numba 7

Nick Corona
Tyrras Warren
Art 101
23 February 2011
                Numba 7
    This week our presenter was Anya Kivarkis. Her area of field is highly crafted and highly skillful objects. The big point she made though, was that just because you think its worth a lot, doesn’t mean its value is as high. A connection I saw instantly that most likely wasn’t her doing, was the fact that she just spit images at us and told us information about them in rapid fire. Like commercials. It reminded me of John Park and his idea that technology changes how we operate. She was pretty young, so I would be willing to bet that when she was young she liked things coming at her at a high speed, just small sound bites of information. I don’t think I like this, but maybe I am the same, because although a lot of times I get bored during these presentations, I was actually surprised at how much time had passed when she finished.
    Anyways, she had a theme throughout her presentation that I am pretty sure I captured right from the beginning. The first artist she showed us was Robert Gober, who sculpted what seemed to be an unfinished sink-thing. It wasn’t very smooth and seemed like he was trying to give the appearance of a hand made object, like just throwing it at us. It made the piece venerable, yet sometimes that can give an object a demeanor of value. The next was Gijs Bakker who is a jeweler who hand makes his pieces, but uses a mixture of real and fake jewels. This is where I got the “what do we value” vibe. It didn’t make sense, and I didn’t like the way the items that he had looked, so the obvious conclusion to me was that one would be making a subtle point in wearing the item. That point, if I am right, is that we (humans) take too much value in a price tag, and not enough in the actual process of making the item. These artists make fun of that, and use obviously cheap materials to make is known that they are ridiculing this stereotype.
    Ok. So I was exact on with my analysis of the presentation. The minute I finished the biography on John Fedorov, I knew that I had nailed it and it was all about stereotypes and the diminishing of actual good work. John was born in 1960 in Los Angeles and was brought up in LA and a Navajo reservation in New Mexico. One of his biggest protrayls in his work is the way that Native Americans were being portrayed by, and stereotyped in contemporary America. Items that are considered sacred by his tribe can bought at stores as common goods. He read that Navajo Nation is the most-studied group on Earth. This is something I didn’t know. It is pretty crazy too, because not only did we rape, pillage and steal from these poor guys, but now, we pitifully try to make up for it by giving them “special right” and things of this nature, while we contaminate their objects of worship and turn their land into dirtholes with casinos in them.
    Fedorov also makes fun of a similar issue in the work place. His videos “Office Shaman” and article and video “Office Diety” show that we work harder in these places for the wrong reasons. Well he doesn’t implicitly say that, but its what I got out of it. He first explains how he got the idea for these things. He read a book where the Native American author compared corporations with tribes. While Fedorov says that he didn’t know if he agreed or not, it was an interesting idea that he expanded upon. He made these works that made it seem like the boss/ceo was some sort of god that all the workers worshipped. The process of training was like some sort of initiation. Then there are all the rituals, which we would probably just refer to as what we do on our average work day. The things they do however, are all for something that really has no real value for them though. They might acquire some currency for their extra troubles, but people are putting too much value in money. We don’t see the real value in things as easily anymore.
    This is Spam. It might look nice on the front, just don’t open the can.

numba 6

Nick Corona
Tyrras Warren
Art 101
17 February 2011
                Numba 6
    This week the guest speaker was Carla Bengston, who’s is in the field of Environmental Art. One of the first things she spoke of was the connection that we have to art and nature, and the connection those two have. From the early centuries, we have always associated nature with a sort of romanticist view that many big names have commented on. Jean- Jacques Rousseau, a Genevan philosopher in the 18th century had the view that man was corrupted by literature and the evolution of society. In his opinion, we would have been better off sticking with our natural ideals. These ideas were very simplistic, and very basic to our natural states, hence, nature. This is a romantic view because we as humans are always drawn to our natural states.
    We also talked about art and nature and how nature itself can be almost an art form. “Not everything is art, but everything is art supplies”. I don’t know who she quoted there but it is relevant and, in my opinion, true. One of the things about natural art is that it is always trying to connect humanity to nature. Motives of the sublime are always expressed, the idea of an awesome power that is beyond our comprehension. The problem is that nature is a part of us, and we can comprehend it, the thing that we cant comprehend is how it got there and how we got there. Those are the underlying questions that we ask ourselves when we see these majestic sights. 
    Another problem that we discussed is the misinterpretation of art. One man put giant snowballs in London, and one, which was in front of BP in London, was seen as a political statement which he did not mean to be entailed. This destroyed the image he was trying to impress upon his viewers. People thought that he was using nature as a political weapon. We take nature for granted and things like this make us feel less connected to nature. While we are separated from nature, I believe that it is a part of us and a foundation for our way of being, like Rousseau says.
    Kiki Smith has a very intriguing style to her art. At first I was kind of perplexed by the whole human coming out a deer thing, but her other works were very interesting and spoke a lot about her spiritual upbringing in the Catholic church. She also creates sculptures of witches and connects death to beauty. This was kind of weird at first, but then kind of nice to know that she doesn’t fear death. Many people criticize these spiritualities because they force ideas onto you and things of this nature, but I find the idea of death being beautiful kind of nice.
    Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” was a challenging read, that really annoyed me because I happen to be reading a read that is just as hard, if not harder right now. Ok, maybe John Locke is a little harder, but this one was still annoying because of the vocabulary chosen. I think that the point of his essay was that to get the full scope of a reading, the author has to relinquish their hold on it and let the true meaning of the work become tangible to the reader. Art works in a similar way, and I think that writing can even be considered an art form, as well.
    The connection between all of these things is that there is a bigger relevance of art beyond the aesthetic. There are connections that need to be made that are beyond what we see. Nature is something huge that is hard for us to comprehend unless we view it from a very basic level. We can then connect to it and find a common ground that we can relate to. Same with spirituality and death, they are things that naturally occur and we have to find meaning in them besides their obvious enormity, we have to make these connections and break them down in order to ever understand and connect to them.
    This is a picture of Mount Olympus. It is obviously a computer generated image, but it doesn’t really matter. The idea is that Mount Olympus was a human construct that Greeks invented for themselves for explain events that they couldn’t understand. The Greek Gods, whether you believe in them or not, are something that help us understand things we can grasp with a mere glance.

BIGGER! but maybe not...haha

numba 5

Nick Corona
Tyrras Warren
Art 101
11 February 2011
                    Numba 5
    This week we were presented with John Park, a digital art guru, and program expert. He was young (apparently dreamy) and went to University of Oregon about six years ago. He was never very specific, but I believe that his focus in art is 3D animation. He also is working on a music and art program with a dancer at University of Oregon. It has to do with combining technology, sound and art together to form some sort of super stimuli. The main focus of his presentation, however, was technology and its problems, strategies and solutions.
    He first explained how technology is something that, although made by us, is not really under our control. People will always be innovating and trying to make faster ways to do things, and cooler ways to do things. It is inevitable. It is hard to judge the morality of such a course, for many reasons. One of the most basic ideas is that technology gives jobs. The more things we have to take care of, and make, the more people will be employed. Yet, the more we innovate things to do things for us, faster, more efficiently, and more cost effectively, the less jobs we will also have, because the machines will be doing the work for us.
    The reading that we had was first on Paul Pfeiffer, who is originally from Honolulu, but lived most of his young life in the Philippines. He works in video, sculpture and photography. He is most famous for his works of photography and video where he edits out certain scenes to get a different perspective of the works he is taping or shooting. His “Four Horseman of the Apocalypse” is  an ongoing series of photographs in which he erases certain parts. For instance: one of them depicts Marilyn Monroe, in one of her famous photographs. He removed her from the picture and it changes the way people view it.
    When asked about erasure, Pfeiffer responds that he doesn’t really think of it as erasure, but more like camouflage. He uses the background to make a the image that he is “erasing” become transparent. Its more like an illusion of the audience or whatever is behind the point that he takes out. He is using his technology as a tool to make the view of his art different. The name “Four Horseman of the Apocalypse” actually is a reference to Albrecht Durer. Who was a pioneer in the field of representation and helped create the foundation for the whole field. It also has a biblical reference, which Pfeiffer likes. It gives a sort of epic foundational image to those who know them.
    In the article about the “Poltergeist” Pfeiffer is asked about the technology he uses to change his pictures and how it helps him do his work. He responds by saying he thinks that it is a big dilemma, in that, the image tools and so complex and almost needed to capture certain images that it is hard to just if we are using the images or the images using us. I think this connects to Johns lecture in that he thinks that we should use technology as a tool and not let it change the way we live our lives. We cannot let our increasing technology to harbor us to a point of necessity.
    A couple of the short videos showed a bit of how he works as far as erasure with the famous Muhammad Ali fight. Its really cool, because you can make out the vague outline of the fighters, but not quite. I kept trying to look behind them though, for the mess-ups in the crowd, but couldn’t catch any. It really does look like more of a camouflage though, than actual erasure. Also, in the scene of the diorama it was interesting to see how he re creates these things, and how the viewer can have no idea of what is real and what isn’t.
    This is a picture of the famous Mona Lisa. Yet the face is missing. I thought that this was a good example of erasure, even though it is a somewhat blunt and obvious explanation of the literal word. Yet, if the Mona Lisa was seen without the face, which is arguably the whole point of the work, it would be seen very differently. It makes me wonder what would be different about views of art if it was actually created like this. If people actually thought in this way of erasure back in “the olden days”. Art would have been totally on a different path, in my opinion. As ridiculous as that sounds.

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numba 4

Nick Corona   
Tyrras Warren
Art 101
2 February 2011

                Numba 4
    This week, the topic was Photography. Craig Hickman decided to bless us with his presence, and teach us about the abstract wonders of photography. Although I say that photography is abstract, it is ironic because one of the big reasons Craig decided to go into photography is because the realness of it. He first started in high school, and was really not influenced really by a photographer in general, but mainly by magazines and things that he would see. Although I don’t know his exact age, he told us that photos were black and white when he was starting, so I can imagine that photography wasn’t as big a thing as it is now.
    He showed us a bunch of photography by a variety of different photographers. One of them, Martin Parr, had a crazy website that at first looked like a PleasantVille scene or something, but his art was viewed as books. So he would have like a picture book style, that would turn over like a book (obviously). Yet his art was not at all pleasant like the style of his website seemed. It was actually kind of grotesque. He had many pictures of gross looking food that, in my opinion, might have shown his view of American diets. It also shows an underlying culture of the average American (again, in my opinion).
    Another photographer that he showed us was Fraenkel. Who had a very modern, vogue feel. Fraenkel was from San Francisco and I could see that his photos had a very San Franciscan feel, as far as the stereotype goes. It was very rebellious and unseemly in that liberal view that a lot of bay area artists express. A lot of voluptuous women, some naked, some not. Almost the opposite of the next photographer he showed us, Yossi Milo, who was focused on modern architecture. Really cool buildings that were usually black and white and in urban settings. The fact that they were in urban settings was probably the only similarity between the two, if I were to hazard a guess.
    These all seemed to be under the foundation of why Craig started in photography, which is what I think (hope) that he was trying to show us. They all were very real looking. Expressing views that seemed to be right in front of ones face, although that might not be what they were trying to express with their photos, this is what I at least got out of it. Kirk Thompson, another photographer had very modern, digital, pictures of landscapes that seemed to have an abstract meaning behind them, but I just thought they looked cool. I don’t know if that’s the wrong way to approach it, but Craig didn’t seem to have any explanation of his own, or the others art
     After reading the article, “Photography as a Weapon” my whole view on photos has changed. Well, maybe not so dramatic as a full turnaround, but it was definitely something to think about next time I see the news, or any photo, for that matter. I already knew a bit about Photoshop, and although I am more computer “savvy” than most, I cant say that I am an expert, especially in Photoshop, something I have never used before. Yet, I know a fair amounts of the limits, which are almost non existent, as far as I know. What I didn’t expect was that something like the LA Times would have a photo that was photo shopped. I mean, how does a company with that much power and revenue not have experts checking these things? And if they do, maybe they don’t even care. Its all about manipulation, my dad has been telling me for years on how little things like the shows we watch on TV, their commercials, the news, its all manipulative. These people just want money, and if they can convince you that the things they put in their media is accurate, and dramatic, why wouldn’t you read it. I guess the old saying, “Bad news is the best news” pretty much sums it up. If there is blood in the paper, people will read it, and they will be interested.
    This also changes my view on digital photos. Although easier (as far as I know) to manipulate, they also are of such a high resolution that it might even be easier to spot fakes, or things that improbable. The other readings; on Chilean, Alfredo Jaar, expressed a similar point of view on manipulation. He was more on scale of how media can be influenced more for people in developing nations. These people, obviously, are less tech savvy than people end up growing up in industrialized nations. Thus, they are more prone to be manipulated by these things, they believe what they see, because being less informed makes them more naïve.
    Believe me, I don’t mean that in a bad way, its just the basic truth, while there are plenty of developing nations that are far from naïve, the general population of these countries sometimes are not even accounted for. In the two articles, Jaar talks a lot about how people become manipulated to, in the case of “The Rwanda Project”, criminal indifference, and desensitization to violent photography and ideas. People are seeing these images, and just throw them away in their minds. It happens so much in the present day and media just throw them at us, and of course the response to such repetitiveness is just non existent almost. The other reading, “ The Gramsci Trilogy” seemed to me to be more informative as to how people connect to media differently. To steal the example of the article, “The Chilean audience will read this peace in a totally different way than the people of Milan”(Jaar). It is hard to make something with a meaning that is universal. This all ties back to Craig’s original thoughts on his starting to be into photography because of the reality of it. Now that I have read this article, I realize why he doesn’t explain any of the art that he showed us. The deeper meaning of things can be totally different than what we think, so in a way he is just telling us to, screw it, and take it how it is.
   

This image is a clearly photo shopped image of a man standing on top of some building in a densely populated urban area. It doesn't really matter what city, or if the plane is actually there or not (although it would be horrible). The point is, if people saw this in a newspaper or magazine that they were used to believing in, they would believe it, and the response would be immediate and immense.

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