Blogs

“…while conceptual art uses its own logical strategies for execution, “conceptual art is not necessarily logical…””

Linked to movements such as minimalism and conceptualism, Sol LeWitt was an influential American artist. He painted or sculpted basic shapes, playing with lines and color combinations. He is most famous for his wall paintings, where his work is actually painted onto the walls of the museum. Over his career he made over 1,200 drawings and paintings. I found a lot of time-lapse videos of his work being installed: http://www.massmoca.org/lewitt/timelapse.php?id=10. As you can see, many people work on each painting, according to LeWitt's plan. This technique of providing instructions to carry out his idea is his connection to Flanagan's concept of critical play. She writes "For Lewitt, art making-as-instruction was a performative game with concrete rules and outcomes." These "rule-drivin visual works" are the product of many artists completing his instructions in a way that Flanagan considers to be critical play. Every time the work is completed, it changes a little bit. His work has been compared to musical compositions because his original score stays the same, but it can sound different every time.

Perspective is everything. When you throw out your trash, you don’t see it as art or something to play with. Those glass bottles you’re about to throw out are probably going to go to the landfills, lost within other glass bottles or dirty paper towels. That broken bike you can’t trust anymore will also make the trip to the landfill, as will those outdated wall tiles that once decorated your home.

Isaiah Zagar sees the glass bottles, broken bicycle, and wall tiles as art. He sees them as parts of his art. One man’s trash is another man’s artwork. The Magic Gardens in Philadelphia show us that our trash can be beautiful; it isn’t just stinky junk that we don’t want anymore. When you throw out your trash, you don’t think that it can be a part of a mosaic that people pay money to visit. Flanagan says that artists “created “situations” and performed art actions complete with instructions.” We use play and art as “a way to rethink issues of authority, politics, and the notion of a cultural status quo.” As a result, I feel as if Isaiah Zagar is using these mosaics to show us that some trash can be used as art and that it can be beautiful.

When I read Barthes's take on photography it reminded me how powerful (or not so powerful) pictures can be. Pictures are useful when they arrest the imagination and make the viewer question certain aspects of life that had not been discussed. As Barthes says, "Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks." Small parts of the photo: a dirty hand; a person walking in the background can expand, devlop new meaning, and take over the entire photo's meaning for one person and do nothing for another person. These small pieces of the photo can strike a chord in some people and can change their ideas about major issues. Sometimes a person can only understand the photograph after they walk away from it. If a photo sticks with somebody, even if they do not know why, they could more completely understand the photo after they let it sit with them for a while.

Samantha Plate

Play In The City

09/29/2013

What Is Play?

            What is play? This is the question that Mary Flanagan tries to answer. She is unable to come up with one specific definition. When asked to describe the reading in class I said “refreshingly indecisive”. The fact that Flanagan admits there are many definitions of play is truly refreshing. Theorists, psychologists, are scientists are always trying to pin “play” down and give it a strict definition. But play in itself defies definition- it is playful. Play sets all the rules and breaks them too. There are so many ways to describe this essential part of life, but no way to define it.

            I truly felt this idea that play cannot be defined on my last trip to Philadelphia. After visiting the mosaic garden my group and I decided to wander around the area, hoping to stumble upon more mosaics. We found ourselves walking in the “wrong” direction, but now I realize it was the right one. We ended up at a playground.

When I was skimming through Flanagan for the first time, the words "Gutai Movement" jumped out at me. I decided to research what this was, and came up with something a bit more specific-- an exhibit (already past) about the Gutai movement at the Guggenheim Museum in New York called "Gutai: Splendid Playground".

The article about this exhibit gave me these facts:

1. Gutai is a Japanese postwar art movement
2. It's a combination of painting and sculpture
3. The exhibit involves participatory play
4. There is a canvas with the sign "Please Draw Freely": each visitor can draw on the initially blank canvas so that it becomes a collaborative work of art
5. Gutai was meant to "rebuild democracy by both demonstrating and encouraging symbolic acts of independence"
6. Gutai underscores and cultivates connections among the new art of Europe, America, and Japan
7. Some of the art is painted with feet, some with robots, and some with fire (yes really!)

Here's the link to the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/arts/design/gutai-splendid-playground-at-the-guggenheim.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

and to the exhibit: http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/past/exhibit/4495

Henri Matisse has long been one of my favorite painters yet up until a few days ago while researching him, I had never seen one of his sculptures.  Although he is labeled as a one of the most important painters in Fauvism, he was also a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor.  Matisse sculpted his figures to express stress and pain and they were certainly darker than his paintings.  He exaggerated the figure’s contours in order to show their struggle.  Much of the figures are twisted and in strange positions. 

As an aspiring art history major, I was pretty excited when I recognized some names when reading Flanagan's text. I was especially excited when I found Marcel Duchamp and Vassily Kandinsky. Though I know some of their artworks, I am not completely fluent in the movements they founded and advocated. As a result, I researched on both artists.

One of Marcel Duchamp's most famous artworks would be The Fountain, which he made in 1917. What was interesting about this piece is that it was a urinal with some words written on it. The point of the piece was to demonstrate ready-made art and how our culture since the Industrial Revolutions changed to become one with a high nature of factory-made items. This made me think about how our play has changed today from being outside in nature versus staying in and playing with our mass produced toys.

When Anne read some information about ecofeminism and speciesism, I found myself immediately rejecting and judging those ideas. I couldn't accept that the next step in equality and inclusion was animals. It sounded ridiculous to me. Why and how would we extend rights to animals? And as Christina said, plants are living too. Including certain non human species in equal rights but not others is just another line to draw. After I left class, I remembered learning about the waves of feminism in my women in history class at high school, and the critiques they received. In the first wave, when women wanted to be able to participate in the public sphere, they were accused of trying to wreck the entire structure of the American family, and therefore the country. I think that every new branch or type of feminism is going to have a counter argument. Sometimes other types of feminists are the ones arguing. I don't want to think of myself as acting/being against a group of feminists, like ecofeminists, but I their ideas don't follow what my feminism is. I hadn't heard any categories besides first, second, and third wave until class on Thursday, and I guess the idea of there being new groups still forming confuses me. Feminism as an ongoing movement seems so different from what we read about in history, and I am having a hard time placing myself. I dont want to be in a box for my type of feminism.

Consider

1) An artist (Dove Bradshaw) claims a fire hose in the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a work of art.

2) She posts a label next tot he hose, and replaces it whenever it is removed.

3) She photographs her work and has postcards printed. She (secretly) deposits these postcards in the museums own gift shop. And they sell them. For years.

4) The museum acquires a photograph of the firehose and accepts it (the photograph) into its collection.

5) The firehose itself is later acquired by the museum that owns it; the artists work is donated to the museum, which is acknowledges in letters to the donor.

6) An artist book is created in an edition of 10 to document the trajectory of this project, which is now called a performance.

7) The book is published free online and you can peruse its 86 pages.

As children we are frequently told not to stare because it is rude. However, the brief 4 minute video clip by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, a professor at Emory  I watched for next week's class confirmed my suspicion that staring is a natural desire. This instinct reflects the desire our brains have to absorb as much of a novel stimuli as possible. No matter how natural it may be, if an action does not conform to society's pre-determined norms, then we are told when we are young and malleable that it is not appropriate. Unfortunately in many cases this fact is true for other things as well, including the discussion of sex, gender, sexuality, etc. Although this conversation takes place relatively openly at Bryn Mawr, this occurrence is not common outside of the Bryn Mawr bubble. I repeatedly realize this statement each time I go home for winter or summer break. Where I come from the conversation does not flow freely. The conversation does not flow freely because society has deemed that it is an inappropriate topic. Soceity restricts itself, even though the origins of these restrictions were "to keep people safe." This statement ironically makes the assumption that we are not safe from ourselves: our own thoughts and our own actions. As a scientist I find it strange that humans, who are at the top of almost every ecosystem food or energy chain, are our own worst enemies.