anything with it. None of us do. We'd rather sit around and watch tv or get drunk or -- whatever -- just do nothing productive. We could be using our power to make a difference in the world so that other people can also experience freedom and peace. We could share the abundant resources we have with the rest of the world. I don't know how one would go about making that happen, but why are so many people suffering while I sit in my spacious home doing nothing?

I can't even get close to describing exactly what I mean by this. It's just like what Alfredo Jaar said when he was working on his Rwanda series of art projects. He tried so hard to convey the feeling he had from his experiences in Rwanda. He said, "It was my most difficult project. That’s why 'The Rwanda Project' lasted six years. I ended up doing twenty-one pieces in those six years. Each one was an exercise of representation. And how can I say this? They all failed".

"The Silence of Nduwayezu," detail1997

It is impossible for an artist to convey his or her true feelings. The viewer will always put his or her own personal feelings, ideas, thoughts into the interpretation. According to Jaar, "The work is always the creation of a new reality. So how do you build this new reality that, one way or the other, translates the lived experience?" That's a very good question.

I really like Alfredo Jaar. I think I loved reading his interviews even more than I liked viewing his art on Art21. I love the messages he is sending with his projects. He is coming from a place of compassion and wants the viewer to be able to see the reality of the situations he is representing. I am especially inspired by one thing that he said, "Most artworks today try to say thirty-seven things at the same time. I try exactly the contrary. When you reach that essential idea, it’s extraordinary."

Our guest presenter this week, Craig Hickman was a little too much for me to handle for such a long period.  I was on image over-load by the end of his presentation.  I felt like I couldn't look up at one more image shortly before he was finished.  I almost made it!  There were definitely a lot of really cool pictures, even though I don't know the first thing about photography.  I wasn't sure I was actually learning anything at first, but I think I did.  For example, he was talking about how changing the color, the brightness just a little bit can greatly enhance the image, making it more appealing.

How about some "artificial color"  in those beans?

For example, he showcased Martin Parr in whose photo book, "Food" there was a photograph of some baked beans.  It was bright and colorful, and Hickman mentioned that it was definitely photoshopped to make it so, because otherwise it wouldn't have been as interesting.  That's probably very elementary to someone who already knows about photography, but I am not that person.  I always forget to take pictures, so the idea of taking it even further and having to manipulate  the photos that I do take would just be asking way too much!

Other people, apparently, are way into photoshopping photos for fun, for profit, and for controversy.  

Take this controversial photoshopped classic, for instance.  There were 3 missiles released in Iran, someone thought it would be more exciting if there were actually 4 instead, so they made there be 4.  Where were they aimed?  Nobody knows that, but that's not the point to the people who care that Iran launched 4 exciting missiles.  I just don't care about war and politics and photoshop so much that it's hard to think of what to say about it.  Why is it so important that this happened, or didn't really happen?  That's not the point.  Are there any images left that we can trust as real?  I'm going to start thinking about that differently now that this has been exposed.  The article that I got this image from, on the New York Times Opinion Pages (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/photography-as-a-weapon/) is very interesting, and talks in depth about the history of photo manipulation, past and present.

I'm not sure how I went from talking about compassion and humanity to talking about baked beans and photoshop, but that's the realm of photography.  It is ubiquitous.  It is so vast that I have about 3 pages worth of interesting notes that did not make it into this blog post.  I definitely feel like I know at least a little bit about photography now, whereas last week, I would not have been able to say that.

Tony Mendoza's close-up flash photos of flowers are extremely beautiful!