Geoff's ART Blog

2009-12-04T20:40:00.000-08:00

2009-11-29T13:56:00.000-08:00

MCA Artist Map

2009-11-11T16:44:00.000-08:00

The Midway Contemporary Art artists' map displays different states and/or countries from where the artist(s) are based, as well as the materials he/she uses. All of the artists were linked through to the MCA with string. It was an interesting concept to gain insight into where most of the artists that show at the MCA arrive from (and the kinds of materials they use), but as far as readability, the map was very confusing. The strings created a sort of web, a mesh of lines that when placed on top of another, made difficult to follow. I'm sure if all of the strings began at the MCA and branched out towards the places of origin the map would have been more clear. Or, possibly, instead of placing the states and countries in correct geography in relation to Minnesota, the origins could have been arranged according to material type, or even by numbers (example: 15 artists from New York, 12 from Italy, 10 from California, 5 from Great Britain - and each cut-out would be placed in order of the number of artists based in each place around Minnesota). The map as it is, though, is still of interest to view - if only because you become aware of the wide variety of artists that are involved in the Minneapolis art scene that truly make the MCA global.

2009-11-02T19:11:00.000-08:00

Graphic Design by Simon Page

Strange Maps

2009-10-15T13:42:00.000-07:00

strangemaps.wordpress.com

Andy Warhol - "16 Jackies"

2009-10-14T09:34:00.000-07:00

Andy Warhol - 16 Jackies

The piece that I reacted to most positively at the Walker was Andy Warhol's "16 Jackies." A screen print of four different photographs of Jackie Kennedy taken at various moments before and after the assassination of President John Kennedy. The hue of the two of the rows is blue, which made me feel a bit melancholy due to the subject matter, and two are white. I am sure if the prints were shaded a different color, like say green, or red, the mood of the pictures relating to the color's implied meaning would alter the intention of the print entirely.

In "16 Jackies" Warhol is breaking up time and exploring the image of a public figure, the physicality of her emotions - in her face: the eyes, her smile turning to shock and disbelief, and to grief. Warhol has imitated this type of repetitious printing with Seven Decades of Janis.

While not as repetitious as "16 Jackies" - the concept is the same. The time is expanded upon for a much longer period: an entire life.

The specific order in which the photos of Jackie Kennedy are placed could also hold some significance: the first row is her arriving in Dallas, the second row is on the Air Force One as LBJ is being sworn in as President, the third row is at Kennedy's funeral, and the fourth is seconds before the shooting. From a design perspective, the two grieving/shocking moments are squished together and sandwiched in between the two joyful photos. As for the choice of color, it would seem that since not only are the two shocked/grieving photos not the same color (to give the same, wanted affect for each), that the placement of color for each photo row is simply a part of the overall design.

I appreciate this piece because of the kinds of emotions it pulled out of me, and the process by which Warhol made "16 Jackies": cutting out photos from LIFE magazine of the event and appropriating them into colored screen prints. [1]

1. http://collections.walkerart.org/item/object/422

Photos:

http://www.walkerart.org/walker_images/e_images/01/wac_735e.jpg

http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=80706

2009-10-12T22:14:00.000-07:00

Russian Underground Press

Larry Clark's "Tulsa"

2009-10-07T22:01:00.000-07:00

“i was born in tulsa oklahoma in 1943. when i was sixteen i started shooting amphetamine. i shot with my friends everyday for three years and then left town but i’ve gone back through the years. once the needle goes in it never comes out. L.C." [1]

Thus begins Larry Clark's photographic journey into the everyday lives of teenagers in the late 60's/early 70's of Tulsa, OK - a three year chronicle of sex and drug use.

Larry Clark, Untitled, 1971

The photographs are in black and white. People shooting amphetamines, or heroin, into their arm veins. A pregnant woman shooting up in a dim-lit room. A father on his bed takes a drag from his cigarette while cradling a baby in his arms. In mom and dad's living room, the mantelpiece is decorated with family photographs and dime store paintings of Jesus Christ; teenagers are caught in mid-laugh, taking turns with the needle. On a bed a man sits beneath his topless girlfriend, he helps her shoot up. A shaggy-haired man in plaid with an unlit cigarette dangling from his open mouth stares at the hand revolver in his left hand. Each image is captured in such a way to infer that these are more documented photos, than staged or posed ones. And together create a whole to produce an atmosphere of a particular way of living.

To look at Clark’s photographs, one must assume that this style of subjective documenting had not simply sprouted out of his mind with no influence whatsoever.

“When I started photographing in Tulsa [Oklahoma] I was just practicing my photography. But after I'd photographed my friends over a period of so many years, I began to see it as visual anthropology, and I said, "Gee, something's really happening here." So, I put it all together, and the end result was Tulsa.”[2]

New York photographer Diane Arbus of the 1950’s-1960’s used the documentary form. Arbus would befriend her subjects over a period of time and photograph them in their daily lives. Arbus sought out her subjects: nudists, cross-dressers, circus freaks, children, Brooklyn couples, prostitutes, oddities. Whereas Clark was literally documenting himself and his friends in their lives. What is the difference? The existence and exploitation of new culture. Weegee, working in the 1940’s New York, took his camera wherever he went, and snapped photos with an open eye – capturing life in the moment. “Weegee’s visceral, unabashedly sensationalistic and fiercely in-the-moment crime reportage also haunts these images.”[3]

Diane Arbus, Mexican Dwarf in His Hotel Room in N.Y.C., 1970

Weegee, The Fashionable People, 1943

Indeed, Clark's depiction of youth is gritty, haunting, and at times shocking. The connection between all of the aforementioned photographers is that they captured city life, in all of its strangeness, and Clark is focusing directly on what he sees - rural Midwestern America. Graphic sex, violence, teenage drug addicts, these concepts of living does not normally seem parallel in a rural landscape.

Yet this is what Clark sees and what he documents with such directness and intensity to evoke something out of the viewer. One cannot avoid looking without empathy at Clark’s photographs. Humans naturally look into a person to try and find something to connect with – whether it is a smile, a set of attractive eyes, a unique face or attitude which shines through – and what shines through Clark’s photographs? Perhaps something you would rather not see, and maybe something that grabs your interest right away.

1. http://museum.icp.org/museum/exhibitions/larry_clark/tulsa.html

2. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1285/is_3_35/ai_n13500796/

3. http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/larry_clark1/

Images:

http://www.phillipsdepury.com/auctions/lot-detail.aspx?sn=UK040209&search=&p=2&order=&lotnum=13

http://www.artnet.com/artwork/424818650/167990/larry-clark-untitled-t40.html

http://museum.icp.org/museum/collections/special/weegee/weegee09.html

http://saradistin.wordpress.com/2008/11/28/compassion-in-portraiture/

"Secret Life of Objects" @ Midway Contemporary Art

2009-09-30T17:12:00.000-07:00

Jack Pierson, You Got What You Deserved
1991
graphite on paper
14 x 11 inches
Collection of Peter and Annie Remes

The piece looks like a found object, like a conversation between two people, one of whom is unaware of the others' existence. The different styles of writing, and the literal division of the paper into halves breaks the words into two different phrases. "You got what you deserved," and "Right off Hollywood Blvd." could also be connected as part of the same sentence, as well.

You Got What You Deserved is a good example of postmodernism in that it asks the viewer to create some kind of setting behind the words. Each person can interpret whether or not there are negative or positive connotations behind the words and their placement on the page. (I was reminded of my experience walking the streets of Hollywood Blvd. when I read this piece. Pages of screenplays are literally littering the streets there, and when I read "right off hollywood blvd." I immediately conjured up a story about lost dreams, dreams torn out of pages and scattered on the ground.)

edit: 10:18pm, 30, September 2009
Dealing primarily in photography, Jack Pierson uses "text art" in other works, as well. Unlike some of his text art where it's akin to cut-out lettering (cutting out individual letters from different fonts & sources to create a word), here Pierson could be said to be sketching the words rather than constructing them. So, You Got What You Deserved is typical in a sense that Pierson is using words, and it is with variety that he chooses the context and subject of the words. I think I would be more curious as to the intent of the piece had I not known any of the artist's previous work, and now that I am familiar with his stuff, this work seems more like a sketch for a different unused design.

Ken Price
Untitled
Acrylic on ceramic
4.25 x 6 x 4.25 inches
Private collection, Minneapolis

Without any prior knowledge or information to the artist or the intentions behind piece of art, I find Ken Price's Untitled to be a work of first-class design. It's only a shape, and that's all it's meant to be. Cut it some slack, it's only a shape. The design is so simple: a geometric rendering of a capsized whale that's been sliced in half, waiting on the beach to be taken into the kitchens of the shanty town to feed the people for the winter.

Untitled could be anything you want it to be, hence the title, therefore I like it.

edit: 9:52pm, 30, September 2009
The majority of Price's work is constructed out of clay, and formed into amorphous, sometimes symmetrical, geometric & cylindrical art. This piece by Ken Price is typical of his "Shapes" period, where Price constructs clay into geometric objects and paints them in layers, fires them, and slices them to the core - revealing the initial color(s). I actually find most of the sculptures serene. I am able to see the core of the object. I am able to appreciate the ridged & colorful exterior, and admire the smoothness of the orange interior. This piece at the MCA is more geometric than most of his other work - shapes which are constructed in more or less an organic way, rather than adhering to the laws of geometry.

M.I.A. Visit

2009-09-19T07:41:00.000-07:00

"Hallway"
Frank Lloyd Wright
c. 1915

&

"Saint Jerome in His Cell"
Albrecht Dürer
1514

Two works of different mediums, yet equal in skill and presentation. Frank Lloyd Wright's "Hallway" is a piece of architecture, which - similar to his other designs - incorporates the outside world with the interior space; Dürer's etching is the study of Saint Jerome (Jerome translated the christian bible from Hebrew to Latin) hard at work in his study, isolated from the outside.

If one were to place these two works in close proximity to each other, one could begin the comparisons: a hallway of elegant structure with enough windows to let the light in; look at the scrupulous detail in Dürer's etching - the amount of line created to give the impression of depth, shadow, atmosphere. With the presence of St. Jerome in Dürer's piece, one might gain insight into the impression the room of his study has on his diligent work, might not the same impression be placed for Wright's hallway? Wright's hallway seems much more mellow than Dürer's cluttered vision; less distraction. Wright's hallway is only meant for someone to pass through from one room to the next. While Dürer's room used for translation, houses a lion, a dog, a human skull, and various artifacts relating to his study.

How does architecture, space, and light, affect our moods, our sense of place within nature?

"Crazy Quilt"
Florence Barton Loring
1900-1905

&

"Flintlock rifle"
John Bonewitz

A quilt made of patches of artwork from various women of society. A flintlock rifle produced to kill man. One piece exemplifies unity, collaboration, a sense of cohesion through style and color; the other, mechanically crafted to shoot bullets most efficiently to kill the enemy. Peace and war.

Within the proximity of the these two artifacts, I would want to evoke in the viewer's mind the process and purpose of each piece. How does one go from looking at a quilt to a shotgun? What kinds of reactions does this person get when he/she is faced with such two different works of art? Is there any connection whatsoever, or are they two seperate pieces unnecessarily linked?

Frank Lloyd Wright, "Hallway," http://artsmia.org/viewer/detail.php?v=12&id=19689

"Flintlock rifle," http://www.stage-props-blank-guns.com/stage_movie_props/catalog/Kentucky-Flintlock-Rifle-p-901.html

Florence Barton Loring, "Crazy Quilt," http://artsmia.org/viewer/detail.php?v=12&id=3052

Albrecht Dürer, "St. Jerome in His Study," http://www.earlyofficemuseum.com/photographs.htm

2009-09-18T08:31:00.000-07:00

"Animated short film by Vladimir Tarasov, made in 1978. Features music ("Godfather Theme") by Nino Rota with permission.

- Official selection at the festival in Lille, France, 1979
- Official selection at the festival in Triest, Italy, 1979."

Taken from the Russian animation film studio Союзмультфильм - Soyuzmulzfilm page

Modern Graphic Design Inspiration Blog

2009-09-17T18:12:00.000-07:00

"Grain edit is focused on classic design work from the 1950s-1970s and contemporary designers that draw inspiration from that time period.
Site content includes interviews, articles, designers' libraries as well as examples of rare design annuals, type specimens, Ephemera, posters and vintage kids books from our bookshelves."

2009-09-11T00:21:00.000-07:00

Cool design blog

2009-09-10T12:21:00.000-07:00

Michael Snow - "La Région Centrale" (1971)

1st Project: Film loop @ The Walker

2009-09-09T19:34:00.000-07:00

The focus of criticism is simply a loop of film being projected through a 16mm film projector. The film shows a nondescript metal warehouse in a field on a sunny day. The film has been shot at a faster speed, thus projecting the image in slow-motion, and one is aware of the speed of the film from the soundtrack - a low, dull roar: the possible noise of an overhead aircraft slowed down for effect. The metal walls seem to be moving, as if some force from inside is forcing an expansion.
It moves and shakes with the uncertainty of gaseous pressure.

Postmodernism applies itself to this piece, with no associations to any formal movement. The loop is an abstract interpretation of time.

CVA OAD 09

2009-09-05T16:29:00.000-07:00

This blog is for the sole purpose of my Orientation to Art and Design course at the College of Visual Arts, fall 2009.

Prepare for the coming of its' awesomeness.