Art 345 Final

For this final project I wanted to take off from my triptych that we did before. I made it into four videos this time instead of three. My main theme for this was bad habits. I chose to use smoking, cracking knuckles, biting nails, and drinking. For each video I filmed about a minute of footage and then edited it to go faster or slower and tinted it blue. I thought that tinting it blue would give it less attention because these bad habits aren’t usually addressed like they should be. Each video has a different sound to it. The smoking has a dial tone because smoking causes health problems that people don’t discover when they are actually smokers, or they do and just ignore it. Dial tones are often ignored also. For the cracking knuckles I used knuckle-cracking sounds. I think to make this more effective the sound had to be louder than what I used. For the biting nails video I used people talking in the background. I needed there to be some white noise and thought that people talking would fit because the sound isn’t usually noticed much just like the dial tone. And for the drinking video I used the original sound that I filmed and added some clinking glass noises. Each video goes the normal speed and way for a couple seconds and then either goes backward or faster. All the videos are differently edited. Putting them on a loop really helps how they are perceived because you can really only focus on one at a time. I really tried to focus on using the program to edit these videos. I wanted there to be a lot of edits to make the videos come alive. Most of the audio was appropriated because what I filmed did not have good enough sound to it. I was inspired by everyday life habits that happen around me. All of these habits have affected someone who I have been close with or myself. Two of them are not as extreme as the others but I still think that they all need light put on them

Art343 Article Reflections

Dada Manifestos
In Hugo Ball's interpretation of what dada is, it doesn't quite make sense. He defines the word "dada" as being terribly simple and that it is just a word. It seems as though he is just making fun of what the word dada means. How it can make you famous or how it can give you eternal bliss. But at the end of the reading, it makes sense of what he is trying to say. That dada doesn't really mean anything at all but at the same time it means everything. It means art and life. It can mean anything you want it to mean. He wanted to evoke emphasis on the meaning of dada. Tristan Tzara explains that dada means nothing. Compared to Hugo Ball's written piece about dada, it is almost opposite. Dada means a lot of things to Ball as where Tzara is saying that dada meanings not much. "Dada Disgusts" He thoughts sound a little all over the place and is hard to follow. He gives plenty of example of why dada doesn't mean anything but then ends the manifesto with LIFE. Overall Tzara made it seem as though he was trying to show his readers the definition of dada by writing something that means nothing in the end.

Situationists
What is everyday life? People go throughout the days just living, not having any specialized
activities. Everyday life isn’t everything there is to life. The author is saying that everything stems from everyday life. Everyday life is governed by the fact that people have little free time and what they do with that free time. There is a poverty of creativeness and expression that lends to everyday life beings meaningless. “There is nothing accidental about this poverty of everyday life: it is a poverty that is constantly imposed by the coercion and violence of a society divided into classes, a poverty historically organized in line with the evolving requirements of exploitation.” People’s lives having big parts of their lives missing but they can’t tell. People are running this world and our society without any means of what is real. They don’t have the power over what has happened in history. Now that technology is a big part in society, it is almost taking over. People are not getting caught up with the fact that technology is getting smarter than them. Everyday life uses technology constantly. The author says that drugs for example are the only way to question life. That capitalism is ruling the world. So what would people do in life that wouldn’t be a waste of time? I didn’t get the answer to that question through the reading but I guess we are all in the modern form of slavery.

Hito Steyerl            The world is filled with poor images. They are taken from place to place throughout the digital world, reformatted, and changed from what it started with. Low resolutions are a problem in the world. Low-resolution photographs or videos are not pleasing to neither look at nor have as much power as a high-resolution picture. Poor images that have been resurrected are still not worth showing to some people. You can find pretty much anything online that you could ever want to see. People have copied it over and over into different formats to put in different places on the Internet. This leads to piracy. “Poor images are poor because they are not assigned any value within the class society of images.” Their status is degrading to the image itself. There are so many bad poor images that are circulating throughout the online world. There are so many experimental and artistic materials that are being downgraded in a way that makes it a poor image. The author is leading to the discussion that poor images and popular images and that can be seen by a mass of people. Steyerl is trying to defend the poor image. The digital world has come so far from the beginning of photography and photographs. Photographs now have less meaning then they used to. Especially when advertisements are seen everywhere and photos are passed around and edited and than edited again over and over.

Maria Lind 

In this article, Maria Lind is trying to prove that artwork could actually form a community. Using bikes to get people to come together the artist used social practice in this work. She got people to come together on their bikes and be social with each other. Social practice as an art movement could be described as art that involves more people that objects and that pushes social and political change. I think that this art movement is a nice change from other normal practices. It gets people involved and gets people to make changes in the world. Instead of just making a sculpture that no one understands or doesn’t care about, these artists are trying to get people to do something for their country or the world that we live in. Even though this art practice is questioned that it is even an art practice is normal. Everything is art is questioned. Social practice has opened up new forms of education. But social practice is just like any other art movement. Some of it might not matter but a lot of it makes a difference.

Moyra Davey

Moyra Davey uses her photography to show in depth of how photography should be used and how much potential is actually has. She leads us through her favorite writers and how they describe photography. Davey has a lot of struggles throughout the notes. She has multiple sclerosis and she has to get eye surgery. She also struggles with taking photos and making them what she wants them to be. She seems to focus more on the image itself rather than the quality of the actual photograph. She is more interested in what is in the photo. She has a very unique outlook on photography and how she views herself. I really liked reading this piece. It showed her personality through what she wrote and I got a better understanding of what she does with her work. Her photographs seem to focus on mostly daily life. She takes pictures of newspapers and books, things that are just lying around. I find this type of photography different than most. Usually people search for the perfect place to take a picture or set up a scene to make it perfect. A couple of people in our class used this a take off for their final project. I really like the idea of taking pictures almost randomly and getting an unexpected result. It gives it a different type of meaning.

Clusterfuck

Clusterfuck Aesthetics is a newer form of art that pretty much explains itself. The article called it a new type of thrift store. Just having different chaos and junk for the art pieces. Mike Kelly was one of the main artists that started the Clusterfuck art movement. He created his own form by using found objects or made objects and stacking them on top of each other or just chaotic. He wanted it to be almost a madhouse of things everywhere. Kelley wanted his audience to feel as though they were at an exhibition that was theatrical or felt very staged. His piece included parts from a high school yearbook. I think that this art movement is very interesting. It is open to so many different ideas and is opened up to your own imagination. The artist use chaos as their driving force for their work. I like how these artists use found objects or made pieces instead of buying things or searching for specific parts. Instead they see something and put it in their art piece and it works.

Lightbox Art343

For this Light Box project I wanted to use Light as my main focus. I created this quote, "A positive mind gives off a positive life" for this project. I wanted the background to have almost a stained glass window effect. I created this file in illustrator. I think that using white letters helps with the light shining through. I wanted the quote to be the main part and have the background darker so you don't notice it as much as the writing. 

Art345 Artist Talk/Exhibition Review

Artist Talk - Scott Tsichitani

Scott Tsichitani first introduced himself with his family greeting card of his fake family with his face on all of his children and wife. This was the perfect family that he was expected to have in his life but never had. He was subverting the cultural norms. His theme of his art practice was stereotypes in his culture. His theme was “undoing the other through anti-anti-Asian art”. The first work that he showed was about the Geisha show in San Francisco at the Asian Art Museum. He noticed that the Museum was taking stereotypical Japanese culture and using it for their exhibits. He took the advertisement for the exhibit and replaced his face with the Geisha’s face. He changed the words on the ad and printed them out and put them in the front of the Asian Art Museum. It took people a little while to discover that those were not the originals. When people started to notice, he got a lot of emails and caused a little stir up. He said that he was crossing boundaries but people needed something to make them realize that this was stereotyping the Japanese culture. He wanted it to be effective political art. The next exhibit that he caused a stir with was Lords of Samurai. This was another idealized and romanticized exhibit at the Asian Art Museum. He took the ad for the exhibit and messed around with it again and made an almost identical website as the Asian Art Museums. It was a parody satire to the pop culture. It created a destiny that could produce reactions. People claimed that this was not art and made him take down all of his work. He did a great job of showing the public of all of this stereotyping the Japanese culture. He made an impact.

Maya Lin

What is missing is a piece about habitat loss and the species that are going extinct. It is a sculptural work with a website that goes along with it. `These pieces are a memorial to the parts of the world that are disappearing. One is Disappearing Bodies of Water: Artic Ice. It is made out of marble and has a granite base. It is white in color and shows the cartography of the waters that are disappearing in the world. The piece is quite beautiful to look at. It is quite large and eye catching. The piece has layers on layers of the marble. When looking at her pieces, you begin to question what is happening with the world and why you don’t really know what is going on. There are so many species and parts of land that are disappearing all due to humans. This work is important for people to look at. Raising awareness for this problem that the world is facing needs to be heard. The website has points of interest that you can click on to see what species has been going extinct in that area of the world.

Dada Exhibition

In the Jot Travis building of University of Nevada, Reno, a dada exhibition was put up. When walking in, there was a lot to notice. There were a lot of papers on the wall and collage type pieces to look at. The use of collage was very interesting because I went in right after my Art 343 class had an assignment about doing collage.  The use of collage pushed the artists boundaries of how dada doesn’t really mean anything. It was a very unconventional way of art in that time period. This exhibit had many artists from different parts of the school system. There was student art and art done by professors. There were sculptures, collages, paintings, and video art to complete this exhibit. A part of the exhibit that stood out to me was the donkey head hanging from the ceiling. It had a video that accompanied it with people wearing different animal heads in different places. It was quite interesting because when looking at it, it was almost creepy to look at. Also there was a book taken apart on the wall. Every word was replaced by an e. It made the book not have any meaning, which is in the spirit of Dada. Every thing about dada is so different from traditional art that is done in school.

Late Harvest - NMA

At the Nevada Museum of Art, there is an exhibition called Late Harvest. The exhibition is mixing the use of painting and taxidermy. The paintings are historically significant in some way. The two different art styles put together gives the viewer a chance to question why that certain animal was placed in a certain scene. In this exhibition there are many artists that contributed. One piece that stood out to me was a deer with a human face. The piece is called Licking the Plate by Kate Clark, 2014. She used a wide variety of different mediums to create the sculpture and painting. Over all I did not like this show. It was very creepy to see all of these taxidermy pieces with human faces or different things added on to the animals. But I did like how they used the paintings to emphasize the sculptures. It made them stand out more than just using the sculptures.