A Different View of the World

Ann Hamilton has a very unique way at observing her surroundings. She is a contemporary American artist best known for her installations, textile art, and sculptures, but is also active in the fields of photography, printmaking, video, and video installation. What caught my immediate attention about her work was her views on the little things that make up the larger aspects of life. Her thoughts of sewing suggest that the viewer take a more intricate look into the material. Every piece of thread plays a major role in the outcome of the final product. Cloths for example, are seen as an object, but truly consist of a mass of smaller objects working together to cover your body.

Another interesting view that Hamilton has is that what is the world like from the view of ones mouth. We hear what the mouth says and how it illustrates the world, but in actuality what is it seeing to make these claims. So she devised a pin-hole camera that would be able to be in her mouth where she could take pictures. "The shape of the opening suggests an eye, alluding to the visual nature of a photograph, while the act of opening her mouth recalls speaking – a reminder that Hamilton is both revealing an intimate view and authoring it." I though this was extremely creative and interesting because we are used to hearing the mouth but we never realize what it actually sees. Ann Hamilton is an extraordinary artist because of her way to make people think differently about the world.

http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/hamilton_ann.php

Barney and Hamilton

Matthew Barney is an artist whose work is hard to decipher. The meaning behind his work is hard to characterize and there are many levels of meaning that are lofty. He was an athlete and a model before becoming an artist and so is very in tune with the body. He has a strange manifestation of format to get the result of what he wants. His movies all titled "Cremaster" are not in numerical order of when they were made. His movies are about body and journey and his characters have a journey that they must undertake, and in this journey there is a sense of conflict. Barney has both an artistic side and a business side. The movies are about physicality not a mattered performance. Violence and passion is sublimated into form in his works and that is the central theme of the movies. The movies have a repetitious look to them in which there is a biomorphic and organic look to them. Ann Hamilton is another artist whose art is of a combined nature in which there is video, installation art, and performance art and other characteristics of art. Hamilton's art is a connection between the thread of sewing and fabric and the line of writing. She feels like there is a social metaphor between the art of cloth and what we wear. She takes this idea in one of her pieces of art in which she has a grey man's suit covered in tooth picks to make him look like a porcupine. She works with words as materials and you can see the theme of a constant tie of thread and writing. In her installation work she feels that people must reach out of what they are expecting to see, and must allow the things that are there but aren't visible to make for experience. Both of these artists have different themes in their work, but have some similarities in the sense that they cross the boundaries of process and theme in their work and have metaphorical underlying messages in all their work. They make what they want as art and do what they have to, in order to achieve their goal. There is a progression of development and they don't plan on making a piece of art, they have an idea come to them and this gets worked into the medium in which they are arriving at.

Picasso- The Innovator of Different Textures

Pablo Picasso was one of the first people to adhere different textures and materials to his paintings. Pablo Picasso was a spanish born artist, but who lived most of his adult life in France. His revolutionary artistic accomplishments made him one of the best known artists in the 20th century. Synthetic cubism started for Picasso in about 1912-1919, and it followed analytical cubism in which neutral tones were used but he took apart objects and analyzed them in their shape, he pasted wallpaper and newspaper clippings onto his artwork and made the first "collage" in fine art. In his synthetic cubism, Picassos art was built up from figures seen from different angles when they were viewed when taken apart or viewed from another angle all at the same time. He put pieces of paper and string onto his pictures. In one of his most famous paintings "Still Life With Chair Caning"(1912) was one of his first attempts at using different materials and textures and the idea of collages and different views of images. In this painting Picasso glued onto the canvas an oil cloth that made the back of the chair caning more real look . The edge of the painting was a rope instead of a traditional frame.

Appropriation Art, a Sticky Situation

Appropriation art is a relatively new from of art that helps artists feed of others creativity to make their own works. This art essentially means to adopt, borrow, recycle or sample aspects (or the entire form) of man-made visual culture. Artists involved although have to be very careful not to cross the line and commit forgery. If caught artist may see some jail time and loose respect from their peer artist. Copyright issues have been associated with this art until its creation in the early 1900's.
One recent artist, Sheppard Fairey, was recently sued for using a photo took by an associated press reporter and transforming it into a campaign poster for the Obama administration. This poster swept the nation becoming an iconic piece of artwork that resulted in the first African American to become president of the United States. The AP went after Fairey suing him looking for payment for the use of their work. The poster would not be considered copyrighted although if Fairey had used the photo to make a painting or drawing of it to use in the paper. This is why this form of art is sticky in some instances and artist have to be careful when creating their works. The movement of this form art has led to a distinct and interesting way of creating art.

Contemporary Art- A Second Glance

Before taking this class when I looked at some contemporary art I usually said, "that's not art a 5 year old could do that" but after being in the class for a few weeks I now understand there there is more to art than the mere idea of "beauty" and "talent." Jock Sturges, an american photographer best known for his pictures of adolescents caught my eye when researching contemporary artists. His work sometimes causes controversy when there is nudity. Sturges was born in 1947 in New York City. He worked in San Francisco for many years. He graduated with a BFA in Perceptional Psychology and Photography from Marlboro College and received an MFA in Photography from San Francisco Art Institute. He is a naturist and often takes pictures in California and in France. In Sturges Twenty-Five Years collection the picture Fanny taken in France in 1995 got my attention. The picture is black and white and is of a young girl crouched naked in the water. I was at first disgusted and felt bad for the poor young girl portrayed in the picture. Then after looking at more of Jocks works, and seeing that he is all about the naturalistic views of people and in natural environments I took a second look at the picture and began to see more than just a girl naked in the water. I believe that this picture shows how the girl is timid because she is hiding her body but also that she is proud because she is naked. The look in her eye shows power.

The Idea of Function

In class lately we have been taking a look at the idea of function in art. How we and the artist consider the piece in its context, how we adjust our perception of how you see things, when and where the artist came from. We look at identifying the artist and what they thought as they were painting or sculpting or recording their piece. We look at what it emotionally does to us when we look at it. There are personal, social, and physical functions and they could all overlap. In my Shaping of the Contemporary World History Class, Marcel Duchamps "The Fountain" came up on one of the slides of the power point presentation. I was taken back and delighted to see this because we had learned about it previously. Our teacher asked us if this was art. Majority of the class said no you cannot take a piece of ready made object and claim it yours and deem it to be artwork. To them the function of this piece was just part of the curriculum of the history class and they didn't find it beautiful. It didn't seem to serve much of a personal function to them, there didn't seem to be any form of pleasure or therapeutic value. It served as a social function in the way that it represented to our History class a political message, and social conditions and social change of the time period and place that we were looking at. Seeing that a piece of artwork can bring about different ideas, and functions, and feelings in many different people in many different settings I find to be interesting.

"Parasite"

After researching for a little while different paintings of contemporary art I can across one that particularly caught my attention. It was a contemporary painting by a young English artist Antony Micallef. His painting, "Parasite", caught my attention because of the unusual combination he chose for his work. Viewing the piece from a far distance it looks like a dark butterfly that has extravagant detail incorporated in it. After I enlarged the photo of the painting I realized that that detail was grayish bodies that were arranged to make the picture as a whole look like a butterfly. This puzzled me because it did not really make sense how you could incorporate such two different things into one piece.
When most people think about butterflies most would suggest that they get a warm spring-like feeling. Having these gray dark bodies make up the structure of the body throws everything off for me. It makes me wonder if the artist is trying to present a idea that although a butterfly is seen as good on the outside who knows what its thoughts are on the inside. Micallef created a brilliant piece that made me really think about the underlying message that he was trying to convey to his viewers. The piece way placed in the foyer of the Royal Academy. Micallef's work was also shown in exhibits around California where many well known stars purchased his work for large price tags. The works that make you consider what the artist was thinking are the works that make art truly amazing.