Flex Credit

A few weeks ago I attended the Chris Jordan exhibit at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of art. The reason I went was not because of the opportunity to earn some extra points in Art 101 class but because my good friend had gone and told me that I HAD to go. I do not remember the last time I willingly went to an art museum but I went because my said it would be worth my time. She was right. The minute I walked into the exhibit I was blown away. Chris Jordan’s exhibit “Running the Numbers” is one of the most eye opening exhibits I have ever witnessed. He takes raw data about American consumerism and converts them into a tangible, visual format that we as consumers can see and relate to. What Chris Jordan has realized is statistics mean nothing to us. If we hear that 25,000 people over in Africa were killed within a month due to Guerilla warfare our response is usually “Oh no, that’s terrible,” and we go on with our lives.  But to see these types of real situations thrown into a visual photograph to represent each individual person, we as people cannot help but to become emotionally involved. Jordan say’s “statistics are dry and emotionless” until we can show consumers the actual damage they are creating.

This is what Jordan’s exhibit is all about. He creates digital photomontages of certain everyday items such as plastic bottles, cell phones, plastic bags, and Barbie dolls to try and show the viewers/consumers magnitude of the statistics. How he does this is he takes a single photograph of, for example a pile of cell phones, and then replicates and overlaps it so the final composition is made up of the exact statistic of that product.

I can honestly say that there was not one piece of work that did not shock me. I am disgusted by the amount of products the U.S uses and how much of that fills our landfills. I loved every single piece of work but I chose a top 3. The first was “Cans Seurat” which mimics the painting done by George Seurat titled “A Sunday on La Grande Jette.” This photomontage represented the number of aluminum cans the U.S goes through every 30 seconds, 106,000. My next favorite was the one with the Barbie dolls in the shape of breasts. This piece represented the 32,000 breast augmentations performed every month in 2006. I can almost guarantee that that statistic has gone up in the past 5 years. The final piece that I chose was the “Ben Franklin” to represent the $12.5 million dollars spent per hour by our government on the war in Iraq.

When I look at all of these pieces I feel like there is something that should be done. It makes me really angry that some people just really do not give a hoot about our environment. Even doing something so easy as recycling can help out a lot. I hope that more people can go and check out this exhibit because it has really impacted me and made me think twice about wastefully using products.

I was not sure if I was supposed to attach an image for this post so I did anyways. This is titled “Paper Bags” which represents the 1.14 million paper bags used in the U.S every hour. This of course is by Chris Jordan.

Week 10

This week our presenter, Brian Gillis, talked about investigating multiples. He started off the lecture by asking, “what is a multiple?” He gave us 3 different definitions for a multiple, one by Webster’s dictionary, one by Duchamp, and one by Albright-Tomb. Combining all 3 of those ideas, I came up with a master definition. I believe multiples to be a three-dimensional object that is repeated many times. The repetition could be exact, a thought, idea, or characteristic of the original.

I really enjoyed the way Brain set up his lecture. It flowed very well and was easy to follow. He broke it down into 4 parts. The first part he talked about how the ideas of multiples have dated all the way back to 200,000 B.C with the Venus figurines. Then he moved on to talk about Duchamp and how he basically came up with the idea of readymade art. Readymades are when the idea behind the object is more important than the object itself. An example of this would be Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ piece. The third thing he talked about was pop art where we looked at pieces done by Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol. My favorite was the piece with Andy Warhol and a few other artists where they mimicked the American Supermarket. In this exhibit, viewers could actually interact with the art and purchase items.

Finally, Brian broke down the question of “what is a multiple?” He came up with 5 different solutions. They were anything mass produced, readymade, industrial processed, repetitive action, or repetitive process.  

 The next artist we looked at was Justin Novak. I was not quite sure how to handle some of his work because when I first looked at his collection of ‘Disfigurines,’ I was a little grossed out. But once I got over the initial shock, I realized how beautiful the collection really was. The way he made the figures look so light and soft with their solemn expressions and the porcelain look of the ceramics was a great contrast to the actions of the figurines. He also created a collection of 21^st century bunnies. I thought that these bunnies were very cute until you see them with machine guns, which kind of ruined the cute factor for me.

The final artist we looked at was Gabriel Orozco. I liked his work because it was so clever. My two favorite pieces were the ‘Ping Pond Table’ and the ‘La D.S’ car sculpture. One thing I noticed that he has in common with all of his pieces is that they make you want to interact with them. If I was walking through a gallery and saw his ‘Ping Pond Table,’ I would hope that there would be a paddle and ball there for me to play a game. It is fun to see these types of work because they go against the traditional gallery set up. We are all conditioned not to touch anything in an art gallery because we could break or damage the piece of art, but Gabriel challenges you with his artwork. He makes it so you are fighting back temptation to go and interact with his work, which I find very intriguing.

All the artists and ideas we have studied this week relate to one thing, multiples. You see the idea of multiples with Gabriel Orozco’s car. The car is probably one of the most mass produced objects in the world today. Gabriel took the idea of a mass produced object and modified it. Another connection that I made was a more literal connection. It would be between ‘The American Supermarket” and another Gabriel Orozco piece where he rearranged a supermarket. Basically the connection is that they both had to do with Supermarkets and both pieces incorporated the viewer. A third connection goes back to the idea of multiples and Justin Novak’s work. In my definition of multiples, I defined a multiple as something that follows a pattern of ideas or characteristics. In his collection of 21^st century bunnies and the ‘Disfigurines,’ they both follow a similar idea or characteristic within their own collection.

Brian Gillis gave me this idea for an image when he used the Mona Lisa to show that even though the picture is distorted in a certain way, you still know that it is the Mona Lisa. I took this idea and did it with another famous piece of work, Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.”

Week 9

This week’s presenter was Amanda Wojick whose primary focus was on sculpting. I enjoyed how she broke the lecture down into 100 years of women sculptors, 9 total, one born each decade. She started off the lecture by asking the class to look for two different themes in each woman’s artwork. The first theme was abstraction vs. representation. Our job was to look at the different sculptures and decide whether they were abstract pieces of art, based on something real but altered in some way, or representation art, mimicking an object. I am not going to talk about all 9 women artists because that will take too long but I will talk about 2 that truly caught my eye. The first was actually the first one she talked about, Louise Bourgeois. Louise’s primary inspiration was based from her childhood of trauma. Whenever artists like Louise have such strong emotional backgrounds, good or bad, I believe it leads to great pieces of work. Amanda read a long quote from Louise and I really loved it. She talked about how modern art is about finding new ways to express your self. It is about the hurt of not being able to communicate your emotions and that is why modern art will live on forever because there are always new ways of discovering your self. Of course the quote sounds much better when put all together but that about summed up what Louise was saying.

The second artist that caught my eye was Yayoi Kusama. I don’t know if it was the art itself or the artist’s story that drew me in. I thought it was very interesting how Yayoi had checked herself into a mental hospital but would leave during the day to go to her art studio to create her art. As weird as this my sound, I think it is fascinating to see what a non-stable persons art looks like. You can tell when you look at her artwork that she spent forever making the pieces just right. What Amanda said is that instead of painting the dots onto every surface, Yayoi instead painted the negative space, which seems like a daunting task.

I wrote the first half of this blog before I looked at the Art 21 assignment readings and just realized that we are going to take a deeper look into Louise Bourgeois’ work, which made me very excited. In her piece called the “Cell” I loved how she mixed two polar opposites together. A quote from the essay states that she “paired the organic with the correctional.” You see this with the feminine/domesticated objects such as mirrors and perfume bottles and then the masculine/institutional objects such as chains and steel fencing. Her second piece “Twosome” I thought was amazing. When I first looked at it, I really didn’t see much, but once I read the essay on it, I understood the genius behind this piece. There is so much symbolism within it like the red light representing passion, either passion of the heart or passion for a few hours. Also how she made this piece symbolize her childhood of seeing her parents quarrel and knowing she was too small to stop it.

Richard Serra’s piece titled “Charlie Brown” was interesting. I like the story behind how it got its name. I think that the name is perfect because the artist said in his video about how this piece of work is never finished because it cannot close. What I got from this statement that relates the Charlie Brown comic character to this piece is that it is never ending. Both are so large and monumental that they will continue to be around for many years.

The reading for this week was titled “Just Looking” by James Elkins. I loved how this reading flowed and actually made some sense to me. James starts off the chapter by telling a story about a shopping experience where the saleswomen came up to him and asked “May I help you?” and his response was “No, just looking.” It’s funny because I guarantee that everyone has used this line at least once in their lives, but the question that James brings up is “What does just looking mean?” He then goes on to talk about how we are not just looking but searching for something. That something could be love, a pair of shoes, a medical diagnosis, or an answer.  

The connection between all of these artists work is the idea of abstract vs. representation. Amanda talked about this at the beginning of her lecture as something to think about when we look at sculptures, so I did. I believe abstract art is a visual form of language that creates an image that may or may not exist. I thought that Richard Serra’s work was very abstract. When I looked at it, I did not see anything familiar. I had to look deeper to get an understanding of the pieces. Representational art I believe is something that you can name just by looking at it. For example, Louise Bourgeois spider pieces were very representational because you knew by looking at it what they were. The reading “Just Looking” was an abstract piece of writing because he talks about how he is searching to find the meaning behind “just looking,” the meaning is not on display for everyone to see.

I remember learning about this sculptor in another class of mine and I fell in love with his work. His name is Ron Mueck and he is a contemporary sculptor. The thing I love about his work is that it is so realistic and grandeur and is something that I feel no other artist has been able to achieve.