28 September 2009

ART4619C - Assignment #3

James Rosenquist
Nomad (1963)
Oil on canvas, plastic, and wood

James Rosenquist was an influential artist in the pop art movement around the 1960’s. Many of his pieces, including the piece above, deal with popular culture and the consumption of consumer objects. Ironically, Rosenquist worked formerly as a billboard painter and in that way was familiar with the world of advertising, with which he was definitely making a commentary of in his work. In his piece, Nomad, Rosenquist combines both painting and sculpture to create a massive art piece that is hard to get away from. On one side of the piece is a flimsy plastic that is somewhat funnel like, covered in paint drips. Under the funnel is the word “New” with bits of paint dripping from it, like the paint had come down from the plastic above. On the panels are images layered over each other of ballet dancers, a light bulb, pasta, picnic tables, and a brand of laundry detergent. While it is not immediately apparent these objects all hold some underlying trait that ties them together. What is this trait? What do ballet dancers and picnic tables have to do with one another? It can be said that the legs of the ballet dancers and the legs of the picnic table hold similar shapes, but that would really only be a part of it. Rosenquist, through the use of layering images on and next to each other, is creating a commentary on mass production and an over communicated society that is constantly being bombarded through the use of media objects.

Robert Rauschenberg
Booster (1967)
Lithograph and serigraph

Rauschenberg was an artist who was involved in both the abstract expressionist and pop art movement. His piece, Booster, is a self-portrait. According to author, Jonathan Fineberg, “Booster filtered through the distance of technological language – the x-ray, the astronomer’s chart of celestial movement for the year 1967, and the magazine images of drills with arrows diagramming their movement.” The piece along with all of the imagery mentioned contains an image of an empty chair, which may suggest a certain amount of emptiness. Along with being a self portrait, Booster, like most, if not all of Rauschenberg’s work is a reaction against the distance of mass culture… and how personal things can be made impersonal by an over communicated society.

21 September 2009

ART4619C - Assignment #2

With abstract formal systems in film, images are usually arranged to compare and/or contrast color, shape, rhythm, and size. According to the article on abstract formal systems, as viewers, when we are confronting a film that exhibits abstract forms, we do not look for casually linked events that make up a narrative, nor do we look for propositional claims that may add up to an argument, which cannot necessarily be said for associational formal systems. Also with abstract formal systems, the motifs used in a film will not necessarily fit into substantive categories. For example, the face of a clock may be put next to an image of a wheel for the simple reason that they are both similar in shape, rather than the fact that they exhibit a mechanical nature. Abstract films are also often organized in what we may call “theme and variations.” The term, while it typically applies to music (And is defined as a melody or other type of motif is introduced and then followed with a series of different versions of the same melody that often have extreme differences in key and rhythm so that the original melody is hard to recognize), can work in a very similar fashion when abstract films are involved. For instance, the beginning of the film may show us in a fairly simple way the kinds of relationships the film will use as its basic material and then in other segments, it will go on to present similar types of relationships but with changes, great or small. Images and possibly sounds are arranged in a way to takes them out of their original context, they are abstracted and the meaning we garner from the film is likely to be more subjective as the filmmaker is not likely set out to create for example, a political art piece. In contrast, associational formal systems use the meshing and visual contrasting of images together to create something that has very possible political and/or moral outlook on life, thereby imposing a set of ideas onto the viewer for the duration of the film.

14 September 2009

ART4619C - Assignment #1

Part I:
First and foremost, I will be discussing the work of fiction, The Garden of Forking Paths by: Jorge Luis Borges. Like most of his other works, The Garden of Forking Paths deals with a theme of books, time, and circles. The story begins as such:

"In his A History of the World War (page 212), Captain Liddell Hart reports that a planned offensive by thirteen British divisions, supported by fourteen hundred artillery pieces, against the German line at Serre-Montauban, scheduled for July 24, 1916, had to be postponed until the morning of the 29th."

Throughout most of the work Borges uses long descriptive sentences that have something resembling a historical ring to them, as if the unnamed man is scribbling in a journal, denoting moments of history as well as moments in his history. The use of words and the structure of the words and sentences creates a visual sound and picture of time. The story is warped in that we do not know if the account of the man telling it is true but that is the case for most literature. What we can tell from the story though is that the man is a spy who set out on a mission to kill a man. The irony in the story is that spy is a descendent of Ts’ui Pen, the author, the maker of The Garden of Forking Paths which was to be the book of all books, infinite… and the man who found out its secret (that the book is a labyrinth) is the man the spy must kill.

Part II:
Ballet Mécanique is a film directed by: Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy. It is an abstract film that uses a circular theme of progression… it is in itself a labyrinth much like The Garden of Forking Paths. We first begin with a woman on a swing, her face, her expression, her movement draws us into the picture. We can relate to her because in a sense, she is like us, she is us. Then the picture is disrupted by objects hats, bottles, and even faces that have been distorted, taken out of the context in which we are so used to seeing them portrayed in. Layers upon layers of objects are spread out on the screen disrupting our perception of reality. The pictures flash in front of us like a rhythmic dance, slow at times and then powerful and even agitated like the cogs in a clock winding endlessly at light speed until we expect it to break. Images are constantly flashed in front of our eyes and repeated in patterns. The patterns themselves, are somewhat sporadic, we don’t know what will come next, the hat and bottles, a woman’s smile, or played out motion of a woman walking up the steps… never getting to her point of destination, just stuck there in time and space. These same images flash before us for what seems like an eternity, the material vs. the flesh… but the flesh is not what it should be it is abstracted. Then the film concludes where it began, with the woman, but instead of feeling anything for her or the scene, everything seems amazingly eerie. She seems mechanical and cold because she has been abstracted just like the rest of the images throughout the film.