Tyrras Warren
Art 101
4 March 2011
Numba 8
This week our presenters name was Amanda Wojick. She is a sculptor and is the head of the sculpting department. Her works are pretty cool and very contemporary. It was also very abstract and I cant say that there was a particular meaning in any of it. This made me think of the comment Ty said that Professor Wojick said to her the day of her grad review. She said, “Why are you using this media?”, which was something I tried to ask myself throughout the presentation. I guess its all a matter of what type of media one is comfortable with and what, essentially, ones gut tells them to use. Amanda’s presentation consisted of nine female sculptors whom she referred to as her heroines. They had some interesting things, and I could tell how a lot of them were very similar. Especially Ursula Vonrydingsvard’s sculptures. They looked a lot like Amanda’s initial work that she showed us on her web page.
The first artist that she showed us was Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010). She was born in France and then later moved to the United States. She worked well into her old age and when interviewed, explained her fear of abandonment and being forgotten. Thus she tried to make a big impact, which she did successfully. One of her big pieces was the Maman. This huge metal spider-thing is about 3 stories tall and after seeing it in real life, I am sure that one would not be able to remove it easily from the mind. After all, one of her famous ideas is that “All art comes from terrific failures and terrific needs”. Maman in French means mother. Aesthetically ironic, but from her vulnerable view, something seems right about it. Maybe I am remembering the movie wrong, but I am pretty sure that in Charlottes Web, the spider is quite motherly.
One of the other artists she showed us was out of her mind. Literally. Yayoi Kusama literally lives in an insane asylum and goes to her studio to make her art every day. Like wtf (pardon the language). Apparently she obsesses over her work which from what we saw, had a lot to do with a plethora of dots. Her coolest one that we saw was a white room with some blob things with red dots everywhere. I didn’t know what was the ground and what wasn’t. It was trippy. In “Just Looking” by James Elkins he says, “no two people will see the same object”. That was real clear in this piece, in my opinion. That thing was basically moving for me, I thought I was high. ‘
It also reminded me of what he had to say on shopping centers. He said that all the objects in these places are “hunting” for your attention. Its funny because when one is in a shopping center, they are the ones hunting for things, and I always find that it takes me forever to find where they are. I always just happen to start looking in the wrong direction. The room with all the dots seemed like something that would instantly grab the viewers attention and they would instantly be scanning the room, trying to take everything in. Maybe its more like Elkins idea of an “eye rest” or whatever he was trying to say when he was talking about how he would sometimes look out his office at the city, and kind of just let his eyes relax on the whole picture instead of taking in the individual happenings.
Richard Serra just proves to home the whole idea of viewing art from the viewers perspective. Every person sees the art differently. In Serra’s “Tortured Ellipses” he has pieces of metal bended and twisted to form these like room looking things. He commented in an interview on how he was surprised at home many people enjoyed his work. I thought that was kind of funny. Yet once again, its just Elkins coming out of his writing into the real world. That’s how you know he’s right, and its true. It seems obvious once you have read it that people will see things differently. Just like we are all different, so are our views of art.
This is pretty obvious. Its one of the Inkblot test things to see how one thinks. Its something that is pretty simple in that everyone sees something different in everything. Yet these are used to see what people are thinking. Maybe we can do the same with art.
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