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.