numba 2

Nick Corona
Tyrras Warren
Art 101
20 January 2011
                Blog 2
    On Tuesday, the guest speaker that came described to us an even different kind of art style than Laura. While Laura tried to broaden her scope of art to almost everything, Michael Salter was more specific, in my opinion, at least. He told us of how he grew up in a generation of over analyzers, everything that was brought to ones attention was instantly questioned and the logic behind a lot of things he observed was most definitely flawed. He began his art career at a very young age and was interested in surf/skate brand logos and things of that nature. He worked very hard for his internships and his first business was while he was in college, that he start going door to door handing out flyers. He was influenced highly by his youthful interests in science fiction. Star Wars, Star Trek, Planet of the Apes(when it was a cartoon) and Battlestar Gallactica where some of the many shows/movies that he watched as a kid that he loved.
    His surf/skate logo career was pretty successful, until he realized that he didn’t want to do graphic design for the money. He was much more interested in the things that he liked and didn’t really care what other people thought. “Graphic design in the corporate world is ruled by the buyer.” (Salter) He liked graphic design a lot because of its flexibility. He has made 20ft high robots out of trashed Styrofoam, full murals of one piece, or the same piece compressed to fit on the average shirt.
    Another thing he loved about the idea of graphic design is the freedom, it is totally up to the creator or the person getting the item created for. The limit is ones imagination. He showed us many slides of logos and things in China and Belgium and the United States that seemed to make no sense at all. Yet he said that was almost the beauty of it. The idea of the design not making perfect sense, yet catching the eye, almost reinforces it in the mind, because you think about it more than something obvious and boring. I thought a lot of his pieces were really cool, not just in the way the design was made, but the idea behind them that I might or might not have understood exactly how he meant. Either way, they were cool to me and I think it would be really interesting to see one of his galleries. I also asked him after class if he screen prints onto t shirts, and although he basically said no, he also hinted that he might some day. So perhaps I will eventually get one.
    The Vocabulary of Comics was pretty interesting and it pertained to the information that Salter gave us. He told us about how some logos didn’t make any sense to him as far as logic goes, and that almost gave is a more interesting factor. The vocabulary of comics was saying that we look for deeper meanings in things whether we try to or not, these images are focused to make us think a certain way, thus making us slaves to the institution. “We assign identities and emotions where none exist”(McCloud 10). McCloud wrote of other things as well, that people normally don’t really think about. He wrote about the realm of concept and the realm of the senses. What he says is that peoples’ identities belong to the realm of concept while the realm of the senses has to be reached by thinking beyond ourselves and experiencing them.
    This reminded me of a segment of the Chris Coleman video “The Magnitude of the Divide” most of the movie seemed quite outrageous to me and there weren’t many moments where I wasn’t wondering how many hallucinogens he was on when he made it. Yet one part in the middle with a hand in front of the screen going through a forest then a burning (suburb?) reminded me of the part of the vocabulary of comics that talked about the senses.
    All of these works and multimedia reminded me of a friend of mine that is really into graphic design and sort of abstract modern art. I really don’t know how to label it to be totally honest but pieces of the art show he went to that was labeled on facebook only as “Claassen art show” really came to my memory a lot, not only during the presentation but during the multimedia as well, and a little for the vocabulary of comics too. This piece, titled: Swine Flew, was just one of the many that I was reminded of. It plays on the words to give a meaning past the one that people would think of right when they read “Swine Flew”.

 Larger image on google : http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1090/5138433455_91b52e10ff.jpg&imgrefurl=http://jeffclaassen.com/blog/tag/pascals-peeps/&usg=__trfG3OIpu_NneM66WL01CO-mD80=&h=500&w=399&sz=153&hl=en&start=0&zoom=1&tbnid=WHcK2pr33L4V5M:&tbnh=131&tbnw=116&ei=6bc3TZ-JMZOasAOSvdmMAw&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dclaassen%2B%2522swine%2Bflew%2522%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26sa%3DN%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26biw%3D1366%26bih%3D638%26tbs%3Disch:1&um=1&itbs=1&iact=rc&dur=485&oei=6bc3TZ-JMZOasAOSvdmMAw&esq=1&page=1&ndsp=20&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0&tx=82&ty=35