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In my  previous "What is Art" post I described art as " a variety of  activities in which someone expresses skill"  that lead me up to explaining the wide variety of forms art could be; sculptures paintings, music, building a building, etc. But I never really put in the aspect of social practice art, which expands the variety even more. Until learning about social practice art I would not have thought of it as a form of art, but after researching and finding a better understanding it makes more sense as well as shows that art really can be found in anything.

Social practice art centers on human interaction and discussion, it's goal is to provoke change through the human interaction. It is human centered way of looking at issues going on and finding creative ways to engage/address such issues, making people more aware and want to take action. The Yes Men, although they do not call themselves artists saying "art is not important to what we do" definitely are a good example of this type of art in that they pass themselves as real representatives of corporations they do not like and "pull pranks" on them at corporate events.

In one of their hoaxes they held a fake council and had a fake press release out to the public pretending to be the US Chamber of Commerce stating they changed their view on climate change policy that they worked very hard on, leaving many people shocked and confused. They did this because the Chamber of Commerce is against climate change legislation and once the press release was out it gained a lot of attention for them and they eventually ended up changing their policy, putting emphasis it was not because of the Yes Men when in my opinion had the Yes Men never brought the issue to public attention, the policies would have remained the same. In another section of the video the Yes Men attend an oil conference and give out free samples of their bio fuel called vivolium made from victims of climate change. In this one it's more connected with art in that they created candles to use in their conference. Because it was made from actual people it really got the audience involved, almost creeping them out but still impacted them hopefully enough to think about what the oil company is doing.

In a way the Yes Men remind me of Banksy and his motive while creating art.  Banksy uses his art to provoke viewers to reflect, and even act on today’s problems. His work encourages us to take action in caring for ourselves, our earth and each other. An example being his environmental message “I Don’t Believe in Global Warming” spray painted on a wall that used to be above water level but is now almost covered by water, contradicting the message. 

Art is powerful in that it can not only fascinate people with its looks and spark up interesting thoughts and conversations but it can also provoke change. Because art gets peoples attention people have been using it for good- to give attention to social issues that may seen to be being ignored, to open people's minds and make whoever is doing the bad possibly see what they are doing and hopefully provoking them to change.

As I mentioned before a common misconception is that it has to be a painting, or sculpture in order to be characterized as art when in reality it could range from dancing/singing, to constructing a building, as well as made by anyone, not just a famous artist. Art is about creativity. It doesn't have to be physical, it could simply be an idea, or music. Art can open people's minds, make them think, and art can make a point. 

In Rick Lowe’s video he explained himself as a social sculpture. Lowe created housing programs with houses he would fix up, bringing people together while doing so giving them an opportunity to learn about ethnic back grounds and culture. He calls him and his crew “Pioneers of expanding the nation of what art can be.” I agree in that he’s going beyond the typical stereotype of what art can be and expanding it to unique forms in a way that gives back as well. 

I learned over the years art has served many important purposes including once being the source of communication in ancient and prehistoric art, it can teach people religious ways, as used in Christianity and many other religions, it can open people’s minds, make a difference, or just simply something to do to relieve stress or boredom. Art has a huge impact on our lives and our way of living. This class definitely has me appreciate art more than I already have, after learning about religious art I attended a wedding in a beautiful church in Chicago called St. Mary of the Angels and usually I would look past all of the paintings but because I had a better understanding I found the art fascinating and looked at all the details we went over during that week such as their odd body positions in the paintings, the colors used, what was placed where and why, etc. 

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Institutionalized Critique

Institutional critique 

Institutional critique is analyzing and assessing an art place- usually a museum or art gallery. It began in the 1960′s described as “something to attack aesthetically, politically, and theoretically” (Alberro). It brings questions about the purpose of art and where it is shown. According to Austin Blanton it is “an attempt to peek behind the curtain of the systems and people that make seemingly-anonymous organizations run.” (Blanton)  It consists of many purposes including to open artists up for “public scrutiny; others express their dissatisfaction with the hidden biases, power structures and commercial agendas underpinning museums and galleries” (Price).

Key Figures

Michael Asher was a conceptual artist, (he is also known as a “canonical” artist which represents power and hierarchy) who did installations at museums. He would rip off floors and walls to reveal a raw state of the galleries. For example in 1974 he took down a wall in the Copley Gallery Installation in LA to reveal an office separate from the exhibit. He is well known for exploring the significance of how where you place the art can signify the meaning of it, he expressed this by moving a bronze George Washington statue from outside the museum to an 18th century exhibit inside the museum in the Art Institute of Chicago in 1979. 

Daniel Buren is a conceptual artist from France.  He had a piece he created in 1973 called “Within and beyond the frame” consisting of 19 banners; 9 in the gallery, 9 outside, and 1 in the middle connecting the outside and inside. The stripes were posted so they did not look like paintings in public, but once displayed, they were paintings. He used these banners as a threshold between inside the institution and outside social life. Buren uses the architectural structure of the museums to depict the importance of his work. Throughout his career, Buren has been focused on the context through which art is displayed and uses his work to draw attention to the characteristics that often are unnoticed; formal, political, ideological, etc.

Andrea Fraser views institutional critique as a way of presenting the museum instead of the artists. In her essay she states “ It is not a question of being against the institution: we are the institution. It is a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to.” (Fraser) In her work “Down the River” Fraser uses an audio recording from a prison and plays it in a completely empty gallery to create a threshold between social, cultural, and geographic division between museums and prisons. 

Advantages of traditional art spaces

Advantages include the fact that all of the art is in one place for people to come travel and see. It is also important in that these art spaces save traditional culture- giving the pieces a place to never be forgotten as well as giving people an in depth understanding of different traditions, customs, and religions. I agree with Dewey when he defines a museum as  “ the proper home for works of art, and in the promotion of the idea that they are apart from common life” (Dewey) in that without museums art may be lost- museums secure many works of art and give them a place to be as opposed to spread all over the world to where we may never see them again. 

Disadvantages

All exhibits essentially are designed the same- one space looks just like the other with the exception of the art it consists of which can become boring. Another disadvantage is the fact that the viewers are limited to being in a room viewing displays as opposed to expanding their perspective in more differentiated areas giving the art more meaning. 

Personal Experience

I definitely have experienced both the advantages and drawbacks in that I got to see a variety of art in one place and experience several different cultures yet because I was limited to just individual small exhibit rooms I feel as though it limited my experience. For example, with the piece Heaven from the Museum of Contemporary Art if the exhibit had been more separate from the others, even elaborated to the point where you were isolated in a room and had the ability to lay down listening to the music and viewing the piece I would have gotten more from the piece. A solution not limited to this piece but to other pieces  may be either making them more separate and giving them their own space that helps further the experience making it easier to interpret them, or even just having headphones with music corresponding to the piece or audio to cancel out the background distractions and lure you into the piece more.  

Sources

“Institutional Critique – Austin's Blanton Museum of Art.” Austins Blanton Museum of Art, blantonmuseum.org/chapter/institutional-critique/. 

Price, Nicola, director. Introduction to Institutional Critique. YouTube, YouTube, 19 Mar. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujE6ntrJdHM.

Alberro, Alexander, and Blake Stimson. Institutional Critique: an Anthology of Artists' Writings. MIT Press, 2011. 

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 Navajo

Background Info

 The Navajos first lived in Western Canada thousands of years ago and then traveled to settle in southwest areas that are now known as Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. The Navajo Nation is the largest American Reservation in the United States. They are very closely related to the Apache tribes.

Visual Art

Harrison Begay (1917)  and Carl Nelson Gorman (1907) are famous Navajo artists who paint and silk screen. A quote from “EveryCulture.com” states:  “Noted for their sinuous delicacy of line, meticulous detail, restrained palette, and elegance of composition, his watercolors and silkscreen prints have won 13 major awards.” (Birchfield, Everyculture.com ) In regards of Begay’s work. Gorman was known for his oil paints as well as his silk screening. There also is a well known contemporary Native American artist named Rudolpf Carl Gorman (1931) of the 20th century. His art combines the traditional with the nontraditional in style and form. 

Crafts

Navajo jewelry is internationally famous. Other crafts include clay pot making as well as weaving. Weaving is a very important economic activity in fact manufacturing of their handmade crafts including all of the above remain an important industry to this day.

Clothing

The Navajo wove yucca plants or deerskin for clothes and are known for their woven rugs and blankets.They learned how to weave cotton from the Pueblo people then later switched to woven wool of sheep. These blankets were very valuable, only the wealthy leaders could afford them so they got the name “Chief’s Blankets” (Lewis,navajo-nsn.gov). Today their rugs and blankets are still in demand and are still pretty expensive. 

Gender Roles/Jewelry

In the Navajo tribe women mainly wove blankets and made clay pots while men made jewelry. Turquoise and silver were very common materials with the jewelry. 

Aztec

Background

The Aztec (Central America) first built their city in what is now known as Mexico City. The people lived in adobe homes (mud brick). Their everyday life was very similar to places in the world today, involving; relationships, shopping, music, meals, entertainment,etc. There was poetry, dramatic presentations, art and athletics. The Aztecs were equally as intimately involved with art as they were with their religion and the two were tightly interwoven.

Gender Roles

In the Aztec tribe the boys received a wider education than girls. Males would learn about trade and were taught fighting as well as leadership skills. Girls were taught how to run a household- cook and care for the family and were also taught crafts to economically support the household. Marriages were arranged and strongly tied to religious beliefs. 

Visual Art

The Aztecs art consists of a wide variety of art forms from massive stone sculptures to miniature carved gemstone insects. They made hand crafted pottery, gold and silver jewelry and feather work garments. The Aztecs had an appreciation for a wide variety of insects, birds, fish and animals, so a lot of their art reflected this. Because of their close relationship with both art and religion the gods were often depicted in their art, and they often resembled animals of various kinds. The drawings of the gods were often sharp and angular, brightly colored. Unlike other tribe’s artwork, the Aztec mainly focused on warriors, gods, and religious and military objects. 

Clothing

Aztec women were responsible for making the clothing, they would twist cotton on a stick and weigh it down with a clay spindle to make a thread. Women’s headdresses were made with the same technique as well as with knotted feathers. 

Crafts

Aztec were widely known for their pottery as well as masks. Their most common style of pottery is now know as black-on-orange since the designs often used those colors as well as white and red. The website “Aztec-history.com” describes the art as states: “Aztec pottery is often known for its geometric shapes.  Often these were intricately drawn, with repeating patterns.  But as time went on, artisans began to use more naturalistic patterns” (N/A) Showing the change in their style. The masks made had religious connections, created for numerous purposes such as rituals or for deaths. They’re often made to be displayed- not worn. Similar to the Navajo, turquoise was also often used within the Aztec’s art. The Aztec jewelry indicated the wealth of the wearer. It was an important component of their dresses. Copper, silver, gold. turquoise, jade and emerald were very common with the jewelry. 

Contemporary References

Today artists use the Aztec images and techniques to explore both contemporary life and Mexican cultural heritage. “ The screenfold format is an emblem of ancient Mesoamerican culture, and has become charged with historical and political meaning. Contemporary artists combine this format with humorous and provocative imagery to explore the cultural and political dynamics of preconquest identity, the colonization of Mexico and current relations between Mexico, Europe, and the United States.” (Baird, newberry.org) Gomez-Pena is a known contemporary artist of whom depicts Aztec culture through a picture of an Aztec warrior confronting Superman and Wonder Woman. 

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Both art and crafts are forms of creativity that need high skill to manipulate the materials, aesthetic values and appropriate techniques as well as similar materials. . Art is a form of work that expresses emotions and expressions. It moves people emotionally and is known to have come out of the heart and soul giving the piece an unstructured, open ended aspect. With art there is no limitations or expectations.Craft is the physical for of work such as molding, carving, ceramics, etc. It is meant to attract people and is a product of ones mind. Not as much meaning is put into it compared to art. Crafts are structures which means they have a certain visible form, leaving hardly any room for open ended expression. When I think of craft, I often think of skills associated with the pre-industrial: knitting, wood turning, ceramics, quilting; and really it's only in the last century or so that craft and art have divorced. Each of those methods have particular connotations, which when used in artworks are often used strategically. Another way the distinctions may have changed over time include how back in the day they used to craft ceramic utilities solely for the purpose to use them where as now we see those pieces as art. I believe that if the maker of the piece intends to express something with their work then it is art where many people see that the material they worked with make it in fact a craft, nevermind the intent. Others argue if what the artist created is usable or wearable then it is no longer art but in the craft category. To an extent I agree that the material used does in fact make it that the person is “crafting” but like I had mentioned, if the piece in any way strikes one’s feelings then it is a form of art. It’s tricky differentiating the two in that it is easy to see that crafts are a form of art but they are in a way very different and art will not always consist of crafting. To me art is communication of an idea or an emotion, while craft is the physical manipulation of material. An object can easily be both, either, or neither. A sculpture, for example, may communicate, but it was constructed using craft. Likewise a teapot can communicate an idea, but it was crafted. One object could be viewed two ways: if you look at the way it was made and the materials used, you are looking at its craft, if you think about its ideas, you are viewing it as art. An object could have been crafted, but contain no art. Even a painting can be crafted but artless. An example of a contemporary artist of whom is “blurring the lines” is Bruce M. Sherman. Ceramics is seen as just a craft until seen/ used in the way that Sherman does.  In an interview I discovered a quote by him reading  “ “In working in clay, one communes with other works that have been fabricated and exist over hundreds and thousands of years...I work in a type of improvisational mode and each new piece is a new moment of beginning.” Instead of viewing it in a structured perspective, Sherman’s work  goes beyond crafting by him infusing them with humor or character, opening the mind to individual interpretation of his work. Eyes and hands are particularly frequent among his figurative sculptures. His explanation of which is:  “The eye has a lot to do with being aware of oneself and seeing; I’m hoping to tell a story visually rather than be didactic..... The hands stress the importance of prayer.” Sherman uses his craft skill to intrigue spectators and spark thought while they view his work as opposed to viewing it solely as a structure itself he includes eyes and other symbols to make them think of each one’s purpose or reason behind them- exploring beyond the structure itself. Another example is Jaime Guerrero of whom takes his talent with glass blowing and  incorporates it with human experience and focuses on subject matter that would normally remain mute, addressing issues of social inequality and the need for change. An example being his piece “Farm Worker.” Through his expert talent in glass blowing he is able to illustrate emotions on the man’s face, showing the suffering he seemed to have been going through, making this not only just a craft of blowing glass, but art as well getting viewers emotionally involved and feeling what the man was feeling in the piece. It takes great skill to not only be able to master the craft but also be able to incorporate certain aspects that make it no longer a craft but art as well in that it is not only a physical form of work but it expresses emotions as well.

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My best friend and I attended the Museum of Contemporary art, overall I had a great experience. I was a little disappointed about how there was not as many exhibits as I had imagined but once you got into them you realize that if there were any more you would definitely need more than a few hours to appreciate all the work. Looking at all the different pieces made me realize how really anything can be art- there was DUST on display as art because it had a great significance. I found a lot of pieces that helped further explain what we have been discussing in class such as a picture of 2 fish with human legs sitting on a rock. This was not necessarily very appealing to the eye but just because it had a lack of beauty did not make it any less of art than the others. As I looked around there were a lot of abstract pieces, however, there were a few that really captured my eye. Heyer’s painting “Heaven” was probably the most intriguing to me, it was set up in a black room with 3 similar paintings on each wall with a silver comforter in the middle of the room depicting a bed. I believe by doing this the artist really set the tone to exactly how I was supposed to feel looking at his work. As I observed each individual painting I got the same urge to fall into the the middle and absorb the art surrounding me. The music also helped set the scene because it made me feel like I was in a more relaxed state, supporting this urge. One of the three painting aroused my curiosity the most, that being the blue swirl-ish one. As I stared into the painting I thought about how the description stated that it was “meant to suck you in and lead you into a place with limitless possibilities” and really felt his intent. Another piece that gained my interest was the untitled sphere-like piece by Robert Irwin. The entire time of be observing it I thought without a doubt it was just a ball hanging off the wall, until one of the workers pointed out that the piece was in fact flat. I was completely surprised and almost thought she was kidding until I did a walk around and found that it was true. I probably had the strongest emotional connection with this piece, it was just amazing to me that someone could be so skilled to the point where they can trick my eyes into perceiving a flat piece as a three dimensional sphere. I was least interested in one of the exhibits that was a video of a man rowing through a creek looking area. I tried getting into the video to see its intent but he just kept rowing and it really just did not interest me. The piece I chose to do the time exercise  with was “Heaven” by Heyer. I almost felt like I couldn’t not choose it because of how interesting it was to me. As I sat there observing the piece I felt as though it was a portal, taking me into a state where I felt extremely calm. It was almost meditative to me. I felt like I was in a dream. The longer I looked at the piece the more it sucked me it. I found it hard to step away from it because I was so into it. I noticed his brush strokes and how important they were in making it have that dream-like feature. Another piece that really sparked my interest was the Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank of which I chose for the criticism analysis. This piece consisted of a large tank filled with distilled water and sodium chloride along with three floating basketballs. It made me think about how much time and effort it took for Koons to find that state of equilibrium that kept the balls floating perfectly centered. To me this piece portrays the balance between one’s dreams and reality by remaining perfect balanced in the middle- not floating too high in one’s fantasies and not sinking too low into reality, representing the balance needed in life.

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Mona Lisa Leonardo da Vinci 1503

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Blog 1: Art and Beauty

To me, aesthetic is relating to something that is pleasing to the eye. It is being able to see and appreciate beauty through obscure situations and unpopular looks. The big difference between beauty and art  is that art is about who created it and beauty depends on who is viewing it. The beauty in art is what you make of it, like the cliche saying I’m sure everyone is familiar with; “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Beauty is found within the spectator as a reaction to the piece of art. Art is about the artist expressing their self with passion, love, joy, pain, etc. Art has its own mood and depending on that it could be considered beautiful or it can be ugly. Art can represent beauty but it does not always have to. It can provoke other emotions and get people to think. Beauty is a state of mind where you may think it is or is not pretty, where art is a physical thing, something created. Whats pretty to me can be down right ugly to you-  I may love the Mona Lisa but you may detest it. Nowadays I believe the relationship between beauty and art has changed in that whatever is aesthetically pleasing is considered beautiful instead of having people interpret a piece that may not be as pleasing to view and finding beauty in it. People now may not appreciate a painting that involved dead rabbits and deer heads in their dining rooms today, but it was quite fashionable at the time. People’s taste changes over time. There are fads that eventually go out of style and a new one takes its place. Most of the great sculptures, paintings, movies, etc of our time are based on events or feelings that are down right ugly, but the finished product is beautiful because of the passion/ love the artist put into it. 

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Van Gogh | Gifs | Art

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🌞🌻Van Gogh🌻🌞