Failure Project

For my failure project, I was inspired by a story of a man who was commissioned to paint the perfect painting and painted a perfect circle. I decided to try and draw a perfect circle using an Etch-A-Sketch. I made 49 different attempts and here are 7 of my better attempts (I tried to post a slideshow with all of them be that didn't work.) 

Art and Social Justice: Tania Bruguera

(3:22 - 6:20)

Immigrant Movement International

This project was started by Tania Bruguera in Queens NY and is a social space where art is taught to Immigrants to empower them personally and politically. She says they learn to “Work from their fear”

Borders

As immigrants the people in this movement have crossed literal borders and have to deal other borders as they adjust to living in this country.

Think back to the beginning of this class when you wrote down what your borders were.

Discuss with your neighbors what you wrote and why you felt that was a significant border to you.

Empowering

Tania Bruguera talks about how learning about contemporary art empowers immigrants to overcome their fears and difficulties.

Think about how art could empower people to overcome the borders you discussed as you watch how art helped the women in this clip.

(0:30-3:22)

How did art empower these women?

How can art empower you to overcome your own borders?

How can you create a classroom where art can empower students?

Activity: Empowering Portraits

Use whatever materials you have to make an empowering portrait of someone next to you!

Artwork

For my art piece I wanted to create a repose to the borders that were our class listed. I felt like a lot of people listed physical limitations as well as fear which I have thought a lot recently about how emotions including fear are physical attributes of our bodies. I wanted to include a border in my piece so I made a border between a black and white "ideal" body and a more realistic but hazy and grey body.

Final Test Question 1

The first three images are abstract expressionist paintings. They are not supposed to be representational but the brushstrokes and paint splatters allow the paint to just be seen as paint. To a modernist this use of paint would be trying to capture the essence of the paint. The next three images are also abstract but they would be most interesting to a postmodernist viewer because of it's use of color theory. Postmodern artist are interested in topics related to diversity and race. In these images the appearance of the skin color changes based on what it is surrounded by just as the ideas about race and skin color change based on different surroundings and context. Addressing topics such as these are what postmodernists are really interested in.

Three questions for my students are:
What strategies were used in the first three paintings to allow the paint to speak for itself?
What could the last three paintings be saying about race and skin color?
How would the meaning of the last three paintings change if they were made by a different person?

Chaco Canyon

Arches National Park:

Hoveneep:

One of many sunset pictures I took in Chaco Canyon:

Kievas

Walking through ruins:

Ruins from above:

Pottery Shards:

Cornell West, bell hooks and Michel Foucault

In response to this post: http://397issuesincontemporaryart.blogspot.com/2016/09/httpwww_29.html

There have been many people who have contributed to postmodern idea's and have started conversations about many different area's of life.

Cornel West has done a lot of work on racial justice. He talks about how black Americans are treated poorly and works for people of his race to be treated fairly.

Bell hooks is a feminist author and has contributed to feminist theories. She focuses on how we should be accepting of differences whether they are different because of gender, class, race, or anything else. She also talks about the importance of including men in feminist discussions.

Michel Foucault was interested in the idea that history isn't just about what happened in the past but that history is meant to be learned from. He rejects the idea that the way we do things now is better than in the past.

All of these people have talked about ways to examine the way we think about the world and be more inclusive of what idea's are important. They deconstruct the way things are usually talked about and suggest new ways to think about the world.

Rene Ricard

For my Art Journal assignment I wrote on an article about Rene Ricard. Ricard was known for his
contributions to art criticism because he wrote in a style that was more accessible and personal. Here is an excerpt from his article "The Radiant Child":

So what defines the art look? When people say Jean-Michel looks like art, the occult significance of the comment is that it looks like our expectation of art; there is observable history in his work. His touch has spontaneous erudition that comforts one as the expected does. In the first gallery piece I saw by Jean-Michel (as distinct from his Tag SAMO) the observable relationship of his drawing to past art alienated me as immediately as it gratified. The superbombers in the same show, with their egregious lack of art history, had the repellent appeal that commands self-analysis in the viewer (me). I didn't want to miss the boat. When you first see a new picture you are very careful because you may be staring at van Gogh's ear. Then I stopped caring about what the pictures should (and might later) look like; regardless of what Jean-Michels look like now, they are transmitting signals that I can receive, that are useful, and finally the graffiti bomb style looks like what it's about and what it's about is packaging.

Rene Ricard was also a poet and an artist who would write some of the words of his poetry on top of painted images.

Defining Modernism

Like most things in art I find it difficult to actually define what Modern art is. I do know however that Modern art began as a way to criticize the art of the past and to push the limits of what art really is. Because of these intentions tend to have an "it is what it is" attitude. A Modernist painting would be all about the paint. It simply has the color of the paint, the shape of the paint and it doesn't look like much more than paint. This is a stark contrast to the goals of painters of the past who would do everything they could to create the illusion that the paint was not paint but a landscape or a person or whatever it was that they were painting. This is what made Modernism so important to the path that art has taken.