Sunday, February 28, 2010
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese born photographer who works in primarily black and white whose work sometimes borders scientific study. His series Lightning Fields, appears as almost a personal study of light and electricity to verify scientific findings from Benjamin Franklin to William Fox Talbot's discovery of the calotype. He says,
"The idea of observing the effects of electrical discharges on photographic dry plates reflects my desire to re-create the major discoveries of these scientific pioneers in the darkroom and verify them with my own eyes."
Adam Ekberg
Top: Balloons Over an Empty Field Bottom: Aberration #7
Adam Ekberg
homework, due march 8th
do another performance and don't document it, simply present text to the class about what you did
write a post to the blog with the following by march 7th:
1. a new internet/photoshop mock-up of a sculpture or sculpture
2. a short paragraph and image from a favorite performance by another artist
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
michael vahrenwald
michael's work is verging on the abstract, he certainly portrays the familiar in new visual terms....go to his website to learn the conceptual framework that drives his photographs...
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Tino Sehgal
For those who need a bit of background on why the artist eschews conventional art objects: A student of economics and former dancer and choreographer, Sehgal maintains that the developed world has too much stuff. His favored means of creating art does not diminish Earth's dwindling resources or contribute to the excess of consumer goods. His art exists only transiently and leaves no physical trace. Like Brigadoon blossoming one day each century, Sehgal's art lives during the experience and afterward persists in memory and legend....
Sunday, February 14, 2010
ross-ho excerpts
Quite literally, in fact her work is turning more into a personal tour of her studio and less of work created in the gallery. The idea of her studio walls becoming the work leads me to question her thought process. She intended to bring the place of consummation to the space of show. However her place of consummation has become the shown object, and I feel that this negates her works. It leads one down a never-ending spiral. If one wishes to show the place of consummation then there should be something consummated to be juxtaposed against the place of creation. However, when all she is showing is her place of creation it really isn’t her place of creation anymore it becomes the created. Where will it end? -aaron
Friday, February 12, 2010
Sarcasm
We briefly talked about sarcasm in response to Billy's passive aggressive piece and I think that it was mentioned that sarcasm is a relatively new way of communicating or interacting with one another. Correct me if I remembered that conversation wrong. Anyway, sarcasm dates back to ancient Greece. And I found this article that I think also speaks to passive aggressive behavior. Passive aggressive behavior is a social calculation as well but more often an unconscious one.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
michael rakowitz
Rakowitz at the Cochrane-Woods Arts Center, 5440 South Greenwood Avenue,
Room 157 at 4:30pm.
Hope to see you there!
http://michaelrakowitz.com/
Michael Rakowitz’s work confronts our shared political consciousness
through performance, sculpture, graphic design and derives
it particular poignancy from an engagement with the world that is
at once pragmatic and poetic. His work has appeared in venues
worldwide, including: P.S.1, MoMA, MassMOCA, Castello di
Rivoli, the 10th Istanbul Biennial, Sharjah Biennial 8, Tirana
Biennale, National Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt,
Transmediale 05, and 16th Biennale of Sydney 2008. His recent
public project, Return, was presented by Creative Time in New
York. He is the recipient of a 2008 Creative Capital Grant for a
collaboration with Emna Zghal, the Sharjah Biennial Jury Award, a
2006 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Grant in
Architecture and Environmental Structures, the 2003 Dena
Foundations Award, and the 2002 Design 21 Grand Prix from
UNESCO. Rakowitz is also Contributing Editor for Surface
Tension: A Journal on Spatial Arts.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Austin Kleon: Newspaper Blackout Poems
ps
jasonlazarus.photo@gmail.com
please email your amanda ross-ho papers to me by friday at noon...selections will be posted to the blog.
ps:
i really enjoyed the beginning of our critique process today...i want to reiterate a few things:
1. be ready to talk about your work...these crits should be efficient and dense in terms of exchange of ideas!!! we don't have time to 'poke around for meaning'...take responsibility for your work/strategy, milk us in the class for feedback!
2. remember, you are encouraged to revisit any assignment before including it in the final documentation of your work for the final book
3. don't take for granted any assignment...all of these develop critical thinking skills, push your awareness of artistic strategies, plant seeds for future harvesting...everything will ADD TO YOUR PRACTICE!
4. keep up your stamina and attitude, don't let an assignment that seems unproductive get you down. you learn the most when you miss the mark....happens to me constantly!
peace in the middle-east! (now more than ever)
also
ps:
superbowl! a contemporary american spectacle rife with material for artists...what does the 2010 superbowl spectacle reveal about us? there are simple and really complicated answers to this question...
Aunia Kahn
Text
The left - The Fall of the Tower of Babel - is by John Furnival, and more closely represents our assignment to research a "text artist." It has an awesome amount of detail, and as subject, depicts a fascinating topic.
The right - Permanently - is a poem by Kenneth Koch. It is hilarious, and lightheartedly critical of grammar within poetry. Though it is the final sentence - "Until the destruction of language" that really gets me.
-Matthew Keable
PS: Sorry for posting the morning of the due date.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Lawrence Weiner
In the 1960's Lawrence Weiner began experimenting with language's capacity to stand for something, using letters on the wall or in books or posters as his mode of presentation. Some of his work describes a physical object, such as Many Colored Objects Placed Side by Side to Form a Row of Many Colored Objects, usually leaving the description general enough for the viewers to supply missing elements in their own imagination. Other works often describe an abstract action, such as this one or The Joining of France Germany and Switzerland by Rope. I think his work is very relevant to our assignment to think of art projects we'd like to accomplish that aren't possible.
amanda ross-ho
Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside-Out February 6 - May 30, 2010
Roger Brown- Kissin' Cousins
This painting was created by Chicago Imagist Roger Brown in 1990 after he found out that he was a distant cousin to Elvis. Roger Brown made a number of paintings using the format of circus freak-show banners from his time and adapting it to address other issues. This piece utilizes the absurdity of the circus banners with a sense of humor.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Judd Morrissey - The Jew's Daughter
Judd Morrissey teaches at SAIC in the Art & Tech department and refers to his work as "electronic literature / data poetics / performance and installation" which is pretty awesome in itself (re: data poetics).
The project I am linking, The Jew's Daughter, is described by Morrissey as "an interactive, non-linear, multi-valent narrative, a storyspace that is unstable but nonetheless remains organically intact, progressively weaving itself together by way of subtle transformations on a single virtual page."
I think it's awesome for a couple reasons: The meaning of the text changes. It is constantly rearranging its own narrative so that you are reading and rereading everything and as a consequence are forced to reconsider your own interpretations of it. It plays with the idea that a phrase can be poetic, beautiful and meaningful and still completely applicable to a whole range of different subjects. You'll understand what I mean when you go to the site and start reconfiguring.
VISITING ARTIST PROGRAM SPRING 2010 SCHEDULE
>
>DOUG AITKEN
>Monday, February 22, 6 p.m.
>Fullerton Hall, The Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave.
>FREE Admission
>
>AMY FRANCESCHINI
>Thursday, March 11, 6 p.m.
>SAIC Auditorium, 280 S. Columbus Drive
>
>DORIS SALCEDO
>Monday, March 15, 6 p.m.
>SAIC Auditorium, 280 S. Columbus Drive
>
>This lecture is co-presented by the William Bronson and Grayce Slovet
Mitchell Lectureship in Fiber and Material Studies at SAIC and is part
of the Common Languages Lecture Series.
>
>MATT KEEGAN
>Tuesday, April 6, 6 p.m.
>SAIC Auditorium, 280 S. Columbus Drive
>
>RYAN TRECARTIN
>*Artist Talk: Wednesday, April 14, 6 p.m.
>SAIC Auditorium, 280 S. Columbus Drive
>FREE Admission
Friday, February 5, 2010
Kay Rosen
Kay Rosen plays with the construction of words and phrases, manipulating their format, and placement to create context that generates new meanings. Rosen’s later work relies more on these attributes but “Oh, Eua,”, one of her earlier works is a short narrative whose context emerges simply from punctuation change. That gesture creates significant differences made between the two texts, speaking to the complexity of language.
-how meaning (of language) changes based on slight factors, like variations of tone.
-how every thing can be two things at once. Or is it every thing can be many things at once?
“Nothing Will Be As Before”
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Christopher Wool
Bruce Nauman
Run From Fear, Fun From Rear (1972) is a neon text piece by artist Bruce Nauman. Run From Fear expresses the manipulative quality in language and communication which Nauman is fascinated by and I am most interested in. The popularity of the piece grew most during the aids epidemic in the early 80's. I once heard an interesting fact about Nauman's neon pieces – I guess his neon works are never sold(?)...and after all of his shows, the neon pieces are all destroyed(?). Crazy.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Slemmons, Rod, “Between Language and Perception,” Exit, No. 16-2004, pp.48-49, 132.
enjoy!