tomcatan

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Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage

Ensaio - C&cs

https://dayoftheartist.com/2014/03/20/day-seventy-nine-kurt-schwitters-inner-merz/

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Parangolé - Hélio Oiticica

Passing Time project

://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGYHJaGXHOU

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C&Cs - Questions

What have you learnt? Do you see the connection with these ideas and your developing practice? Explain that connection? Describe a key discovery from the lecture programme? Are these 20th Century ideas still relevant in the 21st Century? What ideas and movements would a similar lecture programme about 21st Century culture include?

The Critical & Cultural Studies have been very important for me because it gives me some background and contextual knowledge about subjects, artistic movements, important artists and designers and events in history. I see the classes as an introduction for my further research on themes that I believe are important for my practice. The C&Cs are also something that depends a lot on me. For me, being an artist/designer is necessary to have knowledge about the “basic” history of arts and society, and the classes are something that can lead me there. It is really important to see what people have made until we get in the 21st century and how and why the movements were fighting for issues on the context of the era. The context today is very different from those we study, but I see that some thoughts and fights for a better society will always be a topic to be discussed. When I see the people’s fight from another century it makes me think about our situation nowadays and how I, as a graphic designer can make my practice something powerful, with social impact and make people think differently. Tom Catan

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Graphic Design Inspiration

http://kategibb.co.uk Kate Gibb I like the work of Kate because of the using of photography and printmaking. The images treatment overlaying colors giving a new meaning for the artwork. It’s interesting how the artist creates an urban visual language, talking about discarded objects, the hip hop and the street culture on her posters and prints. Something that really calls my attention about Kate Gibb is the using of colors, her work is really marked by the use of vibrant colors in different media. I appreciate the way she creates texture in the works. I am interested in this artist because it is an example of how to use different media and visual languages, such as collage, engraving, typography, vintage elements. Sometimes hand drawing, sometimes digital Kate has a well-defined style, being a great inspiration.

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Alternative Culture

> How were the changes in American society in the fifties & sixties reflected in its visual culture?

> What does American visual culture today communicate about its social & political context?

The American society was going through an aggressive moment post-war in which the conservator values were in were on a grand scale in the ideas and minds of Americans people. There was no space and place to talk about love, art, and music. So there was an immersive growth of movements that were fighting for peace, freedom, and self-expression. People wanted to get the USA out of the war at Vietnam. The art at that time emerged mostly from protest visual communication in which the goal was to inform people to stop being aggressive, conservator and ignorant. In the '60s and '70s, there was also the abstractionist movement, who wanted to break with the solid and correct thoughts about what was art, and who it was made for, for example, Miles Davis with the incredible improvisation on Jazz, breaking with the old patterns. The jazz music, a genre that came from the black people's suburbian, at the '50s was beginning to emerge the Cool movement, with the purpose of taking jazz to the middle-class access. In the music and graphic design with Mile Davis and Reid Miles, with him, fantastic disc covers were bringing jazz to another level of art. In 1967 at Detroit periphery there was massive repression and violent police action to the black people. With this, the black panther movements were a space where people get together to fight for their rights. Emory Douglas was a graphic artist that represent these people on his posters, with powerful content. At the '60s with the ascender of music that fights for liberty, the beginning of LSD and the psychedelic of visual communication, with artists like Victor Moscoso with curved typography. In London, the underground comics magazines like OZ also got attention with their provocative illustrations.

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Brazilian Style I

1. How to elaborate a Brazilian culture of its own without letting it be bureaucratized, without letting it become official in conservative speeches?

2. How to understand the ambiguities of Brazilian cultural formation?

3. How to talk about a “Brazilian culture”, when the country lived in the last centuries in the shadow of the European culture?

The term "project" in Brazil was the idea of creating something new, that bring in a more consistent history with the Brazilian society, going against the conservative values that surround the country for decades. The idea of modernism on Brazil comes with the feeling of representing the reality as it was happening, like at Tarsila's Amaral paint, "A Negra" were she paints a creature that isn't beautiful and isn't real in practical terms, but is really what was in people's mind at that time and nobody sad. The modernism also influenced the counter culture movements that appeared on the next's decades, with the same idea of denying a Brazilian culture idealized, bringing a culture that was not accepted but extremally necessary for contesting the old values and reproductions of the time. Talking of a Brazilian culture is something very difficult to define. We can't say that our traditions were strong, but yes, we had very strong movements and avant gardes, even if they didn't came from the same enviorment, visual language, and locations with no relation between it other. A colony country suffers to "get back" or even to start to construct a new culture that was decimated by the Europeans. With no liberty, there's is no creation of methods and expression. So that, the influence of Europe in our values and way of living was tremendously. How to create a way of expression that wasn't influenced by the European criteria? How to find original values, traditions, and methods that weren't here anymore? The only solution was looking forward, thinking by the concept of projection. What is good and real about Brazil that we can put emphasizes, looking to the nature and people.

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BAUHAUS

What were the key ideas of the Bauhaus ?

The Bauhaus was a School of Art and Design created by Walter Gropius in 1919 on Germany. He wanted to recreate craftsmanship and erase the artificial barrier between “noble” artists and “working craftsmen”, the idea was that “the artist must return to the work of craft”. He claimed that every discipline should unite as one, and that was what he was doing with Bauhaus. The word BAUHAUS comes from the German and it means “Building House”. Bauhaus manifesto had several lemmas that were going into practice. “Form follows function”, “The truth in materials”, “An object is defined by its nature” and other. But the main idea was to make PURE FORMS, CLEAN DESIGN, and FUNCTIONALITY. It was all about organic design revealing the nature of the objects. The new way of thinking proposed a smart use of resources, with zero waste ideal in mind. Make things functional, simple and economical.

Do you feel that the ideas still have an influence on contemporary design?

Yes, I think that the way of thinking simple and functional is been used nowadays. For example the big company Apple, which makes smartphones and computers that have a clean design with pure forms that makes it very practical and good for the use in comparison with another product that can be kind of “confusion” to use, the system operation is very simple and clean.

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Avant Garde

What does the term Avant-Garde mean?

Avant - Guarde is a term that comes from the French and it means the “front line” of the army or a movement. This term has been used for the artistic movements in the 20th century were “the artist serves you as an avant-garde, the power of art is the most immediate”. Avant-garde or Vanguard marked the beginning of a CULTURAL REVOLUTION were the symbols are progress, exploration, and innovation. The fresh and surprising creative ideas was a characteristic of this term, also the new artistic techniques and going against the widely accepted forms, ideas, process and academic understanding of art. There were some artistic movements that became shocking in the 20th century such as Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Futurism, Dadaísm, Russian Constructivism, Bauhaus and many others. The term vanguard can be synonymous of “modern” because it influenced modernist art.

Is it still possible to be truly ‘avant gard’ ?

Now we leave in the 21th century and almost everything has been done. Nowadays there are no rules or conventions that need to be followed. I believe that our society needs art that has a criticism with social power, but nowadays with the mixing media and the accumulation of information is it hard to be original. The artistic movements now are important but they can’t be an avant garde because they are a reproduction of ideas that have already been pointed in the time and context that they come.