Artist Lecture Spring #5: Apocalyptic Writings

Today I went to a lecture that was about apocalyptic writings. There were four questions that the lecturer wanted us to discuss. Why is the end of world such a popular topic in American literature? How might this relate to America’s sense of its own newness and its sense of providential destiny? What causes do these authors imagine might bring about the end of the world? Is the end of the world a welcome event for American authors?

The apocalypse is popular in American Literature for a couple of reasons. Most of these apocalyptic stories emerge during times of upheaval, hence the reason that they are so popular right now. In places such as England, there is already a call for the novel, a very popular notion that holds a tradition in places like that.

We looked at artists such as Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire “Destruction,” 1836. It was the last of four in a series. He believed that the American Empire would be destroyed as the Roman Empire had years before. Another one I really enjoyed was “The Last American” by John James Mitchell. By 1902 we had started to get other reasons as to why the world was going to end.

Apocalypse is a good way to show class, gender, etc. through a text. On a literary stand point the fast burn apocalypse works better then the soft apocalypse. The fast ones are more hopeful and the slow ones are more depressing and more like a cautionary tale. The fast endings tend to critique society, leaving to recover and start over. It is defiantly more exciting then the slow apocalypse where people tend to die and a lot of the times it is because of some type of sickness. In the 1950’s it was considered irresponsible for a person to think of any other ending of the world besides a nuclear war. It is scarier now because we don’t know where the threat is coming from. Apocalypses work very well in film.

Artist Lecture Spring #4: Hank Willis Thomas

Today I attended a lecture for Hank Willis Thomas. I must say that I enjoyed his work a lot. In his series Pitch Blackness he was dealing with the loss from his cousin being murdered. He learned to be himself without his shadow. The next series that he showed us was Sometimes I See Myself in You. It was three images on a black background. One of him, one of his mother, and one where he had photoshopped their faces together. While viewing a lot of his images you start to see that family is very important to him.

My favorite series that he showed was when he figured out that he tended to use a lot of frames throughout his images. The ones where he had people posing with the frames in a studio setting were not that interesting. However, the ones where he gets volunteers to hold the frame over something else. The one that caught my eye the most was the one where two people were holding the frame between them and it caught another couple in the frame. That wasn’t the interesting part though. The best part was the people off to the side that are more interested in what was going on with the photographer and the models then with the other people in their own group.

The other project of Thomas’s that I really enjoyed was his series Along the Way. His friend mentioned to him that a lot of Thomas’s work was a bit depressing because he was still trying to deal with his cousin’s death. So he decided to make a project where he had people stand in front of the camera for 30 seconds and they can do whatever they want. I absolutely fell in love with this project! As a whole it is intriguing and when you see the videos up-close they are hilarious. A lot of the people danced around or did other things which being recorded but there was also some that just stood there awkwardly. I appreciate that he didn’t exclude these videos.

“Always consider meaning when it comes to photography. So much interaction in a split second.” -Hank Willis Thomas

Website
http://hankwillisthomas.com/splash.html

Artist Lecture Spring #3: Paul Pfeiffer

Today I went to a lecture by Paul Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer messes with videos of celebrities and famous athletes to achieve what he is trying to show. Pfeiffer said that he “enjoyed the openness in the way you approach a painting and thought he could achieve the same effect with video.” We were told that many of his acclaimed videos were shown on screens that would be miniature in size and adequately sized for a dollhouse. The screens being this small made what was being shown very intimate.

One of the specific things he is thinking about a lot right now is what he thinks about identity as in race or sexual identity because its one of the things he is forced to rethink as times and sensibilities have changed. He new wants to change the context throughout his images.

One piece that I rather enjoyed was “24 Landscapes.” It was 24 images of the beach that had originally had Marilyn Monroe in them, which Pfeiffer had photo-shopped out. Pfeiffer has the idea that both the origin of the image is important but not important all at the same time, which he considered counterintuitive.

Another piece that I was very interested in was the one about the chicks and their lifespan. Pfeiffer made a video of chicks being born and then raised into chickens. He ran surveillance on them for 24 hours a day for 75 days. Then showed it in the PATH on the way to the world trade center. Started showing video on Easter Sunday 2001. It is about human behavior and how it is related to animal behavior, it is a slight reflection on yourself.

“Art making is not just abut making picture or objects but has a real psychological meaning to it. Any object that an artist plays with, consciously or not, impacts the viewer. “ -Paul Pfeiffer

Gallery
http://www.gagosian.com/artists/paul-pfeiffer/
http://www.thomasdane.com/artist.php?artist_id=12

Artist Lecture Spring #2: Michael Kimmel

Michael Kimmel is the author of the book Guyland. Guyland is about a perilous world where boys become men. It presents a disturbing wake-up call for anybody that is a boy, loves boys, or is raising boys. It is about a new stage of development for all young people. It used to be that you finish your education, get a job, move out of your parent’s house, get married and have children and then you would be considered an adult. On average this used to be completed by the age or 21 or 22. Now the average age for all of these mile markers is 28 or 29.

Kimmel explained by he believes that this is happening in four basic stages. The first one is because people are now starting to live longer then previous generations. The second reason is because of economic transformation. Most people will not have the same type of careers that people before did. It used to be that you followed the family business, if you father was a plumber you were to become a plumber. If he was a lawyer, you were to become a lawyer. Now people are starting to follow their own dreams. You also have to keep in mind that corporations are no longer as loyal to their employees as they used to be. Where our grandparents would have worked at the same place their entire career we will now be switching places of employment a bunch of times throughout our working career. Another reason that these developments are changing is because the parenting style has changed. Now parents raise children in a style, as Kimmel stated, known as “helicopter parents.” It is the over involvement of parents in their children’s lives. For example, those parents that fights for their children about being on a sports team when in reality the child didn’t make the team because they were not good enough, not because the coach “had it in for them.”

Kimmel stated that part of the motivation for this work comes from two contradictory ideas. “Oh my God, they are growing up so fast!” and “Will they ever grow up?” The first one is because children now are more technologically and media savvy then they used to be. The second one has to do with the failure to launch syndrome like living at home until the “child” is 35 years old. Both of these ideas are true in their own way and I can think of people that I know that can fit into both categories.

I must say that I had not ever heard of Michael Kimmel before seeing this lecture. However, he has intrigued me enough by talking about his writing and his ideas that I have already ordered Guyland so that I can read it too.

Artist Lecture Spring #1: Alec Soth

Although I did not like a lot of the things that Soth spoke about, like how photography is mostly luck and how the common housewife is just as likely to get that groundbreaking photograph as a skilled photographer, I do love his style. More as, maybe I just appreciate the method behind gaining these images. I know that once I graduate I would love to be able to freely travel, taking images of people that I do know while in places that I have never been. That is exactly what I strive to do.
Like myself, Soth was painfully shy throughout college and he decided to go and break that barrier by going to parks and asking random people to take let him take their picture. Because of this act, he was able to find that he was making a connection and photographing certain types of people
I did not realize that I had already viewed Alec Soth’s artwork previously until he got to his series “Sleeping by the Mississippi.” I really enjoyed these images because they seemed empty, yet full, at the same time. He went deeper then just the image though. He would ask people to write down their dreams before he would take their picture. Originally he planned on using these dreams as another piece but he never ended up doing it. Being able to travel freely as he was is what made his own personal dream come true.
Website:
http://www.alecsoth.com/
Interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7PpxTHqYWI
Gallery:
Http://www.montserrat.edu/galleries/montserrat/index.php?status=upcoming

Artist Lecture #7: Amy Hauft

Amy Hauft is the chair of the Department of Sculpture and Extended Media at VCU. She is currently showing an exhibit at the Anderson Gallery and gave a lecture yesterday, 12/2/09 about her recent project Counter Re-formation.

It was great being able to interact with the art pieces as Hauft was talking about them. The immense size of the table that Hauft had created for the main attraction, which was inspired by Louis XIV’s banquet table that obviously had Hauft’s personal twist, was overwhelming when viewed at ground level. The white, spiral staircase that was installed was so that you would be able to take in the aerial view so that you could view the pieces as a landscape, as intended. I thought that this was a great way of including the viewer in the art piece because it was a personal decision if you wanted to climb up the floor to ceiling staircase or not.

Although I found her work to be kind of interesting, as much as she spoke about the importance of the materials that are used in a project I was very disappointed with the ones Hauft chose for this project. The materials that were used were all bad for the environment and there was very little sugar used throughout the table, which I thought was important for the idea of the project.

http://www.vcu.edu/arts/gallery/

Artist Lecture #6: Diego Sanchez

I attended the Diego Sanchez lecture at Page Bond gallery and although I did not find much of his work that intriguing there were a few that caught my eye. However, his playful mannerisms are definitely what pulled me in. When talking about his work he mentioned how he fell in love with formal architecture and although he has never been to Rome but how he is going to work with the Coliseum until he is sick of it.

When preparing his work, he usually starts his panels by staining it with color. He builds surfaces, however, since he is not much of an organized person he uses grids which keeps him grounded. He then just takes his time and just studies the surface of the panels until something hits him. Sanchez’s work is very dependant on the surface of his images. When asked about the drafting lines that show up in his images he said that “they are sometimes planned and sometimes they just show up.”

Sanchez has been trying to find the tie between representation and nonrepresentational of elements. He is interested in how people view representation. He creates a realistic space and then comes back and vacates it. You get a major sense of space and depth when viewing his painting.

When talking about the difference in subject matter between his images of the Coliseum and that of an “underpass,” his latest painting, Sanchez stated that “Art is about recording history as you are making work. Artists can give importance to everything in life. Good thing about being an artist is you can look at something mundane and make it important.” He also mentioned how much you can tell about a person by the types of chairs they choose to purchase when speaking about his images of chairs.

Artist Lecture #5: Mary Scurlock

I got the luck of going to visiting lecturer Mary Scurlock at Page Bond Gallery. I have a great obsession with trees and that is her main source of imagery. The reason that she decided to use trees is because it is a metaphor for her personally. A couple of years ago she needed to get surgery on her leg. When she went to see the doctor, they mention how “one leg feels like glass, one feels like wood.” She saw this as a good metaphor for things that happen in our lives and decided that a tree was a good choice for imagery for this.

When making her paintings, it is an evolving process. She works in mixed media. Scurlock builds up about 5 layers of gesso and then continuously digs into it. She then uses oil paint and wax, which tends to take away some of the oil paint. She carried her old style of using writing in her paper paintings to using it in her panel paintings, which she mentioned is just a good aesthetic. Scurlock states that she “doesn’t want her images to be super realistic. A memory is a good way to put it.”

Scurlock mentioned when asked about the point of view of the trees she has painted that she “wanted there to be a depth to the trees and that is why she picked that point of view.” He work is defiantly more about the process but it is also a conscious, formal decision for every mark that she makes on her panels.

When asked about her scale of her images, I couldn’t help but disagree with another viewer who said they wanted to see them large. I feel like that petite size of her panels if perfect for all of the intricate details that are seen throughout. I feel like if they were too much larger they would be overwhelming. Scurlock mentioned how incredibly times consuming these images are and that they might be too much if done in a larger size.

My favorite image of her that was shown tonight was one that was at the back of the gallery. Most of her tree images were done in a very neutral, cool color pallet but this image was done darker. I instantly fell right in love with it because the color is more engaging. I really enjoy her other images but I just could not stay away from this one. It is her latest work and I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.

Artist Lecture #4: Shimon Attie

Upon seeing Attie's work, he focused his presentation on an underlying theme that collective memory is the root of history, stating that he articulates relationships between place, memory and identity through imagery that both originates in and is superimposed upon marginalized communities whose histories are in the process of being forgotten. His haunting art made the forgotten again visible. Attie himself described it as a "peeling back the wallpaper of today to reveal the histories buried underneath."

Attie created a five-channel video installation and a body of still photographs to re-imagine the Welsh village of Aberfan. In 1966, the village became known the world over when a coal waste tip slid down a mountainside and buried the village's only primary school. Nearly an entire generation of the village's children as well as many adults lost their lives. Within hours of the disaster -and ever since- the village lost its privacy as the worldwide news media descended upon it. Having become "famous" as the village that lost its children and forever identified with the disaster, Aberfan -and places like it the world over- has found it difficult to move on. In 2006, on the disaster's 40th anniversary, Attie was invited by the BBC to come to Aberfan to see if it was possible for a contemporary artist to help the village move on. Over the course of several months he invited villagers into his studio and asked them to assume statuary poses that would reflect their social or occupational role within the village while he filmed them on an unseen slowly revolving stage. The Attraction of Onlookers thus lies at the intersection between the static and moving image. Individuals were illuminated by a complex lighting set up that created a delicate and beautiful play of light and shadow reminiscent of Old Master paintings. No actors, digital effects, slow motion, or still photographs were employed. Villagers 'performed' being themselves, with the resulting 'cast' including: the fish-and-chips man (the 'chipper'), the ex-coal miner, the headmaster, the minister, the boxer, the male choir singers, their conductor, the bartender, and so on. By consciously playing on iconic Welsh tropes, Attie created an artwork, which might help Aberfan, take its rightful place, 40 years on, as a Welsh village among other Welsh villages.

I really enjoyed this series. I just could not drag my eyes away from the people that are shown. It defiantly took me by surprise when one of these “static” people would move something minor, like blinking an eye or something like that. I personally believe that it made these videos stronger.

Website:
N/A

Interview:
N/A

Gallery:

http://www.artnet.com/artist/1730/shimon-attie.html

Http://collections.mocp.org/info.php?f=maker&type=browse&t=objects&s=Attie%2C+Shimon

Visiting Artist #3: Robert Crumb

Due to my enrollment in a Counterculture Literature class here at VCU I had the unbelievable luck to get to see the Robert Crumb lecture last night at Richmond’s Centerstage. He was there to discuss his most recent book, a fully illustrated version of Genesis, based largely on Robert Alter’s 2004 translation. If you’re interested in comics, you already know who Robert Crumb is. Françoise Mouly, who would be interviewing him at this event, might not have the same name recognition as her more controversial subject, but her contribution to the world of comics is substantial. Together, after a brief introduction, these two giants of comics took the stage at the Carpenter Center on a rainy Tuesday night to discuss Genesis and all things Crumb.

When I say Crumb “took the stage” I could more accurately say “hit the stage,” as he made his entrance with a perfectly executed pratfall — a trick he’s apparently been working on of late. Crumb is not someone who’s known to be particularly interested in interviews, book tours, etc. so there was certainly some discussion before-hand as to how engaged he might be in the discussion to come. He addressed this head-on, semi-sarcastically remarking, “It’s an ordeal, but I’m a nice guy! It’ll help sell books….” Françoise began by suggesting that she’d be attempting, through the interview, to disabuse the audience of what she feels are some inaccurate perceptions that people generally have about R. Crumb: “People think they know you.”

The final — and most lengthy — topic of the Mouly/Crumb interview portion of the evening was a discussion of Genesis. In one of the more memorable moments of the interview, Françoise had brought along with her a stack of complaints The New Yorker had received after publishing an excerpt of the book, and she began reading them to Crumb. People’s grousing ranged from letters tersely complaining that the work was “salacious and adolescent” to a lengthy multi-page diatribe from a Hebrew scholar who was apparently quite upset about a single word in the text, which he felt had been inaccurately translated. On the general topic of translation minutiae, Crumb said, “The people who are into this stuff don’t even agree on what it all means. And people kill each other over this thing!” Another letter complained that the Crumb Genesis excerpt “didn’t add anything” to the original text. Responded Crumb: “I didn’t want to add anything. I just wanted to illustrate it.”

I found his work to be crude, yet, intriguing at this it’s best. He not an artist that I would necessary follow, however, he is defiantly of a type of mild amusement. The types of people that he brought out did not surprise me, neither did the price of the tickets…

Artist Lecture #2: Brian Ulrich

Brian Ulrich (born 1971) is an American photographer known for his photographic exploration of consumer culture. Born in Northport, New York, Ulrich lives in Chicago, Illinois. In 2001 in response to a national call for citizens to bolster the American economy through shopping, Ulrich began a project to document consumer culture. This project, Copia, is a series of large-scale photographs of shoppers, retail spaces, and displays of goods. Initially focused on big-box retail establishments and shoppers, the series expanded to include thrift stores, back rooms of retail businesses, art fairs and most recently empty retail stores and dead malls.

I must say that there is defiantly something about his work that I just can’t get enough of. I rather seem to enjoy the pieces that do not have people in them more. I found his lecture to be thorough and Ulrich to be an intriguing speaker with a great sense of humor. He defiantly knew how to draw the crowd in to listen to what he had to say. I think his images that were the strongest were defiantly those in which they were on accident. However, looking at his website his Trashcam series is defiantly intriguing and I just can’t get enough of it. You can tell by viewing Ulrich’s images that he has a lot to say of America’s over consumerism. Even in the above spilt milk image, you can see that somebody dropped a case of Pepsi on top of the Faygo, most likely because it was a lot cheaper. This is defiantly an artist that I want to keep tabs on.

Website:
http://notifbutwhen.com/

Interview:
http://www.lostateminor.com/2008/09/10/brian-ulrich/#more-9605

Gallery:
http://www.artnet.com/artist/424468234/brian-ulrich.html

Artist Lecture #1: Penelope Umbrico

I went to the visiting artist lecture the other day with Penelope Umbrico and I am so glad that I went! I absolutely fell in love with her work. Her series that have to do with honeymoon brochures and the sunsets that they show in the windows as well as the discolored television sets. I think that I like these images so much because of the saturated colors in them. I think it is hilarious that we are supposed to believe that the sunsets shown are actually natural. I also never would have thought to find such beauty in television sets being sold on craigslist. I also really enjoyed the images that she took from home magazines where she pulled the windows and doors out and then blew them up to life size. It was funny to see what these ad agencies thought were a “natural” setting.

I usually have a big problem with appropriation. However, I could not be more impress by how Umbrico responded to questions about it. She mentioned that she dared somebody to go up to her sunset piece, the one where she pulled all of the images from flickr, and find their sunset. She has a point. I doubt anybody could because they have been so distorted in the blowing up process that your own personal sunset would be pretty much unrecognizable.
Although I did not find Umbrico to be a strong speaker, I still couldn’t help but to fall in love with her work. This is one artist that I will continue to follow and see where her ideas take her next.

Website:
http://www.penelopeumbrico.net/

Gallery:
http://www.bigredandshiny.com/cgi-bin/retrieve.pl?section=review&issue=issue01&article=LOVELESS_PENELOPE_UMBRICO_131319

Interview:
http://www.penelopeumbrico.net/Essays/5.html