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.