msu2019-blog1

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Project #5: Word on the Street

This project, like all of the others we’ve had this semester, was actually really fun for me!

I just wrote a huge paper for my English class about the worldly taboo surrounding menstruation. It’s a topic I’m very passionate about and have been thinking about this whole semester in preparation for this paper. I believe that there is this unnecessary tiptoeing around talking about periods, especially among males who don’t experience menstruation. A lot (but certainly not all) of men see periods as gross or the reason that females are “bitchy”, which are harmful and pretty offensive stereotypes. It’s become a joke. In my belief, this stems from the lack of proper sex education, as well as the lack of communication regarding periods among, well, everybody. We as a society just tend not to talk about such things. But what if we did?

So with that on my mind, I decided to take it a step further and post these small, almost hidden little phrases throughought the art building. There is one poem, but the rest are my own words. I got my inspiration from Jenny Holzer’s feminist pieces, where she posts short phrases like “Raise boys and girls the same way” on big theater marquis. I loved that. I figured that with these short, tiny little phrases that are almost hidden, it almost creates a sense of intimacy between the viewer and the piece. Like, “hey, now that I have your attention because you took the time to really see what this tiny piece of paper says, let’s talk about this issue.” And in a way, I think that’s the most successful way to get someone to think about something.

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Project #5: Word on the Street

Going into this I had no idea what I wanted to do for the project.  It is amazing what inspiration can come from floating ideas and then sitting on them and sleeping on them and letting them gel. I feel this project is a further response to the reading which had me asking where the lines in communication effectiveness are drawn between the written word and visual arts that do not include words.  The main words here “Words Convey.. ... Meaning ...  ... Art Does Not” is obviously not something I believe but rather something meant to invoke the exact questions I found myself asking as I contemplated the subject.  I hung these up in the hallway in my apartment with the landlords permission.  I was thinking another variation that would be interesting would have been to add additional markers attached with strings and encourage passersby to write their own words.  The obvious limitation for me is that this would have ended up with the kids in the apartment writing all over the walls... but to do a time-lapse of something like that or something similar would be interesting...

Oh, before I forget.  the process here was to grab throw the word “word” into a thesaurus and then start clicking through variations and write them down (because I had no idea what I wanted to do..).  Instead I ended up with the overall phrase and then used the words in the phrase in the thesaurus to find similar words.  They are all synonyms except one on the last frame.  I’ll leave that to the audience to find.  :-)

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Love this!

Final Project:

For this project I decided to write the word “Hate” on 4 notebook sized pages. Behind each letter is facts about climate change, lack of education, hate crime and sexual assault. The reason I wanted to make this piece was because I feel like everybody hears about these things on a daily basis, but don’t really know all the facts about them. Or how to change and help do something about the horrible things happening everyday. I wanted this piece to be an advocate for change.

I also wanted to make it note book style and personal. Kind of like I was just writing in my journal. I decided to place them around where I live and let them blow around. Make it seem like an accident or a treasure if they find them.

The H has climate change facts, the A has sexual assault facts, the T has lack of education and the E has Hate crime.

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Reading Response #5

In thinking about this project I keep coming back to the words that we DO see everyday and everywhere in public spaces: advertisements.  Certainly there are other words out there, street signs for example, but these are not meant to get our attention or capture our imaginative (or our dollars) in the same way.  I think that advertisements are the main competition of any art placed in an outside setting.  To this point Robert Montgomery talks about his beginnings and current projects as a hijacking of advertising billboards. I feel like any art that intends to serve a purpose beyond an esoteric one (and there is room for that!) ought to be engaging in a fight with the norms of commercialized society.  The use of words is particularly powerful in this effort.  Though I don’t knowheir  where the best use of words or pictures overlap or better one another as a medium.  The old saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words” comes easily to mind, and there is some undeniable truth to this statement: Jenny Holzer was asked about artists as a part of the protest movement during the War in Vietnam and the images which came out of that war were earth shattering in the effect they had on the American population.

At the same time words have a profound impact and can communicate things with more subtlety and difficulty.  The images above are pretty clear in their meaning even if we are not familiar with the full context of the photo: it is clear that something has gone horribly wrong.  By the same token these kinds of images are hidden from us now, by and large, and I wonder if words need to take the place of them in some cases?  One of the difficulties in our modern society is that people don’t seem to have a lot of interest in ideas which require more than a bumper sticker worth of reading.  Mongomery argues that people will stop and read a billboard with a hundred or more words on it.  

It is also interesting to note that both artists insist that the general public is actually much more attuned to modern art than they are given credit for and they both strive to create art which is accessible to the general public.  I feel that this is essential in the creation of art.  I can’t speak to a larger broader theory of society and artists role in it, but certainly we are all change agents at some level (even as the refrain in Rush’s Tom Sawyer reminds us that “if you choose to do nothing at all, you still have made a choice!”)....

....We ought to consider what kind of change we are bringing into the world.....

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George Bernard Shaw:

“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no "brief candle" for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”

Or if you want to hear it from Jeff Goldblum skip to 3 minutes in:

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Performance Art: Creating Darkness

Creating Darkness: 

Meaning: I have no idea.  Metaphorically this could apply to anything.  I wanted to do something about our fear of the unknown.  I suppose there is also an element here of putting out hope, but I wanted to finish the second verse of the song so I put the video in reverse at a higher speed, so maybe that symbolizes something positive after all?

  Methodology: I lit a bunch of candles around the apartment and then put them out with a quick pinch of the fingers.  (don’t worry I didn’t burn myself...) the second candle was too deep so I had some trouble with it but I didn’t want to do a second take because that kind of spoils the point of it being unpredictable if I just went back and redid it until perfection... I also should have filmed it horizontally not vertically but didn’t redo it for the same reason.

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Verb List:

1.       To lighten

2.       To Darken

3.       To Appear

4.       To Disappear

5.       To Glimmer

6.       To Fade

7.       To Shake

8.       To Fall

9.       To Frighten

10.   To Dispel

11.   To Shatter

12.   To Reflect

13.   To Haunt

14.   To Burn

15.   To Creak

16.   To Blow

17.   To Gust

18.   To Howl

19.   To Ruffle

20.   To Drop

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The Artist is Present: Response

I finally got around to watching this documentary (life’s been crazy), so here goes:

I have very little to no exposure to performance art.  I felt like an outsider looking in to this documentary until I got some way into it.  What really struck me about Marina Abramovic’s approach to performance art was that the audience is necessarily included in the performance.  Even in the cases where they were standing at some distance or not interacting with the performance directly, they were included in an emotional sense by being made uncomfortable, by the mere presence and appearance of the performers.  In part because they were seemingly often in the nude.  This literal and figurative nakedness projects vulnerability and forces the audience to confront the performance on a personal level.  In my own experience, even going to the theater, I am always uncomfortable with there being real people on the stage.  There is always a fear that they interact with the audience.  It takes a great deal of strength to stand up in front a large crowd under a bright light and perform.  In the case of Marina Abramovic’s work there is no stage and spotlight to shield the audience from interaction.  And while interaction may not at all be involved the mere presence of the artist in a space not separate from the audience forces them to consider their own vulnerability in contrast to hers.  

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This is very interesting.  I was looking for images of the holocaust memorials in Berlin for another class and this is.. kind of performance art.  

This is ... I know it is an installation so not technically performance art, but the point of the experience is performative, in that it attempts to elicit a sympathetic response from the participant to the feelings that a victim of the holocaust might have had...

Here is what I wrote about this in the other class while starting discussion about The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi

“ I was relating some of the what I'm reading in the book to my husband who has been to Germany and to some of the memorials and concentration camps there.  As he was describing some of the memorials to me I realized that the imagery and metaphor was exactly what I was reading.  I would have thought that a lot of the holocaust memorials were about death, or war or murder or something active and bloody and horrifying, but it turns out that so many of them are about isolation and confusion.  When the author explains that victims often did not know where they were, could not have understood the scope of the massacre taking place, did not know there were other camps, did not know when people came and went if they had been moved or were even still alive, had probably lost their family and their property. In other words, from their perspective in any of these camps could not understand much more of the whole than a few feet outside of fence, or a window, or a work house, or any of the other horrors to which victims were subjected before most were ultimately starved, worked to death, gassed or otherwise killed.   These memorials are designed to elicit loss, confusion, and isolation.....  “

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Response to Performance Art Reading

My biggest impression from the reading was that I would have liked the author to spend more time talking about examples of performance art and less time narrating a history of the form.  The name dropping and historical narrative were not especially helpful, to be really honest.  It did give me some ideas though as I was reading it.

In particular, I kept coming back to theater and thinking about the value of theater as a form of political expression.  I know for many of us the theater may primarily invoke images of old plays and Shakespeare and the like, but even some recent examples show the value of theater as a form of political expression: Hamilton and Book of Mormon come to mind in particular.  But more to the point I think about some of the plays that I have had the opportunity to seen over the years that are overtly political.  In some cases these could just as easily have been expressed as street theater in a protest-like manner.  In fact, I wonder if actual street protests could be considered a kind of performance art?  I think so...  I remember seeing images of die-ins and Yasim Bey (formerly Mos Def) having a force feeding tube inserted into his nose to make a point about the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo.. (I was going to link the video but it is VERY disturbing so I changed my mind, I’l let anyone interested Google it.)  

Instead I’ll link Banksy’s “Girl with Balloon” auction stunt.  I hadn’t thought of this as performance art until now, but that’s exactly what it was and what a performance!!

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Project 3 Artist Statement: Vanishing and Becoming

Through these projects in class I’ve been more process driven and introspective than I’d imagine having been, so as I sit and look at the objects and videos created for these classes I realize that the vanishing and becoming is me. This is the year that an 18 year marriage ends, and a new kind of partnership begins; one with a landscape that is foreign and keeps pointing to the questions, “who are you outside of this, what do you believe in, what life will you create for yourself now, what did you learn?”

None of that was forefront in my mind when starting this project, but it’s becoming clearer that as one creates, pieces of oneself are revealed, intentionally or not.

The song used was KMFD’s Dogma, in my 20’s I had painted the lyrics over a giant “X” and had hung it on the wall of my tiny studio apartment in Capitol Hill, it was a reminder to not get caught up in the trappings—to stand for something and believe in it.

The video is from two sources, The New Yorker’s “100 Years of Protesting” and Legion’s Season 1 trailer. In Legion the main character, David Haller, struggles with his sanity and his potential, his past, present and future, among other things. Every so often the video cuts to a protest scene where we see a different kind of struggle that also shows past and present in hopes for a future. The clip that I am most worried about misinterpretation is the KKK, so I’d like to state that I do not support or believe in their cause, but I am surprised by the revival of the sentiments. I’d hoped by including the still from the Civil Rights movement of the man trying to shield the woman from the fire hose and football player Kaepernick’s misinterpreted protest would help signify the position as well as the idea that some things appear to vanish but are still there under the surface, growing and becoming again.

Self-critique: As for the overall video presentation, I’m not happy with all the cuts and transitions—but this has more to do with not knowing how to use Premiere as well as needed to really get an effective flow. There is also a good chance that there was an easier way to do the cuts and inserts than I had done with the video, and the audio could have been cut better at the end, but I couldn’t figure out how at this time. Overall though it was fun, even if it didn’t turn out like envisioned. Eventually (as in soon) I’d like to do some different tutorials on the program to be more proficient and have a better presentation.

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I have always been inspired to create a video for music that was popular before Music Videos were a common medium.  A good music video can either bring the music to life and emphasize the message of the music or tell a different story entirely.  I’ve chosen here to create a completely different story from several songs and images compiled together in a collage of video and sound.   The story I am telling here is about the everyday life of many people: waking up, going to work, coming back home, and we seemingly repeat this cycle ad nauseum.

The video starts out in color and slowly fades to black and white as the doldrum of the day becomes apparent then returns to color right at the end.  I would have liked to embellish this a bit more but I was pressed for time.

The video clips were from a NASA shot of the sun rising and setting, Coldplay’s The Scientist (which was a bit comical in effect), the Starbucks “Glen” commercial, a random section from a walk through a cubicle farm, and images of a Ford motor company plant. The Music was from Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb, Us and Them, Welcome to the Machine, Breathe; The Beatles A Day in the Life; and the Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony.

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“Persons of genius are, ex vi termini, more individual than any other people - less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their character.” ― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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Ok this was the original video that I did... details are in the other post (I don’t want this one to get flagged.)  Naming the file something that did not indicate copyrighted content seemed to do the trick (for now, we’ll see if they flag it.)

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I tried to do a song by Imagine Dragons (Believer) and Madilyn Bailey (Titanium) which actually turned out quite well.  I clipped parts of both videos to make it flow together fairly well, but when I went to upload it it blocked the video because the content from both videos was copyrighted.  I guess I should have known that but I’ve never really uploaded anything to Youtube before.

This video is a mash up between the audio from the Buffalo Springfield song “For What It’s Worth” and the video from a British rap group called The Streets and their song Blinded By The Lights.  It was a quick fix from an older song and lesser known band just to get this done but I think it worked out okay.