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