September 27, 2005

Three Digitally Manipulated Images

This first image is a mash-up of a pair and a woman's bottom. I believe the female model was my aunt on my father's side. I've been told this, but it might just be a kind of family legend. At any rate, she was once involved with the artist Alfred Gescheidt.

The second image is an entry in a Fark.com photoshop contest. The theme was unexplained phenomena.

The final picture is an image created by a recent inductee into the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Artists) hall of fame.

Posted September 27, 2005 01:10 AM. Categories: Assignments , Week 3 | Permalink

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

This is a reading response to an article by Walter Benjamin.

This week's reading continues last week's trend of going over my head. Unfortunately, I can only respond to what I understand, and so I'll give a pretty conservative reading here, sticking only to what I thought I understood.

Basically, art, the kind that's usually put in quotes, or called high art, or something similar, was originally developed in a very different kind of world than ours. This art (think paintings) had to be painstakingly crafted, usually by a single individual, usually taking a great deal of time. The work could only be displayed where it resided, meaning people had to come to see it. Meaning rich people saw it, and not very many of them, and that was it.

So a lot of kinds of art—paintings, sculptures, etc.—were originally developed in this context, where they were meant as single entities, to be shown to and appreciated by a select few only.

But the modern world has turned all that on its ear. We no longer have to share physical space with the original work of art to view it. An original is hardly unique anymore, for it can be reproduced (in some fashion or other) a limitless number of times. Benjamin also points out that film allows us, through the speeding up or slowing down of the reel, to see things—"art"—in a way that we as a species were heretofore completely unable to see.

I believe the author lays this point out to show how the context for traditional art no longer applies, but I'm not sure what the point of that would be.

It seems to me that there have been efforts made by modern-day artists, operating in the old-school mode (i.e., painting), to subvert the context-changing power of mechanical reproduction. One obvious way is in the way that prints are often numbered. This artificially limits the number of extant originals of a work of art. Also, theater seems to be an art form that has been largely immune to the sort of diluting effect of mechanical reproduction, for a play is something that is difficult to move from place to place (though not impossible), and it is impossible to recreate the ambience of the theater in any form.

The author also trots out the Dadaists, a group who, cognizant of the changes in the art world that reproduction was having, consciously created works of art that had no artistic, contemplative, or material value. They were anti-art.

Benjamin takes (to me) a severe left turn in the epilogue to his essay, in which he ruminates on the aesthetics of war. He positions war as a kind of logical extrapolation of art in the age of technology, and draws a parallel between struggles for changing property relations with the struggle of artists to carve out new plateaus in their art.

Posted September 27, 2005 12:34 AM. Categories: Reading Responses , Week 3 | Permalink

September 26, 2005

Robert Smithson's Floating Island

Update: Kara blogged this too.

Because I was out too late at TNO* the night before, I overslept a little and had to rush to meet my friend Kara at her office on Broadway. We hurried east on Houston all the way to the river, but we made it just in time to see, as Kara called it, "the ass of the boat," heading downriver. There was construction at the river's edge, and a chain-link fence keeping us about 30 feet from the river, so we scampered south to get a better view. Of course, by the time we got there the boat had turned around, so we scampered back again, and again caught the ass of the boat, with island in tow.

(This is the official link for the island at the Whitney Museum)

The elusiveness of the island gave it a bit of a mystical feel for me, as though it were always just out of reach. Similarly, I feel like any sort of complete understanding of its significance as art lay just a little out of reach the whole time.

The island is, in a sense, a gigantic, floating flowerpot: There is a great mass of dirt in a flat, wooden frame, with around a half-dozen trees planted in it, and grass covering all the dirt. All of this is pulled along the water by a tugboat, at about 5 miles per hour. When the exhibition is finished (on Saturday, Sep 24), the trees will be planted in Central Park.

I knew of Smithson because of his "Spiral Jetty" sculpture, which was built in the 70s in the Great Salt Lake. I grew up in Utah, and the idea of a contemporary artist choosing someplace as conservative and unfriendly to contemporary art as Utah for (what became) his masterpiece, seemed odd somehow. As a result, the jetty has always stuck in my mind as Utah's one piece of modern art. I wouldn't be surprised if it has a higher profile outside of Utah—no one I knew growing up had any idea that the sculpture existed, virtually in their backyard.

Sometimes the point of art is simply to provoke a reaction, any reaction, in the viewer. There were a lot of things going through my mind when I saw the island, but the overwhelming response was to laugh. The incongruity, the paltriness of just a few skinny, almost plaintive trees, against the backdrop of the most industrial river I have ever seen, was hilarious. I struggled to make sense of it, and then, failing, couldn't help myself but to laugh.

*Thursday Night Out

Posted September 26, 2005 07:16 PM. Categories: New Experiences , Week 3 | Permalink