Apply and reflect week 14

 This week we dove into the topic of racism a bit by looking at the Concerto in black and blue. The process behind the Concerto in black and blue was to walk through a gallery, the same thing is true here with Olafur Eliasson piece The Weather Project. Only his was trying to relate back to climate matters. He took people and brought them into the space to experience the "new" world around them and form there allowed them to determine how they felt about it. He made the space available for interpretation. He wanted to talk about climate control and the effects but wanted people to create there own ideas with it. I love the way artist can do this. With 3D spaces you have the opportunity to physically bring in your audience and have them go through this experience with you to try and see what you do but also to allow them to see whatever they see. I would love to try to incorporate that kind of idea into my works. Allowing my work to be somewhat open ended to where the viewer can have a completely different experience, weather that is physical or emotional to the work then what I the creator has. I love it when artist ask you to come into a space and experience a kind of feeling that they want to convey. That means the audience is subject to a physical and emotional experience to your work. This makes the experience of seeing the work different from that of just looking at a painting or other traditional art foam. This needs peoples involvement to be conveyed, it needed to be walked through and experienced because a picture of a film of it will not do or have the same effect as physically walking through it will. 

Images from : 

https://sarahpadbury93.wordpress.com/2016/04/07/olafur-eliasson-the-weather-project-and-the-green-river-series/ and https://www.cnn.com/style/article/olafur-eliasson-experience-phaidon/index.html

Week 14

The weeks reading really dove into the work of art that was the gallery experience of Concerto in black and blue. This work had a lot of controversy with it in order to figure out what the artist was trying to say by creating this exhibit. Many saying that it was political, about the blacks and blue being police. Critics may have concluded at this decisions due to the fact that the arts of this exhibit has had past work that has had similar meaning of blacks being suppressed due to police or other cultural things. Once hearing that perspective of the exhibit I could see where the colors could be representing that. However first looking at it I would had never lead to the conclusion of that. I saw the work talking more about the unknown of the ocean. Never would I have thought of it to be anything that is political or racial in any way. I think there is black art and then there is art created by black Americans. I think there is art that black artist make that is art, some of that art may be art of other black Americans, or whites or a sculpture of a piece that has no people or color at all. Black American artist that don't want their race to have any effect on the piece and how the viewer sees it. Then there is Black Art. Art the speaks for or to the black culture. Weather it be created by a black person or not but the targeted audience is still the same. I think most Black Art is created by black Americans because they have more of a connection to that type of feeling and how to relay it back to the current cultures. 

This is a painting of our former president Obama receiving his painting by Kehinde Wiley, an black American painter.  https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/kehinde-wiley-s-obama-portrait-controversy-shows-americans-don-t-ncna849156

Week 13

Ask anyone and they will say that a photo is capturing the moment, true to what is going on in the environment. Ask a photographer and they will tell you that photography is fiction. Photography in todays time and way back when it was film has always been fiction if that is what the artist chooses. The act of taking the photo is only half of the process. Back when it was film you could create different chemical reactions to develop all kinds of effects. Today we can do the same but with digital apps like photoshop and lightroom.  Photographers are look to create a story and if there are elements in a photo that conflict with the story then it is removed. Photography is the act of capturing the moment but also creating one. The artist can either create the moment by altering the moment of altering the photos. Countries have gone to war over photos but the likelihood of them double checking them is very unlikely due to people being ignorance about the art of photography.  We believe that photos are true because of how the typical process is explained to us, but photography is a whole lot more then that. It is however important to have photos that are true that tell the story as it happened. Like film we have documentaries and we have narrative films, the same concepts are true to photography we have photography that is fiction and we have photo journalism that needs to stay true in order to keep the history of some cultures alive.  Some cultures need it to show what happened and what thing need to stay true and historic. 

This photo is seen as one of the first photographs it is of the empty streets of paris. But the streets were never empty you just don't see the people because it was a long exposure shot. https://benbeck.co.uk/firsts/2_The_Human_Subject/photo1h.htm

Week 12

This week we dove into the aspects of gender rolls and various forms and place where and how a gender roll can be "preformed" at, by reading  Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,”  This reading really made you think more about societal rolls of gender and were that typically is or is not appropriate.  Gender, while I do think it is changing, seems to still follow a very old almost biblical side of how you should dress and act. Men don't wear dresses, woman do not do much asides from bar children and cook. While this is changing and females are increasingly becoming more and more integrated into our corporate world and and in more recent events into our government. There is still the lingering of stereotypes for our genders. Being raised in a small farming town it was standard that woman not wear short things, boys not have long hair, girls like boys and boys like girls. That's the way it is.  Anyone to go outside of those standards was in a was punished socially. No one would hang out or associate with them. No one was really allowed to explore their or the next gender because you got the one you got at birth that was it. If you were to explore anything you were doing it hush hush and out of the eyes of society. Roles are even still present where women are oppressed in my home town to date, no government leaders are women, but nearly all the teachers are. No women speak or give group prayer at my church just repopulate it. All the woman in that town act femininity they submit to the roles laid down by society before them slowly but surely continuing their own self-oppression.  

The image I choose for this week is the "We can do It" poster and it for its time really represented the opposite of gender norms for women.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Can_Do_It!

Week 11

    This week we got the chance to read Margaret Kovach chapters of "Epistemology and research: Centring Tribal Knowledge." As this weeks reading were fairly complex to comprehend they were different from the topics that we have been discussing. This is our first week talking about the theory of knowing something from culture to culture. I find this topic very interesting as I have traveled a bit. In talking about the language we speak vs how another I think there are a lot of things we have to contribute to when discussing topics across cultures and mainly languages. In taking research from one language to another or talking about another language without being fully versed in the entire language you are almost playing a card game with out a full deck in a way. You do not have all the pieces to the puzzle when you dive into research of a language that you are not 100% in. While there are some things that you can learn that will help you in understanding the language there are also things that you only really know by being fluent or having the language be your native language.  Within some cultures and language there are words that do not even directly translate to another word but more to an idea or a concept of living or thought. With out fully understanding the language you can not fully understand the depth of some of those words or phrases that simply do not directly aline.  I think only knowing one or two language really narrows your world view because yes while you can be an expert in what you speak or know, you still do not connect to the rest of the world that reads or understand within there language. I think you have to know one language, typically being your native language. But as soon as you learn another language then you open your brain and mental ability to understand things that otherwise would not make sense. You see things with a more open perspective because you have to learn something completely different. Learning more language does make you more worldly. Not only by being able to communicate with so many others but by being able to have an open mind set to things that are different.   

For this weeks image I picked Raphael Sanzio painting "School Of Athens" Within it there are some many individuals with various view and theories coming from different language and background. 

http://www.abc-people.com/data/rafael-santi/school_of_athens.htm

Week 10

This week we read  Amelia Jones, "Meaning, Identity, Embodiment: The Uses of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology in Art History,"  and within it Jones goes into talking about the relationship that is created with the viewers of art vs the creators.  There is defiantly a connection between the viewer and what is being viewed same goes with the artist and what they created. All of it has or comes from different backgrounds giving it a different perspective. I view the American Gothic differently because I was raised in farm lands and this piece quite literally reminds me vary much of my neighbors when I was growing up.  However the artist created it not to remind me of my childhood he created it to bring to life is own vision of this situation.  As the relationship of how I see the work vs the artists is different so is the relationship of each individual as they see the work. Each individual brings in their own background as they see a piece and that shifts the way we see the everything.  With That I feel as if we bring the same background and judgement to a returning artist. We will always view Edger Allen Poe's poetry and morbid and all about death because that is the stereotype connected to his work but not all of his work is like that. But because we know that he had a past were many of the people (women) he loved died to early this was defiantly something to influence his work.  I feel as if many people come to art with scratched glasses, something for some reason scratched them and that is how you see, you see with the scratch.  It will influence the way you see things but that the way it is and that is what you are used to. Everyone come to art with a different background and there for the piece hits people hard or not at all evokes different emotions in different people. Art is different to all because we all come from different.  

  

American Gothic : https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/grant-wood-american-gothic-whitney

Week 9

In todays society tokenism is still unfortunately part of our society.  As we grow as a culture and country we become aware of these things. But we still knowing and unknowingly are doing some things to target groups or to make groups feel left out. As we try to grow as a country I think we may see more tokenism as we try to reach all demographics. Unfortunately I see our country going into a little more tokenism for a while before it really just becomes part of our social norm to have people of different gender, rase, religion in various work environments and what not.  While I don't think anyone would really call tokenism great I can see where it can open the door for a lot of other opportunities and or discussions to be had with various individuals and corporations.  But even then I can see how creating equal opportunities in an environment where tokenism is present can be not particularly equal. If you only have two or three people that are different from the whole group and call that equal opportunity I can see where that would be a topic to argue about. How can it be equal if that group is outnumbered and what if that group never benefits form the equal opportunity then they may declare unfair activity thus leading to more unfair advantages or disadvantages. I think there is a problem with diversity and inclusion committees because if a company, school, or any organization was actually inclusive we wouldn't have a need for a committee we would just naturally be practicing that. We need to be diverse and inclusive but we have the committees to make sure that that is being put in effect rather then the actual people finding the correct people for the job no matter the background.  

 

The image I picked is a painting, to describe diversity.