Artist #15 - 3.29.10 - Carol Bove

At our meeting, Paul suggested I check out Carol Bove. There were a few pieces of hers that I really liked, but for the most part I thought her stuff was stupid. Some of her installations were really interesting though, like this one.Carol Bove, The Night Sky over New York, October 21, 2007, 9 p.m., 2007.

In it she has mapped out stars exactly where they are on the ceiling in a web with copper bars hanging from each star point. It reminds me of rays of light, as if they are traveling through space from light years away and I can see all of them falling here. This is one of her more aesthetically pleasing pieces as well, which was another reason I liked it. When I first saw it I thought it was some kind of sound art using wind chimes, when I found out it wasn't, it gave me an idea of an installation where the people in the gallery cannot help but occasionally knock a wind chime, thereby creating a sort of organic, accidental music. Although, this may not work because people might try really hard to avoid touching them, or if there are too many, the viewer may be annoyed. Here are a few more of Bove's work that I enjoyed. I like the ones that use a lot of repetition or pattern.Carol Bove, Untitled, 2009

Carol Bove, Tower of the Prophet, 2002

The ones I particularly didn't like were her bookshelf pieces. I didn't get how these are art. I did some reading, but still couldn't see the what the concept was of placing these items from the 60's and 70's on shelves. Maybe it is for the same reason that Paul couldn't respond to the image I brought him, the media didn't allow him to access the piece. I suppose it is possible that if I saw these in physical form, I would feel differently about them, but as they are, I am not interested.

Idea #14 - Metaphor/Metonym

The other day I was trying to understand contemporary art better and I came across a discussion board about the differences between modern and post-modern art. They said that a big difference is that modernism tends to use metaphors, where post-modernism uses metonymy. I knew that a metaphor is something that is meant to represent something else. For example, a staircase could be a metaphor for life. I am still trying to understand metonymy but my understanding is that a metonym for life could be something like a human or animal, something associated with life. A metonym is more of an association where metaphor is a similarity. After learning this, I'm still not sure how this applies to visual art, I think I get it as far as verbal use, but when it comes to either in art I have trouble understanding what the metonym/metaphor is referencing and differentiating between the two. That is, even knowing this, I still can't differentiate between modern and post-modern art. It seems like modern art is more non-representational, which makes me think that the abstraction is the metaphor. I might be thinking too into it, maybe I shouldn't worry about what is what and just use what I need to use to convey my message.

Artist #13 - 3.22.10 - The Baschet Brothers

While looking for art that deals with music I came across the Baschet Brothers. They create thing that are musical instruments as well as sculptures. I like the idea of these things that look interesting on their own and can be discovered as being musical and interactive. It inspires me to want to make some of my own musical instruments. I have thought of this before, but not in the context of being sculptural as well. I think it would be difficult to achieve something that looks appealing but also sounds good. It is an art all in itself to make an instrument so that it plays in key and has tuned harmonics. Unfortunately my computer is currently out of service and the sound doesn't work on the one I am using so I haven't been able to listen to the sounds the Bashet Brother's instruments make. I am very curious though, it's always cool to hear something with an unusual timbre. I played a didgeridoo over break which is a very unique instrument, but very simple. It is mostly a percussion instrument, these don't necessarily need to be tuned so perhaps if I were to make an instrument it would be a percussive one to eliminate the necessity for fine tuning, I could just focus on resonance. Here are some of the Baschet's pieces:

Francois Baschet

Banjo - 1952

Baschet Brothers - Cristal Baschet

Justin Lewis - 3.22.10 - Anderson Gallery Submittion

Here is a photo of the framed images I am submitting to the Anderson Gallery

Idea #12 - 3.11.10 - Loosining my noose

From my critique I feel like the most important thing I could do is loosen up the way that I make my finished work. I am imaging 'playing' my images. I need a method that allows me to juxtapose my imagery more through feeling. Almost like painting or playing an instrument in the way that you can quickly morph and change a piece by feeling the brushstrokes/note combonations. I kind of like the idea of collage because it kind of can have this property, especially if I were to do it by hand. I think a touch of hand working might be beneficial to my work. However, I don't know how I feel about the aesthetics of collage, and I think the idea of a musical process could be pushed more too. I also have been thinking of moving away from photography, using it only as documentation and focusing more on materials. I think I spoke earlier about my peanut-butter hammock. I think this has the problem of using it's own language but I'm starting to feel like I am having trouble understanding what language could be used other than that.

On a completely different topic, going back to something I started working on the beginning of last semester. I just had the idea of creating a large scale photo of a pretty landscape or something natural and put it on the floor, dividing the space. How would viewers react to it? Would they jump over it? How long before people are stepping on it? I feel like it presents the idea of nature as an obstacle. Do they treat it like an inconvenient piece of art? Or do they destroy it just to pass by? Maybe the big question is would it make them angry or would they appreciate it? Of course this would have to be with the permission of my fellow students because people would have to jump(or just walk) over my piece to get to some of theirs.

Artist Lecture #2 - Sanford Biggers

I almost didn't go to the lecture today because I had a crit at 2:00, but I had to get money to Ashley S, so I decided to go but I had to leave a little early. I'm glad I went though because I really enjoyed a lot of his work. Of course I was very interested in his musical influences as my work is dealing with ideas about music. I also love hip-hop music so it was cool to see art that deals with themes about hip-hop.

I thought something kind of interesting happened when he showed the first video. At one point when it is demanding that everyone get up out of their chairs, hang out the window, and get mad. I almost expected people to get up, or I almost felt the desire myself to get up, but everyone just sat there. It just seemed funny in the context of having all those people watching it.
I also enjoyed his breakdancing piece, when viewed from the top it, like the synchronized dancers, creates a sort of human visualizer and puts the art of breakdancing in a place that treats it as an art. I liked the idea of it being a Buddhist pattern which brings to mind the idea of dance or music as meditation or spirituality. This is something I would like to incorporate in my work.


I couldn't find an image of it on-line, but I thought his piece with the footage of the black and white families was very interesting because for a while I didn't realize that the two families were of different races. That was one of the last things I noticed, which really made the piece a lot stronger for me.
One of the last pieces I saw was this one, I thought it was visually really cool, but I didn't really get it.

Artist #11 - 3.6.10 - Arturo Herrera

I was browsing the Art 21 website and I came across Arturo Herrera. His work, like mine, is inspired by music. He uses methods of splicing and re-contextualizing various sources into abstractions. This method reminds me of how some music is made. Often artists, particularly hip-hop producers, will slice up music samples by other artists and rearrange clips to form a new composition, often with a totally different sound than the original song. I found this quote by Herrera where he relates music to his work that I thought was great,

"Music is related to the way of thinking for what I do- because music offers no solution. It has no content. It’s just total subjectivity. So it lasts for a limited time, and it’s gone. Unless somebody plays it...it’s just non-existent. This experience of making it happen and then disappear- the transient nature of music- is fascinating to me. I’d like the visual images that I’m trying to do to be nonobjective, just like music"

This is a good expression of how I am feeling lately. I am trying to incorporate imagery in my work, but the problems I am coming up with are that when I listen to music I do not usually imagine a scenario, or an image per say. Instead I imagine a quality that might be found in an image, but might not be the subject of the photo. So when I attempt to juxtapose images that I feel have these qualities, their content seems at odds with what I might be trying to say. I want my images to be abstract and non-objective, but I feel a pressure to use photos of things because it seems like using abstraction doesn't communicate anything to anyone anymore. I feel like abstraction is the best (and maybe only) way to visually express music. It doesn't have to be like a visualizer, but to use a combination of objective images seems too close to a film.

Here is some of his work

"Untitled"
2003
Enamel paint on wall, dimensions site specific

"Untitled"
2002
Collage (gouache on paper), 9 1/4 x 7 inches

"Before We Leave"
2001
Wool felt, 84 x 144 inches

Idea #10 - 3.4.10 - Back to color fields

While thinking of ways to present my work, keep coming back to a sort of color field approach to my image arrangement. The way that I am working is similar to color field painters in that there is a great importance in relationships between colors, image qualities, space, and size, but instead of working in one canvas, I will be composing installations of multiple images. I am imagining each instrument as having it's own image and then arranging them in accordance to their presence in the song. I will be kind of mapping out a song like I've always been doing, but now I feel like instead of presenting everything in a song in one image, I am more free to explore how different elements can interweave with one another. The images will be composed based on the feeling of an instrument, like a trumpet would be an image of something bright, tight, sharp and exciting. If it is a trumpet solo, or the trumpet is the prominent instrument in the song, the image may be big or may span the whole composition, but maybe the trumpet just adds little accents throughout the song; then there might be multiples of the same image and would be small and placed throughout as visual accents to other images. Rhythm is important but may not stay exact to the song, instead it will be built based on an overall rhythm in a song, not on individual beats as my work was before.

Artist #9 - 3.1.10 - John Baldessari

One of the artists Paul told me to look at in our first meeting was John Baldessari. Some of his work I do not get at all, but some of it I think is awesome. The stuff' that first struck me was his text work like these:

John Baldessari (b. 1931)

Painting for Kubler
acrylic on canvas
67 7/8 x 56½ in. (172.4 x 143.5 cm.)
Painted in 1966-1968.

John Baldessari, Solving Each Problem as It Arises

John Baldessari
Everything is Purged...
1966-68
68 x 56 in.

What I like about this work is that it is talking about art, it is causing the artist to consider the paradigm that he exists in. My favorite one is Painting for Kubler because I see it as applying to aspects of society other than art. Things like our economic system, art, or even culture are entities on their own. We know nothing outside of them. I feel like they could all be compared to a strange, ancient flying machine that we pushed off a cliff, we only think we're flying because we haven't hit the ground yet. This piece suggests that there are other paths that art (or economics or culture) could have taken, but after it got going in this direction, that is all there could be. If it were all to crumble, what would the next attempt look like? Surely a totally different paradigm.
In "Solving Each Problem as It Arises" I thought it was interesting how he ends it. I think this points at an important flaw in art; how people who aren't artists view art. This piece might not even be about that, but it makes me think about how a normal person, who doesn't know much about art can interpret some of the stuff artists make. As artists are we making art for each other(other artists), or for everyone?

Some of his other work is inaccessible to me, pieces like this for example,

Yves Saint Laurent Shirt
John Baldessari

Is this of a religious nature? Is it about temptation? What is the significance of the painted-over faces with grayscale noses and ears? The title references the shirt, but it doesn't seem to be about the shirt at all, is it about consumerism? Is this supposed to be some kind of modern portrait of adam and eve? This stuff seems to be his most popular work, but it doesn't speak the same way other stuff of his does.